Guest speaker: Esha Pillay (she/her) 
 

Taking inspiration from her feature in Tamil Futures 2020, Esha Pillay presents her vision for a Tamil future as a low-caste coolie from Fiji - encouraging viewers to further their understanding of gendered and caste-based violence(s) of indentured labour, and their intersections with intergenerational traumas.

Resources for the episode (as mentioned in the episode):

- Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein & Dr. Lisa Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments

- Lainy Malkani, Sugar, Sugar: Bitter-Sweet Tales of Indian Migrant Workers

- Dr. Margaret Mishra, Between Women: Indenture, Morality and Health

Biography 

Seema Mattu is a Valmiki world-building trickster, whose multi-channel practice is framed as a theme park—known as SEEMAWORLD. Through the playfulness of intersecting amenities and services, visitors are prompted to portal around a unifying setting weaved by Seema’s own multi-minority personhood.

With an interest in lo-fi high fantasy storytelling, SEEMAWORLD fuses both CGI and IRL environment-building, character creation, mixed-media animation, sound design and visual spectacle to explore: systems of caste, South Asian GL (girl(s) love), queer sorcery, fan labour and classifications of gender via digital technologies.

Recent projects include work with: Berwick Film and Media Festival, IKON gallery, Eastside Projects, New Art City, Blindspot Gallery and QUAD. In April 2022, she completed both Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship and a year-long residency with Wysing Arts Centre in March 2023. In December 2021, Seema became a QUAD International Digital Fellow, leading to her first major solo show in Autumn 2023. 

Esha Pillay is an Indo-Fijian writer based in the U.S. whose research looks into intergenerational traumas among Indo-Fijian communities who are descendants of indentured labour and Girmit. She has a focus on caste violence throughout Girmit and in the present and challenges the "post-caste" narrative among descendants of indenture. Her own family stories and lived experiences guide her activism and story-telling across various digital platforms. Esha used to host a dedicated Instagram account, coolie_returns, to share further marginalized histories within larger indentured labour histories across different countries, islands, and diasporas. Her educational posts are now accessible on her website (izlandkuli.wixsite.com/cooliereturns), and you can find her other writing and projects at linktr.ee/izland_kuli.