The source used for writing this book include official government records, newspapers, collected speeches and writings, reports and minutes, memoirs and autobiographies, oral histories, personal letters, diaries, and songs, as well as monographs and articles with Indian women as their subject. It is particularly significant to note that women’s history is being written now and gender is fast becoming as much a tool of analysis as class, caste, and race. Articles and books are published daily offering new and fresh insights about women's lives and how gender shapes and is shaped by the wider social and political context.

The critical year for the history of Indian woman was I975. Between I975 and I979 thirty books on women were published, as many as the total produced over the previous several decades. A bibliography of works on Indian women in English published in I976 incorporated 8oo references; four years later Carol Sakala's Women of South Asia: A Guide to Resources (Millwood, N.Y., Kraus International Publications, I98o) registered 4,627 entries, and the literature has continued to proliferate. Unfortunately the new literature on Indian women and questions related to gender in India is not readily available. Much of it is published in newer, and sometimes inaccessible journals, pre­ sented at conferences, or published in collected works.