In this engaging and eloquent history Ruby Lal traces the becoming of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms eroticism adventurousness and playfulness even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century remained agential figures their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses elaborated in four different sites - forest school household and rooftops.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Texts, spaces, histories; 2. The woman of the forest; 3. The woman of the school; 4. The woman of the household; 5. The woman of the rooftops.