1. Aparna Sen's directorial debut, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981), won the National Award for best director in 1981, while Sai Paranjpye's Touch (Sparsh, 1980) won the National Award for best feature film, best screenplay, and best actor. While these first films fared poorly at the box office, Paranjpye's next, Far Be the Evil Eye, was a “golden jubilee” hit, meaning, it ran for fifty weeks. Kalpana Lajmi's feature debut, Ek Pal (1986), and Sen's feature debut, Parama (1985), were both commercially and critically successful.
2. Some scholars expressly reject the vocabulary of “waves.” See Maitreyee Chaudhuri, Feminism in India: An Overview (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2004); Sharmila Rege, “Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of ‘Difference’ and towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position,” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 44 (199): 39–46; Chhaya Datar, “Non-Brahmin Renderings of Feminism in Maharashtra: Is It a More Emancipatory Force?,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 41 (1999): 2964–68.
3. Partha Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially the chapter on “Nationalist Resolution of Woman Question”; Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India (London: Routledge, 2005). Though scholarship on the media infrastructures of social movements is scant, I have learned from Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma, eds., Whose News? The Media and Women's Issues (London: Sage, 2006); Ammu Joseph, “Electronic Democracy: An Indian Perspective,” Media Asia 23, no. 2 (1996): 63–67. Also instructive has been the pioneering work of Purnima Mankekar, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Anjali Monteiro, and Nilanjana Chatterjee.
4. See Maya Khullar, ed., Writing the Women's Movement: A Reader (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2005); Radha Kumar, “Contemporary Indian Feminism,” Feminist Review 33 (Autumn 1989): 20–29.
5. Neera Desai, “From Articulation to Accommodation: Women's Movement in India,” in Visibility and Power, ed. Leela Dube et al. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 290.