Amrita Saikia’s book could be read with other feminist studies on the marginalization of women’s voices and roles in nationalist movements. It is an important contribution to this discipline since it deals with a subject that has not been explored much in academia. Besides, the book also contributes immensely to the repository of literature and knowledge on Tibetan women in exile in India while dealing with the ontology of a Tibetan identity. This makes it an engaging manuscript on how identities are socially constructed, in the interstices of politics, history, everyday life, and symbolism.
Saikia documents the regular and everyday socio-political lives of the Tibetan community in exile in India, while addressing the central question of her book: how, like other nationalist movements in the Third World, Tibetan women’s voices have been ignored in the discourse of Tibetan nationalism.