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# GAIUTRA BAHADUR

"In exile, the only house is that of writing." – Adorno

## Sitemaps

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## Posts

- [Eyewitnesses](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2025/09/eyewitnesses/) - In "Indian Country," Shobha Rao set out to accomplish more than just a conventionally satisfying murder mystery. Interrupting the plot’s progression are 12 lyrical interludes that take place between 1814 and 2003 and share an underlying preoccupation with the slippery nature of time, with colonial violence and crimes against women and girls recurring across eras.
- [Oil's Bounty – and its Costs](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2024/05/oils-bounty-and-its-costs/) - Read my dispatch for the New York Times' Headway Initiative about the discovery of oil in Guyana, its echoes of a colonial past and the questions about climate and energy futures that it begs. "The world is at a critical juncture, and Guyana sits at the intersection. The country of my birth is a tiny
- [Unmaking Asian Exceptionalism](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2023/04/unmaking-asian-exceptionalism/) - In the tension between the idea and the reality of “who we are” and “what we stand for” as Americans, I do my work as a writer. I consider myself a lucky embodiment of the American Dream—lucky that my body was not broken with bricks or baseball bats for living it and lucky to have a body that, in a society beset by anti-Blackness, did not hinder my chances at it. Ever since the Dotbusters showed me how words could be weapons, I try my best to use America’s uneven, ironic blessings to illuminate how we have been led to hate each other and how we might transcend that history.
- ["The Prakash Churaman Story"](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2022/03/the-prakash-churaman-story/) - Arrested at the age of fifteen, and interrogated without an attorney present, Prakash Churaman spent six years locked up, four of them while waiting to be tried. Prosecutors argued that he orchestrated a fatal attempted armed robbery at a friend’s home in Queens in 2014. A New York State appeals court overturned his conviction in
- [Masters and Servants](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/05/masters-and-servants/) - For the Boston Review, I write on novels by Neel Mukherjee and V.S. Naipaul and one odd winter in New Delhi that left me unhoused in my own skin. I consider whether, "in the curved space-time of global history, migration can crack open wormholes to freedom from old rigidities and entitlements," including the barriers of
- [Two Divergent Girlhoods in Ghana, United by the Same Debt](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2023/06/two-divergent-girlhoods-in-ghana-united-by-the-same-debt/) - "If family figures as one creditor in the novel, and the suppressed memory of rape another, then Medie intertwines the two, fingers welded in one devastating grip."
- [Read Dangerously](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2022/04/read-dangerously/) - For The Washington Post, I reviewed Azar Nafisi's new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times: “Her observations implicate both adherents of Make America Great Again and their political foes. She sounds alarms about the alienating effects of technology as well as ideology, conjoined twins in preventing us from seeing the full
- [Instruments of Memory](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2017/05/instruments-of-memory/) - The New York Times Book Review A Cambodian Refugee Returns Home, to a Landscape Brutally Changed By GAIUTRA BAHADUR MAY 28, 2017 MUSIC OF THE GHOSTS By Vaddey Ratner 324 pp. Touchstone. $26. Vaddey Ratner calls each of the three parts of her tenaciously melodic second novel a movement. And indeed this story of an
- [Mother Lode](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/05/mother-lode/) - For the Sunday New York Times Book Review, I review a personal history of Ethiopia by Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam, as refracted through the life of the author's grandmother.
- [The United States' Debt to Immigrants](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2019/06/the-united-states-debt-to-immigrants/) - Racism served imperial capitalism well, and xenophobia serves neoliberalism and global plutocrats just as effectively. This Land Is Our Land is Suketu Mehta’s expression of rage at the cynical exploitation of inequality. In it, he makes debt his canvas, overlaying it with borders and borderlands that suggest what we owe migrants. Read my review of the
- ["The Soul as a Picture Gallery"](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/09/the-soul-as-a-picture-gallery/) - For The New York Review of Books, I wrote about a Met exhibition of African-American portraits found at flea markets and other resting places for the forgotten. “Though salvaged, the images remain tinted by this history, their anonymity like a kind of sepia.“
- [Who Gets to be British?](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2020/02/who-gets-to-be-british/) - For The Nation, I write about about the Windrush scandal, the peril and the possibility documents hold for migrants and for scholars, and Hazel Carby’s “Imperial Intimacies,” a personal history of empire, race and so-called Britishness. "The Windrush story—from the arrival of the first British Caribbeans to the piercing betrayals suffered by their descendants—goes to
- [Missing Children](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2019/03/missing-children/) - For the New York Times Book Review, I wrote a piece about Valeria Luiselli's novel in the shape of an archive and consider how it differs from other work (narrative nonfiction or testimonial poetry) that immerses us in the internal and external deserts that unaccompanied child migrants cross: "Which of us who has loved a
- [Perpetual Sorrow](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2021/08/perpetual-sorrow/) - For The New York Times Book Review, I write on Code Switch co-founding editor Kat Chow's memoir of grief and family, immigration and ancestors. Guided by the work of scholars in Asian American studies who have developed a theory of “racial melancholia,” elaborating on Freud, Chow links her own life and species of grief to their
- [Advanced Reporting: The Art of the Profile](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2011/07/arfa20/) - Rutgers University-Newark The Department of Arts, Culture and Media Advanced Reporting (21:086:338:Q1) Fall 2020 | Mondays & Wednesdays 10 a.m. – 11:20 a.m., Held Virtually Through Canvas Professor Gaiutra Bahadur | Email: gaiutra.bahadur@rutgers.edu Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Office Location: Zoom Via Canvas Advanced Reporting: THE ART OF THE PROFILE In this
- [Telling a taboo history of Vietnam](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2020/05/telling-a-taboo-history-of-vietnam/) - For The New York Times Book Review, I consider poet Quyen Phan Que Mai's debut in English, the novel "The Mountains Sing."
- [At Macondo Pharmacy](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2021/06/at-macondo-pharmacy/) - For The Nation, I write about Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's experiment with magical realism in The Undocumented Americans. She goes beyond conventional reportage to mirror the surreal ways in which the undocumented experience their lives. Her work exposes the unsustainable fiction built into the economic and political systems that invite the labor of the undocumented into the
- [A House Filled with Women](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2020/12/a-house-filled-with-women/) - To commemorate the late poet Meena Alexander's life and legacy, Feminist Press has reissued her brilliant and gutting memoir Fault Lines. This new edition includes an afterword by me, "A House Filled with Women," paying tribute to Meena. Here's the Asian American Writers Workshop on the afterword and the reissue.
