This collection offers a broad spectrum of contemporary writing from South Asia, highlighting different facets of the idea of freedom. It is when the ideal of freedom is threatened that forms of resistance emerge, generating their own literatures of protest. Diverse structures of power produce diverse modes of resistance, including nationalism, gender conflicts, class struggles, and questions of caste, environment, communalism, censorship, language, democracy, tribal life and globalisation. The writings included here demonstrate the extraordinary versatility of the idea of freedom, and variegated creative responses to it. Drawn from multiple literary genres, such as poetry, prose, fiction, drama, satire and autobiography, the selections in this anthology reaffirm the human dream of freedom and the role of literature in imagining a new, more harmonious South Asia.