“Devadasi” Reform in Colonial South India: The Case of Radhika Santwanam

Abstract

“The issue of devadasi reform was embedded in larger public debates about sexuality in colonial India… Non-conjugal female sexuality represented a near-irrevocable moral degeneration, and it was in large part responsibility of middle-class women to reform and neutralize its dangers by way of example” by Soneji (Unfinished gestures. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, pp. 112–113). It is within this discourse of marriage and conjugality that I wish to study Radhika Santwanam (The Appeasement of Radhika), an eighteenth century text written by a courtesan Muddupalani, and the public debate that rose in 1911, between Bangalore Nagarathnamma, another devadasi and a ganika, and Kandukuri Veeresalingam, the father of social reform in South India, when Nagarathnamma wanted to republish the text, which had for long been banned from publication and public circulation. In this sringaraprabhandam, Muddupalani uses the male tradition of love making and subverts it, thereby making Radha take the lead in satisfying her bodily desires. Female sexuality was never to be explored or talked about beyond the conjugal relationship in Colonial India. The “new emerging woman” in the nationalist imagination was essentially the keeper of the spiritual domain. In the name of an abstract legality, what was put in the imagination was a “thorough patriarchal family order which maintained the illusion of mutual respect and companionship” (Nair). The image of the devadasi was an antithesis to the image of the “new emerging woman”. Hence, though there is very little or no evidence that Muddupalani faced any opposition when she wrote the piece, the issue of the republication of the text written by a courtesan, taken up by another devadasi, created a huge debate within the larger discourse of social reform in colonial India.