Kunal M. Parker, A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes

Modern Asian Studies 32, 3 (1998), pp. 559–633.
 1998 Cambridge University Press

Printed in the United Kingdom
‘A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes’

Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple
Dancing Girls, 1800–1914
K U N A L M . PA R KE R
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University
Introduction
Contemporary historians imagine reformist activity relating to women

in colonial India as a series of public debates scattered across the nine-
teenth century. Whether such historians discuss sati, widow remar-
riage, the Rakhmabai case or the Age of Consent controversy, they
privilege highly specific vocabularies of contestation, forms of argu-
ment and forums of expression. Judicial reformist activity, occurring
incrementally within the technical vocabularies of law, tends largely
to be disregarded. This disregard is hardly new. Anglo-Indian judges
themselves recognized that their reformist activity was shielded from
scrutiny when they boasted that ‘judicial decisions have silently pro-
moted the cause of female emancipation and progress.’1
With a view to unearthing an instance of ‘silent’ judicial reformist
activity, this paper explores changing Anglo-Indian legal conceptions
of the temple dancing girls of peninsular India between 1800 and
1914. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, temple dancing
girls constituted corps of unmarried temple servants who had been
dedicated to temple deities as young girls through rites resembling
Hindu marriage ceremonies; they performed a range of ritual ser-
vices, derived incomes from endowments associated with their offices
and enjoyed considerable prestige within ‘traditional’ Hindu society
The author would like to thank Patricia McCoy, Vyjayanthi Rao and Yumna
Siddiqi for comments on earlier drafts of this paper and to acknowledge the financial
support of the Cleveland-Marshall Fund.
For the list of abbreviations to Reporters consulted, see end of text.
1
Statement attributed to Justice West of the Bombay High Court in Indu Prakash,
14 March, 1887, quoted in Sudhir Chandra, ‘Whose Laws?: Notes on a Legitimising
Myth of the Colonial Indian State’, Studies in History, 8 (1992), 187, 210 (emphasis
added).
0026–749X/98/$7.50+$0.10
559
560 KUNAL M. PARKER
as ‘eternally auspicious’ women ‘married’ to temple deities.2 By the

early twentieth century, temple dancing girls had been criminalized
as ‘prostitutes’; strong legal foundations had been established for
their complete suppression as a viable group within Hindu society.
This dramatic change was produced in large part through the incre-
mental efforts of the Anglo-Indian judiciary, which enjoyed almost
unfettered discretion in shaping legal conceptions of temple dancing
girls between 1800 and 1914.3 The legal conceptions of temple danc-
ing girls discussed in this paper are constructed principally through
appellate opinions, influential legal treatises, statutes and legislative
documents. Although no claim of priority is made on behalf of such
materials, it is hoped that the insights they provide will complicate the
historiography of social reform relating to women in colonial India.
Anglo-Indian law has been portrayed as torn between two con-
flicting legal forces, each of which represented an essential aspect of
the British colonial project. The first may be described as a legal
solicitude for the individual firmly located within a knowable British
‘public law’; the second may be described as a legal recognition of
the demands of community firmly located within a fundamentally
unknowable Indian ‘private law’.4 The legal imagination of the late
nineteenth century developed contrasting vocabularies to describe
each of these forces. Standing for the best of knowable British ‘public
law’, the Indian Penal Code (Act XLV of 1860), with its roots in
Benthamism, tended to be represented in the glowing language of
the civilizing mission of European imperialism. In 1887, Whitley
Stokes, former Law Member of the Council of the Governor General
of India, described its solicitude for the individual as follows:
Besides repressing the crimes common to all countries, it has abated, if not
extirpated, the crimes peculiar to India, such as thuggee, professional
2
This description of temple dancing girls is a simplification, owing to consider-
able regional variations among the practices of temple dancing girls. Contemporary
scholars have offered detailed ethnographic accounts of temple dancing women to
which the reader is referred. See, generally, Saskia C. Kersenboom-Story, Nityasum-
angali: Devadasi Tradition in South India (Delhi, 1987); Frédérique Apffel Marglin,
Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri (Delhi, 1985).
3
The colonial state resolutely fended off attempts to force it to legislate on the
subject until the 1920s. See M. Sundara Raj, Prostitution in Madras: A Study in Histor-
ical Perspective (Delhi, 1993) (esp. Chapter 6); Kay K. Jordan, ‘Devadasi Reform:
Driving the Priestesses or the Prostitutes Out of Hindu Temples?’ in Robert Baird
(ed.), Religion and Law in Independent India (New Delhi, 1993), 256.
4
Specific configurations of the political economy of colonialism ‘explain’ the shift-
ing relations between these forces. See D. A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian
Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (1981), 649.
TEMPLE DANCING GIRLS, 1800–1914 561
sodomy, dedicating girls to a life of temple-harlotry, human sacrifice, expos-
ing infants, burning widows, burying lepers alive, gang-robbery, torturing
peasants and witnesses, sitting dharna.5
Standing for the worst of unknowable Indian ‘private law’, the Hindu
law tended to be represented in the language of difficulty, error and
failure on the part of the Anglo-Indian judiciary. Required by charter
to apply the Hindu law, the Anglo-Indian judiciary was routinely
accused of rendering the demands of the Hindu community upon its
members more stringent through an excessive textualism resulting
in the erroneous dislodging of relatively ‘liberal’ custom:
The customs and usages by which the Hindus governed their lives are in
fact the Hindu common or customary law, and there can be no doubt that
the English tribunals have failed in many cases to appreciate this, and have
accepted as Hindu law dicta which are to be found in some Sanscrit books
which happen to have been translated into English, but which do not at all
represent the customs and usages which are, or ever have been, in force
among Hindus. . . .6
Anglo-Indian legal conceptions of temple dancing girls shatter the
imagined opposition between a ‘public’ criminal law oriented towards
the individual and a ‘private’ Hindu law responsive to the demands
of community. Beginning in the late 1860s, temple dancing girls,
temple servants and others were convicted under the Indian Penal
Code of what Stokes described as the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to
a life of temple-harlotry’. Justified within legal discourse by a concern
for the autonomy of the young girls subjected to dedication as temple
dancing girls, the ‘crime’ was enabled by the following provisions:
372. Whoever sells, lets to hire, or otherwise disposes of any minor under
the age of sixteen years with intent that such minor shall be employed or
used for the purpose of prostitution or for any unlawful and immoral pur-
pose, or knowing it to be likely that such minor will be employed or used
for any such purpose, shall be punished with imprisonment of either
description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be
liable to fine.
373. Whoever buys, hires, or otherwise obtains possession of any minor

under the age of sixteen years with intent that such minor shall be
employed or used for the purpose of prostitution or for any unlawful or
immoral purpose, or knowing it to be likely that such minor will be
employed or used for any such purpose, shall be punished with
5
Whitley Stokes, The Anglo-Indian Codes (2 Vols) (Oxford, 1887), I, 71.
6
W. C. Petheram, ‘English Judges and Hindu Law’, Law Quarterly Review, 56
(1898), 392, 394.
562 KUNAL M. PARKER
imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten

years, and shall also be liable to fine.
The legislative history of these provisions reveals no intention on the

part of the framers of Indian Penal Code of targeting temple dancing
girls. The ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life of temple-harlotry’ was,
therefore, a pure judicial invention. (Of course, the colonial state
acquiesced fully in this judicial invention once it had been inaugur-
ated. After the experience of 1857, it preferred to accomplish
through the expedient of ‘silent’ judicial reformist activity what it
was unwilling to undertake openly.) However, in order to criminalize
the dedication of young girls as temple dancing girls as a disposal
‘for the purpose of prostitution’, the Anglo-Indian judiciary had to
represent temple dancing girls as ‘prostitutes’.
The legal representation of temple dancing girls as ‘prostitutes’
rested upon patriarchal Hindu legal norms surrounding the sexual
activity of women. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the
textual Hindu law instantiated changing ideologies of marriage with-
out ever abandoning the basic premise that marriage was absolutely
indispensable for Hindu women. Under the ‘old patriarchy’ of the
first half of the nineteenth century, marriage was the source of all
legal status, rights and disabilities for Hindu women; their sexual
activity outside marriage was severely punished as ‘incontinence’,
‘unchastity’ or ‘prostitution’. Under the ‘new patriarchy’ of the
second half of the nineteenth century, the appropriated ideal of Vic-
torian companionate marriage instantiated itself in law. Although
the sexual activity of women outside marriage continued to be
regarded disapprovingly as ‘incontinence’, ‘unchastity’ or ‘prostitu-
tion’, the severity of its legal consequences was mitigated. At the
same time, however, there was a vigorous legal drive to construct
a cohesive Hindu community organized around this new notion of
marriage.
Colonial writers consistently essentialized temple dancing girls as
‘prostitutes’. They were curiously uninterested, however, in examin-
ing what the ‘prostitution’ of temple dancing girls might entail.
Temple dancing girls typically entered into highly stylized relations
of concubinage with upper caste elite males; they did not participate
in the urban sex trade that so completely captured the Victorian
reformist imagination. Within Anglo-Indian legal discourse, how-
ever, ‘prostitution’ operated as a highly opaque category. It encom-
passed vastly different sorts of sexual activity, ranging from the
urban sex trade to any sexual activity of Hindu women occurring
outside marriage. In constructing the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to
a life of temple-harlotry’, Anglo-Indian courts exploited the poly-
valence of the legal category of ‘prostitution’ to the fullest extent.
Temple dancing girls were represented as ‘prostitutes’ not as parti-
cipants in a sex trade but in terms of Hindu legal norms according
to which all female sexual activity outside marriage was designated
‘unchastity’, ‘incontinence’ or ‘prostitution’. The criminalization of
temple dancing girls might be read, therefore, as the deployment of
the ‘public law’ to recover Hindu girls for marriage.
In this respect, the ‘public law’ must be seen as part of, and there-
fore related to, a sweeping reconceptualization of temple dancing
girls in terms of patriarchal Hindu legal norms that occurred in vari-
ous ‘private law’ contexts. This entire process might be viewed as
the incremental, confused and contested construction of a Hindu
community organized around marriage. In the context of temple
dancing girls, the success of this construction depended in critical
ways upon the tension between two specific interpretive devices that
were established during the first half of the nineteenth century: (i)
the attempt to interpret the corporate identity of temple dancing
girls in terms of ‘caste’ and (ii) the attempt to expound a relationship
between Hindu women and ‘prostitutes’ within the logic of the Hindu
law. While the former offered a prism for evaluating temple dancing
girls’ claims to legal recognition of their ‘difference’ from the rest of
the Hindu community, the latter was an overt attempt to construct a
Hindu community through the extension of patriarchal Hindu legal
norms to temple dancing girls. The employment of each of these
interpretive devices points towards the establishment of certain
broader colonial patterns of understanding Indian society. They are
discussed in some detail because they run through Anglo-Indian legal
conceptions of temple dancing girls.
First, the earliest Anglo-Indian legal writings on communities of
temple dancing girls reveal a preoccupation with the question of
whether such communities constituted ‘castes’. The East India Com-
pany’s courts had consolidated colonial rule by involving themselves
in adjudicating disputes over jati ranking.7 However, there was more
at stake in interpreting communities of temple dancing girls in terms
7
N. Wagle, ‘A Dispute Between the Pancal Devajna Sonars and the Brahmins
of Pune Regarding Social Rank and Ritual Privileges: A Case-Study of the British
Administration of Jati Laws in Maharashtra, 1822–1825’, in N. Wagle, Images of
Maharashtra (London, 1980).
564 KUNAL M. PARKER
of ‘caste’. What was at stake was the recognition of customs at vari-

