Women of India is an important volume, not only because as editor Bharati Ray has to gathered in one place essays by almost all the important gender studies scholars in India, but also because it seeks to put into one text all the imaginable aspects of the history of women in modern India. The collection is part (vol. IX, part 3) of a larger project on History of Science, Philosophy and Culture of Indian Civilisation, coordinated by D.P. Chattopadhyay, a project that has already produced a large body of work seeking to chronologically and comprehensively describe all that there is to know about Indian history, culture, knowledge-systems and religions. Placed within this oeuvre, the book under review acquires a kind of a larger claim to representativeness, which readers of the volume must necessarily engage with. A few preliminary remarks on this. The very fact that such a volume takes the form of a collection of many texts rather than one continuous narrative is important.
It shows that from the perspective of gender studies, there could be no illusion of a civilizational totality—though civilization is a term central to the larger project of which the volume is a part—that could seek to encapsulate women’s history in India. For the history of women, if anything, has been a history of dissent and conflict, especially over so-called civilizational terms and claims. Bharati Ray’s introduction too makes no attempt to weave the various essays into any one structure, or even argument, on ‘women of India’.