This review-commentary analyses and annotates two pathbreaking publications authored by Madhavi Desai and Mary Woods. The authors have retrieved and contextualised the practices of Indian women architects who have long remained invisible in the architectural canon dominated by the patriarchs of modernism. The received wisdom is that the male architect, usually in lonely Roarkian splendour, has a great macrocosmic vision. In truth, women architects have been driven by great visions too as designers, policy makers, pedagogues, conservationists and activists, but their visions have not been codified in readily recognisable formulae. Theirs is not the Ozymandian obsession with the singular building; rather, it is a continuing and often mutating, shape-shifting engagement with people, labour, and ecology.
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