D Meenakshi Mukherjee or read. Histories of Telugu literature did not mention it. In the 1980s, when the editors of this volume, after great effort, succeeded in their search for a copy, they also realized that 'the book was no longer banned, but Radhika Santwanam had been decreed out of existence ideologically'. Such squeamishness seems inconsistent in the literary culture of a country that has celebrated Jayadeva's Geeta Govinda for centuries. In Bengali, Bharatchandra wrote 9 Vidya Sundara in the eighteenth century, a long narrative poem with explicit erotic descriptions which may have made the more puritan scholars uneasy, but no one ever thought of condemning or suppressing it. But a woman's articulation of sexual pleasure was evidently threatening to society. The British rulers and the seminal figures of the Indian renaissance seem to have agreed on the need to curb this subversive tendency. Muddupalani's story thus becomes an allegory illustrating the fate of women's writing that failed to conform to patriarchal norms. Apart from the General Introduction providing such startling historical revelations and new theoretical formulations, there are two sectional Introductions, equally informative and analytical, followed by detailed biographical and/or contextual head-notes for each of the sixty or more writers included in the first volume. The second volume, which will concentrate on the twentieth century, has not yet been published. It is necessary to talk about these editorial details, because the teamwork that has made such a vast enterprise possible is really impressive. Other than Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, the two general editors, there are nine regional language editors, and the help of over a hundred persons (some of them also translators) is acknowledged at the beginning of the first volume alone. The task before the editors when they started the work must have been so massive, the territory they were going to traverse so utterly uncharted, that if the volume had not actually been lying in front of me with its elegant red and blue card cover displaying the details of an eighteenth-century painting of Nala Daman, I would have considered the project far too ambitious ever to have been completed. No enterprise of this kind, however, is ever complete. Despite meticulous care, there would certainly be significant omissions, but once the pioneering effort has been made, it will be easier for subsequent researchers to fill in the gaps, or even argue for alternative critical frames. From this point of view the importance of this anthology cannot be over-emphasized. II Despite the subtitle, '600 BC to the Present', this 525-page first volume does not actually traverse twenty-six centuries. After sampling extracts from the sixth century BC Theri-gatha (songs of the Buddhist nuns in Pali) and the Sangam poets in Tamil (100 BC to AD 250), the anthology skips a whole millennium to focus on the Bhakti poets who Number 22