Nothing short of a tectonic shift in feminist legal studies has occurred in the two decades since Women and Law in Colonial India was published in 1996. Where I had, at the end of the introduction to the original edition, lamented that a significant body of legal historical scholarship was yet to take shape, the intervening period has seen the emergence of a very sophisticated set of historical investigations which have uncovered not only new kinds of archives, but suggested innovative ways of interpreting old ones. In part, the scholarship has paralleled the extraordinary visibility of legal institutions and questions of law in determining the contours of gender justice and gender relations more generally. The new scholarship has had the effect of challenging some of the assumptions of the earlier edition, refining many of its enquiries and adding to the insights that it drew on.

The new historical investigations have been prompted in part by developments in three interlocking spheres: first, the concerns, disappointments and engagements of contemporary Indian feminism with the domain of law reform, including emerging disagreements between feminists themselves on the wisdom of expanding the domain of state law into greater areas of women's social lives, and possible alternatives that can be explored, given the limits of due processes; second, an increased legal literacy in Indian society more generally, including perverse and wilful use of the legal system as a weapon, and not always as an instrument of change; and, third, a broader set of political transformations that have made feminist understandings of women and law available to jurisprudential practice and to political readings of the place of law in matters of right versus faith, family versus individual, community versus women's rights, and so on. These are at times aligned with, while at others they remain disjunct from, feminist law reform and legal strategy.

In classrooms and seminars, streets and courtrooms alike, in two of India's most tumultuous decades, the relationship between women and the law has been critiqued, redefined, redrawn and generally productively recharged. The massive public participation in the redrafting of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013, following national public outrage at the ‘Nirbhaya’ rape of 16 December 2012, renewed memories of the incredible optimism about law and its transformatory capacity in the 1983 amendments to the rape law.