Nihar Barua, then 97, a member of the family that also produced Pramathesh, the early filmmaker, was an extraordinary mixture of the scholar and the woman of action. A self-taught amateur anthropologist, Nihar was never crippled by customary purdah requirements; she participated in the lives of the people around her, was an avid hunter and an experienced tamer of elephants. She wrote of customs like ritual nudity and fertility rites that mainstream culture might well consider obscene, and her text is wryly aware of likely reactions in her ‘cultured’ readers. Aware of the hegemonic power of the ‘centre’ despite her privileged background, even when she wrote for prestigious mainstream journals like Desh and Baromas, she displayed an ironic sense of her own marginality in the world of the citified babu culture that made up her audience. For the first time these essays have been collected along with some works which have never before been published