They crossed boundaries, cracked stereotypes wide open and made the difference. Femina salutes the women of many substances

Arundhati Roy
The author of The God of Small Things used her fame to espouse the call of
small people.

Adarsh Gill
What do Barbara Streisand, Diana Ross, the Japanese Royal couple and the Queen of England have in common? Adarsh Gill who has been part of Paris couture for 20 years.

Anjana Appachana
Expectations piled high when Appachana’s first book Incantations and Other Stories won the O’Henry Festival Prize. Listening Now didn’t belie them.

Anita Desai
Born to a German mother and Indian father, Desai’s multiculturalism translates into the effortless culture crossing of novels such as, In Custody, Clear Light of Day, Fasting, Feasting.

Bharati Mukherjee
Mukherjee has made her stance clear: She is an American writer of Indian origins. Winner of the National Book Critics’ Award, she is still one of our finer literary exports.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Her books — from Arranged Marriage to Sisters of My Heart — present the duality of the ex-pat existence without falling into the schisms of right and wrong. She is also president of Maitri, a South Asian Women’s Service.

Chandralekha
Reinvented Bharat Natyam and introduced elements from other dance forms, including ‘Kallaripayattu’ and modern dance a la Pina Bausch, creating a contemporary and challenging idiom.

Deepa Mehta
Fire blazed. Earth moved. Water may have been a wash out by this film maker, but don’t write off the lady yet.

Daksha Seth
With her husband Devissaro, Seth redefined Chhao (the Bihari dance of the princely caste) contemporarised it and has taken it to the West.

Gurinder Chadda
Kenyan-born, Brit-brought up and very Indian, Chadda regaled us with cross-cultural themes in films Bhaji on the Beach, What’s Cooking and of course, the bitter-sweet Bend It Like Beckham.

Gita Mehta
Daughter of Orissa’s legendary Chief Minister Biju Patnaik, Mehta slashed through the thickets of marketable spirituality in Karma Cola and then mellowed into a real storyteller in River Sutra.

Geeta Anand
A health and science reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Anand made news recently when she shared a staff Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for explanatory journalism on a series of scoops on corporate America. She is also the record holder in the 100 m and 200 m breaststroke.

Jhumpa Lahiri
Born in London, bred in Rhode Island and married in Kolkata, Jhumpa represents a melange of cultures that she brought to The Interpreter of Maladies which won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000.

Mira Nair
Mira Nair has gone from her academy award winning Salaam Bombay to Mississippi Masala, India Cabaret, Kama Sutra to Monsoon Wedding with aplomb. With the Golden Lion tucked under her arm, her next feature is based on the Thackeray classic Vanity Fair.

Meera Syal
Meera is a writer, comic, actress, singer, playwright and now producer with Anita and Me. She almost single-handedly proved that middle England could laugh at Indian humour. But then she is very, very funny.

Madhur Jaffrey
Madhur Jaffrey acts. Madhur Jaffrey cooks. Madhur Jaffrey writes. The word polymath might have been coined for her.

Ritu Beri
Her snapped ties with Jean-Louis Scherrer can’t wipe out the fact that Ritu was the first Indian designer to head a French ready-to-wear label and show her couture collection in Paris. Having clients such as Madhuri Dixit and Nicole Kidman only adds to her buzz.

Rina Dhaka
Queen of the barely-there-look, Rina has been part of the Indian fashion industry for more than 15 years. With the successful Lord and Taylor’s, she’s making quick and easy inroads into the international market!

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Daughter of Polish-Jewish parents, Ruth moved to New Delhi after she married and began to write sensitively and perceptively about the nascent Indian middle class. After Merchant-Ivory turned The Householder into a film, she joined them to work on other screenplays and win academy awards for her adaptations of Forster’s works.

Zohra Sehgal
This 90-year-old spunky actress loves to act, laugh and sing. Born a burkha-clad Sunni Muslim, she stayed back at Dresden to study dance, and later joined Uday Shankar’s Dance Company. Now, no crossover film is complete without Zohra Sehgal as the jolly gran who came out of the East.