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Book Review: Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema

and developed by women themselves, even if there was no clear agreement on what the precise role of women should be in the imagined new country. On language, too, Nijhawan argues (pp. 222–4) that women’s periodicals came to contain a variety of registers of Hindi, in a way that much of the rest of the Hindi literary realm was unable or unwilling to do. This is an important insight, though the chapter in which this point is found occasionally makes some difficult reading for the non-specialist. In her conclusion, Nijhawan acknowledges the many exclusions and omissions effected by what was an upper/middle class elite realm of Hindu women’s production, relating to the obscene, the low class/caste and the Muslim, but suggests that the periodicals ‘did not emphasise the readers’ Hindu identity’, and that ‘gender trumped communalist discourses, but notions of sisterhood were by default Hindu’ (p. 234). One wonders, especially given the frequent references to dharma in the quotations themselves, just how unemphasised Hinduness really was. Likewise, more reflection on the exclusions themselves would have been welcome. However, such minor quibbles aside, one of the great joys of this book is the ability to check the quotations themselves, as Nijhawan gives generous transliterated Hindi originals in the chapter endnotes, for those inclined to check translated terms. Further, most originally and helpfully, the book includes roughly 90 pages of carefully selected and translated extracts from the original journals, with further expositions by Nijhawan. This, in particular, is a useful and welcome resource for teaching and research. In some ways, this book raises an almost frustrating number of questions, but it answers more. Anyone interested in the history of women’s writing in India, of gender and the nationalist period, education, publishing and Hindi literature and language, should find it both useful and insightful.