The Lost Life Stories of Mahari-Devadasis in Postcolonial India (1947-2015)
SHRIYA PATNAIK
“Although our rituals of worship and traditions of religiosity are now performed worldwide on dance stages, we have largely remained excluded from this reconstruction of ‘respectable’ dance.”[i] Such were the viewpoints of the last living Mahari Sashimani Devi, prior to the extinction of this matrilineal community in 2015. Reliant on the experiential perspectives of stigmatized subjects from the marginalia, this article critically analyses the effects of Devadasi abolition laws on the legal status and socio-political positioning of Mahari-Devadasis[ii], who were temple-dancers in the Jagannath Temple of Orissa[iii], and the historical creators of the classical Indian dance-form Odissi. Incorporating the oral accounts of the last remaining Maharis in the 2000s, this study attempts to provincialize Europe in situating the life-stories of these women within global feminist and human rights movements. It further traces processes of Devadasi stigmatization and disenfranchisement as a direct by-product of colonial and subsequently nationalist women’s reform interventions on matriarchal actors.
To elaborate further on this topic, before British annexation/colonization of India, the matriarchal community of temple-dancers also known as Devadasis inhabited and performed religious services in Hindu temples. They were socially not bound to the institution of marriage in being wed to Hindu deities in their practices of religiosity. They formed local communities known by different names in different areas: Maharis in Orissa, Jogatis in Kerela, Basavis in Karnataka, Theravardiyars in Tamil Nadu, Natis in Assam, Muralis in Maharashtra, and Bogams in Andhra Pradesh. In their matrilineal kinship structures, these women were not married to mortals but dedicated in temples. They were the creators of Indian classical dance-forms like Bharatnatyam, Odissi and Kuchipudi.[1] Their practices of religiosity and quotidian cultures varied across regions. In particular, Devadasis in the Jagannath Temple of Orissa, also known as Maharis, intrinsically differed in their ritualistic traditions, socio-cultural customs, and kinship ties from other regional variants of temple-dancer communities. As studied by scholars on the subject like Lucinda Ramberg, Davesh Soneji, Frédérique Marglin, and Amrit Srinivasan, unlike parts of Southern and Western India, where historical evidence alludes to trafficking and coerced prostitution from certain poor, lower-caste families using the rhetoric of religion, Maharis were respected cultural figures who enjoyed religious and royal patronage and were the historical creators of the classical dance-form, Odissi. They received a regular maintenance allowance from temple funds and held ancestral properties in Orissa, which were later confiscated into the landed estates of the colonial state. As their matriarchal system mandated a Devadasi’s property to be inherited by a biological or adopted daughter to continue the lineage, these women exercised greater socio-economic autonomy and access to the public sphere, historically denied to most married women in the Indian subcontinent.[2]
Art and Iconography from Orissa Temples depicting the Devadasi art-form (Image by Shriya Patnaik)
Thereafter, the policing of prostitution in the British Empire across South Asia marked a profound moment of institutional transformation as well as systemic displacements for temple-dancers. The passage of Section 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code (1860) along with the Contagious Diseases Act (1864), homogenously categorized the practices of heteroglot, matriarchal communities of Devadasis across the subcontinent as ‘prostitution with a religious sanction,’ and failed to take into account the distinct characteristics of Maharis in Orissa. Consequently, The Prevention of Dedication Acts across the states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra in independent India (subsequently discussed), imbibed colonial nomenclatures and ignored the socio-cultural specificities and quotidian cultures of diverse temple spaces regionally. In such abolitionist movements against dance, viewed predominantly through the lens of sexual depravity, Devadasis were extricated from their historical sites of performativity and instead disenfranchised as ‘base sex workers’. The two dichotomized representations of the unmarried, sexually active Devadasi, either as a victim of abuse or an immoral profiteer, stripped indigenous women of the autonomy to define their vocational status on their own terms, even when their daily lives contested colonial nomenclatures. The passage of homogenizing, orientalized legislations guiding colonial prostitution reform, also ignored regional pluralisms across temple-dancer communities and differences in their quotidian cultures.[3]
