ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representations of Indian Indentured women labourers from Réunion’s colonial literature of the 19th century. The postcolonial corpus on the Indian indentured labourer’s experiences is very meagre in the French narratives of Réunion. This chapter attempts to analyse the colonial literature to understand the representations of the first wave immigrants in the island and their cultural negotiation. Mostly written by white men, the colonial literature with all its shortcomings is an important archival site where the voices of the first wave Indian women and their experiences could be traced. At the same time, the short stories analyzed in the articles delineate how Indian women were constantly kept under the watchful Indian as well as European colonizing male gaze. This in turn rips them off from their status as labourers and make them mere bodies whose primary work is to maintain, preserve and pass on Indianness in the host countries. Yet, the first-generation women find ways to break the shackles of patriarchy in subtle ways in the given oppressing economic and cultural systems.
