In a house with an octagonal drawing room, a group of men gather night after night to talk, drink, and circle around their emptiness. The air is thick with boredom, guilt, and the ghosts of the past. Into this closed, suffocating world walks a young woman wearing a hat garlanded with flowers. She says she wants to make an animated film, that she has lost her memory, that she is looking for capital—and perhaps for herself. Through her, Kamal Desai creates a powerful portrait of women who refuse to be confined by expectations—as wives, daughters, and mothers—and reach for something beyond endurance, towards self-definition.

First published in Marathi in 1975, The Woman Who Wore a Hat is a landmark of Indian feminist fiction. In its quiet yet piercing way, it dismantles the boundaries between the masculine and feminine, sanity and rebellion, belonging and exile, memory and selfhood. With wit, lyricism, and sharp psychological insight, Desai traces a woman’s insistence on choosing her own meaning in a world that seeks to name and contain her.

Shanta Gokhale’s elegant translation brings this daring, introspective novel to a new generation of readers—one that continues to ask what it means for a woman to be free.

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