ance with the textual law. As early as 1827, Mountstuart Elphin-
stone’s awareness of the importance of according legal recognition
to unwritten custom at variance with textual law had resulted in the
promulgation in Bombay of Regulation IV of 1827, Section 26 of
which directed in part that ‘the law to be observed in the trial of
suits shall be . . . the usage of the country in which the suit arose
. . .’. Particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century,
various other jurisdictions attempted to accord some measure of
recognition to custom at variance with the textual law. The Punjab
Laws Act (Act IV of 1872), the Madras Civil Courts Act (Act III of
1873), the Central Provinces Laws Act (Act XX of 1875), the Bengal
Civil Courts Act (Act XII of 1887) and the Burma Laws Act (Act
XIII of 1898) all attempted, to a greater or lesser extent, to recog-
nize customs at variance with textual Buddhist, Hindu and Mahome-
dan laws.8 Furthermore, in 1868, the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council announced that ‘under the Hindoo system of law, clear proof
of usage will outweigh the written text of the law.’9 From a very
early period in the history of Anglo-Indian law, therefore, there was
a stated commitment to recognizing custom at variance with the
textual law. The actual history of recognition of customs is quite
another matter.
Although the range of customs that litigants sought to have recog-
nized in Anglo-Indian courts varied from family customs to tenancy
customs, precisely because of its alleged ontological priority within
the colonial imagination, ‘caste’ became an important category in
terms of which customs at variance with the textual Hindu law would
be recognized, particularly when a certain corporate distinctiveness
was viewed as the basis of variance. The records of Anglo-Indian
courts are crowded with instances in which caste councils were con-
sulted on various points of law with a view to establishing ‘caste
custom’ at variance with the textual Hindu law. Although anecdotal,
it is surely not without significance that the Bombay Sudder
Dewanee Adawlut described Section 26 of Regulation IV of 1827 as
requiring ‘that cases should be decided according to the custom of
the caste, and established usage.’10
8
M. P. Jain, ‘Custom as a Source of Law in India’, in Alison Dundes Renteln and
Alan Dundes, Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Lex Non Scripta (2 Vols)
(New York and London, 1994), I, 54–8.
9
Collector of Madura v. Moottoo Ramalinga Sathupathy, 12 M.I.A. 397, 436
(1868).
10
Ningowa v. Ningungowda, S.D.A. Bombay 89, 90 (1857).
In light of this background, Anglo-Indian law’s attempts to inter-
pret communities of temple dancing girls in terms of ‘caste’ carried
important consequences for its recognition of their customs at vari-
ance with the textual Hindu law. If temple dancing girls were unsuc-
cessful in invoking the status of a ‘caste’, they would lose all assur-
ance that their customs would be recognized as ‘caste customs’ and
would become subject to the textual Hindu law’s strictures regarding
women. Amrit Srinivasan’s ethnography of the temple dancing girls
of Tamil Nadu states:
One of the most basic errors to emerge in the course of research was the
misuse of the term ‘caste’ in relation to the devadasis in the colonial literat-
ure. According to the devadasis themselves there exists a devadasi ‘way of
life’ or ‘professional ethic’ (vriti, murai) but not a devadasi jati.11
Srinivasan is correct in pointing out that temple dancing girls were
not a jati. However, although she accurately identifies the use of the
term ‘caste’ in relation to temple dancing women, particularly
towards the end of the nineteenth century, Srinivasan is perhaps too
quick to accuse colonial writers of ‘error’. From the beginning of
the nineteenth century, colonial commentators were aware of the
difficulties of interpreting the corporate distinctiveness of temple
dancing girls in terms of ‘caste’. In the course of the effort to recon-
ceptualize temple dancing girls, Anglo-Indian law’s difficulties in
reducing communities of temple dancing girls to ‘caste’ were trans-
muted into conflicting legal positions. On the one hand, the fact that
communities of temple dancing girls were not ‘castes’ permitted the
Anglo-Indian judiciary to interpret them variously as a ‘profession’,
‘trade’, ‘guild’ or ‘monopoly’ of ‘prostitutes’ who were masquerading
as a ‘caste’ simply in order to obtain legal recognition of their cus-
toms, which were in turn interpreted as a complex of rules designed
to further the gains of ‘prostitution’. (The ‘prostitution’ of temple
dancing girls was constructed through Anglo-Indian law’s second
interpretive device, that of expounding a relationship between Hindu
women and ‘prostitutes’ within the logic of the Hindu law.) On the
other hand, the notion that communities of temple dancing girls
were ‘castes’ also took hold within Anglo-Indian legal discourse, par-
ticularly in Madras, where certain customs continued to be upheld
as ‘caste custom’ well into the twentieth century. This successful,
albeit erroneous, invocation of ‘caste’ permitted elements within the
11
Amrit Srinivasan, ‘Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 20/44 (1985), 1869.
566 KUNAL M. PARKER
Anglo-Indian judiciary to protect temple dancing girls against the

onslaught of the Hindu law and the criminal law.
Second, the earliest Anglo-Indian legal materials reveal a preoc-
cupation with expounding the relationship between Hindu women
and ‘prostitutes’ within the logic of the Hindu law. Early nine-
teenth-century colonial writers had justified the civilizing mission
of European imperialism in part on the basis of Hindu society’s
oppression of women. In his celebrated History of British India,
James Mill had branded Indian society as inferior precisely because
of ‘[t]he habitual contempt which Hindus entertain for their
women. . .’.12 Almost from their inception, however, Anglo-Indian
courts had been heavily implicated in actualizing this ‘contempt’
by settling the status of Hindu women in areas such as marriage,
inheritance and adoption.
As applied by Anglo-Indian courts, the Hindu law conditioned
women’s property rights upon their chastity. Although this position
would dissolve during the second half of the nineteenth century,
during the first half of the nineteenth century, women who violated
the rigid controls on their sexual behaviour by engaging in what
was variously, but vaguely, described as ‘prostitution’, ‘unchastity’ or
‘incontinence’ suffered a degradation from caste by reason of which
they forfeited their property rights. Certain violations were visited
with a degradation resulting in a permanent expulsion from caste,
the legal consequence of which was a species of civil death, which
had the effect of severing an outcasted woman completely from
undegraded relatives who continued to remain ‘in caste’.
This notion of ‘prostitution’ as sexual activity outside marriage,
along with its accompanying vocabulary of degradation, was
extended to temple dancing girls. Certain developments within the
Hindu law during the 1840s enabled Anglo-Indian courts to imagine
women who enjoyed a measure of sexual freedom and inherited prop-
erty from each other as communities of degraded Hindu women
living outside of ‘caste’ whose property rights arose precisely from
their shared degradation. The implications for communities of
unmarried temple dancing girls, whose matriarchal succession cus-
toms were radically at odds with the Hindu law, were obvious. If they
could not successfully invoke the status of a ‘caste’ (and thereby
obtain a measure of legal recognition of their ‘difference’), they
12
James Mill, The History of British India (Notes by H. H. Wilson) (5th ed.)
(London, 1840), 312.
would be subsumed under the Hindu law, within the logic of which
their succession customs would be ‘explained’ as the succession cus-
toms of degraded Hindu women. They would be represented, there-
fore, as degraded Hindu women whose ‘prostitution’ was defined
residually in opposition to marriage. During the second half of the
nineteenth century, Anglo-Indian law blurred the distinction
between degraded Hindu women and temple dancing girls by
describing both as ‘prostitutes’; courts represented the succession
customs obtaining among temple dancing girls as rules governing
the devolution of the estate of degraded Hindu women; and legal
commentators ‘explained’ the development of communities of danc-
ing girls in terms of an originary degradation from caste. The blur-
ring of the distinction between degraded Hindu women and temple
dancing girls was never fully achieved because the distinctions
between the ‘caste customs’ of temple dancing girls and the rules
applicable to degraded Hindu women were occasionally asserted,
particularly in Madras. However, the extension of the vocabulary of
degradation to temple dancing girls accomplished their recuperation
within the Hindu law. More importantly, it explicitly enabled their
criminalization as ‘prostitutes’.
Although this paper is directed principally towards exploring chan-
ging Anglo-Indian legal conceptions of temple dancing girls, it cannot
always preserve the distinction between ‘temple dancing girls’ and
‘dancing girls’ for two interrelated reasons.13 First, unless the temple
affiliations of dancing women were of particular legal significance
(as, for example, in the criminal context), Anglo-Indian courts
referred to temple dancing girls simply as ‘dancing girls’. The fact
of temple affiliation was simply not mentioned when it was irrelevant
to the precise legal question involved. Second, Anglo-Indian courts
constructed a coherent web of doctrine in which all cases dealing
with ‘dancing girls’, regardless of the temple affiliations of the
women involved, served as precedents for one other. As it operated
within this coherent body of law, the label ‘dancing girl’ covered, inter
alia, communities of women in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies
described as aradhins, bhavins, bogums, jogatins, kalavants, kasbins, muralis,
naikins, basavis and sanis; communities of women in the Bombay and
Madras Presidencies with and without significant temple affiliations;
13
This paper deliberately employs the colonial labels ‘temple dancing girl’ or
‘dancing girl’ over the term ‘devadasi’. The term ‘devadasi’ was not employed com-
monly within Anglo-Indian legal discourse until the second half of the nineteenth
century. Even then, it never dislodged the colonial label ‘dancing girl’.
568 KUNAL M. PARKER
communities of women in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies that

claimed, with varying degrees of success, the status of a ‘caste’ with
distinctive ‘caste customs’; communities of singers and dancers in
Bengal, Hindustan and elsewhere that rarely claimed the status of
a ‘caste’ with distinctive ‘caste customs’; Hindu and Muslim women;
and women whose status as either Hindus or Muslims was itself
uncertain.14 There exists, therefore, an inevitable (albeit entirely
self-conscious) slippage between the terms ‘temple dancing girl and
‘dancing girl’ that runs through this paper. Alternatively, the history
of changing Anglo-Indian legal conceptions of temple dancing girls
may be read as a history of the category ‘dancing girls’ itself.
II. Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls,

1800–1860
A. TEMPLE DANCING GIRLS, ‘CASTE’ AND THE HINDU LAW
The two interrelated interpretive devices developed by Anglo-Indian

courts to make sense of the corporate distinctiveness of temple danc-
ing girls appeared in incipient form during the first half of the nine-
teenth century. This section examines initial attempts to (i) inter-
pret the corporate identity of temple dancing girls in terms of ‘caste’,
and (ii) expound a relationship between Hindu women and ‘prosti-
tutes’ within the logic of the Hindu law.
Early colonial writers established patterns of interpreting commu-
nities of temple dancing girls in terms of ‘caste’. From the perspect-
ive of Anglo-Indian courts, Francis Buchanan’s A Journey from Madras
through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar15 and the Abbé
Dubois’ Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies16 offered the earliest
authoritative accounts. The more accurate of the two, Buchanan,
concluded that ‘[t]hese dancing women, and their musicians . . . now
form a separate kind of cast’.17 However, his conclusion was tentative.
Although he observed that communities of temple dancing girls
appeared to participate in a ‘caste’ hierarchy to the extent that ‘any
14
J. R. Gharpure, Rights of Women Under the Hindu Law (Bombay, 1943), 155.
15
Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara,
and Malabar (3 Vols) (London, 1807).
16
Abbé J. A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies (Henry K. Beauchamp
trans., 3rd ed.) (Oxford, 1906). Dubois’ account was first translated into English in
1816.
17
Buchanan, supra note 15, at II, 266 (emphasis added).
girl that profaned herself by communication with persons of low cast,
or of no cast at all, such as Christians or Musulmans’18 suffered
expulsion from the community, he made other observations that
placed the status of temple dancing women as a ‘caste’ in question.
First, because Buchanan believed that communities of temple danc-
ing girls existed principally in order to gratify the licentiousness of
male temple servants, he denied their corporate identity the ontolo-
gical priority of ‘caste’ by reducing it to corrupt Hindu religious prac-
tice. Buchanan reported that ‘all the handsome girls [of the set] are
instructed to dance and sing, and all are prostitutes, at least to the
Bráhmans.’19 Second, Buchanan noted that communities of temple
dancing girls were unlike ‘castes’ insofar as membership could be
supplemented by purchase. Buchanan remarked that ‘[t]he Nutua or
person who performs on two small cymbals is the chief of the set . . .
and instructs all the good looking girls, born in the set, to sing and
dance, but will purchase handsome girls of any cast whatever that
he can procure.’20
In contrast to Buchanan’s descriptions, Dubois’ more lurid (and
incorrect) account resolutely characterized communities of temple
dancing girls as a ‘profession’ of ‘Hindu prostitutes’.
The courtesans or dancing-girls attached to each temple . . . are often called
devadasis (servants or slaves of the gods), but the public call them by the
more vulgar name of prostitutes. And in fact they are bound by their profession
to grant their favors . . . to anybody demanding them in return for ready money.
....
These women are also present at marriages and other solemn family
meetings. All the time which they have to spare in the intervals of the various ceremon-
ies is devoted to infinitely more shameful practices; and it is not an uncommon thing to
see even sacred temples converted into mere brothels. They are brought up in this
shameful licentiousness from infancy, and are recruited from various castes,
some among them belonging to respectable families . . .
....
The devadasis receive a fixed salary for the religious duties which they
perform; but as the amount is small they supplement it by selling their favors in as
profitable manner as possible.21
In a less nuanced way than Buchanan, Dubois suggested that the
‘profession’ of temple dancing girls recruited its members from ‘vari-
ous castes, some among them belonging to respectable families.’
18
Ibid., 267.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 268.
21
Dubois, supra note 16, at 584–6 (emphasis added).
570 KUNAL M. PARKER
Anglo-Indian law’s attempts to interpret dancing girls in terms of