Responding to colonial interventions upon religion and the affairs of native women, in an effort to assert a national identity that was progressive, non-backward and non-superstitious, Indian nationalists rushed to cleanse temples of the stain associated with Devadasi-dedication and re-appropriated colonial nomenclatures. The Hindu Social Reform Association was formed in the 1890s by middle-class and upper-caste Hindus with an aim of reforming Hinduism of its so-called ‘corrupt’ and ‘debauched’ components. To preserve the reputation of temple-spaces in light of anti-Devadasi laws, nationalists launched the ‘Anti-Nautch Movement’ towards sanitizing the disrepute associated with temple spaces. [4] The regulatory framework (convened by both British officials and Indian reformers) affected public opinion in Orissa and ordered the ‘pure’ spaces of temples be cleansed of the ‘impure’ practices of temple-dancers who had been its historical inhabitants. Under such patriarchal power politics and hegemonic structures, whereas Maharis were previously reputable women in society, they now transitioned to become disenfranchised, illegal and depraved subjects. As argued by Ashis Nandy on the psychological effects of colonialism, this perpetuates a certain kind of epistemic violence against the colonized subject in seeing the world through the prism of western civilization and an English education.[5]
However, in the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial, although the patriarchal framework of Devadasi laws has remained intact, societal remembrances about this matrilineal community have drastically changed, particularly across the domains of popular culture and collective memory in Orissa. This is especially significant in the present times as in 2015, the last Mahari, Sashimani Devi, passed away. Media channels presented this as a defining historical moment: the extinction of an age-old community that had died due to archaic colonial laws.[6] While their dance ritual has been immortalized in performative culture through the classical dance, Odissi, now performed on several local, national, and international stages, the inventors of this form have been in gradual decline since the twentieth century. The death of Sashimani Devi identifies the mutating legal, socio-cultural, and religious identities of a specific group of women across spatial and temporal frontiers. Drawing on transnational feminist movements, the 21st century has concomitantly witnessed regional resistance movements to advocate for equal citizenship rights of this community. In these protest movements, the term ‘Mahari’ has emerged as a unifying term to reclaim a collective past for subaltern communities displaced by similar processes of urbanization. Subsequently, Orissa has witnessed a large corpus of indigenous resistance movements, alongside mobilization of local elites, to preserve the Mahari dance form. Using the Mahari-Devadasi example as a case-study into overarching themes of gender, human rights, women’s reform projects, minority rights, and subalternity, this research thereby posits the need to incorporate the voices and lived experiences of such matriarchal actors from the marginalia, which otherwise go missing from the hegemonic constraints of policy and development discourses.
Here, I thereby focus on the realm of experiential accounts of Maharis through the lens of oral accounts, which contest colonial and nationalist notions of sexual degeneracy and moral turpitude characterizing them. These life stories offer a glimpse into various forms of systemic and structural violence perpetrated against comparable groups of matrilineal actors. In providing a cultural paradigm for women’s life experiences, they play an invaluable role in embodying the affective power of the survivor’s experience and, at the same time, situate such experiences within a discursive context. Hence, recuperating the voices of subaltern actors themselves can help encapsulate a revisionist historiography of resistance and bottom-up solidarity.
