This work attempts to break new ground by posing questions about women’s activism within the Hindu right, a crucial issue that has barely been addressed.

These essays look at gender within the framework of larger questions: the organizational history of the formation – still developing – we call the Hindu Right; its relationship to change in religious processes, economic developments, caste politics and constitutional crisis over the last few decades. The essays also pose difficult questions for the theory and practice of feminist politics which has tended to identify women’s political activism with emancipatory politics. Right-wing movements, it has been assumed, have – because of their emphasis on “tradition” – an inverse relationship to women’s politicization. Yet violently communal politics have pulled women into militant politics.

What do these and other questions and paradoxes mean for the theory and practice of “feminist” politics, and how do right-wing strategies and tactics compare with those developed by radical women’s groups?

URVASHI BUTALIA is a publisher, teacher and activist, involved in women’s publishing and research and activism on gender issues..

TANIKA SARKAR is a historian of modern India. She is author of several books and articles on issues relating to gender and history.

The first full-length autobiography in Bengali, Amar Jiban (My Life) was written in the early nineteenth century by an upper-caste rural housewife named Rashundari Debi. Published in 1868 when she was 88 years old, the book is a fascinating snapshot of life for women in the nineteenth century. Debi, who gave birth to eleven children—her first was born when she was 18-years-old, the last when she was forty-one—ruminates on her very individual understanding of bhakti as well as the new times that were unfolding around her.

Offering a translation of major sections of this remarkable autobiography, Words to Win is a portrait of a woman who wants to compose a life of her own, wishes to present it in the public sphere, and eventually accomplishes just that. The words, in the end, win out. First published in 1999, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in nineteenth-century Indian history. The classic text is reissued here in a new paperback format.

“Sarkar’s dissection of the text – the autobiography of an upper-caste East Bengali widow from a family of landlords, who teaches herself to read and write in secrecy as it’s a taboo to do so – yields a cracking yarn of social history.” — Pothik Ghosh, Outlook