My interest in history, and women’s history in particular, is rooted in my desire to understand the cultural landscape of the city of my birth, Ahmedabad. The city is a mosaic of histories from its Persianate past that lives on in everyday colloquialism, to its role in Gandhian civil disobedience—eclipsed today by Hindu majoritarianism. In addition to sharp segregation along religious lines, the visibility of women in public spaces is shaped by caste, class and respectability politics. How do women and other social groups who lie at the margins of this urban imagination nurture a sense of belonging? The desire to uncover overlooked or de-emphasised historical linkages stems from my interest in this question of belonging. One such woman that I find myself drawn to is Anasuya Sarabhai, a woman who belonged to a family of influential textile mill-owners and went on to establish a labor organisation for the mill workers. Sarabhai has remained in the shadows, amidst the overarching narrative of Gandhian influence on labour politics and women’s political participation in colonial India. I intend to study her impact on the public sphere as a complex historical figure who was among the early generation of women who were political, public figures in the modern sense. Through an examination of Sarabhai’s contribution to labour politics I intend to present a labour and urban history that sheds light on the interactions between elite women and subaltern men and women. One of the key questions I intend to investigate through my research is whether biographies and historical profiles shed light on or obscure larger historical questions.