The extinction of the Mahari-Devadasi tradition with the recent demise of Sashimani Devi in 2015 delineates the significance of writing such experiential accounts from the marginalia into the historical record. In 2014, I had interacted on several occasions with Sashimani during my visits to Puri. Her living quarters in Dolamanda Sai were dimly lit and scarcely furnished. Some local residents referred to the neighborhood as one of the ‘red-light districts’ in Puri, housing people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. Despite her dismal living conditions, Sashimani spoke with nostalgia about her days as a Devadasi. As a child, she was dedicated to the Jagannath Temple. The Orissa State Government thereafter in 1979 had prohibited her to adopt a daughter and continue with the custom. She sustained herself through charitable offerings by dance-teachers whom she had taught Odissi to. On being questioned of the associated link with prostitution she commented “Mun rogi nahin, mun bhogi rahichi.” This translates to: “I have not suffered but experienced the joys of life”. Sashimani’s words allude to a different standpoint of female autonomy and societal acceptance that deviated from official accounts: “I have never brought upon shame to Jagannath; he is my eternal husband. This is our way of life. I have had relations with mortal men. But when did virtues of love, friendship, and bodily contact become a criminal offense? These men did not sustain me financially. I owned ancestral lands until they were confiscated by the state. I received a maintenance allowance from the temple. I am not a kept woman or a commercial sex-worker. Maithuna (Sanskrit term for sexual union in the Panchamakara rituals of Hindu Sakta and Tantric worship) is a part of the human experience.[iv] This does not make me a criminal.”
The term ‘Dushita Byabahara’ refers to attached stigma of prostitution amidst Maharis. In their observed code of conducts, once classified as ‘Dushita’ i.e., impure and polluted by engaging in commercial sex-work, women were no longer allowed to participate in religious rituals and were extricated from the temple’s political economy. Her assertion, “Gudiye aakhi aamoku jaagi chanti taaki aame dushita nahoon,” is particularly enlightening. This translates from Oriya to, “There are many watchful eyes over our code of conduct so that we do not become polluted in the public eye.” She discussed two such women who were ex-communicated from the Devadasi community for engaging in certain forms of sexual commerce with patrons. Furthermore, although Sashimani lived in a penurious state, she spoke of the prestige and affluence she enjoyed in Puri society in her formative years of temple association. She also critiqued the ideal of conjugal matrimony as the sole determinant of heterosocial relationships; this patriarchal vision of feminine respectability being articulated in colonial and nationalist women’s reform projects. “Despite our religious lives, we still had aashas and abhilashas (human emotions and affections). As artists, it helped us bring sensuality to our dance form.”[7]
Images of the last Mahari, Sashimani Devi, from the 2000s
A collective Mahari identity of resistance is further revealed through folk songs that were sung in Mathas (Hindu monasteries) in Puri in the 1950’s and 1960’s. These Mathas emerged as centres of mobilization and reintegration for these women post their disassociation from the temple. Sashimani sang for me a few of these songs:
I pray to Lord Jagannath to rid me of this strife,
My debts and miseries have encompassed my life
And nothing can save me.
No one will give us badhi (a local snack)
No one will give us beedi (local cigarettes).Do not treat us like mindless dupes or victimized agents of reform!
In the good old days,
Everyone in Orissa,
Respected us and worshipped us
They let us live our lives on our own feet
Not fettered, not reliant on anyone but ourselves.But today,
The Government, the police, this society
Have robbed us of our dignity
While sharing sweet words and insincere acts of charity.
Oh! Do not treat us like mindless dupes or victimized agents of reform!Such adversities have never befallen us before!
The menacing Gora Sahab approaches,
He robs us of our seva (worship); he robs us of our meva (food)
The police come with orders to catch us
Oh! Such adversities have never befallen us before![v]
A joint vocabulary of exploitation and subversive agency emerges through folk songs and plays that Maharis performed during communal events of gathering. These voices remain missing and unrecorded in official policy and development frameworks, which fail to record the lived experiential perspectives of temple-dancers. Such modes of mobilization epitomize the development of a collective feminist consciousness, directed against hegemonic structures of modernity/urbanization, globalization, and neo-liberalism.
