SOUTH INDIAN DEVADASIS and the SEXUALITY of RELIGION

GI V E N TO T H E G ODDE S S

Lucinda Ramberg

© 2014 Duke University Press

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Printed in the United States

of America on acid- free paper ♾

Cover design by Natalie Smith

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Library of Congress Cataloging-

in- Publication Data

Ramberg, Lucinda, 1962–

Given to the goddess : South Indian devadasis and

the sexuality of religion / Lucinda Ramberg.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5710-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-5724-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Devadasis. 2. Yellamma (Hindu deity)

3. Sex—Religious aspects—Hinduism. I. Title.

bl1237.58.d48r3635 2014

294.5′2114—dc23

2014012185

Cover art: Photo by Brett Isis Fisher.

In memory of

two renegade priests

KRISHNABAI KADAPURE

1963–2003

and

JENNY BALLARD RAMBERG

1935–89

C ON T E N T S

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Gods, Gifts, Trouble 1

PART I . G OD S

1. Yellamma and Her Sisters:

Kinship among Goddesses and Others 39

2. Yellamma, Her Wives, and

the Question of Religion 71

PART I I . G I F T S

3. Tantra, Shakta, Yellamma 113

4. The Giving of Daughters:

Sexual Economy, Sexual Agency,

and the “Traffic” in Women 142

PART I I I . T ROU BL E

5. Kinship Trouble 181

6. Troubling Kinship 213

Notes 223

Glossary 247

Bibliography 251

Index 270

AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S

I have spent many a solitary hour bent over notebooks and computers, but I have done none of this writing, or the research leading to it, alone.

Forms of institutional and material support for this project were gen-erously granted by the Magistretti Fellowship at the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, the Human Rights Center, and the Department of An-thropology at the University of California (uc), Berkeley; the American Institute for Indian Studies; and the National Institutes of Health, Alco-hol Research Group (niaaa predoctoral fellowship grant t32 aa007240); the Andrew Mellon Foundation; the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky; the Women’s Studies in Religion Pro-gram at Harvard Divinity School; and the Department of Anthropology, Program in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Kathryn Poethig introduced me to the reform of the brides of Yellamma by the brides of Christ (Poethig 1992), thereby planting the seed for the project that became my dissertation and resulted in this book. This was but the beginning of the many years of lively intellectual engagement and generous emotional and practical support from teachers, colleagues, and friends in India and the United States that made it possible for me to bring this project to fruition.

My greatest debt is to the women who permitted me to follow them around and met my intrusive and stubborn questions with patience and humor. I owe the deepest pleasures of my fieldwork to them. Listening to their stories, laughing with them, and sharing food in their homes or mine brought me much joy. In particular I am grateful to the woman I call Yamuna, who drew me into her network of kin and appointed her sons to look after my household. They have continued to generously nourish and

x acknowledgments

shelter me on my return trips to the town I call Nandipur in the Belgaum district of Karnataka. Among those who call Nandipur their home, I am most grateful to Jayashree, Laxshmibai, Sharabai, Kasturi, Sangeeta, Satish, Shivaram and Machindra, in addition to all those who participated in my survey of households and granted me interviews.

Across northern Karnataka and southern Maharastra, women who had been given to the goddess Yellamma shared their life stories and vantage on the world with me. Their contributions provided the foundation of this study. In particular, I am thankful to the members of the Veshya aids Mu-kabala Parishad in Sangli, Maharastra, whose hiv peer education program and rights- based organizing provide an extraordinary model for what col-lectives of sex workers might accomplish. For their provocations, skepti-cism of research, and generosity of time and conversation, I am grateful. I also want to acknowledge members of the Shakti Collective in Gokak and the staff of the Belgaum Integrated Rural Development Society, who took me on my first trip to meet Yellamma in her main temple at Saundatti.

Ambuja Kowlgi’s skills as a fieldworker were indispensable, and her deep intelligence and light spirit continue to inspire me. Jyoti Hiremath’s companionship, extraordinary patience, and willing hard work made my research labors in rural South India possible. To both of them I owe grati-tude for linguistic and cultural mediation and faithful research assistance through till the end. I thank Jyoti’s family for forgoing her presence in def-erence to her work with me.

I have received valuable guidance from many scholars and teachers within the Indian academy. Amrit Srinivasan’s early encouragements em-boldened me to undertake this project. Anil Mudbidri’s assistance in think-ing about problems of political economy and caste mark the book I came to write. K. S. Nair and R. D. Gambhir at Pune University, Hussain Khan at Karnatak University, Jayashree Ramakrishna at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, and Janaki Abraham and Satendra Kumar at the Delhi School of Economics all graciously invited me to speak and teach in their departments and facilitated various forms of institu-tional support. I owe my facility in Kannada to Lingadevaru Halemane, Suma Pramod, and A. Murigeppa.

