A collection of eleven incisive and insightful essays on the plight of the Indian woman written by the celebrated Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma, recipient of the Padma Bhushan and Bharatiya Jnanpith Award. Priestess of the Chhayavadi School of poetry, Mahadevi Varma was also a prose writer par excellence. Translated by Neera Kuckreja Sohoni, these essays examine the inequitable situation of the Indian woman from various perspectives and cover several parameters of the Indian woman’s status ranging from the cultural and historical to the economic, civic, educational and legal. Written in the 1930s, they continue to be relevant even in the modern context. To what extent the present essays will inspire the reader to reflect further is impossible for me to say. But if the blurred outline of the Indian woman’s frightful conditions becomes somewhat clear in the light of these essays, compiling them will not then have been in vain.
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