It is with these lines that the author Leopold Ainsworth, a European planter in British Malaya in the 1930s, described his first impressions of Indian coolies and their intimate relations on the estate of which he had recently become the manager. In the process, he also creates a generalized and yet vivid impression of the everyday intimacies of coolie couples for his readers. Such records were not unique to British Malaya. Colonial plantations across the British Empire, which employed Indian immigrant coolies, have dutifully recorded cases of spousal or domestic violence occurring in coolie lines—whether in planters’ memoirs, local criminal records, or even in parliamentary discussions concerning coolies. For instance, in 1902, following a rise in violent “domestic” incidents amongst coolies on plantations in Fiji, the local Immigration Department was moved by the Colonial Office in Britain to investigate the quality of social life for the indentured laborers in Fiji. W. E. Russell, one of the Immigration Inspectors, argued, apparently based on his findings, that each congregation of Indian coolies in Fiji was “a veritable hotbed of murder.” Similarly, a Colonial Office Commission sent to British Guiana in 1871 to study the condition of Indian laborers there asserted that Indian men killed their partners at a rate “142 times greater than in India's provinces.”