The shape of this work has also been influenced by conversations with re-searchers and activists working on sexuality rights in Karnataka and Maha-rastra. Meena Sesho’s abundant energy, savvy, and nuanced reflections—not to mention food, drink, and bedding—nourished me. I am grateful to Vijay Thakur, an early provocateur in the formation of my research plans.

Acknowledgments xi

I thank Vinay Chandan for sharing his own writing and thinking on sexu-ality, for innumerable confabs at Koshi’s, venturing to Kerala, and tempt-ing me into Cubban Park to discuss The History of Sexuality. Sandhya Rao peered over her glasses, asked me wonderful questions, and invited me to her home. For my stay at the Dharni guest house and subtle assistance with translations, I am grateful to Chandra Shekhar Balachandran. For urban respite in Mumbai and endless kitchen table talk about the puzzles of field-work and anthropological endeavors in the field of sex and labor, I thank Svati Shah. For companionship in Dharwad and for a model of composure in the field, I acknowledge Treena Orchard. For respite in Goa and always compelling discussions, I am grateful to Cath Sluggett.

Friends in Bangalore sustained me, and thus made this work possible, in innumerable ways. Viva Kermani has kindly opened her home to me on many occasions. Superna Bedi refreshed my sense of irony with her amazement at the folly of my anthropological endeavor. Saras Ganapathy watered my spirit with her effervescent intelligence and warmth; put me up in Bangalore, Bombay, and Dharwar; and introduced me to her husband, Girish Karnad, who delighted me with stories about Brahmanized former devadasis.

At uc Berkeley my early formation as a medical anthropologist and scholar of South Asia took place under the close attention of Lawrence Cohen. His formidable intellectual capacities and spectacular kindness have made possible for me a flourishing of the mind I had not been able to anticipate. Calling the liberal tendencies of feminist theory and politics into question is a project I share with Saba Mahmood, and she continues to be a generous interlocutor who adds conceptual clarity and rigor to my efforts in this vein. Other members of the faculty at Berkeley made critical contributions to my thinking, especially Paola Bacchetta, Philippe Bour-gois, Cori Hayden, Trinh T. Minh- ha, Raka Ray, Nancy Scheper- Hughes, and Charis Thompson.

The project took shape as a book under the thoughtful attention of many generous friends and colleagues. Susan Bordo, David Greenberg, Girish Karnad, Ambuja Kowlgi, Anil Mudbidri, Gayatri Reddy, Laurie Schaffner, Karen Tice, and Helen Ulrich all read the whole manuscript at one stage or another, saving me from infelicities and errors and making many useful editorial suggestions. I owe a particular debt to three readers for the Press, two of whom have revealed themselves to be Anupama Rao and Éric Fassin. The generous and thoughtful comments provided by all three readers have helped me hone my prose and elaborate my arguments

xii acknowledgments

throughout. Miriam Angress, my editor at Duke University Press, has been unfailingly encouraging and responsive. I am grateful to Sara Leone for her graciousness and expertise in shepherding this book through production and Jeanne Ferris for zealous copyediting.

At uc Berkeley feedback on one or more chapters from Elizabeth Bern-stein, Cristiana Giordano, Rebecca Hall, Laura Hubbard, Katherine Lem-ons, Tahir Naqvi, Anand Pandian, Elizabeth Roberts, Christopher Roebuck, Dar Rudnyckyj, Lisa Stevenson, Fouzieyha Towghi, and Chris Vasant-kumar taught what my writing was and was not doing and made it possible for me to add lucidity and nuance to my prose. Comments on the introduc-tion from my colleagues at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell Uni-versity in 2007–8—especially Brett de Bary, Petrius Liu, Suman Seth, and Micol Siegel—and from members of the Dakshinapatta Group at Duke University—especially Lauren Leve, Sumiti Ramaswamy, Harris Soloman, and Ajanta Subramanian—proved instrumental to the final shape it has taken. Anne Braude, Benjamin Dunning, Susan Crawford Sullivan, Tania Oldenhage, and Solimar Otero at the Women’s Studies in Religion Pro-gram at Harvard Divinity School helped me clarify the stakes of the book for feminist scholars of religion. Over delicious meals and shared prose in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sarah Pinto and Jon Anjaria became delightful companions in ethnographic endeavor in India.

