This paper is intended as the beginnings of an introduction to a Master’s thesis that will look at discourses around Indian women and gender under indenture in Colonial Natal from 1860 to 1911. I attempt to highlight what I consider to be the main aspects of my arguments about Indian immigrant women who came to Natal under the indentured labour system. The primary intention of the arguments that are presented here is to grapple with the agency of indentured Indian women. There is a distinct set of ideas in this paper about the manner in which the decisions and actions of women who immigrated to Natal as indentured workers confounded a colonial administration that held particular ideas of gender and the expected roles of men and women – both of English men and women in Victorian England, and of Indians they had come to ‘know’ through the colonial encounter on the subcontinent. As such, it departs from the argument proposed by many scholars of Indian women’s history – both on the subcontinent and in the Indian diaspora – that the weight of subalternity shouldered by the Indian woman was