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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.

Aparna Bandopadhay’s book creates a narrative out of the heartrending journey of desire and defiance that women in colonial Bengal went through for daring to assert the aspirations of their hearts. Caught between a patriarchal society and a patriarchal state, it shows in detail how classic patriarchy excludes and punishes women who challenge its control over their sexuality. The chapter ‘Quest for Legitimacy’ recounts the instances when women from kulin Hindu and Brahmo families asserted their right to choose their life partners. The Hindu ideal of marriage was a non-consensual marriage at a pre-pubertal age. Although the Brahmos accepted the concept of mutual consent, they too imposed restrictions of caste endogamy, Brahmo endogamy, regional endogamy, and obtaining the approval of the families. Any choice that did not meet with these criteria was considered transgressive. Young kulin women, haunted by the spectre of lifelong spinsterhood or marriage to a polygamous older man and subsequent early widowhood, married men who were not vetted by their families.

This timely collection of essays is in equal measure a product of and a detailed comment on an important moment in the history of feminism in India, in which feminists reject the need for a unified subject of feminism, and turn towards a deeper interrogation of the activist/academic divide in making sense of feminism itself. It contains excellent essays that reveal the extent to which feminism in India has become alive to the intertwining of many different strands of power shaping of our patriarchies. The editor in her introduction remarks that the essays in the volume are about ‘doing’ gender rather than just ‘thinking’ it, but many of these essays show that feminism in India has often complicated that divide—it is not always just thinking, they seem to say. Rather, it was often the effort to develop a praxis in the fullest sense.