Born in the U.S., Baily spent her teen years in Bangalore during the 1980s and 1990s. She attended Baldwin Girls High School, a private school that championed diversity and excellence. Students were free to hang out with friends regardless of religion or background and felt relatively safe on the streets. Riots in 1992 that demolished the mosque in Ayodhya were a significant milestone in the change from state secularism to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindu fundamentalism. Now a professor of education at George Mason University, Baily reconnected with her classmates to examine how their lives—and Bangalore itself—have changed in the intervening 30 years. Background about Bangalore’s growth into a stratified, global megacity and the climate of misogyny and intolerance of religious and intellectual diversity incited by the ruling BJP are interspersed with reflections from Baily's classmates about how their children, especially their daughters, have less safety and freedom than they had growing up. This deeply researched book is especially timely in light of recent gender-based violence in India.

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Baily’s impressive Bangalore Girls illuminates ominous changes brought on by the rise of Hindu nationalism in the lives of women—Baily’s former classmates—in the once-progressive city of Bangalore, India. Sharing stories through the eyes of these women makes the challenges of contemporary India come alive for the reader. Baily also uses their experiences to raise flags about the rise of nationalism and misogyny in many places around the world—indeed, as she notes, ‘we are all Bangalore girls.’

Anne Holton, former First Lady of Virginia and former Virginia Secretary of Education

This is feminist pedagogy in careful and thoughtful practice. It is a weaving together of the intimate histories of young women with the broader political forces that over decades force them to confront the unraveling of their beloved city into deepening intolerance and violence. Moving from the remembrance of a shared cityscape of friendships and freedoms, Baily poignantly and insightfully analyses the growing fissures of gender, class, caste, and religion experienced by her schoolmates, as nationally the country moves towards authoritarianism. The beloved city and country in this account may be Bangalore and India, but Baily writes for so many of us across the world as we try to confront and resist right wing extremism in both political and (even more painfully) personal ways.

Anasuya Sengupta, co-director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?

An important book – not only for the significance of the case of Bangalore – but for what this case teaches about how the worldwide surge of hypernationalism is so strongly linked to religious intolerance, antiscience, and conspiracist ideation. This is a book exemplifying empirical rigor and moral clarity.

Gilbert A. Valverde, Dean and Vice Provost of the Center for International Education and Global Strategy, University of Albany

The Bangalore Girls, who Supriya Baily describes in this readable, informative, timely book, were her classmates at the Baldwin Girls’ High School. Baily’s interviews with the class of ’89 provide fascinating and sobering insights into how Hindu Nationalists have undermined Bangalore’s secular, democratic, cosmopolitan identity and threatened the freedom of women and minorities.

Amrita Basu, Amherst College