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The book begins with Ram Prasad Bismil’s poem sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai which captures the fire of sacrifice and intense loyalty for nation held by men and women in the Hindi heartland.The main thrust of this book is to explore the contribution of lesser known women who made sacrifices for the sake of freedom. The narrative embarks with the ordeal of Rajkumari Gupta, a freedom fighter of Kanpur. Her involvement in the movement left her homeless, as she had a pivotal role to play in the Kakori plot that resulted in her arrest and consequent rejection by her in-laws. The author starts her discussion culled from oral and archival sources about the role of women participants in the Kakori incident, and furnishes information regarding their experiences and identities.

The book under review, Partition: The Long Shadow, delving into the notions of ‘foreignness’ and ‘belonging’, focuses upon three significant themes: one, it brings back the peripheral regions of the subcontinent, e.g., Assam, Sindh, and Ladakh, into the academic discussion on Partition; two, it gives voice to the second and third generation memories of the event; and three, it suggests a larger study of the psychological aftermath of Partition.

Education occupies an intersecting space between economic, cultural and political spheres in society. In this context, the book under review investigates the nature of identity formation among economically deprived adolescent Muslim girls in Delhi by focusing on the interstitial spaces of the ‘home’ and ‘school’. It examines issues of religion, patriarchy and education, to interrogate the universalistic norms which are generally gendered in India. The volume using an interdisciplinary approach and multiple research methods attempts to contribute to the study of socialization and modern education among minorities and other marginalized groups.

This is one of those books that not only immediately captures one’s attention, but becomes something of an academic page turner. Lila Abu-Lughod’s book may be dismissed by many as an apologia for the abject condition of women in the Islamic world. Her response would be that those who make the most about the issue of the degraded condition of Muslim women are under the sway of what she calls ‘IslamLand’. This is an unchanging notion of the lands of Islam and Muslims that does not take into account the multifarious and diverse ways in which women lead their lives in these many regions, territories and nations of the world. Abu-Lughod’s training as an anthropologist equips her with precisely this imperative to look into the complex matrix of diversity, hopes, miseries, desires, ambitions, dreams and uncertainties with which women lead their lives. Her focus is on the Middle East and in particular a remote village of Egypt in which she has followed the lives of her many female interlocutors about whom she has written, quite often with great empathy.

Sujit Kumar Chattopadhyay’s book titled Gender Inequality, Popular Culture and Resistance in Bankura District is in keeping with the spirit of our times. There has been a rethink in gender studies on the importance of cultural norms and institutions in sustaining gender inequality compared to the more visible social and economic structures such as family and market. Studies have explored the strength of gender norms perpetuated through popular culture and the insidious ways in which it operates to solidify and naturalize gender based inequality (Chowdhry 1994, Uberoi 2009). The turn to cultural studies in gender studies set out as its agenda the need to take cultural forms seriously and use them as subversive sites of resistance. The book therefore contributes to the growing research on popular culture as a site of gender inequality as well as its resistance.

The title of the book Purdah to Piccadilly: A Muslim Woman’s Struggle for Identity is very apt, literally and metaphorically. The book follows the journey of a Muslim woman’s struggle for creating an identity in a world where a woman herself is a non-entity. Based through a timeperiod that sets the background of the story through the social and political upheaval of the pre- and post-Independence era, the story chronicles the life of the author from birth till present times where Zarina Bhatty is leading a quite retired life in Mussorie. The review presented here is more from a gender perspective than anything else.