‘caste’ had extremely fragmentary textual support. The Mitakshara,
around which a ‘school’ of law applicable in peninsular India came to
be identified, contained isolated statements that ‘prostitutes’ (vésya)
might constitute a ‘fifth caste’.22 Invocations of the Mitakshara’s ref-
erences to ‘prostitutes’ were, however, uncommon in early Anglo-
Indian legal texts. The most comprehensive early account of the cus-
toms of the dancing girls of the Bombay Presidency, Arthur Steele’s
Laws and Customs of the Hindoo Castes,23 was commissioned as part of
Mountstuart Elphinstone’s attempt to ascertain customs prevailing
in Bombay. There is no comparable early source of information on
the customs of the dancing girls of Madras. Far from offering a textu-
ally-grounded account of customs, Steele’s report was designed to
minimize the difficulties encountered by Anglo-Indian courts in
ascertaining custom.24
Steele restricted himself to the areas around Poona and Satara.
Although the dancing girls in Steele’s report were not the temple danc-
ing girls described by Buchanan and Dubois, Steele reveals the same
preoccupation with interpreting them in terms of ‘caste’. Like others,
he was compelled to recognize the ambiguities surrounding dancing
girls’ status as a ‘caste’; he resolved them by referring to dancing girls
repeatedly as a ‘caste or profession’. Classifying dancing girls in Satara
among a general inventory of ‘castes’, Steele described them briefly
under the heading ‘Kulawunt, Kowaltupe, Ganchare’ as follows:
Occupation to sing and dance before the Raja, for his amusement. These
castes occasionally come here from Hindoosthan—Some Hindoos of all
kinds follow the occupation, but chiefly Moossulmans; and the name is longer
that of a caste, but of a profession.—The Kulawunt of Poona have five varieties,
Patra, Ramjunee, Gheekuree, Rungunlee, Kunchun.—They intermarry and eat in
company, and follow the same profession of dancing, singing and
prostitution.25
Steele also listed certain other ‘castes’ whose occupations were associ-
ated with dancing girls; the Utuk, Kuthum, a caste ‘to be estimated far
22
J. R. Gharpure (trans.), Collection of Hindu Law Texts: Yajñavalkya Smrti with
Mitakshara, Viramitrodaya and Dipalika: Wyawaharadhayay, Chapters VIII–XXV (Bombay,
1939), II, IV, 1354.
23
Arthur Steele, Summary of the Laws and Customs of the Hindoo Castes Within the
Dekhun Provinces Subject to the Presidency of Bombay Chiefly Affecting Civil Suits (Bombay,
1827).
24
Ibid. II (quoting Minute of the Hon. the Governor, 22 July 1823).
25
Ibid., 117 (emphasis added).
below Soodrus’, followed the occupation of instructing dancing girls;26
and the Busphor followed the occupation of ‘beat[ing] the Pukwaj in
attendance on dancing-girls, and play[ing] on the Saringee.’27
As reported by Steele, the customs of dancing girls generally privil-
eged women in the areas of control of resources, inheritance and adop-
tion. Unmarried dancing girls typically formed joint families. As mem-
bers of a joint family, they enjoyed control over its resources. The
manager or karbaree of the affairs of the joint family was generally ‘a
daughter of ability’ who was required to consult members before
making gifts, sales and pledges of joint family property.28 Partitions
within the joint family were rare; separations might occur upon the
death of a mother; the debts of daughters contracted during the pen-
dency of the joint family were defrayed by members of the joint
family.29 Finally, daughters took absolute interests in the property of
their mothers; sons inherited only in the absence of daughters.30
Dancing girls in Madras also appear to have organized themselves
into joint families. However, only dancing girls, as distinguished from
females generally, enjoyed control over resources. In 1858, possibly in
an attempt to push the analogy between a joint family of dancing girls
and the Hindu coparcenary under the Mitakshara law to its logical con-
clusion, the widowed daughter-in-law of a deceased dancing girl sued
the dancing girl’s daughters for maintenance out of the resources of
the joint family exactly as a widow might sue the male members of a
Hindu coparcenary. Implicitly recognizing the priority of daughters in
matters of succession, the pundits of the Sudder Court rejected the
analogy, determining that it was not obligatory for dancing girls to pro-
vide their brother’s widow with maintenance.31
According to Steele, certain customs appeared to be designed to
perpetuate the ‘profession’ of dancing girls, thereby casting doubt
upon dancing girls’ status as a ‘caste’. First, the process by which
girls became dancing girls suggested that the distinctiveness of the
community lay not in its identity as a ‘caste’ but in its identity as a
‘profession’. Steele reported that ‘[i]n the caste or profession of danc-
ing girls, girls of beauty and accomplishment are made Naikins . . .
26
Ibid., 116–17.
27
Ibid., 123.
28
Ibid., 215.
29
Ibid., 219.
30
Ibid., 230.
31
Rulings of the Court of Sudder Udalut, Contained in the Decisions Passed By Them
During the Years 1858 to 1862.
572 KUNAL M. PARKER
by the ceremony of applying Misee (a powder made out of vitriol) to

their teeth [and putting] turmeric . . . on the girl’s person, after
which a religious ceremony is performed in honour of the Gods, or
Peers.’32 However, girls of other castes might also be recruited to fill
the ranks of naikins.33 Second, the custom among dancing girls of
adopting daughters, which at first might seem to be parallel to the
Hindu law of adoption, displayed some differences. Under the Hindu
law, only men without sons were permitted to adopt sons. The under-
lying theory was that a son was needed in order to perform obsequies
(which daughters could not perform) that would relieve ancestors
from a state of suffering after death. Once performed, an adoption
was irrevocable and the adoptive son enjoyed all the rights of natural
sons. In contrast, among dancing girls, ‘paluk-kunyas [adoptive daugh-
ters] are sometimes given from friendship or taken on receiving a
present.’34 There was no requirement that the adoptive mother not
have children in order to be able to adopt a paluk-kunya. Moreover,
while mothers had rights to paluk-kunyas’ earnings, paluk-kunyas
could only take property in the absence of natural sons and daugh-
ters. Finally, the adoption of a paluk-kunya could be annulled if the
paluk-kunya ‘does not conduct herself at the pleasure of the
adopter.’35 All of these features of the custom of adoption among
dancing girls suggested an absence of other-worldly motives, pointing
instead to rules, cloaked in ‘custom’, that were intended to further
the gains of ‘profession’.
In Bengal, where dancing girls did not allege a distinct custom of
adopting daughters, the adoption of a daughter by a dancing girl was
rejected very early as being completely without sanction under the
Hindu law. A contest for the self-acquired property of a Hindu
‘dancer and prostitute’ between a putative adoptive daughter and
certain other women was resolved through simple recourse to the
Hindu law, when the Pundit answered that ‘there was no such
instance of the adoption of a daughter to inherit by the Hindú law.’36
By contrast, in Madras, a distinct custom at variance with the Hindu
law was alleged and recognized by the Sudder Udalut on the basis of
the recommendation of a Senior Pundit of the court:
32
Steele, supra note 23, at 165.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid., 187.
35
Ibid., 186.
36
Doe Dem. Hencower Bye v. Hanscower Bye, 2 Morley 133, 134 (1818).
[I]t matters not how the Plaintiff was admitted into the family of the Defendant’s
mother, whether by purchase or by any other manner[, the point for consideration
being] whether she had been recognized by the said individual as her
daughter, such recognition in the instance of dancing girls sufficing to con-
stitute adoption without any formal act of adoption.37
According to Steele, other customs prevailing among dancing girls
suggested ‘caste’-like features. First, the Kulawunt of Satara followed
certain rules associated with endogamy and commensality. Second,
‘punchaets’ among the Kulawunt of Satara performed the function
of censuring recalcitrant members. ‘Among dancing-girls (Kulawunt),
should a girl be disobedient to her parents or quarrel with her hus-
band on account of the possession of her child, she [might] be
excluded by a punchaet, and prohibited to wear her ankle-bell—she
is readmissible on payment of a fine.’38 Third, certain marriage cus-
toms prevailing among dancing girls in Poona were described as
‘caste customs’:
Among the caste or profession of Dancing girls, a son is always married; a
daughter may either be married to a Moossulman or Hindoo, or be intro-
duced at once to her profession at her parent’s pleasure. Marriage is concluded
according to caste custom, and the wife may remain in private creditably under her
husband’s protection. A girl being of such marriage is under the order of her
parents, and need not follow the profession unless from choice.39
The reference to a ‘caste custom’ of marriage with respect to
daughters is noteworthy because it went to the very heart of the
profound ambiguity surrounding the corporate identity of dancing
girls. In the dominant imagination, dancing girls were characterized
by an absence of marriage. If communities of dancing girls were
characterized as a ‘caste’, it was indeed possible to imagine a ‘caste
custom’ of marriage; while some female members of the ‘caste’
would contract marriages pursuant to ‘caste custom’, others would
not. If, however, dancing girls were viewed as a ‘profession’ of ‘prosti-
tutes’ whose customs were no more than rules designed to further
the gains of the ‘profession’, a ‘caste custom’ of marriage made little
sense because dancing girls as ‘prostitutes’ necessarily practiced their
‘profession’ outside marriage. According to this view, the distinct
customs of dancing girls could only have effect among unmarried
women following the ‘profession’ of ‘prostitution’; if a female
37
Vencatachellum v. Vencatasamy, S.U. Madras 65 (1856) (emphasis added).
38
39
574 KUNAL M. PARKER
member of the dancing girl community got married, the rules of the
‘profession’ would cease to apply to her.
Steele elected not to resolve this problem. He restricted himself
to emphasizing the ambiguities of the corporate identity of dancing
girls through repeated references to dancing girls as a ‘caste or pro-
fession’. In 1851, however, the Sudder Dewanee Adawlut of Bombay
adopted the view that the distinct customs of dancing girls were
attached to the ‘profession’ of dancing girls. Because this ‘profession’
could only be practised ‘outside’ marriage, whenever a dancing girl
contracted a marriage, the distinct customs of dancing girls ceased
to operate. Although the Sudder Dewanee Adawlut was implicitly
recognizing the inheritance customs among dancing girls who
elected to follow their ‘profession’, its holding that a kusbin ‘abandons
the profession of kusbin [by contracting a marriage], and the peculi-
arities of inheritance among kusbins can, consequently, no longer
attach to her issue’40 opened up a space for imagining dancing girls
as a ‘profession’ defined as existing outside marriage. The customs
of kusbins could be abandoned, and kusbins themselves rescued,
through the expedient of marriage. Interpreting dancing girls as
‘outside’ marriage would bear significant consequences for their sup-
pression during the second half of the nineteenth century.
While the corporate identity of communities of dancing girls was
being imagined in terms of ‘caste’, Anglo-Indian courts were actively
constructing a Hindu legal tradition with respect to women. First
published in 1826, Sir Thomas Strange’s Hindu Law is the earliest
comprehensive colonial commentary on the Mitakshara ‘school’ of
Hindu law prevalent in peninsular India.41 It remained the most
authoritative colonial exposition of the Mitakshara law until well
after 1850, in no small part because it reproduced fragments of com-
mentaries by highly influential early Anglo-Indian legal ‘practi-
tioners’ such as Colebrooke, Ellis and so on.
As expounded by Strange, the Hindu law’s pronouncements with
respect to women revealed an obsession with marriage. Virtually all
legal rights, duties, incapacities and disabilities in respect of women
were constructed around marriage. The broad principle of marriage
as a ‘sacrament’ ordained for women cannot have been distasteful
to early colonial commentators. Strange remarked approvingly:
40
Shida v. Sunshidapa, S.D.A. Bombay 137, 139 (1851).
41
Sir Thomas Strange, Hindu Law: Principally with Reference to Such Portions of It as
Concern the Administration of Justice in the King’s Courts in India (2 Vols) (London, 1830).
By no people is greater importance attached to marriage, than the Hindoos.
It is, among them, with one sex, (the female,) indispensable. With the
other, it constitutes the order of Housekeeper, (Grihasta,) the second, and most
respectable of the four, by which, with them, the different periods of human
life are distinguished.42
However, the Hindu law systematically disabled women through
its specific valorization of marriage. First, according to the Hindu
law, it was obligatory for a father ‘to select a suitable husband for
his daughter, at an age when she can have but very imperfect ideas
of the object [of marriage].’43 Second, through the entire duration
of her marriage, a Hindu woman was deemed to be in a state of
tutelage with respect to her husband, during which physical chastise-
ment was expressly sanctioned. Strange reported that ‘Menu . . .
includes the wife among objects of domestic discipline, when con-
ceived to deserve it.’44 Third, while the Hindu law sanctioned the
adoption of sons by men, as a general matter a Hindu woman could
only adopt a son on behalf of her husband. The Collector of Madras,
Mr Ellis, commented that ‘[w]omen have legally no right to adopt
for the transmission even of their separate property . . .’.45 Fourth,
a Hindu woman under the Mitakshara law could not succeed to her
husband’s separate estate before lineal male heirs; never enjoyed an
absolute estate when she did succeed to her husband’s separate
estate; and was entitled only to maintenance with respect to property
held by her husband in a Hindu coparcenary. Finally, a Hindu woman
was subject to rigid controls on her sexual behavior. Sexual activity
was sanctioned only when it occurred within marriage. Any infringe-
ment of this rule might result in a legally sanctioned threat of phys-
ical chastisement, forfeiture of inheritance and degradation resulting
in a permanent loss of caste or civil death.
Although Strange claimed that ‘the law of disqualification [from
inheriting property] applies alike to both sexes,’46 this was not
strictly accurate. The grounds of degradation, which resulted in a
disqualification from inheriting property, were not equally applicable
to both sexes. Infringements by an unmarried, married or widowed
Hindu woman of the Hindu law’s strict controls on her sexual
Only Sir Francis Macnaghten’s Considerations on the Hindu Law as it is Current in Bengal
(Serampore, 1824), which discusses the Dayabhaga law of Bengal, is older.
42
Ibid., I, 35 (citations omitted) (emphasis in original).
43
Ibid., I, 36.
44
Ibid., I, 48.
45
Ibid., II, 128.
46
Ibid., I, 164.
576 KUNAL M. PARKER
behavior might be visited with degradation resulting in a permanent

