Voicing the Last Maharis: Orality and the Politics of Devadasi Sexual Regulation Projects in India

:As a result of the colonial Contagious Diseases Acts and postcolonial abolitionist legislation, culminating in the extinction of the Devadasi community in Orissa in 2021, Maharis’ quotidian cultures have declined within the modern Indian nation-state. This article examines histories of subaltern agency and bottom-up mobilization after Devadasi criminalization laws through the case-study of Mahari-Devadasis, unmarried temple women of the Jagannath Temple of Puri. It first outlines Maharis’ anthropological and kinship structures within Orissa’s regional religious register, and then traces the colonial, nationalist, legislative, institutional, and caste-inflected sexual regulation projects that categorized Devadasi religiosity as “religious prostitution” and dismantled Maharis’ ritual and material worlds. Finally, drawing on oral testimonies from the last surviving Maharis, Sashimani and Parasamani, while reflecting on the shifting of popular memory in contemporary Orissa, the article elucidates how these women contested top-down disenfranchisement through songs of resistance, oral iterations, performative traditions, memory, and quotidian cultures, carving circumscribed positions of autonomy in twenty-first-century Orissa.