Reading Devadasi Practice through Popular Marathi
Literature
In the reading, the author analyses various
literary texts and plays popular consumed and hailed in Maharashtra for their
discourse on the Devdasi pratha. She critically analyses and presents the
situation as something which is paradoxical and as something which doesn’t
exists in two binaries of either good or bad practice as it is not something
which is only subjugated by patriarchy but also that of caste and hence forming
Brahminical patriarchy which rewards different kinds of wives and ‘non-wives’
sexual labour differently.
She points out how a jogtin ,a lower caste women who
is supposed to be ‘polluted’ and ‘untouchable’ becomes sexually accessible to
upper caste men and the entirety of village without polluting them – because there
lies an ‘honour’ in being the devoted wife of a deity even though it makes her
sexually promiscuous and subjected to consensual and non-consensual acts
of sex. An honourable jogtin is one who engages in practicing a
monogamous relationship with an upper caste man to get material support for herself
and the man’s offspring, termed zulwa. The author points out how it is duplicitous
since when the woman is sacrificed to the deity she is made sexually available to
the entire village and the notion of choice is merely superficial as she has to
take all sexual advances and still remain satpan (pure) when she doesn’t
really have an agency over her body (as is pointed out to several characters in
different books). A true satpan Jogtins is supposed to maintain zulwa as
is closely resembles what an upper caste married woman would be like, i.e., monogamous.
She concludes by asking - How can the agency of women in prostitution be
articulated when the “lower caste” women enter prostitution not merely because
of physical coercion or economic necessity, but because of the social injunctions
linked with dedication that deny them the options of marriage or stable sexual
relation and even non-sexual work,and brand them as “sexually available”?
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