SOCIAL SCIENTIST first step towards a more comprehensive examination of the relationship between caste and gender. Evidently unaware of the increasing amount of scholarship that has been, of late, concentrating on this aspect. As is usual in a collective volume of this kind, some essays which are of an in depth nature, centrally address the theme of the book and are germane to the subject. While others are, at best a cursory outlining of the conceptual framework. It is often assumed that the goddess, especially powerful and independent ones, affirms and promotes power and creativity. It is also surmised that this affirmation must have positive consequences in the social realm. Gender inequality and the asymmetric power relation between men and women have constituted the main framework of research for a large number of scholars. Anthropological research focuses attention on the rich cultural-symbolic world of women. The problem with these studies is that they tend to depict womanhood and femininity only in terms of the cultural-symbolic values associated with them, usually lapsing into essentialist analysis. In other words an a temporal, a historical view of feminine nature is projected. Socio-economic approaches concerned with the development of gender inequality by contrast, deal with the aspects of historicity in the social reproduction of gender asymmetry. An attempt has been made to combine these two kinds of approaches in Living With Sakti. It is therefore a welcome addition to the genre of studies that wish to grasp the overall complexity of the construction of female subjectivity.