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Book Review: Indian Women by Indira J. Parikh and Pulin K. Garg

The book ‘Indian Women’ presents a terrific research on ethos, pathos, history, and all those societal and its allied parameters that affect the space and liberty and identity patterns of women in all walks of life in our country for ages. Written by a duo of a woman and man – Indira J. Parikh and Pulin K. Garg – this book brings forward the inner dialogues of women from various facets of life that are not necessarily voiced over the time.


These inner dialogues, expressed and unarticulated, form the scaffold of the book’s narrative. Despite producing such intense and profound content, which the duo have been compiling since 1983, the book goes in a smooth way, with least interruptions and above all it sounds like a complete work on the status of Indian women, providing relevant and timely commentary and throwing a  highlight on their space. It’s a general fact that women in our country endured a lot since the dawn of women. They had been denied privileges, personal space, basic freedom, professional aspirations, hegemony, choices in marriages and much more due to the obsessive patriarchal ecosystem of our societies and economies.

There galore many folktales, even from the mythological times, that girls were married to fulfill the words of their parents (mostly kings and queens). In the first chapter, the authors deliver such folktales where girls are married under differential circumstances, beautiful girls taken away by disabled beggars or tricksters. Right after each tale, the authors have provided the counterviews and who fared how is given to exemplify their justified stance.

Total segmented across 8 chapters, the book traverses through a vast scope of women space, it particularly provides coverage from Sita…Sati…to Savitri. Since the book’s coverage is extensive, cupping it under one genre or category is impossible, nevertheless it brilliantly captures the life of women associated with marriage and the subsequent roles she plays while being uprooted and re-rooted to fit in the void of social strictures. While playing many roles and seeking love in husband, in any class women have been denied their inner voice, she nurses her suppressed emotions mutely and bears the oppression like a responsible slave.

The tone of the book is neither biased nor inclined towards feminism. It is written and presented in such profundity that its real usage cannot be gauged by reading it just once. Students, critics, researchers – it is a perfect archive and food for their thoughts. One of the major objectives of the book is to make aware the current and coming generations of our country with the spaces of women that have been deliberately kept unknown and hidden.

Buy the book from Amazon/Kindle

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