Sexed States: A Small History of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj

For gender studies of colonial and post-colonial India, the historical figure of the Devadasi (a pan-Indian term, alternately understood as sex-worker, courtesan, prostitute—literally “maid to the gods”) provides a much-needed shift in the terms through which genealogies of caste, sexuality and state-formation can be narrated. Devadasis (overdeterminedly in southern India) are sought after objects of study, fueled by feminist and state claims to discover, reform and/or restore sexual difference in India’s past. This paper shifts regional location and emphases to focus instead on a prominent Devadasi community in western India, principally in the states of Goa and Maharashtra: the Gomantak Maratha Samaj. Even as the Devadasi figure becomes taxonomized and rehabilitated through the passing of the various Contagious Disease Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) and anti-Devadasi Acts (1930, 1932, 1934), what falls away is its rootedness in an India that is multiply colonial: Portuguese, British, and to some extent, French. My paper centers the history of Devadasis within the nexus of British and Portuguese colonial rule in India to raise two central questions: What happens when the establishment of anti-Devadasi laws is read in conversation with competing colonial codifications of profit and pleasure? What forms of citizenship and subjectivity are being historicized through the figure of the Devadasi, even as we recuperate its presence and expand our understanding of the colonial past?