- [The Grammar of Oppression](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2020/12/the-grammar-of-oppression/) - For the December 2020 issue of The New Republic, I write on caste, race and Isabel Wilkerson's recent book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. "By neglecting individualized Dalit experience, by skipping stories about the violence against lower castes in India, Wilkerson misses an opportunity to achieve a more radical goal: to build popular and
- [The parable of the red flag](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2020/10/2292/) - In this short essay for The Guardian, I tell the story of the British overthrow of the democratically elected government in Guiana, its sole colony in South America, in 1953. The piece engages with the conversation in the United Kingdom around attempts to rehabilitate and revise the history of empire and imperialism. "The parable of
- [The Jonestown We Don't Know](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/12/the-jonestown-we-dont-know/) - An aura of contingency continues to surround Jonestown, so often portrayed as the tale of a lone madman, a charismatic crackpot who imploded in a random heart of darkness. In truth, as I have come to learn, Jonestown does not point to a singular erratic Svengali but, rather, to fundamental aspects of both my adopted
- [Edifices of Empire](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/04/edifices-of-empire/) - For Dissent Magazine, I wrote an essay about racial capitalism, drawing on Peter Hudson's Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean and Stuart Hall's memoir Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands: "For Hall, his family, his class, his island—the color line was drawn inside them. It was a psychological legacy of the power held by
- [Songs of Themselves](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/06/songs-of-themselves/) - In a review essay for the July issue of Prospect Magazine in the UK, I write about the memoir Ants Among Elephants, double consciousness and the rhetorical tradition of memoirs by Dalit women.
- [Footnotes Know Me](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/03/footnotes-know-me/) - For The Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote about a collaborative effort to rescue a rare literary text: "... footnotes are where history shows its true colors: they reveal how power, held or withheld, has muted the contributions of people like Edmonstone. To be called a footnote to history is usually a put-down. I would, however, like
- [Of Islands and Other Mothers](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2016/10/of-islands-and-other-mothers/) - "From one woman acting on behalf of a daughter to the next, had maternal fierceness somehow forged a chain to connect us across the divisive waters of race and religion and history? Was this then, at last, our Caribbean archipelago?” My reported essay about Caribbean New York, “Of Islands and Other Mothers,” appears in the
- [Tales of the Sea](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2018/01/tales-of-the-sea/) - In this lyric essay for The Griffith Review, the Australian literary magazine, I connect tourist seas to refugee seas, Brexit to the post-World War II migration of West Indians to Great Britain, and indenture to slavery. The piece is about friendship and family, and it's about race in the Caribbean. "FOR LAUREN AND I, the
- [Tangled Roots: An American in India](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/01/american/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Two men, pinkies linked, strolled across the ruins of the old Portuguese fort. With the afternoon sun still overhead, the fort crawled with tourists. But it was easy to imagine the bayside setting - with evening spread out against the Bombay sky - transformed into the perfect spot for
- [Paperback Writer](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2016/06/paperback-writer/) - For the Guardian's Paperback Writer series, I write about my strategies for overcoming gaps and biases in the government archives that document indenture: "The stealing of the voices of indentured women, born into the wrong class, race and gender to write themselves into history, was structural. How could I write about women whose very existence the official
- [India's Missing Women](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2014/06/indias-missing-women/) - A review essay for the July 7-14, 2014 issue of The Nation: The way women navigated the boundary between the home and the world was a question with great resonance and imaginative significance for India’s anti-colonial struggle during the first half of the twentieth century. (The title that Rabindranath Tagore gave his 1916 novel about a
- ["A Good Story, If I Can Remember It"](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2016/08/a-good-story-if-i-can-remember-it/) - Tracking down the memories of anti-apartheid writer and editor Sylvester Stein for Lapham's Quarterly. "Even before dementia’s onset, Stein felt mocked by the fallibility of memory, which exacerbated the creative toll that exile already takes. Decades earlier, he brooded over the fate of his friend Gerard Sekoto, a painter who continued to churn out portraits of
- [Wine Dark Sea](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2016/04/wine-dark-sea/) - An essay for The Virginia Quarterly Review: "For both artist and migrant, ships are symbols of the universal. A slave, an indentured servant, a tourist, a seaman, a refugee obviously each inhabit a ship distinctly, but aboard, each is ultimately at the mercy of the sea. I share Locke’s instinct for seeking comrades in the
- [Plantation Road](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/01/plantation-road/) - Read how Scots gave their names to misbegotten places while on youthful adventures abroad: my dispatch from Scotland for Abu Dhabi's The National.
- [A Way in the World](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/01/a-way-in-the-world/) - In Neel Mukherjee’s first novel, a young Calcuttan hiding out in 1990s London reimagines the life of an English spinster in turn-of-the-century Bengal. Read my review of this ambitiously transnational debut in The Abu Dhabi Review, the arts and ideas section of The National.
- [A Master of the Art](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/03/a-master-of-the-art/) - Among the many things about democracy that annoyed the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville during his 1830s tour of America was the shape-shifting quality of language under its influence. He complained, in his classic treatise Democracy in America, that the restless spirit of citizens under this political system led to the constant creation of new words and new meanings at every turn. There was a
- [All Souls Rising](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/05/allende/) - It was an art critic who coined the term “magic realism,” to describe a new wave of painting in 1920s Ger­many. The work departed from the moody Expressionism of the day, emphasizing material reality even as it unlocked an elusive otherworldliness in the arrangement of everyday objects. Sometimes, though, the fantastic rubbed elbows with the
- [Conflicted Feelings](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/06/853/) - "The Surrendered" opens with an image reminiscent of a war photograph. An 11-year old girl is riding on top of a train, cradling her two younger siblings against the cold with a stolen blanket as they flee south with other refugees at the start of the Korean War. The image is iconic, beautiful in its
- [Reporter's Notebook](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/06/reporters-notebook/) - Read "On the Migrant Trail," my dispatch from the U.S.-Mexico border for The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund. I spent a day in the desert with the Samaritans Patrol and took this photo of the border wall in Sasabe, Arizona.
