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This book presents an overview of the experiences and representations of motherhood in India from ancient to modern times. The argument is that the centrality of motherhood as an ideology in a woman's life is manufactured. It analyses different structures of society - language, religion, law.

Mary E. John and Meena Gopal (Eds.), Women in the World's Labour—Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Perspectives. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2021, 423 pp., ₹995, ISBN 978-81-949258-9-7 (Paperback).

The following piece contains the reflections of Maithreyi Krishnaraj, a wellknown senior feminist scholar on 'Feminism, Epistemology and Education' by Shirley Pendlebury, in David Car( Ed.) Education, Knowledge and Truth (Routledge, 1998, pp. 174–188). Re-visiting it after twenty years, she feels that Pendlebury's views still have relevance.

The beginning of Women's Studies has a special history in India. It owes its origin not only to some stalwarts but also to the historical times in which its birth took place. Its location in the SNDT Women's University in Mumbai was at the initiative of Dr Neera Desai, a Professor of Sociology at that university. Her own work on women's issues in her Master's thesis and her involvement in the women's movement gave her the background for envisaging that a women's university should engage with analysis of women's condition and not just teach women other academic disciplines. It was with this motive, that the Research Centre for Women's Studies was set up in 1974, a year before the publication of the report Towards Equality of the Government of India. The university - originally begun at the initiative of the educationist Shri Dhondo Kheshav Karve received a handsome grant from the industrialist Shri Damodar Thackersey and got named after his mother Shrimathi Nathibai Damodar Thackersey hereafter SNDT Women's University. The Centre with the involvement of able and farsighted administrators at this university spearheaded the development of this Centre, which became the torch bearer for raising women's issues.

Jyothsna Latha Belliappa, Gender, Class and Reflexive Modernity in India. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 184 pages. ₹ 5,874.

Chitra Sinha, Debating Patriarchy: The Hindu Code Bill Controversy in India (1941–1956), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 289, ₹750.

The women's movement in India goes back to more than a hundred years but its composition, its agenda, its form and style, its outreach, its inclusiveness have been changing over the years. The social reform movement before independence first addressed the woman's condition within Hindu society but this was restricted to the women in the upper castes and exposed illiberal traditions such as that of treatment of widows and child marriage and was largely sponsored by men who saw threats to Hindu society by colonial powers' criticisms and hence wished to safeguard their cultural edifices by reforming what they thought were mere aberrations but left the patriarchal social structure un touched. Subsequent events were induction of women in the nationalist movement, the Constitution's promise of gender equality; 1974's Towards Equality Report prepared by the Committee on the Status of Women; international women's movements and The Convention on the Abolition of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Have these instruments been successful in liberating Indian women from patriarchy?