Counting House

Issues of caste, slavery, racism, and the immigrant experience in the early 19th century are addressed in this novel. Rohini and Vidia, a young married couple struggling for survival in a small, caste-ridden Indian village are seduced by a recruiter's persuasive talk of easy work and plentiful land. They sign up as indentured laborers to go to British Guiana and discover their harsh fate as "bound coolies" in a country only just emerging from the savage brutalities of slavery. In their problematic encounters with the Afro-Guyanese, hostile to immigrant labor, they confront the truths of their uprooted condition and learn to live with their fate.

David Dabydeen is the director of the Center for Caribbean Studies and a professor at the Center for British Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. He is also Guyana's ambassador-at-large and a member of UNESCO's executive board. He is the author of A Harlot's Progress and Turner, and the poetry collection Slave Song, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.