Hester Betlem
My dissertation project explored the discursive origins and local implications of a state law banning a Hindu ritual practice – the “devadasi custom” – in rural South Eastern Andhra Pradesh. “Devadasi” is an umbrella term for a number of loosely related Hindu rituals, officially banned under the terms of the 1988 Andhra Pradesh Devadasi (Prohibition of Dedication) Act. The remaining expressions of the ritual are marked by the dedication or “marriage” of pubescent girls to a village goddess. The dedication ceremony initiates a girl, said to be a manifestation of the goddess, as an indispensible ritual specialist for the low-caste community of which she is a part. Because the completion of the dedication ceremony prevents a dedicated girl from marrying in the future, but sanctions sexual intercourse with multiple men over to course of her lifetime, the state regards the custom as a “forced initiation into a life of prostitution.” Accordingly, the Act bans the dedication ceremony and all the ritual roles traditionally performed by dedicated women. However, twenty years after the enactment of the law, the custom continues to flourish, and is increasingly practiced in out of the way places, far removed from the gaze of the government and non government agents (NGOs) who embody state law.
Existing scholarship notes that the Devadasi Act and the associated reform efforts raise questions about not only the scope of constitutional rights to religious freedom, but also about the Indian state’s explicit investment in securing normative conjugal relationships and bodies. Indeed, contemporary scholarship generally concurs that such interventions into religious practices affecting “Hindu” females, implicitly authorize an ideal of the “authentically Hindu” female conjugal body that marginalizes low-caste female subjectivities like the Devadasi’s. Accordingly, this scholarship focuses on the disciplinary and pedagogical practices implied by social reform laws like the Devadasi Act, and their disruptive impact on communities that fall short of the “ideal” subjectivities authorized by the State.
My research builds on this scholarship by tracing the effect of state law and reform on the nexus between the ritually binding roles and duties performed by dedicated women, the caste goddess to whom these women are dedicated as children, and the social, moral and territorial integrity of the small village units where my interlocutors lived. I argue that far from marginalizing, constraining, or displacing forms of life deemed incompatible with state law, the Devadasi Act constitutes the grounds for a form of legal procedure that simultaneously draws on the idioms of secular state law and local understandings of legally binding duty and obligation vis a vis the village goddess. In doing so, the work shifts its focus away from the sexuality of the dedicated woman to suggest that the state’s official curtailment of dedicated women’s ritual roles is an important site through which to understand how contemporary rural Indians inhabit and negotiate multiple, often mutually constitutive, forms of legal reasoning.
On completion of my book project, I plan to start research on a new research project, tentatively entitled Village Goddesses/Urban Spaces that builds on my research in rural Andhra Pradesh. My dissertation research brought to light the crucial role of village goddesses in the delineation of space and community in Andhra Pradesh’s rural areas. Villages, however, are not the only spaces inhabited by these popular, non-Sanskritic goddesses. The working and lower-middle class neighborhoods of Telangana’s (formerly Andhra Pradesh’s) state capital, Hyderabad, are home to thousands of popular goddess temples. Moreover, much like their village counterparts, these goddesses are annually propitiated in a citywide festival, known as Bonalu. In fact, preliminary research indicates that many Hyderabadi natives and new migrants to the city alike regard this festival as quintessentially Hyderabadi and, as such, the relationship one has with the goddess in one’s neighborhood is intimately related to a sense of belonging to the city. For my second project, I wish to investigate this sense of “belonging to the city” by conducting ethnographic research on the everyday worship and relationship that people forge with local goddesses in the Secunderabad area of Hyderabad city. Specifically, I wish to investigate how relationships with these goddesses mediate everyday life in an environment marked by rapid economic development, modernization and aspirations for social, economic and educational mobility.
Supervisors: Deborah Poole, Veena Das, and Naveeda Khan
Phone: 347 536 1583
Address: 35-28 77th Street, Basement
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
Existing scholarship notes that the Devadasi Act and the associated reform efforts raise questions about not only the scope of constitutional rights to religious freedom, but also about the Indian state’s explicit investment in securing normative conjugal relationships and bodies. Indeed, contemporary scholarship generally concurs that such interventions into religious practices affecting “Hindu” females, implicitly authorize an ideal of the “authentically Hindu” female conjugal body that marginalizes low-caste female subjectivities like the Devadasi’s. Accordingly, this scholarship focuses on the disciplinary and pedagogical practices implied by social reform laws like the Devadasi Act, and their disruptive impact on communities that fall short of the “ideal” subjectivities authorized by the State.
My research builds on this scholarship by tracing the effect of state law and reform on the nexus between the ritually binding roles and duties performed by dedicated women, the caste goddess to whom these women are dedicated as children, and the social, moral and territorial integrity of the small village units where my interlocutors lived. I argue that far from marginalizing, constraining, or displacing forms of life deemed incompatible with state law, the Devadasi Act constitutes the grounds for a form of legal procedure that simultaneously draws on the idioms of secular state law and local understandings of legally binding duty and obligation vis a vis the village goddess. In doing so, the work shifts its focus away from the sexuality of the dedicated woman to suggest that the state’s official curtailment of dedicated women’s ritual roles is an important site through which to understand how contemporary rural Indians inhabit and negotiate multiple, often mutually constitutive, forms of legal reasoning.
On completion of my book project, I plan to start research on a new research project, tentatively entitled Village Goddesses/Urban Spaces that builds on my research in rural Andhra Pradesh. My dissertation research brought to light the crucial role of village goddesses in the delineation of space and community in Andhra Pradesh’s rural areas. Villages, however, are not the only spaces inhabited by these popular, non-Sanskritic goddesses. The working and lower-middle class neighborhoods of Telangana’s (formerly Andhra Pradesh’s) state capital, Hyderabad, are home to thousands of popular goddess temples. Moreover, much like their village counterparts, these goddesses are annually propitiated in a citywide festival, known as Bonalu. In fact, preliminary research indicates that many Hyderabadi natives and new migrants to the city alike regard this festival as quintessentially Hyderabadi and, as such, the relationship one has with the goddess in one’s neighborhood is intimately related to a sense of belonging to the city. For my second project, I wish to investigate this sense of “belonging to the city” by conducting ethnographic research on the everyday worship and relationship that people forge with local goddesses in the Secunderabad area of Hyderabad city. Specifically, I wish to investigate how relationships with these goddesses mediate everyday life in an environment marked by rapid economic development, modernization and aspirations for social, economic and educational mobility.
Supervisors: Deborah Poole, Veena Das, and Naveeda Khan
Phone: 347 536 1583
Address: 35-28 77th Street, Basement
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
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