I have had the good fortune to work at two excellent universities as an Assistant Professor. I am grateful for the warm welcome and rich intel-lectual engagement extended to me by my colleagues in the Program in Gender & Women’s Studies, the Committee on Social Theory and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. In particu-lar, comments on one or two chapters from Cristina Alcade, Erin Koch, and Sarah Lyon clarified the possibilities of this ethnography. Srimati Basu and Emily Burrill, with whom I first began exchanging work in the con-text of a UK writing group cum roving dinner party formation, have be-come invaluable and cherished interlocutors. I thank my colleagues here at Cornell University in the Department of Anthropology; Feminist, Gen-der, & Sexuality Studies; the South Asia Program; and the Society for the Humanities for their inspirational thinking and essential support. In par-ticular, Shelley Feldman, Chris Garces, Billie Jean Isbell, Stacey Langwick, Masha Raskolnikov, Camille Robcis, Courtney Roby, Steven Sangren, Nee-lam Sethi, Rebecca Stolzfus, Sera Young, Amy Villarejo, Sarah Warner, and Andrew Wilford have offered pithy and useful commentary on one or more of the chapters. I am especially grateful to Durba Ghosh, Saida Hoizic, Amy

Acknowledgments xiii

Villarejo, and Dagmawi Woubshet for superb editorial suggestions and in-cisive questions.

Over the years of revision and rewriting that have led to this book, earlier versions of portions of it have been published elsewhere, as fol-lows: a part of chapter 2 in “Magical Hair as Dirt: Ecstatic Bodies and Post-colonial Reform in South India,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Vol. 33 (4): 501–22; portions of chapter 4 in “When the Devi is Your Husband: Sacred Marriage and Sexual Economy in South India,” Feminist Studies 37 (1): 28–60; and portions of chapters 4 and 5 as “Troubling Kinship: Sacred Marriage and Gender Configuration in South India,” American Ethnologist

40 (4): 661–75. I thank the editors of and readers for these journals, their comments and suggestions have helped me to refine my arguments.

Talks about and discussions of my research with colleagues at the fol-lowing institutions have helped me refine and specify my claims: the Uni-versity of Pune, Karnatak University, Cornell University, Butler University, Indiana University, Harvard University, Syracuse University, Hamilton College, and Duke University. I thank all of these colleagues and friends for helping me write a better book than I might have done alone. What errors and limitations remain are my own.

Love and friendship have made me and this writing possible. In the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, through several academic peregrinations I have been buoyed along for over two decades now by Lisa Fiorelli, Nina Haft, and Margaret Thompson. In Lexington I was treated to extraordinary hospitality and delicious cooking in the homes of Suzanne Pucci and John Erickson, Srimati Basu and Tiku Rawat, Karen Tice and Dwight Billings, and Kate Black and Kathi Kern. In addition to the Cornell colleagues I have mentioned above, I have been warmly gathered in to life in Ithaca by Ester Fernández, Arnika Fuhrmann, Andrea Hammer, Billie Jean Isbell, Hope Mandeville, and Lyrae van Clief- Stefanon. Writing retreats with Micol Siegel, Emily Burrill, and Cristiana Giordano have sustained my spirit and spurred on my revisions. I want to thank Amy Huber, who accompanied me on my first research trip and who always knew, even when I did not, that I could see this project through. I am grateful to Brett Fisher for her generous correspondence and beautiful photographs of the denizens of Nandipur. Delightful humor and daily provocations from Susanne Deising saw me through the dissertation phase of the manuscript. Jane O’Connor’s grounded and gentle encouragement got me through the first draft of the book. The zany humor and sweet strong presence that Casey Wenz offers helped me finish this book at the writing table she built for me.

xiv acknowledgments

Finally, I want to thank my natal family. My sister Julia Ramberg brings both serious determination and playful abandon to life, and she has taught me a great deal about when to buckle down and when to surrender. My sister Jenny Sayre Ramberg models for me the gifts of an unfettered and abundant creativity. I am inspired by this and by her healthy sense of the ridiculous, especially in the conduct of her elder sister. Awareness of my own absurdity has turned out to be invaluable in my endeavors as an an-thropologist. My father’s vast curiosity about the world and wanderlust laid the ground for my own wide venturing. But last, and first, I am grate-ful beyond measure to my mother, Jenny Ballard Ramberg. Her passionate commitment to human thriving, skepticism of sentiment, fierce faith, and keen intellectual appetite forged the metal of my mind, filled the well of my spirit, and made the pages that follow possible.

Note on Translation and Transliteration

All transliterations and translations are from Kannada, except where noted, and reflect the spoken character and somewhat distinct vocabulary of the Northern dialect of that language. I have used Kittel’s Dictionary ([1894] 1994) as the general basis for transliteration of Kannada terms into Eng-lish orthography and have foregone diacritics in favor of readability, dou-bling vowels where they are long or consonants where they are stressed. Translated terms and phrases appear in italics. The proper names of deities, castes, individuals and places appear in their most common Anglicized spelling without italics. I have followed the grammatical conventions of English where the plural form of an Indian term was called for, for instance devis rather than devaru, except when directly quoting someone.

The names of most people and some places have been changed in keep-ing with ethnographic convention and in the effort to protect those people and places from undue scrutiny.