Autobiography as a distinct literary genre, as Kathyrn Hansen notes in the last essay in this collection, appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout British India in a variety of languages and forms (p. 257). But women's autobiographies, even in this period, were still relatively fugitive works, particularly in the nineteenth century—difficult to find, requiring translation, and often written by authors about whom we often know very little. It is this elusive nature of women's life histories that makes this new collection of essays on women, gender, and autobiography particularly welcome. Editors Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley have put together an eclectic selection of essays that range from an exploration of the life history of a well-known Mughal courtesan (by Shweta Sachdeva Jha) to consideration of two life histories by actors who, while male, performed as women for much of their careers (by Kathryn Hansen). The deliberate intention of this provocative collection of essays is to expand our understanding of both the genre and the nature of autobiographical writing itself. As the editors write:

The essays are arranged into sections that illustrate the editors’ intentions. Part I: “Negotiating Autobiography” includes four studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographies. Sylvia Vatuk's essay discusses a subsection of an unpublished Urdu memoir by the twentieth-century writer Zakira Ghouse and focuses on the intersection between the author's love of fiction and her narration of her life. Ritu Menon analyzes two autobiographical pieces by the novelist Nayantara Sahgal written at different moments of her life. Asiya Alam discusses the pre- and post-partition autobiographical writings (diary, memoir, and letters) of Nazr Sajjad Hyder, also a novelist and journalist in Urdu. Shubhra Ray discusses the 1847 diary of the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Kailashbhashini Debi, written when she accompanied her husband Kishori Chand Mitra on tour for the East India Company in Bengal. With the exception of the Menon piece, these essays illustrate the elusive and often incomplete nature of women's autobiographical writings where context is often missing, topics (such as sexual intimacy) are frequently absent, and only the combination of life history sources can provide a fuller picture.

The second section of the collection—“Forms and Modes of Self-Fashioning”—focuses on the lives of women who did not write self-histories, diaries, or memoirs, but whose life actions (“performances”), it is argued, can be used to indicate an autobiographical preference and “to express a sense of female subjectivity” wherever they occur (p. 6). Uma Chakravarti discusses three novels (in English or translation) by women on experiences during partition, arguing briefly at the end that “by anchoring the novels in their own temporal, geographical, and cultural worlds” the authors have blurred “the boundaries between the autobiographical and the novel” (p. 138). Jha recreates the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century life history of the famous Urdu poet and courtesan Mah Laqa Bai “Chanda” using her poetry, Urdu biographies, and a history of Hyderabad, along with public pageantry and a prayer house Chanda commissioned––all of which, Jha argues, contributes to this “autobiographical history” (quotations are hers) of Chanda and her self-reinvention and self-fashioning (pp. 157–58). Afshan Bokhari argues that the seventeenth-century Mughal princess Jahanara Begam (eldest daughter of Mumtaz Mahal) used her autobiographical Sufi writings and architectural commissions “to subjectively narrate and weave her persona through the religious, imperial, and political values of the court…” (p. 166). While there is no question that works of fiction and/or the commissioning of buildings might speak to the donor's self-conception, in this selection of essays, these assertions sometimes seem made to fit the structure and interests of the edited collection but are not fully argued or demonstrated.

The final section of the collection—“Destabilizing the Normative”—contains three essays that are at the provocative heart of this collection, challenging our notions of what autobiography is or can be and, in the final essay, considering two autobiographies of men who performed on stage as women. Malhotra provides a historically dense and fascinating analysis of how the mid-nineteenth-century Muslim prostitute Piro recounts her conversion, abduction, and return to Gulabdas's Sikh sect through a poetic form (the kafi) not usually used for narration. Lambert-Hurley reads a twentieth-century Raihana Tyabji's Bhakti account of Sharmila, a gopi, and Krishna (The Heart of a Gopi) along with biographical sources to consider “how far … this piece of Bhakti devotionalism may still be read as a kind of personal narrative, an evocation of the self” (p. 232). Perhaps, Lambert-Hurley concludes, it may be considered as an “autobiography of the imagination” (p. 247). Finally, Hansen focuses on the autobiographies of two early twentieth-century male actors famous for their performance of female roles to emphasize the performative aspect of all autobiographies.

These ten essays, along with a helpful introduction, come together to form an interesting and excellent collection. The “challenge” offered to the concept and genre of autobiographical writings is not, in the end, quite as substantial as the editors and authors sometimes suggest. But broadening the definition of what is or can be considered as “autobiography” allows the inclusion of a much wider range of analyses of the life histories of South Asian women than might otherwise have been the case. All of these essays should be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on gender and women's history in South Asia. Many would be useable within an undergraduate class on a wide range of related subjects.