- [No Place for Heroes](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/07/no-place-for-heroes/) - In Laura Restrepo's novel about Argentina's Dirty War, the tragic is hidden amid ordinariness, like the secret prisons of the country's military dictators. Read my review in The Washington Post.
- [When London Was Capital of America](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/08/when-london-was-capital-of-america/) - The Observer – The decade before America's declaration of independence in 1776 saw more Americans visiting England than ever before. This engaging social history, written with a novelist's eye for character and plot, tells their tale – one author Julie Flavell calls "a missing chapter in the social and cultural history of Americans abroad." Read
- [Nativists Get A Tea-Party Makeover](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/10/nativists-get-a-tea-party-makeover/) - The Nation – The Minutemen were the largest border vigilante group in the country before financial scandals and criminal violence tore the group apart. Now former leaders are bringing their anti-immigrant politics inside the Tea Party. Read my piece for The Nation. (Thanks to The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund for providing support.) Minutemen gather near Tombstone, Arizona in
- [Years of Red Dust](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2010/11/years-of-red-dust/) - The Washington Post – It just so happened that Qiu Xiaolong was in St. Louis when the Chinese government massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. A T.S. Eliot translator, Qiu had won a grant to conduct research at Washington University, founded by Eliot's grandfather. Because of that chance timing, his life diverted dramatically.
- [Homeland Revisited](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2011/01/homeland-revisited/) - The New York Times Book Review – In the middle of his accomplished book, “India Calling,” Anand Giridharadas tells of meeting a Maoist revolutionary in Hyderabad. The city, nicknamed Cyberabad, serves as a base for both the globalized Indian economy and an armed insurgency at war against the country’s inequalities, rooted and new. India’s Maoist
- ["Coolie Women Are in Demand Here"](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2011/04/coolie-women-are-in-demand-here/) - The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2011 – Our journey took us past endless fields of flowering yellow along the northern banks of the Ganges. When we pulled into towns, we asked for directions, from children balancing loads three times their size on their heads, from crouching women tending baskets of cauliflower and eggplant by the
- [Writing a Life, Living a Writer's Life](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2011/12/writing-a-life-living-a-writers-life/) - The Winter 2011 issue of Nieman Reports, a publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, focuses on books and the book industry. It features an essay by me on discovering that, as the German critic Theodor Adorno put it, "in exile, the only house is that of writing."
- ["Should My People Need Me"](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2012/02/should-my-people-need-me/) - My profile of Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi runs on the cover of Ms. Magazine's Winter 2012 issue. The woman who has long personified the fight for democracy and human rights in Burma has finally decided to engage with one of the world's most repressive regimes. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is running for a
- [I Am Your Mirror](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2012/11/i-am-your-mirror/) - Chinese-born artist O Zhang traveled across the United States, photographing thousands of blank and neglected billboards, a trek that echoes Dorothea Lange's own documentary expedition during the Great Depression. Zhang has taken an object that has long been a canvas—with pop art icons such as Andy Warhol designing billboards for the Sunset Strip—and made it the
- [Pink Sari Revolution](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2013/08/pink-is-the-new-khaki/) - Pink Sari Revolution, by Amana Fontanella-Khan, tells the story of the Gulabi Gang. The gang's story—of poverty-stricken, unlettered women standing up for themselves, struggling against centuries-old misogyny—inspires. “Hope is a very big thing,” one elderly member says. “Sampat gave it to us every time she came to the village.” Still, it needs to be asked how
- [The Cooked Seed](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2013/07/the-cooked-seed/) - The Cooked Seed traces Anchee Min's evolution from a woman with shattered self-esteem to one with brass enough to have a child when she wanted, although her Chinese-immigrant partner didn’t, and then to divorce him and find love with an American, a Vietnam veteran. Like him, Min suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and her prose bears the marks. Her book
- [Writers Retreat](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2013/10/writers-retreat/) - Imagine an 18th-century London town house, once a fashionable address but recently home to successive huddled masses: Jewish refugees, Irish then Bangladeshi then Somali immigrants. Now fill that house with 30 foreign writers who have fled oppression and violence, all asylum seekers specially chosen for favored treatment. Call them “fellows.” Hang identity cards, with their
- [The Overseer of British Guiana](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2013/12/the-overseer-of-british-guiana/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur | Published in History Today Volume: 64 Issue: 1 2014 On March 22nd, 1869 a young plantation manager in the West Indies wrote an expansive letter to his sister in Essex. Often Henry Bullock only managed to scribble perfunctory notes to his family, but this letter probably satisfied their hunger for details about
- [The Upstairs Wife](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2015/02/the-upstairs-wife/) - I review Rafia Zakaria's memoir in Ms. Magazine's Winter 2015 issue: "The Upstairs Wife revises an old conceit—at least as old as Plato—in telling the story of a nation-state: justice (or lack thereof) in the philosopher’s ideal Republic is reflected in the souls of its individual citizens. A nearer example is Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s
- [Postcards from Empire](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2015/03/postcards-from-empire/) - The spring issue of Dissent Magazine, devoted to migration, carries my essay "Postcards from Empire." The piece dissects Victorian-era photographs of Indian women used on postcards to sell images of the Caribbean as a tourist paradise: "Several of the 'coolie belles,' for instance, appear to be wearing the same flowered orhni or veil draped over their heads and
- [Risker, Risk](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2015/08/risker-risk/) - With support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, I produced a package of stories on the long-lasting effects of U.S. Cold War intervention on politics in Guyana, a former British colony on the northeastern shoulder of South America. Risker, Risk The Caribbean Review of Books, July 2015 ¤ CIA Meddling, Race Riots and a Phantom
- [Mirror, Mirror](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2013/09/mirror-mirror/) - Daniel Alarcón’s first novel, Lost City Radio, focuses on a radio show that reunites the disappeared with their families in a country recovering from civil war. In At Night We Walk in Circles, regimes don’t steal people, but other things do: mundane death, rival lovers, America. The village where Henry’s late lover spent his childhood is eerily
