Arunima Datta provides a new social history of Indian coolie women in colonial Malaya

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya, by Arunima Datta, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 254 pp., $AU141.95 (hbk). ISBN 9781108837385, Publisher’s website: https://www.cambridge.org/

This book is a strong intervention in a field of research that has received little attention, and importantly, no investment, for decades. That field is women’s social history in Malaya and Malaysia, especially where the women in question are members of a marginalised migrant minority, such as the South Indian, primarily Tamil, coolies that Datta has centred in this important history.