Web of Deceit: Devadasi Reform in Colonial India

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Dasigal Mosavalai (Web of Deceit) propagates the abolition of the devadasi system and seeks to reclaim youth from the temptations and immorality of the dasi. And yet in the very process of articulating the demand, the novel uncovers different layers of resistance and acquiescence to this demand. It is the story of lived lives, of political aspirations, of wealth, and of love in its several forms (maternal, paternal, conjugal, fraternal, sororal, erotic, for instance), of sexual desire – female and male. It documents the shift from one historical epoch to another using the space of the story to map these changes. Born in 1883 in a traditional devadasi family in Muvalur village of Thanjavur district. Ramamirthammal began her political career in the Congress, and went on to become an active self respecter and a passionate abolitionist. While supporting Muthulakshmi Reddi’s measures for legal reform, she struck a clearly different note in her articulation of the root cause of the system, locating herself firmly within the ideology of the self respect movement. In the introduction, Kalpana Kannabiran and Vasanth Kannabiran frame the novel in the large intersecting economies of the state, land, reform, caste, culture, morality and conjugality in a period of transition. Through a feminist analysis of judicial discourse, constructions of gender and family, and the politics of citizenship that contain the complex interconnections between abolition, anti abolition, self respect, nationalism and the performing arts, they provide insights with an intricacy of detail that deepens an understanding of the novel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kalpana Kannabiran

Kalpana Kannabiran is a founder member of Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Secunderabad, and teaches sociology and law at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. With Vasanth Kannabiran she has co-authored De-Eroticising Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power (2000), and translated from the original Tamil, Web of Deceit, a novel by uvalur A. Ramamirthammal (2003). She received the VKRV Rao Award for Social Science Research in 2003, for her work on teh social aspects of law.

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Bibliographic information

Title
Web of Deceit: Devadasi Reform in Colonial India
Author
Edition
Reprint
Publisher
ISBN
8186706631
Length
x+217p.
Subjects