This essay considers two recent English-language Indian novels, Radha Padmnabhan’s Suchitra and the Ragpicker 2000) and Kashmira Seth’s Keeping Corner 2007), which incorporate representations of the ‘new Indian girls’ of a contemporary, postcolonial India. These novels are symptomatic of the emergence of adolescent fiction which thematises the struggle for gender equality in contemporary India, and whose protagonists tend to come from middle-class families. The gender politics of the two novels accord with Western liberal second-wave feminist principles of equality of opportunity, and overlook the conflation of gender, class and caste in Indian society. In Suchita and the Ragpicker, for instance, a middle-class girl comes to the aid of Kupi, a young girl who has been kidnapped and forced into child labour. In effect, Kupi constitutes a Third-World girl who is rescued by the privileged Suchita, so that the novel reinstates relations of power through its implication that oppressed children have no personal agency but are reliant on the idealism of middle-class protagonists.