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Abstract
This thesis focuses on the decline and demise of the regional community of Devadasis (hereditary, ritualistic, temple dancers and singers) in the Jagannath Temple of Puri, Orissa, colloquially known as Maharis. The thesis progresses chronologically through time, starting from the 1860s, a period marked by the initiation of legal and policy developments that conflated Devadasis as prostitutes, and ending with the extinction of the Mahari-Devadasi community in Orissa in 2021. It delineates the ideological factors and institutional processes shaping the policing of temple dancing under colonial and postcolonial structures of governance in which Devadasi dedications were conceptualised and categorised monolithically through the lens of prostitution, the caste dynamics of regulation projects, and the subsequent silencing of women’s voices under abolitionist policies. Each of the four thesis chapters explores how different sets of actors dealt with the regulation of Devadasis across colonial and postcolonial India (namely colonial officials, British feminists, nationalists, Indian women leaders, social workers, the international human rights arena, grassroots NGOs, dancers, religious authorities, and Devadasi family members), and how Devadasis have in turn resisted, contested, or adapted to top-down measures imposed upon them, especially in the spatial locale of Orissa. Incorporating oral testimonies from the last two surviving Maharis, Sashimani and Parasamani, this study further elucidates how these women historically mobilised against or subverted policing measures through their songs of resistance, quotidian cultures, social positioning, and practices of religiosity, carving out circumscribed positions of autonomy for themselves in postcolonial India. The thesis employs a multisited and multiscalar ethno-historical approach, drawing on 11 archives and fieldwork conducted across India, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Its sources include colonial and postcolonial official documents, media sources, legal court cases, public health files, NGO records, United Nations and League conventions, religious texts, census surveys, Devadasi petitions, temple iconography, Odissi dance videotapes, microfilms, Devadasi songs, participant observation, and interviews with the last two surviving Maharis and regional interlocutors.