The role of such oral histories to account for the missing voices of marginalized actors cannot be discounted. They help record complex modalities of subversive agency, resistance and mobilization that contest mainstream development models. Additionally, as examined by feminist scholars like Urvashi Butalia and Veena Das, in conditions of structural violence the recollection of suppressed silences can also serve functions of catharsis and emotional unburdening, primarily for historically underrepresented communities. The power of oral narratives is useful for recording the life circumstances of subaltern actors, many of which are absent from the historical record, towards reconceptualizing limits to human rights protocols.[8] Moreover, in the making of laws and policies on the ‘reform’ and ‘rehabilitation’ of such disenfranchised subjects located on the fringes of civil society today, what remains missing is their voices and experiential narratives. Conceivably so, in examining the limits of the Eurocentric legacies of colonial archives, such non-elite, bottom-up perspectives from non-state actors are pivotal to encapsulate.
Sashimani’s viewpoints narrating Mahari processes of socio-economic stigmatization, alongside their exclusion from the cultural, performative spaces of Orissa, are not sole accounts. One must also pay attention to the voices of the last living Maharis (like Harapriya, Kokila Prabha and Parasamani), explored in the documentary-film Given to Dance. A documentary made by Ron Hess reliant on the ethnographic fieldwork of Frederique Apffel-Marglin, Given to Dance explicates the mutating life circumstances of Maharis in the changing socio-political climate of Orissa in the 1980s and 1990s. This was a period marked by a state governmental takeover of the Jagannath Temple from the Orissa Gajapati royal family, producing a series of transformations in age-old structures of religious and royal patronage. Against the backdrop of the new geo-political configurations of the independent nation-state whereby abolitionist legislations in other parts of the nation (like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra) criminalized Devadasi dedication, this documentary aptly encapsulates the distinct regional landscape of Orissa. Incorporating the life stories of the now-extinct community of Maharis, along with religious authorities like KC Rajaguru (the Rajaguru is the Adhya Sebak i.e., head priest of the temple), the film underscores their lost traditions. Moreover, it accounts for the history of Odissi dance embedded within the ritualistic customs of Mahari-Devadasis, who historically constituted some of the central temple duties amidst the thirty-six categories of temple-servitors. Against aspects of institutionalized exclusions in tandem with systemic forms of discrimination in dominant policy and development discourses, the value of giving expression to suppressed voices and memories cannot be side-lined, whereby it becomes momentous to recount for the lived experiences of historically under-represented groups.
Interpretations of the cruciality of Mahari rituals in the temple as recorded in the aforesaid documentary were imparted to me by Frederique Apffel-Marglin. While there is abundant literature on the wider context of the Devadasi system across parts of southern and western India, very little has been studied about the regional Mahari tradition and its specific context in Orissa. The most influential research has been done by Marglin, who has interacted with several Maharis about their religious ritual, social modes of organization, along with their performative culture. Marglin kindly shared with me observations of her interactions with many of the last remaining Maharis in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the significance of their Sakta rituals, embodying female power and divine energy.[9] The historical habitats of the dying-out generation of Maharis as recorded in such oral and aural narratives, alongside disruptures therein, are critical towards informing a fresh perspective on this community that otherwise go missing from the conventional, hegemonic annals of Odissi dance today.
As discussed in Given to Dance, the performative traditions of Maharis in the temple were in the decline from the 1950s onwards, ending a tradition dating back thousands of years. In the modern period, as royal and religious patronage disappeared, conceptions of dance and its creators radically changed. In the aftermath of colonial and successively nationalist abolitionist campaigns, the very characteristics of socio-economic autonomy and sexual agency that had attributed onto Mahari-Devadasis societal respect and auspiciousness [10] now resulted in their decline and demise. Some of the interviews in Given to Dance deserve special mention. They debunk many myths surrounding linear Devadasi depictions along lines of sexual exploitation or moral turpitude, as done in majoritarian policy, humanitarian, and development discourses today. They further illustrate the processes of impoverishment of this matriarchal community in the modern nation-state. Take for instance, Harapriya Devi, the senior-most remaining Mahari, who recalled that when she was 25, there were about 50 remaining Maharis; but in the 1990s, only a handful remained. Harapriya narrates the community’s quotidian practices historically, which although included sexual relationships, could not be classified along lines of prostitution or trafficking, as that precludes elements of choice/volition and bodily autonomy that they exercised in their choice of patrons.[11] Furthermore, in a conservative nexus of Oriya family values where married women were confined to roles of domesticity and motherhood under patriarchal kinship structures, Maharis were among the few groups of women who exercised socio-economic agency, cultural capital, and public sphere access. Kokila Prabha notes, “To learn reading, we went to school. Very few girls were educated then. It was not considered important. The housewife is attached to the family. God has given us a different life.”[12] Kokila further notes the respect they held in Puri historically, where the presence of Maharis was deemed integral to auspicious ceremonies like weddings or child-birth. “Pilgrims and people worshipped us. They washed our feet and took the water home like Ganges water.”[vi] Such insights inform a profound change of discourse on female agency. The Mahari as Calanti Lakshmi, i.e., a living embodiment of the female goddess Lakshmi, thwarts the figure of the victimized, coerced girl sexually exploited by the patriarchal configuration of the temple.
