Women as Subjects affords a rare opportunity to consider the changing identity and status of women in India today- how they view themselves and how they are viewed- through the current work of seven scholars- anthropologists, historians, and sociologists from India, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

These essays combined with Nita Kumar's substantial theoretical introduction, illustrate the overall problem of women's subjectivity extraordinarily well and serve to question, modify, and adapt Western-based feminist theory and Eurocentric postmodern theory, building a bridge both to non-South Asian feminist work and to nonfeminist South Asian work.