Real and Imagined Women explores a number of fascinating and important theoretical questions for feminists by offering a challenging mode of reading resistance', set against the stereotyped and sensationalist image of the third world woman' as victim. Real and Imagined Women reconceptualizes this overdeterminded subjectivity in separate but related essays that explore the practice and representation of sati, the issues around rape and wife-murder and the official and media construction of the new' woman as these relate to the situation of women in colonial and post-independence India. In addition, an essay on the case of Indira Gandhi identifies, at the other end, the elite female subject, the woman-as-leader, and seeks to reclaim her for a feminist politics. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan reads the cultural representations of women through a wide and varied range of texts - from the classical Tamil epic Silapaddikaram to recent film, popular fiction, commercial advertisements, legal texts and journalism - and by this means raise the issue of how the postcolonial situation frames the contest between real' and imagined' women. l