 In the beginning, the word for an educated woman was agali, which was called harrafa. Who knows harf? That means who knows the letters? And it was used for the wives and so on. When a man writes about a woman, he writes with pride. When a woman writes about a woman, she writes with pride. This pride and pride will always remain. For a man, his wife is someone who is not going to live very easily, especially if she doesn't wander off into jungle parks or read the wrong literature. One of the early texts that we have is this account of the verses composed by bhikkhu monks and by bhikkhu nuns. There's this very interesting account in which the tempter, Mara, comes to a woman who is seated under a tree and is a bhikkhu nun who is seated under a tree and she's meditating. And this guy says to her, what are you doing sitting under this tree and meditating? All you need is two finger consciousness and what is two finger consciousness? It's the ability to put your hand in a pot of rice that is cooking. Take out the rice and test whether it's cooked or not. Two finger is translated as two finger consciousness. And she responds back saying, what do I want to do with two finger consciousness? I seek okasha, space, the sky, what you might describe as the extended self. The first works that come out, other than the nuns of course, are the usual women. There's no difference in how women talk and behave. So the first works that come out are women dissing their husbands, talking about their mothers in law and how terrible they are and how badly treated they are, household drudgery, how much they have to walk for water, how much they have to cook and sexual slavery. Women sang these songs while they cut paddy, as they do in Tamil Nadu even today. It's also how they wrote in a way because they created those verses as they worked. The print revolution gives women the capacity to enter the public sphere on their own terms. The first serious account is actually Pandit Ramabai's high caste Hindu woman and Tarabai Shinde's polemic on Sri Prashtolna, in which actually the widow is the trigger for her writing. I have seen my own house. My mother was 22 years old in a village. She was English. My mother told her father-in-law that she wanted to study. There were many courses away from the village. I would go there to study. My father didn't refuse. In fact, he had fun in the society. His daughter-in-law goes to study. His mother-in-law was told that she goes to study as a mad woman. What really affected me in the sense of like sea change or radical uprooting kind of change, rethinking, putting down new roots and forming new ideas was when I read Mahasweta Devi's work, Dropati. This particular work, because I think Devi's identification of the character Dropati both historically in the Dropati story and in the contemporary story of tribal women and their plight and the way in which all women have to live with the fear of assault, of having their autonomy taken from them. I think it's now clear that the rape and abduction of women happened on a mass scale. We know from statistics of different organizations that at least 100,000 women were abducted, possibly raped, impregnated by men of the other religion sometimes raped by men of their own religion because they don't magically become better at moments like this and many were killed by their own families in order to ostensibly save them from possible rape. This is really the dark side of independence. Very soon after I moved here about nine years ago started walking here. People in the colony are aware so periodically I'm taken aside and I'm told, this will happen to you, that will happen to you and no one will say what will happen to me. When I started cycling, I used to do this thing of counting the number of cycles that I saw on the road on my very small commute to my office and back and to my other office and back. On any one of those legs of cycling, it was maximum 20-25 minutes of actually cycling down the roads and I saw an average, average, because I used to count them every day of between 60 and 70 cyclists. Over the course of a year, I counted two other women apart from me. If you don't understand how women have lived and how they reflect upon their lives, how do you make policies for women? How do you understand what they need in the contemporary society until you know how they have lived and how they have been part of it?