once were.

Her poetry serves as an alternative imaginarium, a rival source like the family portraits, illuminating a hidden chapter of colonial history from the perspective of those who suffered its wounds. In the haunting and macabre “Beast,” one of a handful of poems by Das in which she directly engages with the subject of indenture, she writes:

. . . pirates in search of El Dorado

masked and machete-bearing

kidnapped me.

Holding me to ransom,

they took my jewels and my secrets

and dismembered me.

The reckoning lasted for years.

Limbs and parts eventually grew:

a new nose, arms skillful and stronger,

sight after the gutted pits could bear a leaf.

It took centuries.

Das doesn’t explicitly mention the historical murders, but the machete that flashes between her lines evokes the violence against indentured women as well as the widespreadplunder that accompanied colonialism. Her poem refers to the first British encounter with the region, an explorer’s foray but also an imperial one: Sir Walter Raleigh was in search of El Dorado and its golden loot when he landed in the Guianas in 1594. In folk songs and stories told by the indentured three centuries later, the British in India feature as kidnappers of women, because they, even more than men, resisted recruitment as plantation laborers for a number of cultural and economic reasons. British seamen and overseers, who raped and exploited indentured women on ships and plantations, were literally and metaphorically responsible for stealing their “jewels” and their “secrets.” In the poem, Das accuses European colonizers of doing some “dismembering” of their own—severing the indentured from their