“COOLIE”

What Does It Mean?

I first heard the epithet around 1965 from Wilfred Cartey, an English professor from Trinidad with an African background and appearance. He was speaking of V. S. Naipaul, another Trinidadian who was beginning to publish prominently.

“Coolie,” according to Cartey, was the common Trinidadian epithet for people descending from South Asia, which is to say India mostly and Pakistan sometimes.

Some years later I used the epithet with the manager of my local supermarket who was a fair-skinned Trinidadian of mostly African ancestry. He advised me not to speak that work because it referred to people who carried things atop their head. Okay.

However, some more years later, while talking to a Guianese woman of south Asian background, I somehow recalled the story of Cartey on Naipaul. But the Nobel author is “a coolie,” she explained, because his grandfather immigrated as an indentured servant (i.e., a contractual slave). By contrast, he boasted, she was born more generations away from India.

I’ve not (mis)used the word since, though writing about it for the first time now.

Oddly, I can’t think of the American analogy to this story.