loss of caste, which had the effect not only of barring future inherit-
ance but also, in the case of widows, of divesting estates that had
already vested. Strange was not clear as to whether infringements by
a Hindu woman of the Hindu law’s controls on her sexual behavior, if
unaccompanied by degradation resulting in a permanent loss of
caste, might result in the extinguishment of her property rights. In
a somewhat cryptic passage, he stated that ‘according to an opinion
of great respectability, . . . for loss of caste, unexpiated by penance
and unredeemed by atonement, [the property interest of a widow]
is forfeited.’47 This might suggest that mere unchastity in a widow,
cured by penance or atonement, was insufficient to extinguish her
property rights. However, during the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, this view was not generally adopted; simple acts of unchastity
by a widow, unaccompanied by degradation resulting in a permanent
loss of caste, were deemed sufficient to effect a divestiture of
property.
Anglo-Indian law threw its entire weight behind the Hindu law’s
patriarchal norms surrounding marriage, chastity and property.
While a legal paternalism dictated that Anglo-Indian courts would
‘protect native women against their own acts, as they can scarcely
be considered sui juris,’48 presumably in the capacity of a market
participant, ‘native women’ paid heavily for acts deemed to violate
strictures on their sexual behavior. However, what sort of act was
legally sufficient to terminate a woman’s property interest was itself
left maddeningly vague, suggesting that what was being targeted was
the entire range of sexual (and occasionally, nonsexual) behavior
outside of marriage. The first reported case arose in Bengal, where
charges of unchastity against widows were especially likely to be
brought because widows succeeded to their husbands’ interest in
coparcenaries under the Dayabhaga law. In 1792, the Supreme
Court of Judicature in Bengal held that a widow who had been ‘incon-
tinent, and had long since voluntarily quitted the house and protec-
tion of her husband’s family’ had forfeited her right to her husband’s
estate by her ‘incontinence’.49 This position was maintained for over
half a century when, in a dispute over the estate of the Rajah of
Burdwan, the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut of Bengal ruled that the
47
Ibid.
48
1 Morley 474.
49
Doe Dem. Radamoney Raur v. Neelmoney Doss, 1 Ind. Dec. (O.S.) 190 (1792)
(S.C. Bengal).
Maha Ranee Bussunt Koomaree, one of the Rajah’s widows, had for-
feited all legal claim to maintenance by her husband’s family by her
conduct, which was described as ‘voluntarily quitt[ing] the raj baree
by night in the same carriage with a person named Baboo Dhukina-
runjun.’50 It should be noted that, because neither case actually men-
tioned any degradation resulting in a permanent loss of caste by the
widow involved, the implication was that a widow’s property interest
could be extinguished by simple acts of ‘incontinence’ unaccompan-
ied by degradation.
Widows were by no means the only women who were subject to
the legal linkages between marriage, chastity and property. Adulter-
ous wives paid dearly for any sexual activity that occurred outside
marriage. Adultery had the effect of terminating all claims that a
woman might make of her husband (or his estate) if it was visited
with degradation resulting in a permanent loss of caste. In 1800, a
pundit requested to deliver an answer in a case arising in Madras
invoked textual authority to support his view that ‘[i]f adultery be
proved against a Hindu woman, she is liable to be degraded, unless
the accusation can be traced to malice.’51 Where adultery was not
visited with degradation resulting in a permanent loss of caste, the
Hindu law required expiation of adulterous women without depriving
them of all rights, as revealed in a Law Officer’s statement that the
husband of an adulterous woman ‘should give the woman sorry food
such as Natcheny, Rice, &c. &c. and an old cloth, and make her live
in a hut near his house . . .’52. However, Anglo-Indian courts occasion-
ally disregarded such statements so as to deprive adulterous women
of any rights to maintenance from their husbands.53 Furthermore,
the consequences of adultery were not restricted to claims that
women might make of their husbands. When visited with degrada-
tion resulting in a permanent loss of caste, adulterous women also
lost their rights to property they had inherited from their own
parents.54
Anglo-Indian courts displayed some awareness that the very loose-
ness of the standard of ‘unchastity’ made it attractive to litigants to
50
Maha Ranee Bussunt Koomaree v. Maha Ranee Kummul Koomaree, 8 Ind.
Dec. (O.S.) 129, 130 (1843) (S.D.A. Bengal).
51
Strange, supra note 41, at II, 269.
52
Ragavacharry v. Seenummaul, Madras S.D.A. 20, 21 (1831).
53
Ibid.
54
Mussummaut Rubbee Koor v. Jewut Ram, 6 I.D. (O.S.) 608 (S.D.A. Bengal,
1818).
578 KUNAL M. PARKER
level allegations of unchastity against women when an estate opened

up for devolution. On an appeal based in part upon the fact that
the lower court’s decree was ‘ambiguous as to what constitute[d] sufficient
prostitution to bar inheritance,’ the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut in Bengal
refused to bar a widow from inheriting on the basis of allegations
by her husband’s relatives that she was ‘a woman of bad repute’; it
preferred instead to rely upon the fact that ‘[the woman’s] own wit-
nesses describe her to be a woman of good character [and that] the
stories against her appear to have obtained currency only since the
institution of the present suit . . .’.55 However, these difficulties did
not result in any deviation from the general legal principles that
linked marriage, chastity and property.
It might be surmised that, before the nineteenth century, the
deprivations caused by legal linkages between marriage, chastity and
property were suffered almost solely by the women who had been
subjected to degradation. During the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, however, while women undoubtedly continued to suffer severely
from the legal linkages between marriage, chastity and property, the
economic impact of such linkages was extended to their undegraded
relatives. The growth of an urban society had engendered a new
urban prostitution, with Hindu women as its principal practitioners.
A report on the composition of prostitutes in Calcutta lists the cat-
egories as follows:
The prostitute class in and about Calcutta is recruited from all castes and
classes, the greatest number being Hindu widows who have been seduced
in their native villages, and, being outcasted, come to Calcutta to practise
as prostitutes; a second class are those who were reared to the profession
from infancy; a third class consist of women, Hindu and Mahomedan, who
have run away from their husbands on account of ill-treatment, or because
they object to polygamy . . .56
When these (typically outcasted) women amassed property, the
devolution of their estate became the subject of dispute between
degraded and undegraded heirs.
The Hindu law of degradation had been developed primarily to
inflict deprivation upon the individual degraded. Pursuant to the
logic of total severance, degradation resulting in a permanent loss of
55
Debnath Roy Chowdree v. Degumberee Debea, 13 I.D. (O.S.) 149, 150–1
(1856) (S.D.A. Bengal) (emphasis added).
56
Sumanta Banerjee, ‘The ‘‘Beshya’’ and the ‘‘Babu’’: Prostitute and Her Clien-
tele in 19th Century Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly (1993), 2461, 2465
(citations omitted).
caste, as distinguished from certain forms of temporary degradation,
resulted in a species of irrevocable civil death. Two entirely distinct
communities, structured around degradation, emerged as a con-
sequence. Strange described the structuring principles of these com-
munities as follows:
What distinguishes degradation from other causes of exclusion is, that it
extends its effects to the son, who is involved in his father’s forfeiture, if
born subsequent to the act occasioning it. Born before, he is entitled to
inherit, and takes, as though his father were dead. Whereas, in every other
instance of exclusion, the son, if not actually in the same predicament with
his father, succeeds . . .57
Degradation resulting in a permanent loss of caste was not, there-
fore, personal to the individual affected. It extended to all lineal
descendants of the degraded individual born subsequent to the act
resulting in degradation.
When confronted with disputes between degraded and undegraded
heirs of ‘prostitutes’, Anglo-Indian courts found themselves in an
awkward situation because the Hindu law did not furnish ready
answers. The logic of total severance described by Strange suggested
that, in a contest for the estate of a degraded individual, heirs born
subsequent to the act resulting in degradation would be rewarded
over heirs born prior to the act resulting in degradation. In 1846,
the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut of Bengal admitted a special appeal
on a point of Hindu law raised by a dispute over the estate of a
woman who had been outcasted; the court framed its question to its
pundit as follows:
If a Hindu woman, who is an outcast in consequence of living by prostitu-
tion, die, and leave three daughters, one a married woman, and mother of
several children, and respectable; the other two prostitutes, who lived with
the outcast mother, and had all things in common with her: which will
inherit the property?58
There was no evidence that the ‘prostitute daughters’ had been born
subsequent to their mother’s degradation resulting in an irrevocable
loss of caste. Nevertheless, the pundit’s inventive response was that
‘[t]he two prostitute daughters alone inherit whatever the mother
may have left; because the relation of the married and respectable
daughter to the outcast mother has been severed.’59 The claims of
57
Strange, supra note 41, at I, 163 (citations omitted).
58
Tara Munnee Dossea v. Motee Buneanee, 2 Ind. Dec. (O.S.) 247 (1846)
(S.D.A. Bengal).
59
Ibid.
580 KUNAL M. PARKER
the ‘prostitute daughters’ were preferred not because they had been
born subsequent to their mother’s degradation, but because they
shared their mother’s degradation. The view that shared degradation
was the basis of preferring the claims of degraded heirs became law
until the end of the nineteenth century. What is important about it is
that it opened up a space for ‘explaining’ the matriarchal succession
customs of ‘prostitutes’. Henceforth, it became possible to argue that
customs according to which ‘prostitutes’ inherited each other’s prop-
erty existed by reason of their shared degradation from caste. The
implications of this decision for temple dancing girls would be real-
ized during the second half of the nineteenth century.
B. THE ORIGINS OF ‘CRIME’
This section is intended primarily to illustrate that the ‘crime’ of

‘dedicating girls to a life of temple-harlotry’ was entirely without
antecedents in criminal law as it existed prior to the passage of the
Indian Penal Code. However, there were several instances in which
Anglo-Indian courts expressed hesitation in recognizing specific legal
claims made by dancing girls that might be linked to their sub-
sequent construction of the ‘crime’.
Early colonial legal commentators were aware that the Hindu law,
and practice generally, sanctioned a traffic in children. First, the
Hindu law expressly recognized slavery, going so far as to list the
various modes through which individuals might become slaves.60
Second, the Hindu law recognized the sale of children by their par-
ents, although it imposed various restrictions on such sales. The sale
of children by their parents was not looked upon favorably every-
where. Strange referred to ‘the authority of Sir W. Jones for an order
of the Bengal government against it; purporting to have been made
after consultation with the most respectable Hindoos on the spot
‘‘who condemned such a traffic as repugnant to their Sastra’’.’61
Third, the Hindu law contained some textual authority for the posi-
tion that, if the adoption of a child failed because the requisite cere-
monies of adoption had been inadequately performed, the adopted
60
Slavery was also recognized under the ‘Moossulman’ law. See Sir W. H. Mac-
naghten, Principles and Precedents of Moohummudan Law (4th ed.) (Madras, 1876)
(1825).
61
child assumed the status of a slave.62 Finally, the Mitakshara itself
made reference to the practice of adoption by purchase. An extract
of a letter by Henry Colebrooke dated 14 March, 1812 discusses the
legality of adoption by purchase as follows:
On this side of India [Bengal], adoption by purchase is obsolete, and consid-
ered to have been prohibited in the present sinful age of the world. The
only practice analogous to it is the purchase of children by Gosians, Sannyasis,
and other professed ascetics, for the initiation into their order of devotion,
the disciple becoming the heir of the master. This however is not adoption,
but a practice grounded on other provisions of the Hindu law, and on the
peculiar customs of the mendicant tribes.63
However, there was considerable evidence that among certain castes
in peninsular India ‘the mode of adoption [was] uniformly by
purchase.’64
Although they were by no means the only ones to do so, dancing
girls appear to have engaged in the purchase of children. Colonial
legal commentators were quick to identify what they imagined to be
the uses to which female children purchased by dancing girls would
be put. In a section entitled ‘Service and Slavery’, Steele described
dancing girls’ purchases of female children as follows:
Female children are often purchased on a Khureed-putr or deed of sale, by
dancing women for the purpose of public exhibition and prostitution. . . .
They are taught the usual accomplishments of the profession, and some-
times eventually rise to the head of the establishment. They cannot leave
their purchasers without the consent of the latter, and the parties generally
live harmoniously together. Sometimes the mistress and the slave exchange
the appellations of mother and daughter, the latter supporting the former;
sometimes the girl’s liberty is purchased by an admirer. At others from
rivalry, ill treatment, or attachment to a favorite lover, they abscond, and
the mistress becoming a loser in consequence complains to the government
authorities. Under the Native government the girl was restored with remu-
neration for the injury sustained to the person who had from infancy main-
tained and clothed her, unless a compromise was entered into by the
seducer. . .65
Although Steele suggested that the purchase of children was directly
related to maximizing the gains of the ‘profession’, the absorption
of purchased children into the establishments of dancing girls also
points towards a certain blurring of the distinction between family
relationships and slavery.
62
Ibid., II, 323.
63
Ibid., II, 137 (citations omitted).
64
Ibid., II, 156.
65
582 KUNAL M. PARKER
Steele was correct in pointing to the incidence of suits brought by

