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Gender and Caste Hierarchy in Colonial Bengal by Deboshruti Roychowdhury explores how different ranks of caste groups in colonial Bengal contemplated the ‘ideal woman’. The subtitle suggests that the book might talk about significant ‘interventions’ by subordinate castes on the ‘women’s question’ in colonial Bengal, interventions that could possibly bring out the contested and variegated nature of the ideal(s). Reading the book, however, makes it clear that the author’s point is about ‘Brahmanical hegemony’ being ‘something truly total in nature’ (p. 217). Thus the author argues that claims of superior status in terms of caste were organically linked to claims of ‘purity’ which, in turn, placed oppressive burdens of chastity, fidelity, subservience and self-sacrifice invariably on women. Amid unprecedented opportunities offered by the colonial regime, low caste groups saw their improvement of social status in the imposition of oppressive patriarchal norms, ‘Brahmanical in nature’ (p. 216), on their women. Roychowdhury assumes that this meant a loss to lower caste women’s erstwhile relative freedom ‘whose way of life was subjected to fiercer scrutiny than ever before’ (p. 204). To quote her: ‘The absence of free choices for women thus became a ubiquitous phenomenon prevalent across almost all the social strata of colonial Bengal’ (p. 9).

What makes this book a unique read is that it focuses not on any stepwells in Gujarat but on stepwells that were commissioned by women between the 7th and the 19th centuries— we are talking about the connect that stepwells and women had which was not restricted only to women drawing water from them but also of women creating a space for themselves at the stepwells. The book opens with two pictures facing each other—one is a map of the important stepwells commissioned by women or built to honour them while the other picture is that of a group of women on their way to the wells with their water pots. The book begins by tracing the importance of water for rituals and traditions across India. Bhatt traces the history behind the construction of wells and stepwells which were regarded as ‘acts of charity’.

One of the first thoughts after going through the book under review is the sense of deep dissatisfaction and unease with the dominant model of development as induced by World Bank and International Monetary Fund manifested in Structural Adjustment Programmes being practised in the name of development in India in general and Punjab in particular. From the feminist lens the resultant situation is more alarming as it is the women who have and are still bearing the aftershocks of such lopsided understanding and practice of development as ‘… development policy in general, and structural adjustment in particular, is not gender-neutral’ (DeshmukhRanadive, 2003: viii). Padhi’s book is an account through the voices of women survivors i.e., Jat-Sikh wives and widows and mothers how their lives are fraught with economic and familial insecurities, helplessness, humiliation in the wake of suicide committed by the male members of the family due to inability to repay back the loan to the local money lender, the arhtiya. Through the extensive fieldwork conducted intermittently during 2006–2010 of the selected villages, the author judiciously uses both questionnaire and interview tools to elicit data in narrative form which later on has been qualitatively and quantitatively analysed to arrive at ‘patterns’ of ‘structured layers of class, caste and patriarchy’ (pp. 168) affecting women. The agrarian milieu of districts of the Malwa region, Punjab provides the setting of the study. The choice of the region is much guided by the fact that it has been the seedbed of green revolution.