[1] Bahadur was born in New Amsterdam, East Berbice-Corentyne in rural Guyana and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was six years old.
In her decade as a daily newspaper reporter, she covered politics, immigration and demographics in Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and spent three months in the spring of 2005, during the Iraq war, as a foreign correspondent in Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau.
[6] She collaborated[7] with poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir to recover the only known text by an indentured immigrant in the Anglophone Caribbean, a songbook by Lal Bihari Sharma first published as a pamphlet in India in 1915.
Mohabir's English translation, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, was published in 2019[8] with an afterword by Bahadur, who first encountered the text in the British Library while doing research for Coolie Woman.
[9] She is an associate professor of English and journalism at Rutgers University-Newark and has taught creative nonfiction at the University of Basel in Switzerland[10] and Caribbean literature at City College of New York.