ABSTRACT
At the end of the 1950s Elisabeth Bhugwandye Singh,1 inuenced by her eldest son Hardutt, sat down to write her memoirs. She did it in an ordinary copybook on three different occasions: on 27 April 1958, on 9 April 1959 and on 27 April 1961. She was born in Suriname on 22 April 1892. is may have been the reason why month April held a special meaning for her. Two years before her rst entry in 1958, her husband Jung Bahadur Singh, born in British Guiana2 died. It is also possible that writing her life story was a way of dealing with the death of a man she was married to for over forty-nine years. Years aer her death, her grandchildren gave a copy of these memoirs to the Caribbean Research Library (CRL) at the University of Guyana (UG).3 is gesture makes it possible for outsiders to read a unique document narrating a very personal story about being born and growing up in Suriname amongst people who had come from the Indian subcontinent. It also tells a story about living in a multi-ethnic
society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, it is unique because the voice of a woman is in her own writing, which is not so common in Surinamese and Guyanese historiography; especially by a woman of Indian descent.4 She married and moved to Suriname’s western neighbour, English-speaking British Guiana, where she lived most of her life. is may explain why she wrote in English although she must have been uent in Dutch. Her education in Suriname helped her to acquire these language skills. is accessible document will be read closely and will be analysed to nd meaning in the life of a woman who lived in two colonial societies (Guyana and Suriname) on the north-east shoulder of South America.
