Synopsis A comprehensive and polemical study of the Hindu view of woman, the present study seeks to deconstruct, question and expose the phallogocentrism of patriarchal metaphysics which pervades the entire corpus of Hindu literature on the subject. By adapting himself to what is now known as ‘cross-gender reading’, the author is able to demonstrate that Hindu texts, the loud-mouthed masculinist propaganda about the so-called ‘glorification’ of femininity notwithstanding, create, through their network of myths and figural devices, a hoax to bind, exploit and inhibit woman who is strategically projected as a metaphor but essentially seen as a female. To be free and respectable, woman is therefore urged in this study to see through and reject, once for all, the traditional patriarchal game in order to establish herself as a new centre of knowledge and power.