dancing girls for the restitution of girls that had absconded with
paramours. When such suits began to appear before Anglo-Indian
courts, Anglo-Indian judges imagined themselves to be in the diffi-
cult position of being transformed into instrumentalities of ‘prostitu-
tion’. A particular discomfort experienced with ‘prostitution’ was
transmuted into, and therefore expressed in terms of, a concern for
the autonomy of the purchased girl. (This professed concern for the
autonomy of young girls was hardly ideologically ‘pure’; the Rakhma-
bai case is evidence that suits brought by husbands for the restitution
of wives were entertained regularly in the late nineteenth century.)
In Hoosany v. Rundagoo, decided in Bellari in 1807, the plaintiff sued
for restitution of a female slave who, upon being punished by her
mistress, had absconded to the home of the defendant, who refused
to return her. The sastri’s response was that there was no distinction
between the girl and any other form of property; and that ‘[w]ill-
ingness, or a want of it in the girl to return, makes no difference as to
the right of the Plaintiff to have her back.’66 There are two remarks
appended to the sastri’s response. While Ellis, the Collector of
Madras, thought the sastri to be correct as a matter of law, Cole-
brooke’s comment reveals an incipient concern for the autonomy of
the girl involved that, in his view, would justify interference with the
existing law of slavery:
In general, the owner of a slave shall recover his property from the person
in whose hands he or she may be. But ought courts of justice to suffer themselves
to be made instruments to enforce prostitution? And ought not such an abuse of an
owner’s power over a slave, have the effect of barring the remedy at law?67
Similarly, in 1822, when a Moohummudan dancing girl in Benares
sued a woman she had raised from infancy in contract for monthly
payments out of the woman’s earnings, the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut
of Bengal refused to enforce the contract on the grounds that the
defendant was not a legal slave and that the plaintiff had been suffi-
ciently recompensed for the expenditures she had incurred in train-
ing the defendant.68 The autonomy of the defendant was the object
of considerable judicial solicitude:
66
67
Ibid., II, 230 (emphasis added).
68
Mussammaut Chutroo v. Mussummaut Jussa, 6 Ind. Dec. (O.S.) 818 (1822)
(S.D.A. Bengal).
It is merely set forth by the plaintiff, that she had educated the defendant
from her childhood; and it is a well known fact, that in Benares many chil-
dren are annually stolen and sold to persons who profess dancing and sing-
ing; besides, it is equally notorious that those people obtain much of their
livelihood by the practice of prostitution. It is incumbent on the judicial
authorities to obtain, without the fullest proof of free will, from countenancing
the servitude of any individual entitled to freedom. . . .69
When the plaintiff attempted to bolster her cause by reference to
the customs of dancers, the Court dismissed such customs as being
‘in opposition to the law, and unworthy of being judicially recognized
from their manifest tyranny and injustice.’70
Dancing girls did not restrict themselves to suits against women
they had either bought or raised. They also sued men to whom they
had hired girls out as mistresses on the basis of fairly elaborate con-
tracts. Here too a judicial concern with autonomy revealed itself.
The case of Sutaoo, Kusbin v. Hurreeram bin Ramchunder, decided by the
Sudder Dewanee Adawlut of Bombay in 1835, is an excellent
example of the different sorts of legal discourse at play in the resolu-
tion of such suits.71 Sutaoo Kusbin, the plaintiff, had sued Hurreeram
bin Ramchunder, the defendant, on the basis of a written instrument
by which Hurreeram engaged to hire Sutaoo’s daughter, Bajee, on
a monthly salary of Rs 30 and clothes. After Bajee had lived as Hur-
reeram’s mistress for nine months, Sutaoo sued to claim an unpaid
balance as well as damages because, contrary to the bargain, Hur-
reeram had refused to let Bajee absent herself from his house. The
Native Judge of the Poona Zilla held for Sutaoo Kusbin. The Zillah
Judge (S. Marriott) declared that the recovery of wages of prostitu-
tion was not a cognizable action in a Civil Court; therefore, pursuant
to Section LIII of Regulation IV of 1827, he fined Sutaoo Kusbin Rs
100 for filing a groundless claim. Sutaoo Kusbin sought a Special
Appeal before the Sudder Dewanee Adawlut on the ground that ‘the
custom of both her caste and country sanctioned prostitution, and
therefore, being justly entitled to sue for the wages due on that
account, she had not only been fined without cause, but could claim
a judgment on a genuine deed of agreement . . .’72 The Sitting Judge
of the Sudder Adawlut, G. W. Anderson, referred the case to the
69
Ibid., 819–20.
70
Ibid., 820.
71
S.D.A. Bombay 1 (1835).
72
Ibid., 2.
584 KUNAL M. PARKER
Shastree, who cited the Mitakshara to the effect that such contracts
were cognizable under the Hindu Law. The Sitting Judge was com-
pletely convinced of the profound injustice of fining Sutaoo Kusbin
for bringing a groundless claim:
The [plaintiff] could not think her claim, in its nature, groundless; the law
and custom allows it, and the Native Judge awards on it. It is only the
Judge, bringing to the case a different system of morality, unknown to the
[plaintiff] that sees the claim is without ground. It is a light very proper
for him, but most oppressive to expect that it should be found equally in
the [plaintiff], who could see only that which all her previous living and
conceptions taught her.73
However, the Sitting Judge was also unwilling to accept the opinion
of the Shastree and set aside the decision of the Zillah Judge. The
difficulty experienced with upholding the contract reveals a curious
intertwining of the discomfort surrounding (a certain kind of) ‘prosti-
tution’ and a concern for autonomy:
In England, a contract or settlement for allowance to a kept mistress would
be enforced; how far a common prostitute would be allowed to recover her
demand, if resisted, may be a question. In this case, there is a written
agreement, partaking of the nature of a settlement, but there is here this
difference, that the contract is not with the woman, but with her parent.74
The case was therefore referred to the full Court, which (although
it set aside the fine imposed upon the plaintiff for bringing a ground-
less suit) refused to recognize ‘a contract, where a mother hires out
her daughter for concubinage’, the Hindu law notwithstanding.75
This judicial discomfort with recognizing rights associated with
‘prostitution’ was not directed specifically against temple dancing
girls. More importantly, it never translated into the deployment of
the criminal law with a view to suppressing temple dancing girls as
a group within Hindu society. The remainder of this section suggests
that the criminalization of temple dancing girls after 1860 was, in
addition to being entirely without antecedents in prior criminal law,
unintended by the framers of the Indian Penal Code.
Before the enactment of the Indian Penal Code, the criminal law
in India was extremely confused. The confusion resulted in no small
part because, until 1833, each Presidency exercised legislative
powers independently of the others. In Bengal and Madras, the Ma-
73
Ibid., 4.
74
75
Ibid., 4.
homedan criminal law was generally applicable; in Bombay, the Ma-
homedan criminal law applied to Muslims only, while the Hindu
criminal law applied to Hindus; and in each Presidency, regulations
modified applicable criminal law. In Bombay and Madras, the prosti-
tution of minors does not appear to have existed as an independent
crime; the criminal law appears to have been directed principally at
safeguarding the rights of guardians. Accordingly, in Bombay, the
stealing of a child from the custody of its guardians, and the receipt
of a child knowing it to be stolen, were punished as crimes.76 Even
where there was evidence that the accused intended to sell a child
into prostitution, no separate crime arose.77 Similarly, in Madras,
although the stealing of a child from the custody of its guardians
was punished as a crime,78 the removal of a child from the custody
of its parents with the intention of selling it as a slave, despite evid-
ence that the child might be used as a concubine, did not result in
a prosecution for the prostitution of a minor.79
In Bengal, however, the judiciary slowly developed an independent
crime of selling children into prostitution. Although the earliest pub-
lished reports of convictions for stealing and selling children date to
1817, none of the convictions for child-stealing and selling focused
specifically on the accused’s intent to prostitute minors.80 Instead,
as in Bombay and Madras, such crimes were directed specifically at
protecting the custody of guardians from interference. However, in
1841, the Nizamut Adawlut was confronted with the case of a woman
who had attempted to sell five young girls to prostitutes in the bazar
at Mouzah Serajgunge.81 Although it recognized the need to suppress
such practices, the Nizamut Adawlut found its hands tied because,
in order to convict the accused of child stealing, it would have to
76
See Bombay Regulation XIV of 1827, Sections I and XXXIII; Yemajee v. Luxi-
mon, S.F.A. Bombay 35 (1829) (child stealing); Oosman’s Case, 4 S.F.A. Bombay
29 (1855) (child stealing); Lubdheechund’s Case, S.F.A. Bombay 275 (1857) (child
stealing). Jiwna’s Case, 1 S.F.A. Bombay 183 (1861); Sukoo’s Case, 6 S.F.A. Bombay
543 (1856) (receipt of a stolen child).
77
Nana’s Case, 1 S.F.A. Bombay 34 (1854).
78
Royoor Mahalutchmee v. Royoor Ramanah, S.F.U. Madras 323 (1856).
79
Mootcheanee v. Gopee Bhaira, S.F.U. Madras 20, 20–1 (1854–5).
80
See, e.g., Mussamaut Punchum v. Sheik Mudaree, 1 R.N.A. 337 (1817); Khut-
ela v. Musst. Munna, 2 R.N.A. 66 (1821); Musst. Anjorea v. Musst. Hichnee, 2
R.N.A. 308 (1824); Musst. Rikteea v. Hoolasee, 2 R.N.A. 389 (1825); Govt. v.
Dursun, 2 R.N.A. 447 (1826); Ullahoodeen v. Waris Khyaut, 4 R.N.A. 47 (1831);
Cy-Chang Cossyanee v. He-er, 5 R.N.A. 30 (1836); Govt. v. Mussamut Aseea, 5
R.N.A. 57 (1837); Sonamonee Bewah v. Purbee Aorut, 6 R.N.A. 322 (1850).
81
Govt. v. Golab Peshagur, 6 R.N.A. 4 (1841).
586 KUNAL M. PARKER
receive evidence that the girls had been removed from the custody
of their guardians. However, the guardians of the girls were untrace-
able (and had very likely sold the girls in the first place). It was only
the opinion of the Court’s law officer, to the effect that the sale of
free-born persons was prohibited under the Mahomedan law, that
rendered the accused punishable. In 1853, the Nizamut Adawlut
held that, although the simple sale of a wife was not an offense under
the Mahomedan criminal law, the sale of a wife to a prostitute was
a criminal offense.82 Finally, also in 1853, the Nizamut Adawlut dis-
pensed with the requirements of removal from custody entirely by
ruling that, under the Mahomedan law, the sale of a child to a prosti-
tute, and the purchase of a child by a prostitute, were criminal
misdemeanours.83
In September 1858, the Nizamut Adawlut was called upon to adju-
dicate what had already become a sensational case.84 The Officiating
Magistrate of Monghyr, Mr Toogood, had stumbled upon leases of
two female infants to a brothel-keeper, Mussamut Amirun, for
periods of between ninety and ninety-five years. He had also disco-
vered that the leases had been registered by the Cazee of Monghyr,
an officer of the colonial government. Proceeding on his own initiat-
ive, Toogood had pressed charges against Mussamut Amirun, the
Cazee of Monghyr and one of the Cazee’s scribes.85 At issue were
complicated questions about the applicability of Act V of 1843 which
‘abolished’ slavery in India, on the one hand, and the applicability
of Bengal cases criminalizing the purchase of children by a prosti-
tute, on the other. Five judges of the Nizamut Adawlut heard the
case. Although two judges convicted Mussamut Amirun for varying
periods with a view to putting an end to such ‘revolting practices’,86
the remaining three held the proceedings void ab initio because the
Officiating Magistrate had exceeded his authority in proceeding motu
suo, apparently in violation of applicable procedure. Under Act II of
1856, a magistrate required a formal complaint to proceed unless
the offense was one against public morals. In an entirely egregious
opinion, one of the presiding judges of the Nizamut Adawlut found
that there had been no such offense against public morals because,
‘[o]n analysing the crime, it is clear that it is one mainly against the
82
Govt. v. Mussamut Gourmonee Peshagur, R.N.A. 630 (1853).
83
Govt. v. Sheikh Shetabdee, R.N.A. 643 (1853).
84
Govt. v. Mussamut Amirun, R.N.A. 343 (1858).
85
Ibid., 343–4.
86
Ibid., 369.
purity of the infants sold and purchased; and, as between the parties
to the transfer, is a conspiracy for the defilement of an infant
female’;87 Toogood could therefore only have proceeded on the basis
of a formal complaint, in the absence of which the entire proceedings
were to be declared void.
The political response to this unfortunate decision, which came to
be known simply as ‘the Monghyr case’, was swift. On 6 January,
1859, spurred by statements in the British press and private com-
munications addressed to him, Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for
India, requested Lord Canning, the Governor General of India in
Council, to transmit the entire proceedings of the case to London
‘together with a statement of the measures which you have taken,
or propose to take, in connection with this subject.’88 On 11 March,
1859, Canning replied that ‘the subject [had] been referred to the
Legislative Council for consideration in connection with the Penal
Code.’89 However, Stanley continued to stress the urgency of the
matter. After a scathing summary of the Nizamut Adawlut’s pro-
nouncements in the case, he stated that:
Her Majesty’s Government ordinarily abstain from any comment on the
judicial proceedings of the Sudder court, but they cannot withhold the
expression of their great regret at the result of this case. . . . A similar
offense had on former occasions been visited by the same Court with severe
punishment, and it cannot be feared that an acquittal based as in the pre-
sent case, on technical grounds which must necessarily be unintelligible to
the native community, will be regarded as a reversal of those previous
decisions, and as giving a legal sanction to slavery of the most revolting and
degrading character.90
He added that ‘Her Majesty’s Government . . . are of the opinion
that unless there is a prospect of early passing on the [Penal] Code,
the matter is one which calls for separate and immediate legislative
interference.’91 On 14 October, 1859, unmollified by Canning’s
assurances that the new Code of Criminal Procedure would leave no
doubt as to the power of magistrates to proceed motu suo in cases of
a similar nature, the new Secretary of State for India, Sir Charles
Wood, was again pressing that ‘the Penal Code, which must precede
the Code of Procedure . . . leave no room for doubt as to the power
87
Ibid., 385.
88
OIOC L/P&J/2/1214 at 26–7.
89
OIOC L/P&J/3/297 at 89.
90
OIOC L/P&J/3/1214 at 430–2.
91
OIOC L/P&J/3/1214 at 433.
588 KUNAL M. PARKER
of a Magistrate to punish persons of the offence of leasing young

girls for the purpose of prostitution.’92
Throughout its long period of gestation, the Indian Penal Code
had contained no independent offense targeting the prostitution of
minors. The first draft submitted to the Governor General in Council
in 1837 did not specifically target prostitution, although Section 357
thereof created the offense of aggravated kidnapping where the per-
petrator knew it to be likely ‘that the consequence of such kidnap-
ping may be . . . the rape of that person, or the subjecting of that
person to unnatural lust, or the slavery of that person . . .’.93 In 1846,
the Indian Law Commissioners pointedly rejected as unnecessary a
suggestion by the Sudder Court of the Northwestern Provinces that
Section 357 of the first draft be amended to add the words ‘or the
dedicating that person to prostitution.’94 The outcry following ‘the
Monghyr case’ rendered such a stance impossible. Sections 372 and
373, specifically targeting the prostitution of minors, were included
in the final version of the Indian Penal Code presented to the Legis-
lative Council on 18 February, 1860. Sparking no discussion during
the Legislative Council’s deliberations on the Code, they were
enacted as law on 6 October, 1860.
III. Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls,

