Beacons In An Area Of Darkness

Early feminists of colonial India

Bharati Ray

Oxford University Press

173+10 pages, Price Rs 445

There is a species known as WASP. They are supposed to be the privileged of the world. Needless to say they are human, in the pejorative sense of the word; normally they are male; normally again, they are the upper class of the species that are so privileged. They are not wasps, but they have been stinging the rest of creation for millennia.

At their antipodes are those humans of the third world, they are female, usually though not always, of the lower class and caste and it