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ciplines as it showcases a range of quantitative and qualitative work carried out in what remains a hostile territory both to feminism and to geography. The introduction and the first two chapters are a mustread not just for budding geographers in India but for informed readers across all social science disciplines both in India and overseas. To Indian readers, these chapters explain both how conversation with geography can enrich their own work, and how dominant possibilities of knowledge production are constrained by gender relations within a discipline. Overseas readers can benefit from listening to some talkback from Indian colleagues and gain an understanding of how one’s location in geopolitical power relations (say an Indian university versus a British university) determines whether one gets to merely do empirical research or enunciate theory. The remaining chapters in the book showcase research that demonstrates how by taking on-board questions of gender, young geographers in India are able to produce insights into how gender norms are inscribed in spaces/places, and how places/spaces in turn reinforce or alter the enactment of gender norms. The sites of these studies are diverse – homes, workplaces and streets. The skill demonstrated in working with the available toolkit of Indian geographic schools – statistics, maps, surveys, interviews and visuals – is impressive.

The volume is evidently put together in the face of severe odds, not the least of which is the sparseness of high-quality publishable research emanating from Indian geography departments, and resear chers’ preference for publishing first in international refereed journals. Yet it is valuable to take note of two shortcomings of the volume, more in the spirit of flagging concerns that need to be taken on-board in future work. The book remains, nevertheless, a useful addition to the sparse shelves of geography textbooks in India at the graduate and undergraduate level.

The first of these shortcomings is the skewed geography of the contributing authors’ affiliations. Five of the six contributors and one of the editors has been affiliated with the Centre for the Study tation of geographic research from south of the Vindhyas. The second issue has to do with the perplexing silence on caste in the volume. This silence is conspicuous because in recent years, particularly since anti-caste activists participated in the Durban Conference on Racism, a new crop of young scholars has begun to raise new challenges to the women’s movement in India. These challenges are marked by a political acuity and intellectual sophistication. Insofar as gender is a social construct, as the authors insist, and gender sensibilities are about equality and justice, geographic research on gender in India simply cannot turn away from caste. Surely, a geographic imagination that begins with a dialectical understanding of space and society can do better than to merely acknowledge caste and class as important factors alongside gender as the authors do. The social construction of caste and gender can no more be contained in two separate analytical boxes.

Finally, and following upon the two shortcomings noted above, the volume leaves the reader wondering why at least a tentative agenda for engendering and fostering new geographic research in India could not have been included in the volume. It is a strange irony that in any international geography quiz, Indian students can outshine American students and yet when it comes to sophistication in theory and empirical research, it is universities in the Anglophone world outside India that dominate. Addressing this disjuncture needs concerted action at multiple levels. This volume comes at a time when geographic research is on the threshold of a new era, where opportunities for intervention are proliferating for researchers with geographic sensibilities and training in the necessary tools of the trade. Therefore, such an agenda, however tentative, could have made the difference between an agreeable nod and enthusiastic support from the intended readers of the volume.

Anant Maringanti (amaringanti@gmail.com) is an independent scholar specialising in human geography, based in Hyderabad.