1860–1914
With their emphasis on the sale, purchase and hire of children under
the age of sixteen, Sections 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code
reveal unmistakably their origins in ‘the Monghyr case’. They were
not intended to suppress temple dancing girls as a group within
Hindu society. The criminalization of temple dancing girls must be
located within a broader reconceptualization of temple dancing girls
in terms of patriarchal Hindu legal norms with respect to marriage.
However, Anglo-Indian legal commentators represented the crim-
inalization of temple dancing girls as flowing ineluctably from the
language of the Indian Penal Code itself. (From the perspective of
the legitimacy of judicial decision-making, the invocation of statutory
92
OIOC L/P&J/3/1214 at 574–5.
93
A Penal Code Prepared by the Indian Law Commissioners and Published by Command of
the Governor General of India in Council (Calcutta, 1837), 91.
94
Indian Law Commissioners, Notes on the Report of the Indian Law Commissioners,
Dated 23rd July 1846, On the Indian Penal Code (London, 1848), 127.
provisions was undoubtedly preferable to the invocation of the more
fluid patriarchal norms of the Hindu law.) The ‘inevitable’ crim-
inalization of temple dancing girls under the Indian Penal Code was
then represented as the ‘true’ source of judicial hostility towards
temple dancing girls:
[U]ntil the passing of the Penal Code in 1861 [sic], no aspect of prostitution
was illegal; and the court recognised, and gave effect to the usages of [danc-
ing girls] as relating to rights of property, power of adoption, and special
rules of inheritance inter se.95
It is indeed the case that Anglo-Indian judges invoked the ‘public
law’ occasionally to justify their aggressive derecognition of the cus-
toms of temple dancing girls after 1860. However, as the following
sections illustrate, Anglo-Indian judges’ reconceptualization of
temple dancing girls in terms of Hindu legal norms, which formed
the basis of the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life of temple-
harlotry’, cannot be explained as emanating from the criminal law.
They must be seen as part of a process of constructing a cohesive
Hindu community through the dissemination of Hindu patriarchal
legal norms that marshaled for its own ends the allegedly ‘autonom-
ous’ domain of the criminal law. Although the following sections are
organized around (i) the interpretation of temple dancing girls in
terms of ‘caste’, (ii) the extension of the Hindu law to temple danc-
ing girls and (iii) the criminalization of temple dancing girls, the
specific bodies of law described therein should be imagined as devel-
oping simultaneously in relation to one another.
A. TEMPLE DANCING GIRLS AND ‘CASTE’
A highly systematized knowledge about ‘caste’ developed over the

latter half of the nineteenth century. An early twentieth-century
account defines ‘caste’ as ‘a social group having two characteristics:
(1) membership is confined to those who are born of members . . .;
(2) the members are forbidden by an inexorable social law to marry
outside the group.’96 Reflected in various state practices, the wide-
spread use of ‘caste’ as a heuristic device for the reduction of Indian
society to knowledge is perhaps best revealed by the series of
95
John D. Mayne, A Treatise on Hindu Law and Usage (6th ed.) (Madras, 1900) 61
(citations omitted).
96
S. V. Ketkar, The History of Caste in India (Ithaca, 1909), 15.
590 KUNAL M. PARKER
voluminous pseudo-ethnographic compilations commissioned by pro-

vincial governments around the turn of the century, including
Crooke’s Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh,97
Enthoven’s Tribes and Castes of Bombay,98 Risley’s Tribes and Castes of
Bengal,99 Russell’s Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India,100
and Thurston’s Castes and Tribes of South India.101
As before, temple dancing girls proved irreducible to ‘caste’. Both
principles of ‘caste’, membership by birth and endogamy, appeared
to be routinely flouted. In his entry entitled ‘Déva-Dási’, Thurston
observed that, while ‘[t]he Dásis were probably . . . the result of left-
handed unions between members of two different cases, . . . they are
now partly recruited by admissions, and even purchases, from other
classes.’102 Only plain girls in the ‘caste’ married; men either parti-
cipated in the activities of dancing girls by playing music or married,
drifted out of the community and ‘[tried] to live down the stigma
attaching to their birth.’103 Describing the Bhávins of the Bombay
Presidency, Enthoven represented the ‘caste’ as ‘naturally somewhat
loosely knit’ because formed from Maratha and Bhandari castes; he
reported that women were also recruited from various Shudra castes
through the expedient of ‘pouring oil on their head from the god’s
lamp in a temple.’104 Under the heading ‘Kasbi, Tawaif, Devadási’,
Russell’s account of the ‘caste of dancing girls and prostitutes’ of the
Central Provinces emphasized that ‘[t]hough the better-class Kasbis
appear to have a sort of caste union, this is naturally quite indefinite,
inasmuch as marriage, at present the essential bond of caste-
organization, is absent.’105
On the other hand, temple dancing girl ‘castes’ displayed ‘caste’-
like features, including participating in caste hierarchies. Thurston
reported that Dásis ‘form a regular caste, having its own laws of
inheritance, its own customs and rules of etiquette, and its own pan-
97
W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (4 Vols)
(Calcutta, 1896).
98
R. E. Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay (3 Vols) (New Delhi, 1990)
(1922).
99
H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (2 Vols) (Calcutta, 1891).
100
R. V. Russell, The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (4 Vols)
(London, 1916).
101
Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of South India (7 Vols) (Madras, 1909).
102
Ibid., II, 126.
103
Ibid., II, 127–8.
104
Enthoven, supra note 98, at I, 146.
105
Russell, supra note 100, at III, 381.
cháyats . . .’.106 They were divided into Valangai (right-handed) and
Idangai (left-handed), with the chief distinction among them being
that the Valangai had nothing to do with any left-handed castes;
members of both divisions were forbidden from having any dealings
with men of the lowest castes.107 Dancing girls who were members
of the ‘Telegu dancing-girl caste’ of Sanis would ‘scorn to eat with
any of the other dancing castes.’108 Similarly, Enthoven observed that
‘[i]n the social scale [the Bhávin] ranks below the Kalávant and is
not allowed to sing or dance in public, nor may regular musicians
accompany her.’109
The ambiguities surrounding temple dancing girls’ status as a
‘caste’ were typically resolved by essentializing temple dancing girls
as a professional corps of traditional ‘prostitutes’. Their ritual prac-
tices were deemed vestigial to the exercise of their ‘profession’.
While Thurston’s lengthy entry entitled ‘Déva-Dási’ devoted only a
single sentence to the temple duties of dancing girls, Enthoven
stated categorically that ‘[t]he Bhávin practices prostitution and dif-
fers from the common prostitute only in being dedicated to the
god.’110 The consensus among colonial writers that temple dancing
girls ‘[got] most of their wealth outside the temple’111 was
undoubtedly responsible for their disregard of the role played by
temple dancing girls within Hindu religious service. There was also
a sense that the diminishing prestige of temple dancing girls, attrib-
uted to a recognition of their essential condition, reflected the grad-
ual ‘improvement’ of Indian society:
Owing to the wise guidance of British rule, female education and enlighten-
ment have made great strides . . . and we are likely to hear less and less of
the déva-dásis. Secular prostitution always has existed and will always exist,
for the simple reason that, where there is a certain and constant demand,
so also is there an equally certain and constant supply.112
When temple dancing girls sought to represent themselves as a
‘caste’ in order to win legal recognition for their customs, therefore,
their representations were made against a background in which their
106
Thurston, supra note 101, at II, 127.
107
Ibid., II, 128.
108
Ibid., VI, 293.
109
Enthoven, supra note 98, at I, 146.
110
Ibid.
111
N. M. Penzer, ‘Sacred Prostitution (Appendix IV)’, in C. H. Tawney (trans.),
The Ocean of Story (10 Vols) (London, 1924), I, 254 (emphasis added).
112
Ibid., 254–5.
592 KUNAL M. PARKER
ambiguous status as a ‘caste’ was recognized, interpreted and judged.

While they increasingly referred to dancing girls as a ‘caste’, Anglo-
Indian courts in the second half of the nineteenth century responded
to this ambiguity in a variety of ways.
Of all the customs of temple dancing girls, Anglo-Indian courts
were most disturbed by the custom of adopting daughters. There
were at least two reasons for their nervousness. First, the custom of
adopting daughters was entirely without parallel in the Hindu law.
Even during the second half of the nineteenth century, Hindu men
were permitted only to adopt sons;113 Hindu women were permitted
only to adopt sons on behalf of, and for the benefit of, their hus-
bands.114 As a result, from the perspective of certain Anglo-Indian
legal commentators, adoptions of daughters by temple dancing
women could not result in ‘true’ adoptions; the entire custom was
dismissed as ‘merely an imitative institution’.115 Second, the custom
of adopting daughters was associated with slavery, child-selling and
the prostitution of children. Strange’s influential Manual of Hindoo
Law stated that ‘[a] dancing girl . . . may make adoption of a daugh-
ter, if authorized thereto by the Pagoda to which she is attached
. . .’.116 The suggestion that temple authorities authorized adoptions
by dancing girls, which appears to be completely unfounded in light
of the evidence contained in adjudications of adoptions, raised the
specter of temples perpetuating vice through directing a traffic in
children.
Although the ‘public law’ made certain important inroads into the
custom of adopting daughters, the principal judicial debates about
the derecognition of customs of adoption were structured around the
status of communities of dancing girls as ‘castes’, the validity of
‘caste custom’ at variance with the textual Hindu law and, ulti-
mately, the relationship between dancing girls and Hindu society.
Significant differences emerged between Bombay and Madras.
The Bombay High Court’s opinion in Mathura Naikin v. Esu
Naikin117 was the first extended legal discussion of the validity of the
113
Gangabai v. Anant, 13 Bom. 690 (1889).
114
Mayne, supra note 95, at 255.
115
Raymond West and Johann Georg Bühler, A Digest of the Hindu Law of Inherit-
ance, Partition, and Adoption: Embodying the Replies of the Sâstris in the Courts of the Bombay
Presidency (3rd ed.) (Bombay, 1884), II, 933.
116
Thomas Lumisden Strange, A Manual of Hindoo Law as Prevailing in the Presidency
of Madras (2nd ed.) (Madras, 1863), 25.
117
4 Bom. 545 (1880).
adoption customs of dancing girls in Bombay. Both parties in the
dispute were naikins. The plaintiff, the adopted daughter of the
defendant, sued to compel a partition of ‘family property’ consisting
of real property that had been improved in part through her ear-
nings. The alleged adoption was described as having been performed
‘according to the custom of the naikin caste.’118 Called upon to recog-
nize the validity of the custom of adopting daughters among naikins,
the Bombay High Court construed the question in terms of whether
naikins as a group were in fact capable of creating their own customs.
(Although it could have based its decision by invoking the shadow
cast over the customs of temple dancing girls by their recent crim-
inalization under the Indian Penal Code, the Bombay High Court
chose explicitly to base its decision upon a different rationale.) Nai-
kins were represented as follows:
The parties in the present case belong to a class, called naikins, who, as
dancers, singers and courtesans, perform in Bombay functions which recom-
mend them highly to some portions of the native community. . . . In Bombay
the naikins recruit their class locally by female births and adoptions, or
so-called adoptions. They are or were a tolerably opulent class, holding out,
amongst a poor and weak population, the injurious example of a flagrant
and prosperous immorality, if that title is to be given to a mode of life
opposed to what mankind, in general, have learned to recognize as the
highest conception of social progress and happiness.119
The Bombay High Court denied naikins any corporate distinct-
iveness that might legitimate their ability to formulate their own
customs. According to the Court, mere ancient established usage, as
indicated by references to prostitution in Hindu legal texts, could
not be a criterion for the validity of custom. The legal consciousness
of naikins themselves was equally insufficient. Instead, the ability of
naikins to formulate their own customs was contingent upon, and
drew its validity from, the sentiments of the larger Hindu commun-
ity. It was the task of the Anglo-Indian judge to ascertain those
sentiments:
The decision must, in truth, be founded on an appreciation of the legal
consciousness of the community; but when that consciousness is unsettled
and fluctuating, its nobler may properly be chosen in preference to its baser
elements as those which are to predominate.120
118
Ibid., 546.
119
Ibid., 549.
120
Ibid., 553.
594 KUNAL M. PARKER
The implications of empowering the ‘nobler’ elements of the

