The horrors faced by some of them persuaded Bumillar to undertake the initially daunting project. She argued, for instance, that Indians were not ready to rule their own country because, among other things, they overindulged in sex. It deepened my feminist convictions and made me realize how individual, yet universal, is each woman's experience. Rather than going to the periphery, I had come to the center. Bumillar is sensitive to the complexity and contradictions of Indian life.
Women are in an especially paradoxical situation.
A personal dilemma for Bumillar was the conflict between upholding a woman's freedom to choose abortion while condemning the abuse of amniocentesis by using it to identify, and abort, female fetuses. In south India, she met members of a poor family who said that they had been forced to kill their day old infant daughter because they couldn't afford the cost of her dowry. Infanticide, too, was outlawed by the British in 1870. But many poor villagers recognize little difference, other than expense, between abortion and infanticide. Among other things, Bumillar intends this book to remedy such silence.