In 1963, after eight years of litigation, the Orissa State Government took over control of temple management and its lands from the Gajapati royal family. The present king Dibyasingha Deb now remains a symbolic figurehead in the temple’s administrative edifice. The declining system of royal patronage gravely impacted the socio-economic and cultural landscape surrounding Maharis. Without any temple or royal support, they were pushed to the fringes of society.[13] Devadasis like Parasamani narrated in the documentary, that they barely had any income to sustain themselves in the 21st century. Parasamani rented out rooms in the house that she inherited from her adopted mother. Besides, she sustained herself by complementing her rental income with song and dance lessons. Her earnings were small, amounting to a meagre sum of Rs. 100 a month in the 1900s. Such predicaments were also reiterated to me in my encounters with Sashimani. Moreover, some of the factors constituting Devadasi demise are appositely summarized by Krishna Chandra Rajguru: “The power and influence of the king declined, and with the Maharis’ prestige diminished. People’s faith also slackened. The people no longer showed an interest and the dance ritual gradually ceased. It wasn’t long ago – 25 or 30 years back, I saw it come to an end. No one stopped it here in Orissa. There was no prohibition. It was just that no one cared.”[14] Rajguru’s comments are especially explanatory towards highlighting the distinctive regional register surrounding Maharis in Orissa from other variants of Devadasi communities across parts of western and southern India, along with successive historical discontinuities in their socio-cultural landscapes.
Subsequently, it is informative to note that the process of nation-building alongside the revival of the classical dances in a newly independent India was ironically marked by an appropriation of the cultural capital of such actors in tandem with their invisibilization from bourgeoise, respectable stages. Such phenomena were not unique to Devadasis alone, but also manifested across other matrilineal communities like Tawaifs (courtesan communities who catered to the Mughal nobility via their performative culture in Kathak dance, Hindustani classical music, and Urdu literary traditions).[15] Ascribed colonial nomenclatures of ‘Nautch Girls’ and ‘Prostitutes’ along paradigms of sexual deviance, debauchery, moral turpitude, crime, and disease, played a key role in the distancing of the performative arts from their predecessors, while simultaneously absorbing aspects of their cultural capital. The appropriation of the performative culture of Mahari-Devadasis into the modern repertoire of the Odissi dance, albeit an erasure of select elements of eroticism/sensuality to pander to bourgeoise, respectable audiences on contemporary dance stages, is observed by Harapriya in Given to Dance. When asked the difference between their historical practise of the dance from the contemporary Odissi variant, she stated, “You dance outside on the stage. To you, dance is art, work, and knowledge. We danced only inside the temple, as devotional service to God.”
