Maharani's Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean

Verene Shepherd, Maharani's Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002, xxix + 177 pp.

In Maharani's Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean, Verene Shepherd explores the "other Middle Passage", the journey from South Asia to the Caribbean which brought hundreds of thousands of South Asians to the Caribbean in the years following the end of slavery. Shepherd uses the case of one woman (Maharani) as a starting point in her analysis of the tensions and outright violence that occurred on immigrant ships and the race, class and gender-based strains that marked the indentureship system as a whole. The result is an impressive work of scholarship that convincingly interweaves an individual's story with an examination of larger historical processes.

In 1865, Maharani left Calcutta on the Allenshaw, bound for colonial Guyana. However, she did not arrive in the Caribbean but instead died on the voyage following what appeared to have been a brutal rape. Four official inquiries were held into the events on the Allenshaw. The first was conducted on the ship by the surgeon, Dr Hardwicke, and the second soon afterwards by the governor of St Helena, where the ship had stopped en route to Guyana. Once the Allenshaw arrived in Guyana, another inquiry was held, this time conducted by the...