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book is a look at some successful Indian women: Indira Gandhi, women in the Indian Parliament, three creative women of Calcutta, the film actresses of Bombay, a policewoman and a New Delhi housewife. One of the last chapters considers India’s attempts to control its population. This is the nation’s biggest challenge, and women remain the key to the population-control program’s success.
    Throughout my journey, I came upon some highly sensational and disturbing aspects of Indian society—female infanticide, for example—but the material in this book is not designed to shock. I have arranged the issues more or less in the order in which I encountered and understood them. One woman led me to another, and one topic drew me into the next. I often felt as if I were traveling from the most evident to the most elusive.
    A journey like this suggests some kind of personal transformation, but I am not sure that people really change in their basic character. It is probably true that they simply become more intensely themselves, or what they were meant to be all along. But certainly the balance of a person’s views can change. Although I am still learning exactly what my experience in India meant to me, I do know that it transformed much of my thinking. It was in India that I had some of the most moving experiences of my life—seeing the birth of a baby in a village, or the quiet dignity of two young boys who waited outside a Calcutta crematorium with the body of their dead grandmother, her face shrunken but peaceful amid the tumult of the city.
    At the very least, my journey forced me to question assumptions about mortality, religion, duty, fate, the way a society governs itself and the roles of men and women. It deepened my feminist convictions and made me realize how individual, yet universal, is each woman’s experience. In the beginning, there were times when I felt that what I was exploring had little consequence for the lives in the world from which I had come. But slowly I realized that the way Indian women live is the way the majority of women in the world spend their lives; it is Americans who are peculiar. Ultimately, I realized my journey to India was a privilege. Rather than going to the periphery, I had come to the center.

CHAPTER 2

W EDDING F IRST , L OVE L ATER
Arranged Marriage Among
the Educated Classes
    DURING WEDDING SEASON IN NEW DELHI, IT IS POSSIBLE TO SEE THREE , four, sometimes even five nervous bridegrooms riding through the streets on white horses toward women they barely know but will marry that evening. The little wedding parties are hard to miss: the groom, wearing an elaborate brocaded suit and a headpiece with streamers covering the embarrassment on his face, is escorted on his ride by a phalanx of relatives and a ragtag, improbably named “disco band” playing tinny, off-key marching music. The Hindu priests have deemed it an auspicious night, and it is easy, after stopping in traffic to let a few of these processions pass, to become carried away and imagine the thick Delhi air redolent with hope and fertility. Each procession can take half the evening to reach the site of the wedding, usually a home or, if the family has recently come into money, a big lawn at one of the new luxury hotels. The groom is often several hours late, which greatly annoys the bride’s family but is not a catastrophe. The bride, meanwhile, has been closeted with her mother, aunts andclose friends, monosyllabic and nearly immobile under a gaudy red silk sari so extravagantly trimmed with gold that it can weigh fifty pounds. This is just as well, because she is meant to be a passive presence at her own wedding, with her eyes demurely cast down, like a silent maiden from an Indian miniature painting. Her preparations have taken all day and are a ritual in themselves. Flowers have been woven into her hair, small jewels applied over her eyebrows and an intricate lacelike design painted in henna all over her hands and