- [PINK IS THE NEW KHAKI ](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/09/pink-is-the-new-khaki-2/) - Review by Gaiutra Bahadur (Ms. Magazine, Summer 2013) The author of Pink Sari Revolution compares India’s Gulabi Gang to insurgents, saying they number 20,000, eight times the size of al- Qaeda in Afghanistan. She uses this analogy to define the scope of their movement, started in 2006 by Sampat Pal, a daring, electrifying seamstress- turned-social worker. By likening Pal’s recruits—rural
- [The Professor of Light](http://clips.bahadur.ws/1999/04/budhos/) - Caught Between Worlds, Shadows and Light: The Professor of Light by Marina Budhos Review by Gaiutra Bahadur Newsday DON'T LOOK BACK, if you're racing, pursued by the flames of Sodom and Gomorrah. Or you'll be turned into a pillar of salt. Don't look back, if you're Orpheus on the threshold of escape, holding your Eurydice
- [Miami: America’s Edge](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/07/edge/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur Outlook Traveler A memorial in Miami’s Little Havana bears the words of Cuban poet Jose Marti: “Las palmas son novias que esperan.” The palm trees are girlfriends who wait. And indeed there is something both sensuous and sad about the palm trees that line the beaches and boulevards of South Florida. Their
- [The Professor of Light](http://clips.bahadur.ws/1999/04/the-professor-of-light/) - The Professor of Light by Marina Budhos Review by Gaiutra Bahadur Newsday
- [Cookin’ with Chutney](http://clips.bahadur.ws/1998/03/chutneysoca/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur Newsday UNDER THE elevated tracks of the J train - in a squat warehouse across from a Queens branch of the U.S. Post Office - midnight means the swish of hips against hips, feet pounding the floor and hands writhing in mock Bharata Natyam, an Indian classical dance form. The doors open
- [Incendiary Circumstances](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/04/amitav/) - Review by Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The word incendiary was used to describe firebombs that dropped from planes during World War II. It sprang often from Edward R. Murrow's lips during his broadcast sorties from London. Amitav Ghosh has chosen this word from another time to title his recently published anthology of essays. Intended
- [No Gloves or Curves: It's Base Ball](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2002/07/base/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer It was only the top of the first. There was already a man on third. And with the noonday sun an unforgiving spectator above, Tom "The Squid" Jordan had just knocked a single across the field at Fairmount Park. "There you go, lad!" shouted his captain. The cheer from
- [No Gloves or Curves: It's Base Ball](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2002/07/vintage/) - No Gloves or Curves: It's Base Ball By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Tale of a Puerto Rican Plantation Mistress](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2011/07/tale-of-a-puerto-rican-plantation-mistress/) - The New York Times Book Review, July 17, 2011 – Conquistadora's strength is its Rubik’s Cube portrait of Ana, an unconventional, ambitious woman whose attitudes toward children, slaves and lovers are so perplexing, they kept me riveted. Ana isn’t much of a mother, but she takes in a humpbacked baby girl abandoned on her doorstep
- [The Keys to the Keystone State](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2008/05/bowling/) - When Barack Obama went bowling in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on March 29, his opponent was Senator Bob Casey Jr., the son and namesake of a popular former governor whose coal-mining pedigree had made him a hero of the white working class. Casey Junior had just endorsed Obama, and the presidential candidate, wearing blue-and-white Velcro shoes and
- [Survival Sex](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2008/07/survival-sex/) - Sajida can’t talk openly about what war and displacement have forced her to do. She banters with male customers at the cafe where she works in Damascus, Syria. But the men want more from this 43-year old divorced mother of two, a refugee from Iraq. And she can’t refuse; her boss has seized her passport.
- [A Passage From India](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2008/11/a-passage-from-india/) - In 1883, the British government sent the accomplished linguist Sir George Grierson to look into alleged abuses in the recruitment of indentured servants from India (known as “coolies”) who ended up on ships bound for British plantations throughout the world. In his diary, Grierson wrote about an encounter with the father of one female coolie
- [Vulnerable in Morocco](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2009/06/vulnerable-in-morocco/) - Laila Lalami, a Moroccan- American writer who in her late 20s crossed a literary border into the landscape of English prose, begins her first novel with lines from the Cuban-American poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat: “The fact that I / am writing to you / in English / already falsifies what I wanted to tell you.”
- [](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2009/11/globalpost/) - The whites-only BNP, founded in 1982 as a breakaway from the neo-Nazi National Front, has been trying to shed its nutter image as part of a bid for respectability in mainstream politics. It was recently given a platform far more prominent than Speakers' Corner, when its chairman, Nick Griffin, appeared on the BBC flagship program "Question
- [Dead Woman Talking](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2009/11/till-we-can-keep/) - Read my review of Till We Can Keep An Animal by Megan Voysey-Braig in the Fall 2009 issue of Ms. Magazine.
- [Bilateral Commitments](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2008/09/bilateral-commitments/) - The short stories in Sana Krasikov’s first collection unfold in two contemporary landscapes: the former Soviet Union and New York City and its suburbs. But an entirely unrelated setting might help explain why these stories work as well as they do: 17th-century India, where court artists created illuminated manuscripts of the ancient Hindu epic the
- [Exile's Return](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2009/03/exiles-return/) - The subtitle of “Honeymoon in Tehran,” an engaging new book from the author of “Lipstick Jihad,” promises “two years of love and danger in Iran.” But while Azadeh Moaveni does indeed deliver details of her romance with the son of an Iranian textile tycoon, there’s another, more intriguing relationship at the core of this memoir.
- [Sleeping With the Enemy](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2009/06/sleeping-with-the-enemy/) - The narrator of “The Last War” has received an anonymous letter accusing her war correspondent husband of infidelity. So, unfortunately, did the book’s author. It speaks to Ana Menéndez’s maturity — as a woman and a writer — that her novel doesn’t go where it might have. It doesn’t constitute literary payback. Continue reading my
- [Song of India](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2009/10/song-of-india/) - Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel, a comedy of manners set in 1980s India, centers on the teenage scion of a corporate family who neither dresses nor acts the part. Read my review of The Immortals in The New York Times Book Review. And read an excerpt from the book here.
