READING DEVADASI PRACTICE THROUGH POPULAR MARATHI LIT.
ANAGHA TAMBE
Lord Krishna had sixteen thousand wives, Marathi kings had more than one wife, but a woman in our society is considered to be pure only when she has one sexual partner.
Anagha Tambe in her paper uses Marathi literary work as a reference
to the devadasi practice that is prevalent in Maharashtra. Devadasi is a girl
who is devoted to the god and so can never belong to one man. People consider
these girls to be sexually available to everyone in their village; she cannot
refuse to sleep with any man. What strikes most to me in the article is that
the lower caste women who are devadasis are exploited by the upper caste men. In
this practice the upper caste men keep the upper caste women ‘pure’ whom they
can marry and they exploit the lower caste women and steal their virtue. These girls
are not considered pure and nobody wants to associate with them. The irony is
that a lower caste women if not a devadasi is an untouchable but when she
dedicates herself she loses that title. She only loses the title so that the
upper caste men can have sex with her without having to hide face that he slept
with an untouchable; apart from this nobody associates with them, she is even
kept in a separate home away from her family.
In our society where lower caste women have no help, advantage,
any sort of justice are considered to be a free ticket to satisfy man’s sexual
desires and there is no debate happening over this.
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