Ironically enough, Maharis like Harapriya, Kokila Prabha, Parasamani or Sashimani did not gain prominence as the formative gurus of Odissi in the revival of the dances, now reconstructed by Gotipuas and male dance maestros. In the appropriation of their dance ritual, certain elements of Mahari devotionalism, sensuality, and eroticism in Abhinaya facial gestures and bodily movements, were sanitised from the reconstructed vocabulary of Odissi to pander to liberalized, middle-class audiences. This was confirmed to me in my conversations with the prominent Odissi dancer, Ileana Citaristi.[vii]
Photos of the Mahari dance-form and dress, from which the modern-form of Odissi is derived (Image clicked by Shriya Patnaik during a local dance-festival in Puri, 2016)
The above-mentioned perspectives articulate a shared, bottom-up vocabulary of mobilization, adaptation, and resistance against the nationalist consensus on Devadasi-dedication movements vis-à-vis the passage of Devadasi abolitionist legislations across the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra, which played a key role in the general climate of disfavor that Maharis suffered. On this, it is useful to refer to the various regional Devadasi abolitionist Acts across these states via legislations like Tamil Nadu Devadasis Prevention of Dedication Act (1947), The Karnataka Devadasis Prohibition of Dedication Act (1982), Andhra Pradesh Devadasis Prohibition of Dedication Act (1988), and Maharashtra Devadasis System Abolition Act (2005). However, it is instructive to note that despite a strong history of Devadasi dedication in the states of Orissa and Assam in eastern India, there were no state legal movements towards abolition of these practices in these areas. This was reiterated to me in my interviews with various actors in Puri who stated that select elements of Devadasi traditions, including but not limited to their song and dance ritual at Jagannath Temple festivals like the Rath Yatra, continued right up until the 2000s with the extinction of this community. This specific religious context in Orissa, which was characterized by a complete lack of abolitionist legislations and/or resistance movements against the Devadasi System, are instructive towards differentiating the distinct regional register of the custom, along with aspects of the elite historical status accorded to these women. In addition, the extinction of this community in 2015 was also characterized by shifts in collective memory and popular culture in terms of a selective amnesia and cultural nostalgia in Orissa. Such mutating configurations in popular culture and collective memory, especially with the demise of this community, could be rooted in a select terrain of cultural romanticization and societal remembrance, which are consequential to trace.
The various abolitionist movements in the aforesaid states further delineate how Devadasi reform movements were enshrined in a pedagogical vision embedded in protecting women, integrating them into domesticated roles, disciplining bodies, and criminalizing deviant sexualities. In fact, Muthulakhshmi Reddy, one of the leading Indian feminists of 20th century, was at the forefront of abolishing the Devadasi System in the Madras Legislative Assembly and integrating these women as “chaste housewives” or “deferential maidservants” along middle-class patriarchal principles.[16] The patriarchal consensus in the nationalist movement ascertained a distinct Gendered Habitus for women, thereby systematically marginalizing the quotidian cultures of matrilineal communities.[viii]
In light of the patriarchal underpinnings of respectable femininity in women’s reform projects in independent India, it thus becomes significant to revisit the above-mentioned contours of popular culture and lived memory. Such bottom-up representations discredit generalized/stereotypical and homogenized representations of this community along paradigms of sexual deviance and/or exploitation. Maharis’ practices of religiosity and matrilineal customs now remain relics of a bygone era. However, their cultural memory lives on despite several measures at erasure and appropriation. In piecing together fragments of individual and collective memory, the above-mentioned oral histories therein demarcate a complex history of the Jagannath Temple through the experiential accounts of women themselves along with everyday actors who had close interactions with them. Such lost voices elucidate complex modalities of historical subjectivity, human experience, and bottom-up adaptation that can contest top-down, arbitrarily policing measures by the state, and are therefore important to recuperate.
In writing a history of gender and humanitarian projects, it is momentous to incorporate the lived experiences of such marginalized actors who fall outside dominant categories of heteronormative gender identities, law, and citizenship. The sexual agency of non-conforming groups like temple-dancers underlines how the nation-state maintains its hegemony by regulating the behavior of groups, situated outside the boundaries of patriarchal kinship structures. The story of the Devadasi therein became linked with appropriation and control over women’s bodies and sexualities, which constituted the epistemological and ontological principles of respectable, pedagogical citizenship attributes in the modern Indian nation-state. Voices such as those of Sashimani Devi, Harapriya, Parasamani and Kokila Prabha, shed light on how this ideal for citizenship is fundamentally divided along gendered lines, which precludes inclusive/comprehensive emancipation efforts.