- [Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri](http://clips.bahadur.ws/1999/09/jhumpa/) - 20 Questions with Jhumpa Lahiri Interview by Gaiutra Bahadur Philadelphia City Paper September 16-23, 1999
- [Black Girl in Paris](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/02/black-girl-in-paris/) - Black Girl in Paris by Shay Youngblood Review by Gaiutra Bahadur salon.com
- [For Both Parties, Race in East Texas is Vital](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/08/yellowdog/) - Outcome could shape congressional politics By Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
- [Midnight's Grandchildren](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/08/mishra-jha/) - The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha Review by Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
- [Critics of State Regulatory Agency Say Patients Aren't Top Priority](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/08/dentalboard/) - Critics of State Regulatory Agency Say Patients Aren't Top Priority By Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
- [High-Tech Braceros Make Their Mark on Silicon Hills](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/11/high-tech-braceros-make-their-mark-on-silicon-hills/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Austin American-Statesman When Kaushal Kishore and a taxicab full of Austin techies crossed the border into Mexico this summer, they also crossed a border in time, into a frontier town where history seemed to be repeating itself. Rewind about fifty-five years. Ciudad Juarez was a depot for "braceros" _ Mexican contract
- [High-Tech Braceros Make Their Mark on Silicon Hills](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/11/braceros/) - Software Workers from India Are Reshaping Central Texas By Gaiutra Bahadur The Austin-American Statesman
- [Gallego Guides Legislators to Common Ground](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2001/04/gallego/) - Gallego Guides Legislators to Common Ground By Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
- [Condo Rules Chafe, Then Comes A Lawsuit](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2002/05/condo/) - Condo Rules Chafe, Then Comes a Lawsuit By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Baby Formula's Hot in Underground Market](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2002/09/babyformula/) - Drug Addicts Drive Black Market in Baby Formula By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [A Hate Crime Threatens New Tragedy](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/01/hasan/) - Family of 9/11 Hate Crime Victim May Be Deported By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Hindu nationalists tap immigrant guilt in the U.S.](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/01/diasporafunds/) - The "Hindutva" movement opposes India's secular system. Its leaders are raising funds in America. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [A Homeland Thought Lost Now in Reach](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/04/homeland/) - Two generations of Iraqis in Phila. long to go back. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Mistaken Identity Lands Man in Prison](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/05/mistaken-identity-lands-man-in-prison/) - Nadir Khan's Story By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Aging Immigrants Are Going It Alone](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/06/aging-immigrants/) - Aging immigrants are going it alone By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [What Will Their Vows Allow?](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/07/gaymarriage/) - Canada's Gay Marriage Law Raises Questions in the U.S. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Many Pakistanis Flee Atlantic City for Surer Refuge in Canada](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/08/pakistanis-flee/) - Fear shakes immigrant enclave By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [A Legacy of Vietnam, Lost in Translation](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/10/legacylost/) - Amerasians Lobby to Become U.S. Citizens By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Mike Weds Su: A 'Hinjew' Wedding](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/11/intermarry/) - Descendants of immigrants are now quicker to intermarry By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [An East-West Affair](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/12/an-east-west-affair/) - Madras on Rainy Days by Samina Ali Review by Gaiutra Bahadur Ms. Magazine, Winter 2003/2004
- [An East-West Affair](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/12/an-east-west-affair-2/) - Click on image below and then zoom in.
- [Immigration Plan Recalls Bracero Era](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/01/bushplan/) - An analysis of Bush's guest worker proposal By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Wild, remote Guyana becoming Caribbean drug hub](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/02/guyanadrugs/) - Cocaine traffickers cut a route through sugar republic. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Seeking U.S. Asylum, She Finds 3 Years in Jail](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/05/takky/) - Takky Zubeda's Story By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Boat-Lift Refugees Fighting Limbo](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/10/detainees/) - High Court Reviews Mariel Cases By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Iraqi Aides Are Denied a U.S. Haven](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/04/nohaven/) - They are running - and rejected. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Ethnic, Political Ties Seen as Key to Jobs in Iraqi Government](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/04/corruption/) - Ethnic, Political Ties Seen as Key to Jobs in Iraqi Government By Gaiutra Bahadur Knight Ridder Newspapers
- [Al-Sadr Followers Clash with Iraqi Forces](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/05/sadr/) - Al-Sadr Followers Clash with Iraqi Forces; Police Uncover Mass Graves By Gaiutra Bahadur Knight Ridder
- [Critics Say Satellite TV Beams Western 'Poison' into Iraq](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/05/satellite/) - Critics Say Satellite TV Beams Western 'Poison' into Iraq By Gaiutra Bahadur Knight Ridder Newspapers
- [In Now-religious Iraq, No Tolerance for Gypsies](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/06/gypsies/) - In Now-religious Iraq, No Tolerance for Gypsies By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [A Final Trip to a Distant Home](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/07/burydead/) - Immigrant communities join to help repatriate their dead. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [From Real War to the Political Fray](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/08/patrickmurphy/) - Iraq veteran runs for Congress By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Muslims Balance Between Cultures](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/08/muslim/) - A tradition of assimilation makes immigrants and their children less likely recruits for terrorism, experts say. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Chinese Immigrants Revitalize A Neighborhood](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/09/chinese/) - Are Immigrants A Tool for Urban Renewal? By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [A Faraway Fight Visible in Phila. Area](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/12/ivorycoast/) - Discord in their homeland divides Ivory Coast immigrants living here. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Stowaway: A Man with No Country](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/01/stowaway/) - From port to port, he is trapped on a ship. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Minutemen Extend Far from Southern U.S. Border](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/03/minutemen/) - Reach of Minuteman Goes Far Beyond Southern U.S. Border By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [An Arduous Path to Green Cards](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/04/greencard/) - Highly skilled workers on visas say the citizenship backlog in the United States leaves them frustrated. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Deep Roots, Now Less Sure](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/04/carlos/) - Profile of an Illegal Immigrant Father By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [An Old Struggle to Adapt to a New Country's Ways](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/05/genos/) - The Immigration Debate | Then vs. Now By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer
- [Alentejo Blue](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/06/alentejo-blue/) - Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali Review by Gaiutra Bahadur Ms. Magazine, Summer 2006
