NEW PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN'S ROLE 113 leads her to juxtapose women's spiritualism with the 'subversion' of patriarchal society, a rather obvious and monochromatic view in my opinion. If taken together certain arguments find rather contradictory resonances in the two books. In Walking Naked, while making a larger point on the transsexual metaphorical space afforded by spiritualism, Ramaswamy writes: 'Thus the male spiritual aspirant reverses secular metaphors [my emphasis] of woman as the hunted prey and the man as the pursuing hunter. In the spiritual realm, it is the woman who hunts, ensnares and eventually destroys man' (1997:14). In Divinity and Deviance, she writes: '...in reversing the usual imagery and in writing of woman as pursuer and man as the hunted, the pursued, Basava [the leader of the Virasaivite movement, the latter forming the primary focus of this book] is in fact indicating the male sexual weakness and man's inability to impose self-control' (1996:14). While both the quotes may be acceptable in their places (though I wonder how?), one would have ideally wanted the author to flesh these out more in both contexts. All this does not, however take away from the very high readability of these two books. Throughout the two books, Ramaswamy never flags - not even once - in her now-fascinating ability to braid various strands of society's canvas, not overlooking relatively minor issues like the compradore character of Brahmins vis-a-vis European colonialists which resulted in a 'restrengthening' of patriarchal values within the 'colonial registers' (1997:236); or the formidable political position of the Virasaivite pontiffs at the Keladi and Ikkeri courts which 'led an admittedly radical movement like Virasaivism backwards to a hierarchical, gender and caste-based organisation' (1996:65). Significantly contributing to our understanding of gender and feminist history in medieval south India, as also to a complex social structure seeking to concretise various (perhaps unexpected) fluidities, these books must be read by all those who believe, as I do, in what Joan Kelly said many years ago: 'I want women's indignities to be ended -millennia long, borne with such endurance and grace... I want an end to patriarchy! Passionately!