Book Reviews : MALAVIKA KASTURI, Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-Century North India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 238

Abstract

the voice of the Hindu woman over the Muslim woman. Ray’s explanation, ’Throughout the discussion I have chosen to speak of Sarala Debi before Begum Rokeya because she was the older of the two women’ seems a rather inadequate justification. It is clear that the experience of pardah and abarodh (or confinement) marked the formation of Rokeya’s critical consciousness in a way that it did not mark Sarala Debi’s as a privileged woman of the Tagore family. But to make the experience of pardah the defining moment of Rokeya’s life, and by extension, the lives of all Muslim women in Bengal, is to render the practice simultaneously exceptional for one community and invisible for another. For, it is also true that the Bengali Hindu bhadramahila was also a subject of the antahpur, making for a similar set of experiences between the two groups of women, even if unevenly shared. Sumanta Bannerjee’s (1989) account of the ways in which the loss of a shared culture of