Devadasi Act

[bethlakshmi]

At brunch on Sunday, there was some incredulity over my mention of the Devadasi Act. Not suprising... I'm sure most folks have better things to do with their time than trace down laws about sexual issues in India. Nonetheless, chatty provider of obscure knowledge that I am, I figured I'd refresh my own memory and pull together some info on Devadasi Acts.


The "Devadasi Act" outlawing devadasi practices - including the ritual of dedicating them as well as the condition of their employment as dancer & sexual worker - is not really one act, but several. Kind of like the fact that India is not one culture, or one nation, but many different groups crammed onto one subcontinent.

The whole mess starts with the British Raj. Anyone familiar with colonial England can probably guess how the sparse garments, and an art form that is centered on sringara - ie, erotic love interracted with a ruling class that encouraged corsetry and a culture of sexual repression. Add to that the fact that the devadasi system had been in decay since the advent of the Mughal era in the 16th and 17th century - so that it wasn't the highly funded hot-shot profession for smart, talented women any more and you can see how it didn't look so great. The first Devadasi Act was passed in 1934 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi#Legislative_initiatives).

When Indian independance was won in 1947, another Devadasi Act was put on the books - "Madras Devadasi Prevention of Dedication Act" was put in place to outlaw devadasi dedication in the state of Karnataka (incidentally, this state contains Lakshmi's home, as well). There was another act, outlawing dedication in Karnataka in 1982, one in Andhra Pradesh in 1998, and another in Karnataka in 1992. That's what my google-fu is turning up, but I would not be suprised at others.

Quite a number of human rights organizations report that devadasi dedication and practices continue to exist with more children being dedicated every day. In the 50+ years of outlawing it, it has not dwindled. It poses a two-fold problem - (1) children are dedicated, not adults, so they cannot consent, and they begin labor in their minority. (2) even in adulthood, the process creates women capable of doing little else, who are completely unaware of or unable to pursue other options.

That said, even in the last 50 years, immensely talented devadasis have influenced the world of Indian dance. Balasaraswati is my particular favorite. She was a women intensely devoted to God and dance, who used her passion and skill to bring a spirit to the developing art form of Bharata Natyam that is rare and special. This is the good side of childhood dedication - in those who are truly drawn to this profession, it can create a performer with astonishing talents.

In the SCA, I enjoy playing a persona that is a devadasi - Lakshmi was dedicated very young, as were most children in a variety of family professions in her time. In the SCA "known world" she has risen to an accomplished rank and has quite a lot of fame to her name. In manuscripts of her period, the stories of famous devadasis who fund irrigation systems, have the right to chatise kings, and get married after having careers come side by side with tortured young women who run away from temple service. I much prefer the former.

But that doesn't mean that the devadasi system has held the same place in the world then as now. For the moment, devadasis are caught between a rock and a hard place - coming forward is dangerous, villages support the traditional system, and India is vast. Laws against devadasism are hard to enforce, and there is not the budget for the kind of large scale social effort it would take to "rehabilitate" these women, and gaining access to the rural areas is non-trivial.

I don't have an answer on that one - but I'll readily admit to seeing the problem.

Comments

[rosadioro.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, do you have more on the modern definition of what a devadasi does as it differs from that of the period one?

!Sparked my curiosity!

[rosiewoodboat.livejournal.com]

The reality is that when the last brick was pulled out of the Raj system after Partition, the temple patronage system fell apart. The devadasi was often forced to find work outside the mandir in order to survive, and that work at times extended to prostitution. Official prohibition of devadasi dance was intended to prevent sexual exploitation of women, and in particular to stave off the feared consequent breakdown of caste purity due to the increased availability of prostitution. Devadasi dance tradition was preserved in its most shuddah form by the gotipuas who were trained by the last generation of Maharis because they could at least find work being boys...

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Huh. Well, there you go.

[siderea]

From the Human Rights Watch:

The practice of devadasi, in which a girl, usually before reaching the age of puberty, is ceremoniously dedicated or married to a deity or to a temple, continues in several southern states including Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Literally meaning "female servant of god," devadasis usually belong to the Dalit community. Once dedicated, the girl is unable to marry, forced to become a prostitute for upper-caste community members, and eventually auctioned into an urban brothel. The age-old practice continues to legitimize the sexual violence and discrimination that have come to characterize the intersection between caste and gender. The patrons of the devadasis are generally from the higher castes because those from the devadasis own castes are too poor to afford to [pay] for the rituals_ In many cases a patron kept many girls and the number of girls used to be a yard stick of the status of that man. This system of patronage has given way to [a system of] commercial prostitution in the populated big cities.218

Activists involved in the Dalit women's movement explain that the nexus between caste and forced prostitution is quite strong and that the devadasi system is no exception. Most Indian girls and women in India's urban brothels come from lower-caste, tribal, or minority communities. Like other forms of violence against women, ritualized prostitution, activists believe, is a system "designed to kill whatever vestiges of self-respect the untouchable castes have in order to subjugate them and keep them underprivileged." By keeping Dalit women as prostitutes, and by tying prostitution to bondage in rural areas, upper-caste men reinforce their declaration of social and economic superiority over the lower castes.

According to the Ambedkar Centre for Justice and Peace, a Canada-based NGO:

Thousands of untouchable female children (between 6 and 8 years) are forced to become maidens of God (Devadasis, Jogins, a Hindu religious practice in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka State, Maharashtra, Orissa State, to mention only a few). They are taken from their families, never to see them again. They are later raped by the temple priest and finally auctioned secretly into prostitution and ultimately die from AIDS. It is estimated by NGOs that 5,000 to 15,000 girls are auctioned secretly every year.

[...]

