Post-Independence Hindi literature is by and large dominated by the representations of urban, middle class life. Given this context, the focus of Krishna Baldev Vaid's The Diary of a Maidservant is unusual. While the setting is still the big city, the novel bridges the class-divide todelineate the life and thoughts of a young woman who earns a living as a casual household help.The story revolves around Shanti, a teenage maidservant. The generous and literate Mrs Varma gives Shanti a notebook to write in. Through this 'diary' Shanti gradually discovers all kinds of things about herself-impulses, dreams, contradictions. The same diary unfolds the forces an intelligent butpoor girl has to contend with in burgeoning New Delhi. Shanti must cope with a family struggling to survive, predatory males, demanding mistresses, and a multitude of her own desires. Even the kindness of her middle-aged employers Biji and Newspaper Sahab-two people who idealistically set out toimprove Shanti's lot in life-brings problems with it. Dedicated to hard-working women domestics, Krishna Baldev Vaid thrusts the reader directly into the complications of everyday relationships between masters and servants, and men and women. The Introduction to the volume has been written by AshokVajpeyi, a distinguished poet, critic, and editor.The novel, an absorbing read, and the analytically rich introduction by Professor Ashok Vajpeyi, a distinguished poet and academic, will appeal to students and scholars of literature in general and Indian literature in translation in particular, comparative literature, gender studies, culturalstudies, as well as general readers.