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Synopsis "What do we know about women's lives on the eve of this transformation? There are, of course, the records of the reformers but these are tainted by polemics. Constructing a clear picture of the lives of women before colonial rule is difficult, although recent feminist scholarship has added a great deal to our view of the past. The pre-British records include an abundance of prescriptive texts but fewer documents that shed light on the actual lives of women. Unfortunately, "there are no reference to women agricultural laborers, market women, or any of the vast army of women who must have been living and working outside the context of the court. There were also significant changes in what women could do-often characterized as a movement from the private to the public sphere. But this both overly simplifies the Indian context and overly dramatizes what actually happened. The shift was neither abrupt nor permanent and many women, who briefly attended a school or emerged from purdah to attend a "mixed" function, returned to the household where they continued to live in the more traditional fashion."