Living With Sakti, a collection of articles is the second volume on South Asian Religion in Senri Ethnological Studies. This book is a by-product of a three year project, "The Goddess", held at the National Museum of Ethnology from 1991-94. The contributors comprise of both indologists and anthropologists who hoped to provide new data and new interpretations on gender, sexuality and religion with a historical perspective. It aims at introducing the scholarly standard of Japanese studies on India to those who are not familiar with such works. Those who have not come across any writings on Indian religions by Japanese scholars would welcome the introduction. It provides a useful overview, albeit a short one, of the kind of perceptions existing on popular Hinduism. This is done by a glimpse at the literature on India published in Japan during the Second World War. India was represented in essence with three main focuses. First, the negative essentialist view, the second dealt with the "brutal and the cunning character of the British" and lastly, the paternalistic idea that Hinduism was a significant and central theme for integrating India. Descriptions of certain temples like the Madurai temple or even different aspects of Hinduism per se reveal that these writings did not escape the grand paradigm of the Orientalist of the nineteenth century, where many a facet of Hinduism was pronounced as grotesque and monstrous.
The broad spectrum of this book is indicated by the title. A large segment of books are published under the rubric of gender studies. Sexuality is today becoming a recognized object of study in the Indian academy. Serious disciplinary focus is found in disparate disciplines, rendering it a legitimate object of interrogation. Hence it may be said that there are many voices that join the debate of gender, sexuality and religion in south Asia. The study of gender primarily began by inserting itself into the lacunae exposed by the recognition that 'woman' was an inadequate sociological category for analysis. The propelling concept of gender was the challenge of formulating new categories, which could better encounter the operation of gender process. The discursive frameworks of gender and sexuality can be said to constitute very powerful idioms deployed to define identities. These are constantly reformulated in history. They are also employed to interpret the history of self and others and therefore they not only define men-women, relations but a much larger worldview. It is this worldview constituting socio-cultural notions, practices of daily life and ideology that are being discussed in this book. There is a rigorous thematic unity in this text with it being divided into three parts, each