ABSTRACT
The construction of women in terms of recognizable roles, images, models, and labels occurs in discourse in response to specific social imperatives even where it may be offered in terms of the universal and abstract rhetoric of ‘Woman’ or ‘women’ (or the ‘Indian woman’, as the case may be). As Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have pointed out in the introduction to a collection of essays that explores the project of ‘recasting women’ in colonial India, ‘womanhood is often part of an asserted or desired, not an actual, cultural continuity’. 1 Elsewhere Sangari has argued that
female-ness is not an essential quality. It is constantly made, and redistributed; one has to be able to see the formation of female-ness in each and every form at a given moment or in later interpretations, and see what it is composed of, what its social correlates are, what its ideological potentials are, what its freedoms may be. 2
