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These are stories of eight selected women from Indian myth, legend and history - Draupadi, the common wife of the five Pandavas; Radha, Krishna's celebrated lady love; Ambapali, the courtesan-turned-Buddhist-nun of Vaishali; Raziya Sultan, the only female monarch to rule over an empire; Meera Bai, the queen who became a mendicant, choosing Krishna as her fantasy lover; Jahanara Begum, Aurangzeb's elder sister and Sufi mystic; Rani Laxmibai, the legendary warrior queen of Jhansi; and Hazrat Mahal, consort of Wajid Ali Shah, ruler of Lucknow, who fought the British East India Company to the bitter end. These women are famous, to a greater and lesser extent, all over India (and abroad, to a certain extent) and their stories reasonably well-known. However, what Ira Mukhoty does here is to shine new light on their half-remembered tales, part fact, part fiction, and part legend. And it is indeed a fascinating journey.

The author says:

To be able to convey a sense of the antiquity of India, this book covers the lives of eight women, real or imagined, across three thousand years of India’s stories. There is a Mughal princess, a Turkish Mamluk warrior, and a Brahmin widow. There is a courtesan, a princess of Chittor and a begum who was of part-African descent. Yet in time, all these differences are scuffed or overlooked and the women become representative of a universal, north-Indian ideal of beauty—fair skinned and buxom. The fire goes out of their eyes as does the strength in their limbs which once wielded talwars and scimitars. More corrupting still is the effacing of their personalities, the sublimation of their faults and their unacceptable transgressions.

In other words, these women have been sanitised to fit a single mould, that of the virtuous Bharatiya Nari. Desexed, depersonalised and disempowered, they have become like "Raja Ravi Varma’s kitsch poster art" (I would also add Amar Chitra Katha). Ira Mukhoty digs deep into their histories, separates wheat from the chaff, and presents before us three-dimensional women of flesh and blood: not as "pure" as touted, more vulnerable, and in some cases, not very likeable - but better than the pastiches we knew from fireside tales.

In the heroic context, it may not appear to be very momentous to leave one’s home and the security of society in search of a personal goal, but even today, women in India face society’s opprobrium or worse for being seen to ‘transgress�� or even when they are just going about their lives. Women are mutilated and murdered on cold December evenings in Delhi outside movie theatres, and they are raped on balmy Mumbai afternoons in abandoned textile mills. They are killed, and brutalized and tortured in Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and beyond, for leaving their homes with men of the wrong religion, or caste or colour. This is why the obduracy of that first step, which took these eight women outside the safety of their known universe, was truly remarkable, because every woman in India understands why such a decision was momentous.

This is what binds these heroines together, despite their varied natures and fortunes - their courage to step outside invisible societal boundaries.

Thus we have Draupadi, the infinitely desirable heroine of the Mahabharata, who rails against the Dharma which cursed her to her fate. We have Radha, whose erotic love for an adolescent godchild younger than herself was indulged in with gay abandon. We have Ambapali, a courtesan who became a Buddhist nun, to find independent agency in the only two options available to women outside the sanctity of marriage. We have Raziya, who ruled as Sultan over an empire, and very much "wore the pants" (both literally and figuratively) - (in fact, she reminded me so much of Indira Gandhi, the way she was underestimated by the people who put her in power with the idea of making her a figurehead). We have Meera Bai, whose bhakti was as much rebellion as devotion. We have Jahanara Begum, Aurangzeb's elder sister who was a Sufi and who held her own until her death in her brother's blood-soaked reign. We have Laxmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who was a diplomat who tried to compromise with the enemy until the very end when her back was to the wall, and who then became a battling fury. And finally, we have Begum Hazrat Mahal who was much more of a threat to the British than the Laxmibai and who never gave up - and whose story was eclipsed in Independent India maybe because she was a courtesan of African origin and a Muslim.

What does Ira Mukhoty expect to gain from retelling these stories, fascinating as they are? She says:

In the twenty-first century reality for Indian women, it is more important than ever to remember the stories of our heroic women. To remember that women having been standing up against injustice and oppression for thousands of years, with courage and grace. For the countless daughters of India who would be astronomers and scientists, artists and entrepreneurs, it is essential that there are heroic role models who are human in their fallibility and sublime in their ambition. Real women, with weaknesses to overcome, not impossible goddesses complacent in their divine superiority.

Yes indeed. In contemporary India, where women entering temples are assaulted with pepper sprays on account of them being "impure", and every day the country wakes up to the stories of girls raped, tortured and murdered, we do need such heroines - if only to remind ourselves that the "Lakshmana Rekhas" are valid only so long as women honour them.