- [Deep Roots, Now Less Sure](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/04/undoc/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Carlos' secondhand white van zigzags through his South Philadelphia neighborhood, plastic rosary beads dangling from the rearview mirror. The Mexican migrant, who did not give his last name because he is here illegally, is on his way to FDR Park with his wife and three children for a birthday
- [Summer Fun, Islamic Lessons](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/08/islamic-camp/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Throwing all his weight into the yank of the rope, Subhan Tariq cried out in Arabic: "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most kind." The invocation didn't help. The team of boys from New York, anchored by the hefty 16-year-old, lost for the second time to
- [Immigrants: 9/11 Probe Violated Rights](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/08/lawsuit/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer BRAMPTON, ONTARIO _ Everything had been set for Akhil Sachdeva's fresh start. He had sold his gas station on Long Island to raise money for a sandwich-shop franchise in Toronto. His belongings were boxed up in the basement. He had even arranged to change the odometer on his BMW
- [In Now-religious Iraq, No Tolerance for Gypsies](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/06/qawliya/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer BAGHDAD - Kamalia used to be whispered about as a place of sin, part of the decadence of Saddam Hussein's rule.The houses in this former red-light district once bore carvings of the deposed dictator with dancing girls - the Gypsy courtesans he had installed here. Now, the walls are
- [Seeking U.S. Asylum, She Finds 3 Years in Jail](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/05/zubeda/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer For more than three years, a pay phone at the York County Prison has been Takky Zubeda's lifeline, connecting her to her husband and to her peace of mind. She is here - prisoner No. 62025 in a bleached-out jail in rural Pennsylvania - not because she committed a
- [Looking for America ](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2001/09/home/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Austin American-Statesman (Texas) How does that Paul Simon song go? Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they've all come to look for America. I don't know if I was looking for America. I don't know that I've ever looked for America on the New Jersey Turnpike. But I have
- [Mike Weds Su: A 'Hinjew' Wedding](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/11/hinjew/) - Descendants of Immigrants Now Quicker to Intermarry By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Klezmer music cued Sunanda Ghosh's entrance. She walked down the aisle in a white organza gown, arm in arm with her parents. Her mother, Krishna, wore a sari. In deference to the occasion, her father, Avijit, wore a black yarmulke atop his
- [Alentejo Blue](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/06/monicaali/) - Review by Gaiutra Bahadur Ms. Magazine Summer 2006 Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane, won her kudos and condemnation. She earned the kudos for gracefully telling the undertold stories of Bangladeshi immigrants in London. The condemnation came from some of those very immigrants, who denounced her portrayal of their community as “insulting and shameful.”Ali’s second
- [Minutemen Extend Far from Southern U.S. Border](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/03/bordercontrol/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer John Ryan is, as the slogan on his olive green T-shirt announces, an "undocumented U.S. Border Patrol agent." No one deputized the retired Quakertown telephone repairman to stare into the hardscrabble desert between Mexico and the United States, protecting the U.S. border from the estimated million people who cross
- [An Old Struggle to Adapt to a New Country's Ways](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/05/steakwid/) - The Immigration Debate | Then vs. Now By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer How do you say steak wid' in Spanish? Joseph Vento, the owner of Geno's Steaks, doesn't know. And he doesn't care. Just read the laminated signs, festooned with American eagles, at his South Philadelphia cheesesteak emporium: This is America. When Ordering, Speak
- [Many Pakistanis Flee Atlantic City for Surer Refuge in Canada](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/08/exodus/) - Fear shakes immigrant enclave By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The neon go-go girl still flashes near the deli where Mukeem Butt once worked. The streets are still studded with cash-for-gold joints. And an endless train of holiday gamblers and sunbathers continues to animate the Boardwalk. But away from the hubbub of Atlantic City's casino
- [A Lesson in English](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/06/englishlesson/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The hullabaloo over the signs at Geno's Steaks has been fed by a perception that many immigrants don't want to, try to or have to speak English. That perception is so fierce and deep that elected officials at every level have reacted: The U.S. Senate voted last month to
- [Hindu nationalists tap immigrant guilt](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/01/hindutva/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Ten years ago, in a small town in north India, Ashok Singhal spearheaded the destruction of a 16th-century mosque, sparking the worst religious riots since the country won independence. His supporters tore down the Babri Masjid brick by brick. A week ago, in a basement in suburban New Jersey,
- [Midnight's Grandchildren](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/08/midnights-grandchildren/) - The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra and The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha Review by Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman Critics have coupled Pankaj Mishra and Raj Kamal Jha in their encomiums. And why not? After all, both are men of letters in their 30s who made their novelistic debuts this year, at a time when
- [Black Girl in Paris ](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/02/shay_youngblood/) - Black Girl in Paris by Shay Youngblood Review by Gaiutra Bahadur salon.com "Black Girl in Paris" is the story of a young woman's pilgrimage to the city that nurtured her literary gods, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Eden Daniel, the 26-year-old narrator, sets out from the American South to the French capital in search of
- [A Hate Crime Threatens New Tragedy](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/01/hatecrime/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer He had done only "what every American wanted to do," Mark Anthony Stroman said. Four days after the World Trade Center collapsed, he walked into a Dallas convenience store and fired a bullet into the face of its Pakistani owner, killing him. More than a year later and a
- [Aging Immigrants Are Going It Alone](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/06/alone/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The names by its buzzers hint at a Little Odessa within. Outside this senior apartment complex in Northeast Philadelphia, the bus stops six times an hour - allowing Sofiya Pustelnik to visit her husband's grave four stops away, near the Neshaminy Mall, as often as she likes. When her
- [Mistaken Identity Lands Man in Prison](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/05/mistaken-identity/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The warrant was for Nadar Khan, date of birth, 2-7-59, wanted on heroin-trafficking charges in Texas. But the morning before Independence Day last year, the FBI, U.S. marshals and immigration agents in Philadelphia arrested Nadir Khan - date of birth, 1-25-55 - the wrong man. The truck driver languished
- [What Will Their Vows Allow?](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/07/canada/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer TORONTO _ Their white stretch limousine, punctuated by a "Just Married" sign, led the way.Newly anointed as the Scheuerman-Stallones, Brent and Steve waved at onlookers piled onto the sidewalks from their perch above the limo's sunroof. Each tilted a glass of champagne against a bright Toronto sky and savored
- [Boat-Lift Refugees Fighting Limbo](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/10/mariel/) - High Court reviews Mariel cases. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The United States wants to deport them, and their homelands won't take them back. Meanwhile, they wait in detention centers. They are at least 1,700 stowaways, thwarted asylum seekers, and ex-convicts who have done their time for their crimes. The vast majority have been
- [Muslims Balance Between Cultures](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/08/assimilated/) - A tradition of assimilation makes immigrants and their children less likely recruits for terrorism, experts say. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Adam Bdeir jigged his shoulders like rapper Jay-Z. Then the 7-year-old spat out the Arabic alphabet, to the beat of a Middle Eastern drum: Alif, Baa, Taa. The so-called Alif Baa rap, concocted
