Recovering 'Lost' Texts attempts a formulation of the cultural history of India, intending to provide a setting in which to read the texts. The section on American feminist theory in the Introduction may have been necessitated by the fact that the book was first published in the USA. Since the volume is in English it is meant as much for English-knowing Indians as for those outside our culture, and this section may have been conceded as a point of 8 reference for the latter group. While acknowledging how feminist theorists from the Anglo-American and French traditions have made new readings possible of old and familiar texts, the editors also take a stand against the kind of western feminism which assumes that it can speak for the experiences of women all over the world. The editors argue that the texts included here have to be seen as tethered to a specific historical situation, gaining their richness and variety through the complex variables of religion, region, caste, class, diversity of family mores, social practices and political structures that have generated them. Through their selection of material the editors also challenge the highly restructured version of the Indian past that orientalist western scholarship as well as enlightened Indian social reform leaders had collaborated to construct. This emphasized a male upper-caste perception of culture which suppressed, ignored or erased out of existence texts that did not conform to their specifications of acceptability. In the process a great deal of raw energy, subversive humour and bawdy wit had been edited out of this high culture. The case of Muddupalani and her eighteenth-century Telugu text, Radhika Santwanam (Appeasing Radhika), is seen by the editors as a paradigm of the entire process. Although her work belonged to an accepted genre in Telugu literature — shringara prabandham — that retold the love story of Radha and Krishna, she came under severe censure because she wrote with warmth and lyrical joy of erotic pleasure where the woman's sensuality was central, not the man's. Due to lack of factual data it is difficult to reconstruct every step in the history of this troubled text, but the editors have dredged out enough information to show that, though popular in her own time, Muddupalani's poem fell into disrepute in the nineteenth century. Embarrassed by its unabashed eroticism, leaders of the reform movement like Veereshalingam coii demned the book categorically: This Muddupalani is an adulteress.... Many parts of the book are such that they should never be heard by a woman, let alone emerge from a woman's mouth.' Muddupalani was a courtesan in the Thanjavur court in the eighteenth century. She had a sympathetic reader two centuries later in another learned courtesan, Nagaratnamma. When Nagaratnamma reprinted Radhika Santwanam in 1910 in order to make available to a larger public a poem that had given her great aesthetic pleasure, she ran into problems. Radhika Santwanam was proscribed in 1911 as obscene and 'in 1911 Police Commissioner Cunningham seized all the copies.' Eventually, in 1947, the ban imposed by the British government was withdrawn, but the book was not heard of Journal of Arts 6f Ideas