Book Reviews : BHARATI RAY, Early Feminists of Colonial India: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002

If no one now takes seriously the entire self-promoting notion of a dissociation of sensibility that supposedly took place under colonialism, it is generally acknowledged that something more momentous-less literary-than sensibilities did change in the course of the period. Phule, to be sure, is part of this period of cultural invention and depredation; and yet, I am convinced-from the sheer point or force of his selected writings-that there is more to Phule than having ’invented’ (or at least radically redescribed) away of talking about hierarchies, both cosmic and social, of knowledge, behaviour and entitlement. The theorist Homi Bhabha has a