Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman’s joint work hitherto comments generally on the legal and constitutional implications of the rise of the Hindu Right in India and specifically as they relate to women. The work is already distinguished by a keen historical understanding of Indian law and discernment about what is at stake: the fate of India’s enduring, but hardly flawless, liberal democratic constitutional polity. Subversive Sites represents an extension and deepening of this progressive and feminist engagement. The book’s fine and thorough research, as evinced in extensive and careful notes, places the Indian women’s movement’s engagement with the law and the perplexities with which it confronts Indian feminism in the historical perspective of the working of colonial and independent Indian law. Only such an account is capable of demonstrating the historical relationship between the formatively-flawed liberalism of the Indian state and constitution on gender issues (and related ones of cultural difference), and the contemporary challenge the Hindu Right represents by advancing along precisely these fractures of Indian liberalism.
