Ansichtkaarten met foto’s van Hindostaanse vrouwen

This image is part of a genre of European colonial photography featuring indentured South Asian Caribbean women. Photographers dubbed these women “coolie belles,” using a slur for South Asian indentured workers. This image of a young woman, whom the photographer Eugen Klein identifies as Eunoobia, shows her standing confidently in an idyllic setting, looking directly at the camera. The low angle was typical of colonial portraiture of racialized women; it tends to render the woman both monumental and eroticized. Eunoobia is adorned with heavy jewelry, a common aspect of these portraits meant to evoke beauty and exoticism. Klein operated a photo studio in Dutch Suriname in the 1890s and 1900s. His works included many images of Black and South Asian women posing in idyllic tropical settings. These kinds of photographs were frequently distributed as postcards, the beginnings of the mass advertisement of the Caribbean as a Global North vacation destination.