(imagined) consciousness of an (imagined) community were to trans-
form the standards of the textual Hindu law into a point of reference
against which all customs at variance with it would be measured.
Because the textual Hindu law was itself the exclusive domain of
the Anglo-Indian judiciary, the battle for the recognition of custom
was represented as a battle about the actualization of an enlightened
morality.
However, in order to make this argument, the Bombay High Court
was compelled to confront the problem of ‘caste’, which had been a
critical basis for the recognition of custom at variance with the
Hindu law as a consequence of the ontological priority assigned it
within the Anglo-Indian legal imagination. Although it acknowledged
that during the first half of the nineteenth century ‘[t]he Sadar
Court had . . . acted pretty consistently on the principle, approved
by the shastris . . . of giving precedence to caste usage over the Shas-
tra’,121 the Bombay High Court launched into a summary of recent
cases in which ‘caste customs’ of marriage had been overridden by
the Hindu law (or the Indian Penal Code).122 This was done in order
to show that all ‘caste customs’ were enjoyed at the sufferance of
the larger Hindu community. Although ‘caste customs’ could clearly
be overridden by the criminal law, the cases in which ‘caste customs’
had been explicitly set aside in the name of Hindu legal standards
were weak precedent. Furthermore, they were not numerous. Indeed,
given the vast body of legal pronouncements professing to uphold
custom that had accumulated over the nineteenth century, the
Bombay High Court would have been on extremely precarious legal
ground if it had suggested as the basis of its decision that the textual
Hindu law could defeat ‘caste customs’ at will. Therefore, without
acknowledging that it was doing so, it simply refused to represent
naikins as a ‘caste’. Throughout its opinion, the Bombay High Court
represented dancing girls as constituting a ‘guild’, ‘loose aggregate’,
‘company’, ‘corporate or quasi-corporate body’ or ‘organization’ of
‘prostitutes’. In fact, the author of the opinion, Justice West, stated
explicitly: ‘I have thus far dealt with the present case on the same
principles on which I should deal with one concerning an association
of Thugs or card-sharpers.’123 Each of these labels, in contradistinc-
121
Ibid., 567.
122
Ibid., 567–70.
123
Ibid., 571.
tion to ‘caste’, enabled a representation of communities of dancing
girls as little more than professional corps of prostitutes. Accord-
ingly, the custom of adoption prevailing amongst naikins was charac-
terized as rule incident to the perpetuation of prostitution: ‘The so-
called adoption is, in fact, only a stage in the ceremonies by which
a girl is dedicated to prostitution.’124 Applying the Hindu law of adop-
tion to the case, the Bombay High Court rejected the custom of
adopting daughters alleged by naikins on the ground that ‘[a]n adop-
tion by a woman presupposes a husband, to whom she adopts as his
representative, and a naikin can have no husband.’125 Its decision
was referred to sympathetically by the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council as an example of the ‘great difficulties . . . felt by
Courts of Justice in admitting the validity of transactions intended
for the furtherance of prostitution.’126 The enormous influence of the
Bombay High Court’s decision in Mathura Naikin v. Esu Naikin
ensured that the custom of adopting daughters became permanently
illegal in Bombay.127
A radically different position emerged in Madras. In Venku v. Mah-
alinga (per Muttusami Ayyar, J.),128 the Madras High Court resolved
a dispute over the estate of Timmu, a woman of ‘the dancing-girl
caste’, between Venku, who was Timmu’s sister by adoption, and
Mahalinga, Timmu’s natural brother. Venku’s claims to the estate
were attacked, inter alia, by challenging the validity of the custom of
adoption. Referring to Madras precedent from the 1850s, the
Madras High Court saw ‘no reason to doubt that, prior to the intro-
duction of the Indian Penal Code, a dancing girl without a daughter
was, by the custom of her caste, entitled to adopt a daughter so as to
constitute between them the legal relation of mother and daugh-
ter.’129 Directly rebutting the arguments made by the Bombay High
Court in Mathura Naikin v. Esu Naikin that Anglo-Indian courts
were duty-bound to privilege the ‘nobler’ elements of the Hindu
124
Ibid.
125
Ibid., 572.
126
Ghasiti v. Umrao Jan, 21 Cal. 149, 156 (1893) (Privy Council).
127
See Hira Naikin v. Radha Naikin, 37 Bom. 116 (1912). Doubts were expressed
when a dancing girl on her death-bed adopted a daughter, designated her in a will
as the beneficiary of her estate, and died a few days later. However, the adopted
daughter’s claim to the estate was upheld on the basis of the will, rather than on
the basis of the custom of adoption. See Manjamma v. Sheshgirirao, 26 Bom. 491
(1902).
128
11 Mad. 393 (1889).
129
596 KUNAL M. PARKER
community by determining the validity of customs in terms of Hindu

legal norms, the Madras High Court’s judgment identified with con-
siderable acuity the difficulties inherent in the judiciary’s arrogating
to itself the status of a declarant of the sentiments of the ‘Hindu
community’. Its grasp of the politics behind the judicial assault on
dancing girls was uncommonly sophisticated. First, it suggested that
the disappearance of a custom of its own accord (or through an act
of the legislature) was the ‘sound basis for judiciary action . . .’.130
This was essentially an argument against judicial activism as a
matter of institutional practice. Second, it understood the dissemina-
tion of Hindu legal norms as necessitating a prior construction of
the Hindu community in order to ascertain its sentiments; it saw the
construction of such a ‘Hindu community’ as an extremely precarious
endeavor, given past patterns of recognition of custom:
How would this theory work as the basis of judiciary action if a Judge in
Malabar or South Canara were to hold that according to a very considerable
body of Hindus the non-recognition of marriage as a legal institution is
pernicious and that he would therefore decree tarwad or Aliyasantanam
property to the sons and daughters of those who now follow the special law
of the nephews?131
Finally, it captured with considerable irony the reformist politics
behind judicial attempts to construct a ‘Hindu community’ in order
to disseminate highly contingent moral values:
I may observe that whatever may be the change in the sentiments of the
general mass of Hindus in regard to dancing women in Bombay and Poona
I am unable to say that there is a considerable change in this Presidency in
the opinion of the general mass of the Hindu community as contra-
distinguished from a comparatively small section that has come under the
influence of Western culture.132
Subsequently, the Madras High Court recognized as valid ‘caste
custom’ a custom of adoption among dancing girls that permitted
the adoption of a more than one daughter, even though analogies
to the Hindu law—which permitted men to adopt no more than one
son—were even weaker.133 Therefore, in Madras, the invocation of
‘caste’ became important in ensuring a measure of protection for
130
Ibid., 400.
131
Ibid., 401.
132
Ibid.
133
Muttukannu v. Paramasami, 12 Mad. 214 (1889).
the adoption customs of dancing girls against the onslaught of the
Hindu law and the Indian Penal Code.
However, in each of the Madras cases discussed above it had been
important to the ultimate decision of the Court that the adoption
in question had taken place before the Indian Penal Code had come
into effect; the advance of the criminal law could be checked simply
on the basis that it could not be applied retroactively. When adop-
tions that had taken place after the coming into effect of the Indian
Penal Code began to appear before Madras courts, however, the
inroads of the criminal law, ‘caste custom’ notwithstanding, could
no longer be resisted. The criminalization of the adoption customs
of temple dancing girls will be discussed later. As a result of this
criminalization, however, each instance of adoption came to be scru-
tinized to determine whether the intent of the adoptive mother was
in fact to ‘prostitute’ her adoptive daughter. Such intent to ‘prosti-
tute’ was regularly found on the basis of facts that might constitute
evidence, in a criminal prosecution, of the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls
to a life of temple-harlotry’.134 The consequence of finding the requis-
ite intent was that the adoption was set aside and any rights asserted
on the basis of such adoption automatically extinguished.135 In order
to protect their clients’ interests, lawyers typically argued that adop-
tions had been made with a view to getting adopted daughters mar-
ried; Madras courts were often skeptical,136 but occasionally recog-
nized that such an intent in fact existed.137
Fueled by the inroads made by the criminal law, Hindu legal
norms occasionally asserted themselves explicitly in adjudications of
customs of adoption in Madras. In Guddati Reddi Obala v. Ganapati
Kandanna,138 the Madras High Court was required to decide whether
a married woman of the Bogum caste, one of the dancing girl ‘castes’,
could rely upon ‘caste custom’ to adopt a daughter. The Court
134
Kamalakshi v. Ramasami Chetti, 19 Mad. 127 (1895); Sanjivi v. Jalajakshi,
21 Mad. 229 (1897); Gangamma v. Kuppammal, 1938 Mad. 789 (1937).
135
Kamalakshi v. Ramasami Chetti, 19 Mad. 127 (1895); Sanjivi v. Jalajakshi,
21 Mad. 229 (1897); Gangamma v. Kuppammal, 1938 Mad. 789 (1937).
136
Sanjivi v. Jalajakshi, 21 Mad. 229, 231 (1897). But see Nagamuthu Pillai v.
Dasi Sundaram, 32 I.C. 743, 744 (1915) (adoption upheld where the dancing girl
‘took the girl in to help her in her household duties out of compassion for the
helpless child and . . . did not intend to force her to a life of prostitution’).
137
Shanmugam Pillai v. Krishnaveni, M.W.N. 288 (1931); Veeranna v. Sarasirat-
nam, 71 M.L.J. 53 (1936).
138
23 M.L.J. 493 (1912).
598 KUNAL M. PARKER
refused to let a married woman invoke the ‘caste custom’ of dancing

girls:
[I]t is clear that in some castes such as a section of the Kaikkalar castes
and in the Bogum caste, a girl can be married as a Hindu and lead a family
life though born a prostitute. . . . The ordinary Hindu law ought to be
applied to such persons and not the law applying to the prostitutes. [The
woman] and her husband were therefore clearly not legally entitled to adopt
a girl and they ought to have adopted a boy only according to the ordinary
Hindu law. . . . Even if [the woman] turned a prostitute (during her hus-
band’s life or after his death) she could not be allowed to adopt a girl having
once adopted the ordinary Hindu law.139
On this occasion, the Madras High Court retreated from the
view of ‘caste custom’ articulated in earlier decisions; although it
continued to employ the label of ‘caste’, the Court understood the
‘caste customs’ to attach to the profession of dancing women;
therefore, if a woman born into the ‘caste’ became ‘a moral Hindu
family woman’, the customs of the ‘caste’ could no longer apply
to her. Calling for a judicial declaration that the customs of
adoption were illegal in their entirety, Justice Sadasiva Aiyar
blamed courts in Madras for preventing the caste of dancing girls
from dying ‘a natural death’ by persisting in recognizing adoptions
by dancing girls.140 Hindu legal theories of adoption were, in his
view, entirely inapplicable to the customs of adoption among danc-
ing girls because ‘no spiritual benefit can accrue to a prostitute
mother by the spiritual ministrations of her prostitute adopted
daughter . . .’.141 At stake was a reimagination of Hinduism itself.
Justice Sadasiva Aiyar asserted vehemently that ‘[a]s a Hindu I
wish to express . . . emphatically my opinion that prostitution is
not looked upon by the Hindu religion or its laws with any more
favorable eye than the Christian or Mahomedan religion or the
Christian or Mahomedan laws.’142 Such expressions of Hindu legal
norms were, however, an exception to the general recognition of
customs of adoption subject to limitation by the criminal law.
Essentialist interpretations of temple dancing girls as a corps of
professional prostitutes revealed their instability when dancing girls
sued to enforce rights associated with temple worship that could not
even remotely be reduced to ‘prostitution’. Anglo-Indian courts
139
Ibid., 495.
140
Ibid.
141
Ibid.
142
Ibid., 494–5.
arrived at inconsistent positions depending upon the specific right
asserted. When the Dharmakarta of the temple of Mallikeswaras-
vami dedicated girls without the consent of the existing body of danc-
ing girls, two temple dancing girls sued for declaratory relief; citing
established custom, they requested the Madras High Court to ascer-
tain their rights with respect to the dedication of Déva Dásis and
the Dharmakarta’s powers to fine and suspend them.143 The Madras
High Court refused to recognize the customary rights asserted by
the temple dancing girls on the ground that, following the passage
of the Indian Penal Code, it could not countenance claims to ‘a
monopoly in [the] profession of Déva Dási . . ..’144 It specifically
essentialized temple dancing girls as prostitutes:
We cannot shut our eyes to what is the main purpose of this profession, as
it is perfectly notorious that it is prostitution and the gains from that
source. If the religious services, which the Déva Dásis have to attend, or in
which they are required to join, be anything more than a mere veil to cover
the real and substantial occupation of their lives, it is still impossible to
regard their religious services as disconnected from the other inevitable
pursuit of their profession as Déva Dásis.145
However, the argument that the ritual practices were a ‘mere veil’
could not always be made. When it could not, the existence of prop-
erty that was the subject of the suit was invoked to uphold the claims
of temple dancing girls. Accordingly, when temple dancing girls sued
to establish their rights to temple offices, courts recognized their
claims on the ground that the suits were not about monopolies on
prostitution, but instead about the endowments attached to temple
offices.146 The Bombay High Court went so far as to uphold claims
by the adopted daughter of a naikin to receive the inam lands associ-
ated with the temple office of her adoptive mother; the derecognition
of the adoption customs of dancing girls in Bombay was distinguished
on the ground that the Court could not refuse to recognize the
endowments associated with the temple.147 Similarly, when temple
dancing girls sued to compel temple officials to permit them to wor-
ship in temples, they were treated as ‘entitled . . . to take part in
public worship.’148
143
Chinna Ummayi v. Tegarai Chetti, 1 Mad. 168 (1876).
144
Ibid., 170.
145
Ibid.
146
Kamalam v. Sadagopa Sami, 1 Mad. 357 (1878).
147
Tárá Náikin v. Náná Lakshman, 14 Bom. 20, 23 (1889).
148
Vengamuthu v. Pandavéswara Gurukal, 6 Mad. 151, 153 (1882).
600 KUNAL M. PARKER
B. TEMPLE DANCING GIRLS AND THE HINDU LAW
Upon the abolition of the posts of Native Law Officers in 1864, the
Hindu law entered a pronounced textual phase. More than at any
previous time since the institution of Anglo-Indian courts, pro-
nouncements on Hindu law became decontextualized (and often
highly abstruse) disquisitions on Hindu legal texts. Earlier positions
articulated with the assistance of Native Law Officers were aban-
doned on the grounds that they were not adequately grounded in
Hindu legal texts. The textualization of the Hindu law had two con-
sequences. First, because it was increasingly divorced from the know-
ledge of social context afforded by Native Law Officers, the Hindu
law came to instantiate a ‘new’ set of patriarchal norms with respect
to the sexual behavior of Hindu women in keeping with approp-
riations of the Victorian ideal of companionate marriage. Second,
because all legal spaces without explicit textual authority became
unstable, the Hindu law extended itself aggressively to cover groups
that had been viewed as governed by normative structures distinct
from those of the Hindu law. A Hindu community emerged through
the extension of Hindu legal norms to such groups.
After 1850, various aspects of the patriarchal Hindu legal tradi-
tion constructed in Anglo-Indian courts during the first half of the
nineteenth century were ‘liberalized’. A new patriarchy, organized
around appropriations of the Victorian ideal of companionate mar-
riage, constructed itself through the debates surrounding the Hindu
Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856 (Act XV of 1856), the Rakhmabai
case, the efforts to raise the age of consent and so on. From the
perspective of proponents of this new companionate marriage, its
relative marginality within Hindu conjugal practices was imagined
as a ‘problem’. In his Hindu Law of Marriage and Stridhana, Sir
Gooroodass Banerjee stated the ‘problem’ through the following
characterization of different forms of conjugality prevailing through-
out India: ‘Indian life presents almost every possible form of the
conjugal relation, from the grossest polyandry verging on promiscu-
ity, to the purest and most rational form of monogamy.’149
The valorization of ‘the purest and most rational form of mono-
gamy’ continued to prescribe a role for Hindu women. In keeping
with the ideal of companionate marriage, however, it dictated the
149
Sir Gooroodass Banerjee, The Hindu Law of Marriage and Stridhana (Delhi,
1984), 31 (1915).
erosion of certain ‘outmoded’ legal restrictions upon the sexual
behavior of Hindu women. As early as 1851, Anglo-Indian courts
began to invoke the Caste Disabilities Removal Act (Act XXI of
1850) to justify a refusal to extinguish women’s property rights on
the ground that they had been unchaste. Intended to facilitate the
proselytizing activities of European missionaries, Section 1 of the
Caste Disabilities Removal Act (Act XXI of 1850) provided that ‘so
much of any law or usage . . . as inflicts on any person forfeiture of
rights of property or may be held in any way to impair or affect any
right of inheritance by reason of his or her renouncing or having
been excluded from the communion of any religion, or being
deprived of caste, shall cease to be enforced as law . . .’. In thus
applying the Caste Disabilities Removal Act, the Anglo-Indian judi-
ciary continued to describe an entire range of female sexual behavior
outside marriage in opaque terms such as ‘immorality’, ‘incontin-
ence’, ‘unchastity’ and ‘prostitution’. The difference was that such
behavior no longer resulted in a loss of property.
The invocation of the Caste Disabilities Removal Act was by no
means uncontested during the 1850s. Although the Supreme Court
of Bengal refused on the basis of the Caste Disabilities Removal Act
to divest a widow in possession of property for having ‘led an immoral
and unchaste life’ after her husband’s death,150 the Sudder
Dewannee Adawlut of Bengal interpreted the Caste Disabilities
Removal Act to apply only to loss of caste by reason of excommunica-
tion from religion (and not, therefore, to loss of caste by reason of
unchastity).151 In 1869, the Calcutta High Court adopted the
Supreme Court’s interpretation of the applicability of the Caste Dis-
abilities Removal Act so that degradation resulting in a loss of caste
by reason of unchastity was no longer held to divest a widow of an
estate that had already vested in her.152
However, this ‘liberalization’ also entailed a reworking of the
Hindu law itself. Prior to 1869, the law in Bengal had been that a
simple act of unchastity in a widow, albeit unaccompanied by
degradation resulting in a permanent loss of caste, was sufficient to
terminate her property rights. Because the Caste Disabilities
Removal Act applied only to divestiture of property resulting from a
loss of caste, if a widow’s estate was viewed as capable of enjoyment
150
Doe Dem. Saummoney Dossee v. Nemychurn Doss, 2 Ind. Dec. (O.S.) 577
(1851).
151
Rajkoomaree Dassee v. Goolabee Dassee, 14 S.D.A. Bengal 1895 (1858).
152
Matunginee Dabee v. Joykallee Dabee, 14 W.R. 23 (1869).
602 KUNAL M. PARKER
only so long as she remained ‘chaste’, the Caste Disabilities Removal

