Ashes To Light: Stories Of Hope Towards Gender Justice

What does it mean to live in a gender-attuned world—not a perfectly just one, but a world that notices, listens, and responds to the subtle ways gender shapes lives, choices, institutions, and relationships? Ashes to Light explores this question through an anthology that confronts gender-based prejudice not with slogans or proclamations, but by attending to the quiet, everyday forms of violence that often go unnamed. At a time when conversations on gender are increasingly polarized, the book dwells in lived experiences where oppression may not always be overt but is persistently present through normalization, condescension, erasure, and quiet endurance. Bringing together reflective essays from fields such as culture, politics, bureaucracy, law, academia, sports, art, and media, the anthology features voices like filmmaker Deepa Mehta on gender and creative choice; social activist Laxmi on socially sanctioned ideals of beauty; actor Rahul Bose on the rise of the Indian women’s rugby team; food scholar Pushpesh Pant on women’s struggles in the Indian kitchen; producer and screenwriter Kiran Rao on marriage and personal history; and former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on the feminist origins of family law, among others. As editor Priyadarshini Bhattacharya observes, Ashes to Light does not shout but nudges, anchored in hope—not mere optimism, but a daily, conscious practice of attentiveness, movement, and imagining otherwise.