South Asian Worldviews

In her book under review anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa provides a generalized model of the ‘Devi and the Dasi’ to understand what it means to be a woman in South Asia. For a book that has South Asia in its title, the focus is very narrowly on India. She justifies this by saying, in a footnote in the conclusion to the book, ‘Since South Asia was a unified region till quite recent times, unless we are talking of the postcolonial period, to talk about India, means to talk about South Asia’ (p. 184).