Book excerpt: This book deals with the interface between identity, culture and literature. It aims at studying questions of cultural identity and gender in Hindi plays of the 19th- and 20th- centuries and the interplay of poetics and politics, as revealed in the work of several influential playwrights. The book explores questions related to the ways in which seven representative playwrights imagine India and its identity and the ways, in which this concept is revealed in the "narratives of the nation", its postcolonial contentions and the politics of identity, as revealed in the production of various cultural discourses. The chapters explore various aspects of the ongoing process of constructing and narrating culture, gender, the nation and identity. There has been no monograph on the questions of cultural identity in Hindi drama. This is a pioneering project and a desideratum in the field of Hindi literature, South Asian Studies, and broadly, in the study of theatre of India and of South Asian cultures and literatures.