- [A Legacy of Vietnam, Lost in Translation](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/10/amerasians/) - Amerasians Lobby to Become U.S. Citizens By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The photo - of a black man in a uniform - is Dung Nguyen's only memory of his father. It was destroyed, like all other mementos signaling ties to the United States, when Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City in 1975. " 'Burn
- [A Final Trip to a Distant Home](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/07/finaltrip/) - Immigrant communities join to help repatriate their dead. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer As Claire Outou Bakayoko lay in a casket in West Philadelphia, a choir of fellow immigrants from the Ivory Coast sang: Je suis un étranger. (I am a foreigner.) Je me suis un passant. Je me dirige vers mon Père. (I
- [Immigration Plan Recalls Bracero Era](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/01/bracero/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Four decades of working in the United States has left Carlos Diaz-Nunez, 63, a shrunken man. His face is lined with wrinkles, his left leg crushed by a box of mushrooms six years ago. This farmhand from Mexico, despite his shriveled frame, carries much on his shoulders: His life
- [Chinese Immigrants Reshape a Neighborhood](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/09/revitalize/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer As the bus approached Philadelphia's Northeast, where houses are arrayed with attractive gardens and even more attractive price tags, passenger Wen Chen pitched a friend in New York City. "Philadelphia houses are so cheap," she chatted into her cell phone in Chinese. "It's easy to buy." The 38-year-old waitress,
- [Freed Asylum Seeker: "I Feel Like It Is A Dream"](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/05/freed/) - After 3.5 Years in Jail, Takky Zubeda Can Begin the Life She Sought in America By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Takky Zubeda stepped off a prison van to freedom in the United States of America on Friday afternoon. She emerged with two other detainees at the Greyhound station in this faded manufacturing town in
- [Condo Rules Chafe, Then Comes a Lawsuit](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2002/05/lawsui/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Enter the gates of the Blue Bell Country Club, into a cluster of condos in Montgomery County and nothing seems to break the harmony of the landscape. Gray shingles cap every roof, and wrought-iron lanterns hang next to every front door. Then comes Steve Blaustein's house. Here, the curtains
- [Baby Formula's Hot in Underground Market](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2002/09/blackmarket/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Call them the Bonnie and Clyde of baby formula. Erin Hayes, 20, and Michael Paciotti, 22, wheeled a shopping cart full of hundreds of dollars worth of Enfamil and Similac out of a Genuardi's store in Montgomery County, according to guilty pleas entered earlier this summer. The serial shoplifters,
- [Wild, Remote Guyana Becoming Caribbean Drug Hub](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2004/02/cocaine/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The Takatu River is so slender a border between Guyana and Brazil that speedboat taxis skim across it in a minute. In the dry season, villagers ford it by jeep or even on foot. At Lethem, the official gateway into Guyana's southwest, there is no checkpoint. Only a medicated
- [India Holds to its Self-Reliance](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/01/tsunami/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Self-sufficiency is a stance as deeply rooted in India as its fight to cast off its colonizers. Mahatma Gandhi wore only khadi, or homespun cloth. The gesture, tied to a boycott of textiles made in Britain, signified that the country did not want to - nor did it have
- [A Faraway Fight Visible in the Phila. Area](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/12/discord/) - Discord in their homeland divides Ivory Coast immigrants living here. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer When Alassane Dramane Ouattara's opponents wanted to discredit him in his bid for president of Ivory Coast in 1995, they looked to Philadelphia for material. Their operatives dug up the Wharton School graduate's marriage certificate, issued by Pennsylvania in
- [Stowaway: A Man With No Country](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/01/nocountry/) - From port to port, he is trapped on a ship. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer A stowaway aboard a ship that docked last week in the Port of Camden is now a virtual prisoner on the vessel, says its captain, because no country will claim him. The Trubezh arrived Jan. 20 bearing unexpected cargo,
- [An Arduous Path to Green Cards](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2006/04/backlog/) - Highly skilled workers on visas say the citizenship backlog in the United States leaves them frustrated. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer A photograph occupying a place of pride in banker Meenaish Damania’s Morrisville apartment shows her in a white sari, smiling and hopeful on her wedding day a year ago in India. She was
- [Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri](http://clips.bahadur.ws/1999/09/maladies/) - 20 Questions with Jhumpa Lahiri Interview by Gaiutra Bahadur Philadelphia City Paper September 16-23, 1999 In her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books), Jhumpa Lahiri chronicles the attempts of married couples, adulterous lovers and immigrants to cross borders and, as E.M. Forster wrote, "only connect." In "This Blessed House," a recently married
- [A Homeland Thought Lost Now in Reach](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2003/04/goback/) - Two generations of Iraqis in Phila. long to go back. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer The bus he was about to board would carry him, heart pumping, past dozens of checkpoints with a fake student ID and $7,000 in cash. Imad Alabudi had never before left Basra, his birthplace in southern Iraq. But that
- [Iraqi Aides Are Denied a U.S. Haven](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/04/running/) - They are running and rejected. By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer BAGHDAD - Alyaa said she was the first woman in her neighborhood to sign up to work with the U.S. government after Saddam Hussein fell. She used to stand shoulder to shoulder with an American soldier in front of the U.S. military's Camp Scania
- [Ethnic, Political Ties Seen as Key to Jobs in Iraqi Government](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/04/biased/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur Knight Ridder Newspapers BAGHDAD - Saddam Hussein's rules for young and ambitious Iraqis were clear: If you want a future, you must join the Baath Party.Now, as the leaders of the new National Assembly parcel out Cabinet posts according to ethnic group and religious or political affiliation, students and recent college graduates
- [Al-Sadr Followers Clash with Iraqi Forces; Police Uncover Mass Grave](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/05/clash/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur Knight Ridder BAGHDAD - Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the militant Shiite Muslim cleric responsible for two uprisings against the United States last year, clashed with Iraqi security forces in the southern city of Kufa on Friday, on a day of widespread violence in Iraq. A mass grave was found at a dump
- [Critics Say Satellite TV Beams Western 'Poison' into Iraq](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/05/poison/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur Knight Ridder Newspapers BAGHDAD - Oprah has a fan base in Iraq. Iraqi mothers fret about the amount of time their teenagers spend watching "Star Academy," an Arabic-language cross between "American Idol" and "The Real World."And an ad for the satellite channel MBC's new lineup - which includes "Inside Edition," "Jeopardy!" and
- [For Both Parties, Race in East Texas is Vital](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/08/east_texas/) - Outcome Could Shape Congressional Politics By Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman (Texas) Polk County in rural East Texas is a place where hosannas electrify the airwaves, churches anchor the main town at a rate of six per square mile and the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt once reigned almost as supreme as God. It is also
- [Critics Say Patients of Regulatory Board Aren't Top Priority](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2000/08/dental/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman (Texas) A surveillance camera recorded dentist Bradley D. Hagen fondling a female patient at the Del Valle correctional facility in 1997. The Travis County sheriff's department arrested, then fired him. Criminal charges are pending, and five inmates have sued Hagen, alleging sexual assault. Still, Hagen continues to practice in Manchaca.
