Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India.

• Author: Sharma, Arvind

Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India. Edited by MANDAKRANTA BOSE. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. xiii + 346. $70.

A book easy and enjoyable to read but difficult and daunting to review. As a symposium volume it contains multitudes; the list of the contributions must speak for itself: 1) "A Controversy over a Verse on the Remarriage of Hindu Women" (Krishna Dattan); 2) "Sati: The Event and Ideology" (Mandakranta Bose); 3) "Satyavati: The Matriach of the Mahabharata" (Jayntri Ghosh); 4) "Usable Woman: The Tales of Amba and Madhavi" (Madhusraba Dasgupta); 5) "Ansuya: A Pativrata with Panache" (Vidyut Aklujkar); 6) "'The Wildering Gloom': Women's Place in Buddhist History" (Chapla Verma); 7) "The Goddess, Women and Their Rituals in Hinduism" (Samjukta Gombrich Gupta); 8) "The Goddess-Woman Equation in Sakta Tantras" (Madhu Khanna); 9) "Women's Wealth and Worship: Female Patronage of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism in Medieval Tamil Nadu" (Leslie Orr): 10) "The Goddess-Woman Nexus in Popular Religious Practice: The Cult of Manasa" (Manasi Dasgupta and Mandakranta Bose); 11) "Mirabai in the Academy and the Politics of Identity " (Nancy Martin-Kershaw); 12) "Candravati Ramayana: Feminizing the Rama Tale" (Nabaneeta Dev Sen); 13) "Women Saints in Medieval Maharashtra" (Eleanor Zelliot); 14) "Powers Behind the Throne: Women in Early Mughal Politics" (Mriducchanda Palit); 15) "For Our Native Sisters: The Wesleyan Ladies' Auxiliary in India" (Sarika P. Bose); 16) "Flora Annie Steel: A Voice for Indian Women?" (Karyn Huenemann); 17) "Exploring Tradition and Change among Women in Marathi Culture" (Suma Chitnis); 18) "The Construction of Gender in History and Religion: The Sikh Case" (Doris R. Jakobsh); 19) "Post Colonial Identity as Feminist Fantasy: A Study of Tamil Women's Short Fiction on Dowry" (Matilda Gabrielpillai); 20) "Eroticism and the Woman Writer in Bengali Literature" (Nabaneeta Dev Sen); 21) "Women in Radical Movements in Bengal in the 1940s: The Story of the Mahila Atmaraksa Samiti (Women's Defense League)" (Tripti Chaudhuri); 22) "The Feminist Movement in West Bengal: From the Eighties to the Nineties" (Maitreyi Chatterjee ). Thus is the history of India pierced with the needle of "feminism," and a quilt of many colors is thereby sewn.

This obvious if somewhat tedious task of sharing the contents of the book with the reader has served a useful purpose: it reveals the diversity of themes canvassed...