- Lived:
- 1850–1910 · Buldhana, a district town in Berar (now in Maharashtra) — where, as far as the record shows, the entire life was spent
- Field:
- social criticism — author of Strī Puruṣ Tulanā ("A Comparison of Women and Men," 1882), the first sustained feminist argument written in an Indian language by an Indian woman
- The Big Idea:
- For centuries the question had been "what is wrong with women?" Tarabai turned the interrogation around: she put men in the dock, audited their vices line by line against the charges laid on women, and asked who, on the evidence, is actually the wicked sex.
- In their words:
- "Let me ask you one thing, God. You made this whole world, and you made both women and men. So tell me — did you pour every fault into women alone, and keep men's clay clean?" (the opening challenge of Strī Puruṣ Tulanā; the rendering from the Marathi is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- A woman in a small cotton town answered the entire press of western India with one furious pamphlet — five hundred copies, nine annas each — was laughed into lifelong silence, and a century later the pamphlet was recognized as the founding text of Indian feminism.