In conclusion, this case-study thereby calls for an assimilation of the voices of minority actors into historical cannons, in conjunction with their modes of navigation through civil society. The complex teleological subjectivities of third world women that evade representation along a liberal discourse of first world feminisms, has oftentimes privileged a skewed modality of historical telling that presupposes a Eurocentric trajectory of development for women’s rights. This linear historicism manifests in a representation of colonized women’s experiences along an evolutionary specter of first world feminisms; as Chandra Mohanty hypothesizes of a homogenizing benchmark “by which to encode and represent cultural others.”[17] Consequently, in light of the exclusions in the official archive in accounting for the life stories of women like Sashimani, attempting to encapsulate the experiential life-stories of subaltern actors is pivotal towards writing a revisionist history on matrilineal communities like Devadasis. Such accounts help reconstruct an alternative Devadasi historiography that contests binaristic notions of prostitution and/or sexual exploitation/coercion. The life stories of Mahari-Devadasis therefore call for a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres across postcolonial worlds, alongside a cognizance of the quotidian cultures of indigenous groups. It is important to situate the life-histories of these women within the ambit of transnational feminist debates and human rights movements today.
Primary Sources
[i] Sashimani Devi (Last living Mahari Devadasi of Orissa), Interview by Shriya Patnaik. Personal Interview, (Puri: August 11, 2014). The interview has been translated from Oriya to English by me.
[ii] ‘Mahari’ is the localized name for Devadasis in the context of Orissa. Temple-dancer communities were colloquially referred to by different names in different areas: for example, Maharis in Orissa, Jogatis or Basavis in Karnataka, Theravardiyars in Tamil Nadu, Natis in Assam, Matangis or Muralis in Maharashtra, Bhavins or Kalavants in the Konkan region, and Bogams in Andhra Pradesh. In their matrilineal kinship structures, these women were not married to mortals but dedicated in temples. They were the creators of Indian classical dance-forms like Bharatnatyam, Odissi and Kuchipudi. Their practices of religiosity and quotidian cultures varied across regions.
[iii] Though a contemporary reading of the region reads as ‘Odisha’, for the purposes of historical consistency, I shall refer to it as ‘Orissa’ in this article.
[iv] In this Maithuna ritual of the Panchamakara denomination of Jagannath worship, women possess strength through in their bodily fluids, which they release in dance through intense rhythmic movements. The Mahari is a divine manifestation of the Goddess Shakti who enters her body in a sacral dance, called Sakti Ucchista. This dance ritual has been historically attributed to ensure the fertility of Jagannath’s kingdom in Oriya mythical literature. It is only after being blessed with the “fullness of Goddess Shakti’s form” is the temple’s Mahaprasad Bhoga (i.e., food offering distributed among subjects), distributed. Insights from my interview with Shyam Sundar Patnaik (Jagannath Temple ‘Adhya Sebak’ Head Priest who has conducted extensive research on the preservation of Jagannath Temple Talapatra palm-leaf manuscripts detailing the rituals of worship), Interview by Shriya Patnaik. (Personal Interview: Puri, July 2, 2016). On this point, also refer to Frederique Apffel-Marglin, Wives of the God-King, The Rituals of The Devadasis of Puri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 240.
[v] I have translated these songs from Oriya, during my fieldwork trips to Puri from 2014-2016.
[vi] The translations of the interviews from Oriya to English have been done by documentary’s makers.