As the Karnataka activist explained, the law works to the disadvantage of women because it criminalizes their actions and not the actions of their patrons. Police will even go so far as to demand sex as a bribe: "They will threaten to file charges under the act if the woman says no."222 Their perceived status in society, as women who are supposed to serve men sexually, also makes it more difficult for devadasis to approach the police for help: "When a devadasi is raped, it is not considered rape. She can be had by any man at any time."

See original link for footnotes.

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

Pretty much - what siderea speaks of is the state of things, as I understand them today. After several years of research, I can say conclusively that a devadasi does in the 16th century is not particularly clear. I have my handouts from a persona class up in the SCA_India files section. But in brief, jobs may include:
- ritual specialist functions - blessing things, averting the evil eye by dancing, entertaining the god at various points througout the day, waving a fly whisk for the god, and so forth.
- dance functions - the only epigraphs I have are in conjunction with religious functions, but then I look at temple epigraphs... so consider the source
- they do have sex - I have found some records of children of such women. The line between devadasi and courtesan is blurred - because both do public dance it's sometimes hard to tell from stories whether a courtesan is also a devadasi.
- public works - in several cases, they amassed enough money through temple service to fund things like irrigation canals. Of course, that's a big deal, and thus why someone carved the info on a temple wall...

We have records that kings would manage the devadasi allocation system, moving N devadasis from temple A to temple B. We have records of dancing girls in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples. Sometimes, even when the greater society is patriarchal, devadasis are named with their mother's names. Also, women in this type of service to the temple are indentified as "women of the temple" not "wife of", "daughter of", "sister of" as is typical for other women. Lastly, they seem, at least in the Chola Era, to be more in control of their funds than regular women. They don't have men doing donations on their behalf, they do it themselves.

Leslie Orr does a great study of "women of the temple" called Donors, Daughters and Devotees where she points out that in the Chola Era women who are identified as being "of the temple" are not so much connected to dance, they are more on the ritual end. Her work also points out that we don't have a very complete picture of their daily lives. Her hypothesis is that the real "devadasi system" starts in the North and really only trickles South after the Chola Era.

Beyond that, the system and it's practices come and go with the typical caveat of time/location/religion/sect.

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

Certainly... although I think you have used up your limit of foreign words on this one... 4 non-English terms in one sentence is a bit much, don't you think?

"Devadasi dance tradition was preserved in its most shuddah form by the gotipuas who were trained by the last generation of Maharis because they could at least find work being boys..."

My impression of the gotipua tradition (for you non-enormous Indian dance geeks reading along at home... that is the tradition of young boys being trained to dance like girls) is strongly tied to the Odissi dance tradition. Not so much so for Bharata Natyam or other dance forms. By and large the dance tradition of temple women in the South was transmitted from temple women to Brahmin women.

[hawkegirl.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing! It feels overwhelming to me at times to even begin to understand some of these bits of Indian culture (having never been an Indiaphile, yet finding myself doing a traditional Indain practice I find I'm up a creek with out a paddle and not looking as hard as I should be for one). I enjoy your bits to give me something to chew on.

Huh. And my reply disappears.

[rosiewoodboat.livejournal.com]

"I think you have used up your limit of foreign words on this one..." To which I have to reply with the same sense as before, Hindustani basho mein baath karthey karthey, Hindustani cheez ke baare me baath shuru aathey hain. Which we can understand roughly as "The Use of the language of India facilitates talking about things from India," a concept which most theories of language affirm.

Re: Huh. And my reply disappears.

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

Use of language is only useful when everyone understands the language.

Use of obscure jargon to an audience which does not understand the jargon is pretentious and makes one seem exclusive and exclusionary.

The origin of confusion.

[rosiewoodboat.livejournal.com]

I was introduced to you years ago, as someone who was interested in 'scholarly studies of the Indian dance tradition." You original post was about an "obscure" thing -- the Devadasi act, and I assume you posted this because of your interest in same. This of course motivated my reply. There is no "jargon" or obscurity in my posting, just the normal language that one would find in beyond-surface-level discussion about the subject matter at hand. Perhaps I misunderstand your Journal discussions about these topics, or perhaps I have simply overestimated the scope of your interest or misudged your interest in reading things outside of translation, but really, there are no accurate substitutes for the four words italicized in my original post, nor did I think you would find such focused language surprising or exclusionary.

Re: The origin of confusion.

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

For the record, I followed about half of your terminology. The folks that I intended the post for - ie, my friends who did not know that there even was a devadasi act - knew less that that.

To learn what you were posting, I actually looked up the rest of the words online - some of which - specifically "shuddah" - did not provide even a hint of insight in terms of the relative context of your post. No one else I've spoken to who reads my journal even bothered to try that hard. I would argue, that I have about as much knowledge a fairly interested, non-professional, non-any-Indian-language-speaking artist can have. If I'm not able to follow along, I think you're in over the head of most others reading this journal.

One of my largest beefs with books on Indian art is that they make very little effort to even attempt to translate Indian words. Whether or not a single decent definition is possible, NO understanding at all is reached if the jargon remains completely undefined. It took me about 5 years to even begin to get a handle on words like marga, desi, rasa, bhava and the many, many, many other terms used in Indian art. Over the course of that time, I found that many books combined "hinglish" words and completely awful grammar to create incomprehensible compositions. I feel that authors often hide behind these words to avoid taking the time to make the terms intelligible.

And I do believe that many of these words are concepts that the experts will argue over for entire life times. But I'm also not so interested in making this journal a place for such argument.

In my mind, it's great to use a word or two for art terms that are not easy to express in English. But when all meaningful words in a sentence have to be replaced with foriegn vocabulary, you have to wonder if you haven't sold the English language short.