- [Gallego Guides Legislators to Common Ground](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2001/04/polprofile/) - By Gaiutra Bahadur Austin American-Statesman (Texas) Pete Gallego's great-grandfather worked on a crew laying the railroad tracks that later would divide Alpine, his West Texas hometown, into two halves. Anglos would live to the north; Mexicans, to the south. There, in an adobe hut in the barrio in 1917, his grandfather opened Pete Gallego's Chili
- [From Real War to the Political Fray](http://clips.bahadur.ws/2005/08/iraqvet/) - Iraq veteran runs for Congress By Gaiutra Bahadur The Philadelphia Inquirer Like John Kerry, Democrat Patrick Murphy, an Iraq veteran running for Congress in Bucks County, Pa., is straight out of central casting: earnest, clean-cut, a lawyer, an officer in war. But while Kerry was the poster boy for veterans who came home to denounce

## Pages

- [Bio](http://clips.bahadur.ws/about-2/) - Gaiutra Bahadur is an essayist, critic and journalist. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, a personal history of indenture shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. Gaiutra was born in Guyana and emigrated as a child to Jersey City, New Jersey, where
- [Literary Criticism](http://clips.bahadur.ws/book-reviews/) - The Nation “At Macondo Pharmacy," The Nation, June 14/21, 2021 “Coming Home," The Nation, February 11, 2020 "India's Missing Women," Review essay, July 7-14, 2014 The New Republic "The Grammar of Oppression," a review essay on race, caste and Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, December 2020 “The United States' Debt to Immigrants,"
- [Selected Reporting](http://clips.bahadur.ws/select-articles-2/) - Oil's Bounty – and its Costs The New York Times, March 30, 2024 The Prakash Churaman Story / Asian American Writers Workshop Part 1: Raised by the System The Margins, March 17, 2022 Part 2: Fighting for His Freedom The Margins, March 18, 2022 Pulitzer Center Package / 2015 elections in Guyana Risker, Risk The Caribbean
- [Essays](http://clips.bahadur.ws/essays/) - “Unmaking Asian Exceptionalism,” The Boston Review, Summer 2023 “At Macondo Pharmacy,” The Nation, June 14/21, 2021 “The Grammar of Oppression,” The New Republic, December 2020 "A House Filled With Women," afterword to Fault Lines by Meena Alexander (Feminist Press, November 2020) "In 1953, Britain openly removed an elected government, with tragic consequences," The Guardian, October 30, 2020
- [Books](http://clips.bahadur.ws/books/) - Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013) – In 1903, my great-grandmother sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie”— the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, she disappeared, like so many of the indentured, into history.
- [Off the Beaten Path](http://clips.bahadur.ws/off-the-beaten-path/) - "Baby Formula's Hot in Underground Market," The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 9, 2002 "Condo Rules Chafe, Then Comes a Lawsuit," The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 27, 2002 "No Gloves or Curves: It's Base Ball," The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 2, 2002
- [Investigative](http://clips.bahadur.ws/investigative/) - "Nativists Get a Tea-Party Makeover," The Nation, Oct. 28, 2010 "An Arab Voice is Challenged," The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8, 2003 "Critics of State Regulatory Agency Say Patients Aren't Top Priority," The Austin American Statesman, August 20, 2000
- [Political Coverage](http://clips.bahadur.ws/political-coverage/) - "Nativists Get a Tea-Party Makeover," The Nation, Oct. 28, 2010 "Bowling for Pennsylvania," The Nation, May 5, 2008 "From Real War to the Political Fray: Iraq Veteran Runs for Congress," The Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 14, 2005 "Gallego Guides Legislators to Common Ground," The Austin American-Statesman, April 25, 2001
- [Foreign Coverage](http://clips.bahadur.ws/foreign-coverage/) - "Should My People Need Me," Ms. Magazine, Winter 2012 Two-part series on the British National Party, Globalpost.com, Nov. 14, 2009 "Survival Sex," Ms. Magazine, Summer 2008 "In Now-Religious Iraq, No Tolerance for Gypsies," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 6, 2005 "Critics Say Satellite TV Beams Western Poison into Iraq," The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 12, 2005 "Al-Sadr Followers Clash With Iraqi
- [Post Sept. 11](http://clips.bahadur.ws/post-sept-11/) - "Many Pakistanis Flee Atlantic City for Surer Refuge in Canada," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 18, 2003 "Immigrants: 9/11 Probe Violated Rights," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 23, 2003 "Mistaken Identity Lands Man in Prison," The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 12, 2003 "A Hate Crime Threatens New Tragedy: Family of 9/11 Hate Crime Victim May Be Deported," The
- [Immigration](http://clips.bahadur.ws/immigration/) - "On the Migrant Trail," Reporter's notebook from the U.S.-Mexico border for The Nation Institute, June 10, 2010 "An Old Struggle to Adapt to a New Country's Ways," The Geno's Steaks Story, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 30, 2006 "Deep Roots, Now Less Sure," The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 27, 2006 "Minutemen Extend Far from Southern U.S. Border,"
- [Race and Ethnicity](http://clips.bahadur.ws/race-and-ethnicity/) - "Bowling for Pennsylvania," The Nation, May 5, 2008 "Muslims Balance Between Cultures," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 7, 2005 "A Final Trip to a Distant Home: Immigrant Communities Join to Help Repatriate Their Dead," The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 2005 "Mike Weds Su: A Hinjew Wedding," The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 16, 2003 "Aging Immigrants Are Going

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