By Deepika S.

Have you seen a recent book on powerful Indian women without profiles on Chanda Kochhar, Naina Lal Kidwai, or Indra Nooyi? No? And if the thought of one more of those books makes your eyes roll, hang on a bit. A new book called She Walks, She Leads: Women Who Inspire India (priced at Rs 599 on Flipkart) by first-time author Gunjan Jain, introduces her like (we hope) no one has ever done before: it begins with a paragraph about bandhani saris, and how they’re part of her heritage, before going on to say:

“Yet between jetting around the world and presenting endless power-packed presentations — whenever she gets the luxury of a few minutes of quiet reflection — her thoughts must surely turn to the role that the much-coveted bandhani saris and Indian traditions have played in her life.” 

You may roll your eyes now. Naturally, that’s what one of India’s highest-paid bankers is thinking about “whenever” she has time to reflect.

She Walks, She Leads, which brings together stories about 24 powerful and inspiring women across a range of fields, has more gems. Nita Ambani may have topped a Forbes list of “Asia’s 50 Power Businesswomen” for 2016, but in this book, the chapter on Ambani juxtaposes her business interests with a ridiculous emphasis on her charms, grace and beauty. This is followed by a question-and-answer session with her husband Mukesh, who is asked, among other things, about her “parental skills” and how she runs her home flawlessly.

Nita (described here by business tycoon Sanjiv Goenka as the “complete woman”) and Kochhar aren’t by any means the only casualties in this book. Under “Altruism & Other Interests”, each piece on the five women in this section contains an interview with their husbands. No doubt because they’re the better, sorry, other half. Heaven forbid they be complete on their own.

Jain, described on the book’s jacket as an “inspired writer, speaker and thought leader”, writes about 24 ‘cool’ women, but each profile is followed by an interview with a man, with only two exceptions. Designer Anamika Khanna’s piece is followed by an interview with her “muse”, actress Sonam Kapoor. For Olympic medal-winning boxer MC Mary Kom, Jain interviews (in what is only one of several amazingly tone-deaf moves in the book) actor Priyanka Chopra: a mainlander who played Kom in a biopic on her and whose features were digitally altered to appear Manipuri. In the marvellous domino game that this book is, Chopra herself becomes the subject of a separate essay in this book, and the Q&A endorsing her is not with one of the many amazing female actors across generations in Bollywood, but with Ranveer Singh.

In the “Corporate, Banking & Law” section, the largest part of the book, Jain asks Jaydev Mody, in a Q&A about 60-year-old top corporate lawyer Zia Mody, who he is married to, “What is your vision for her?” A photo of banker Naina Lal Kidwai appears in the book with the caption, “A natural beauty”.

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect a book that aims to highlight role models and to be “a celebration of womanhood” to step beyond the same old tropes used to talk about successful women. But it is alarming that Jain’s book sounds uncomfortably like the parody Twitter account @manwhohasitall, whose creator, staying in character, has authored a new book that will be out in October: From Frazzled to Fabulous: How to juggle a successful career, fatherhood, ‘me-time’ and looking good. In this, Jain is by no means alone:

In 2015, Kidwai herself put together a book called 30 Women in Power: Their Voices, Their Stories. It’s a valuable book for its generous doling out of advice by women at the top of their respective fields. In many of these accounts, the women talk about dealing with their families and children too. However, their work is the main focus and their personal lives, when they mention them, are revealed more as windows of insight into their working lives, complete with tricky points, failures and regrets – as possible blueprints for women who may be interested in charting similar careers for themselves. Certainly not as celebrations of their charming abilities to kill it at work while looking amazing and being paragons of motherhood, where applicable.

Another book about conventionally successful Indian women is Corporate Divas, by Sonia Golani, published in 2014, which also includes Kochhar, Kidwai, Mody and other women with unquestionably great accomplishments. It’s just a pity that such books don’t think very far beyond the women we already hear about.

Sometimes, it’s hard to complain when accounts of women don’t always feature in similar books on successful people. Penguin’s 2015 book, The Portfolio Book of Great Indian Business Stories: Riveting Tales of Famous Business Leaders and Their Times, features the usual suspects: Dhirubhai Ambani, various Tatas, a Birla, a Bajaj, and so on, but not a single woman. When Kidwai introduces the women in her book, saying there are “no shortcuts to hard work” and the women refused to “rely on a surname”, it reveals the blinkers we have on when we talk about hard work and merit, and how success is achieved. Many of the women featured in Kidwai’s book and Jain’s were from middle or upper-middle class families already, perhaps with the sole exception of Mary Kom. We need more books like the excellent Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs by  Devesh Kapur, D Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad, which tells the stories of people like Andhra construction magnate Mannam Madhusudhan Rao, as well as the witty Manju Rani, a garment manufacturer in Karol Bagh (we wish she wasn’t the sole woman featured in the book).

Perhaps we’d all have more amazing role models if we expanded our vision; not just in terms of our gaze on succesful women, but widening our very definition of this term.

Deepika S writes for The Ladies Finger (TLF), a leading online women’s magazine. Visit the website here.