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).
South Asian Worldviews
Papori Bora
GENDER IN SOUTH ASIA: SOCIAL IMAGINATION AND CONSTRUCTED REALITIES by Subhadra Mitra Channa Cambridge University Press, New Delhi, 2014, 238 pp., 795
February 2014, volume 38, No 2