[vii] On this topic, I have been in conversations with Dr. Ileana Citaristi (a prominent Odissi dancer today who has been conferred the prestigious Indian Padma Shri award for her contributions to Odissi dance). Dr. Citaristi is a student of the famous dance maestro Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, who is also known as one of the founding fathers in the revival of Odissi. As she has also authored books on Odissi, owing to her expertise on this subject, Citaristi has shared her insights with me on the evolution of the present practise of Odissi from the Mahari temple-ritual, along with an erasure of some of their sensual/erotic performative gestures to pander to a bourgeoise, respectable audience on contemporary dance stages.
[viii] The concept of a “Gendered Habitus” refers to the bourgeoise, respectable ideal that women’s reform projects in the twentieth century were guided by in the cultivation of a domesticated, moral woman who behaved by upper class and caste cultured ideal. This new habitus sought to regulate the behaviour of women and was exclusionary to the vision of gender equality subsequent women’s rights movements advocated. Refer to Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 68-70.
Further readings
[1] B.R. Patil, “The Devadasis”, Indian Journal of Social Work 35, no. 4 (1975): pp. 377-389.
[2] Pankaj Charan Dās (17 Mar. 1925)” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Music and Dance India (New Delhi, Oxford University Press).
[3] Philippa Levine, “A Multitude of Unchaste Women: Prostitution in the British Empire”, Journal of Women's History 15, no.4 (2004): pp. 159-163.
[4] National Archives of India: Home Department Files, File 820 (1922), “Dr. H.S. Gour’s Bill to Amend the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure for the Purpose of criminalizing the Devadasi System”.
[5] Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).
[6] “Sashimani Devi, temple dancer - Obituary” The Telegraph, UK (14 April, 2015): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11535593/Sashimani-Devi-temple-dancer-obituary.html; Ellen Barry, “Sashimani Devi, Last of India’s Jagannath Temple Dancers, Dies at 92,” The New York Times, March 23, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/world/asia/sashimani-devi-last-of-indias-jagannath-temple-ritual-dancers-dies-at-92.html
[7] Sashimani Devi (Last living Mahari Devadasi of Orissa), Interview by Shriya Patnaik. Personal Interview, (Puri: August 11, 2014). The interview has been translated from Oriya to English by the author.
[8] Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Veena Das, “Specificities: Official Narratives, Rumour, and the Social Production of Hate,” Social Identities 4, no. 1 (1998): pp. 109-130.
[9] Observations by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. Interview by Shriya Patnaik. Personal Interview on Zoom, (Geneva: December 1, 2020).
[10] The auspiciousness of Mahari sexuality as per the Sakta denomination of Hinduism worshipping female energy has been discussed in detail by Marglin in her pioneering study of Orissa Devadasis. Refer to Frederique Apffel-Marglin, Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa (India: Oxford University Press, 2008); Frederique Apffel-Marglin “Kings and Wives: The Separation of Status and Royal Power,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 15, no. 1–2 (1981): pp. 155–81.
[11] Ron Hess, Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Andrew McCord, Madhavi Mudgal, and Purna Chandra Mishra, Given to dance: India's Odissi Tradition (Madison, Wisconsin: Film Distribution Office, Center for South Asian Studies, 1993) [distributor].
[12] Ibid.
[13] Gajapati Maharaj Dibyasingha Deb (Present Puri King, Chairman of the Jagannath Temple Management Committee), Interview by Shriya Patnaik. Personal Interview. Puri, June 13, 2016.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Veena Talwar Oldenberg, “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (1990): pp. 259-287.
[16] Mary Hancock, “Home Science and the Nationalization of Domesticity in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies, 35 no. 4 (2001): pp. 894.
[17] Chandra Talpade Mohanty “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds.) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 55.
Shriya Patnaik is a doctoral student in International History at The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, where her research is funded by the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship. Her Ph.D. research focuses on the historical genealogy surrounding discourses on trafficking, prostitution, and sex-worker rights in India through the lens of matriarchal communities like Mahari-Devadasis, and is methodologically reliant on oral histories along with colonial-period archival records.
*Editorial assistance by Tara Giangrande