Act could not prevent its termination upon the commission of an act
of ‘unchastity’. In an erudite opinion profiting fully from the contra-
dictory statements in Sanskrit and Anglo-Indian legal texts, the Cal-
cutta High Court set aside over seventy years of precedent to rule
that, under the Hindu law, the divestiture of a widow’s estate did
not take place upon the commission of an act of ‘unchastity’, but
only as a result of degradation resulting in a loss of caste (which had
been neutralized by the Caste Disabilities Removal Act).153 Almost
a decade later, this position was upheld by the Judicial Committee
of the Privy Council.154
In addition to widows, daughters and mothers became beneficiar-
ies of a loosening of the legal linkages between marriage, chastity
and property in Bombay, Madras and the Northwest Provinces. This
loosening also occurred on the basis of reinterpretations of the tex-
tual Hindu law. Early positions were abandoned on the basis of new
‘strict’ readings of Hindu legal texts. In 1875, the Allahabad High
Court declared that ‘[t]here is no passage to be found in the Miták-
shara or other authority followed in the Benares school, debarring
a woman living in unchastity from inheriting stridhana.’155 In 1879,
after an exhaustive discussion of applicable Hindu law, the Bombay
High Court declared that ‘there [is] neither text nor case which
shows that, according to the law as it prevails in Western India, a
daughter is, by her incontinence, debarred from succession to the
estate of her father . . .’.156 In 1881, the Madras High Court held
that there was no authority to support the view that a widow who
had suffered degradation resulting in a loss of caste by reason of
unchastity prior to her son’s death was prevented from succeeding
to his estate under the Hindu law as applied in Madras.157 In 1902,
also in keeping with this textual trend, the Madras High Court held
that a daughter who suffered degradation resulting in a loss of caste
was not barred from inheriting the stridhan property of her
153
Ibid.
154
Moniran Kolita v. Keri Kolitani, 5 Cal. 776 (1880) (Privy Council). See also
Dolores F. Chew, ‘The Case of the ‘‘Unchaste’’ Widow: Constructing Gender in
19th-Century Bengal’, Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation sur la recherche fémi-
niste 22 (1993), 31.
155
Mussamat Ganga Jati v. Ghasita, 1 All. 46, 49 (1875) (per Oldfield, J.).
156
Advyapa v. Rudrava, 4 Bomb. 104, 122 (1879).
157
Kojiyadu v. Lakshmi, 5 Mad. 149 (1881); Vedammal v. Vedanayaga Mudaliar,
31 Mad. 100 (1907).
mother.158 However, this ‘liberalization’ was by no means a universal
trend during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Dayab-
haga in Bengal continued to be interpreted strictly to exclude
unchaste mothers159 and unchaste daughters160 from inheritance.
At the same time that the legal linkages between marriage, chast-
ity and property were being dissolved as part of the construction of
a companionate marriage, the Hindu law annexed degraded Hindu
women who had been considered ‘outside’ Hindu society by claiming
them as Hindus. The effect was that their property was reabsorbed
into Hindu society. The rule of law ‘invented’ in Bengal in the 1840s
had been that the estate of a ‘prostitute’ devolved to her degraded
heirs on the basis of shared degradation. As contests for the estate
of ‘prostitutes’ between degraded and undegraded heirs multiplied
in the late nineteenth century, the position of courts with respect to
the question of whether ‘prostitution’ produced a severance of ties
so as to extinguish the claims of undegraded heirs began to shift.
Initially, courts continued to uphold the old rule rewarding
degraded heirs over undegraded heirs.161 In a contest for the estate
of a widow who had become a ‘woman of the town’, the Calcutta
High Court ruled on the basis of Bengal precedent that, because the
widow had ceased all connection with her husband’s family, members
of her husband’s family could not set themselves up as heirs to prop-
erty acquired after her degradation.162 Although it did not follow
Bengal precedent, the Madras High Court arrived at the same result.
Holding that the Hindu law governing the devolution of stridhan
could not apply to the earnings of a ‘prostitute’, it suggested that
‘there [was] an analogy between the legal relation of two prostitute
sisters living together in their degraded condition and that of two
brothers living in coparcenary, while a third brother lives away from
them without any community of interest.’163 It was an analogy to the
158
Angammal v. Venkata Reddy, 26 Mad. 509 (1902).
159
Ram Nath Tolapattro v. Durga Sundari Debi, 5 Cal. 776 (1879).
160
Ramananda v. Raikishori Barmani, 22 Cal. 347 (1894); Sundari Letani v.
Pitambari Letani, 32 Cal. 871 (1905).
161
Sivasangu v. Minal, 12 Mad. 277 (1888); In the Goods of Kamineymoney
Bewah, 21 Cal. 697 (1894); Bhutnath Mondol v. Secretary of State for India in
Council, 10 C.W.N. 1085 (1906).
162
In the Goods of Kamineymoney Bewah, 21 Cal. 697 (1894).
163
Sivasangu v. Minal, 12 Mad. 277, 284 (1888). In Arunagiri Mudali v. Ran-
ganayaki Ammal, 21 Mad. 40 (1897), the Madras High Court held that the Hindu
law applicable to the estate of a woman who had married two husbands was inapplic-
able to the self-acquired property of a ‘prostitute’.
604 KUNAL M. PARKER
Hindu law, rather than the logic of total severance, that rewarded
degraded heirs over undegraded heirs. Each of the two ‘prostitute’
sisters in the case had been mistresses of long standing to local men.
By the early twentieth century, however, courts arrived at the posi-
tion that ‘[b]y her degradation a woman does not cease to be a Hindu
unless she become a convert to some other religion, and therefore
the rule of succession to her property would be the ordinary rule of
Hindu law.’164 This legal position was enabled through textualism.
Courts in Bengal began to dissent from the old rule on the ground
that the opinion of the pundit relied upon in the Sudder Dewanny
Adawlut’s decision in 1846 ‘had cited no original texts, either from
the Smritis or from the Commentaries in support of his opinion.’165
The silence of Hindu legal texts themselves on the question of the
devolution of a ‘prostitute’ ’s property was interpreted as sanctioning
the reabsorption of degraded Hindu women into the Hindu law. In
order to do this, the effect of degradation resulting in a permanent
loss of caste was itself reimagined on the basis of labored readings
of Hindu legal texts as no longer entailing civil death:
It is fairly clear from the passages already quoted that the performance of
ceremonies similar to obsequial ceremonies by the kindred of a person who
is guilty of a heinous sin and has thereby become an outcast, is indicative
not of the fact that he is civilly dead but rather of the fact that his social
rights have been suspended and such rights may be revived by the perform-
ance of the appropriate ceremonies and penances.166
Once degradation itself was ‘neutralized’, the argument that
degraded Hindu women continued to be governed by the Hindu law
could be articulated forcefully. The reabsorption of degraded Hindu
women into the Hindu law meant that the property of degraded
Hindu women could be considered stridhan167 or some other form
of property governed by the Hindu law; that the Hindu law on the
devolution of stridhan or such other form of property could be
applied to such property; and that a degraded woman who claimed
to be the heir to the estate of another degraded women by reason
of shared degradation, if otherwise barred from inheriting under the
Hindu law, would have the impossible task of making out that ‘the
164
Narain Das v. Tirlok Tiwari, 29 All. 4, 7 (1906).
165
Chatoo Kurmi v. Rajaram Tewari, 11 C.L.J. 124, 125 (1909) (Order of
Reference).
166
Hari Lal Sinha v. Tripura Charan Ray, 17 C.W.N. 679, 689 (1913).
167
Ibid., 686–7.
stain of degradation [had] created a new heritable right in her.’168
While courts in Madras continued for a while to express the view
that preferring degraded heirs of a ‘prostitute’ might be defended
on ‘equitable principles’, they also held that loss of caste did not
dissolve a marriage tie, thereby permitting undegraded members of
a ‘prostitute’ ’s husband’s family to succeed to her estate.169 Finally,
casting aside any concern for ‘equitable principles’, courts in Madras
held that ‘[i]llegitimacy or degradation cannot be treated as a
ground of preference’,170 thereby abandoning all expression of prefer-
ence for degraded heirs.
Through its adjudication of property relationships among temple
dancing girls, Anglo-Indian law effectively extended the Hindu law
to them. This extension was a highly complicated process, consisting
of a simultaneous absorption of temple dancing girls into, and rejec-
tion of temple dancing girls from, the Hindu law. Anglo-Indian legal
commentators offered simplistic accounts of these processes by redu-
cing them to the inconsistencies of Hindu legal texts. In his authorit-
ative treatise on the Hindu law, John Mayne identified these incon-
sistencies succinctly as follows:
[P]rostitution is not only recognized by Hindu usage and honoured in the
class of dancing girls, but the relations between the prostitute and her
paramour were regulated by law, just as any other species of contract. Even
according to the Hindu views, however, it is immoral, and entails degrada-
tion from caste.171
In the writings of Mayne and others, these inconsistencies were pro-
duced by juxtaposing textual references to ‘prostitutes’ and textual
restrictions upon the sexual freedoms of women; they were typically
‘resolved’ by pointing out that ‘[the Hindu system] contains within
itself the means of a gradual purification corresponding to [an]
advance in moral . . . refinement . . .’.172 The ‘advance’ in question
would, of course, be the preserve of the Anglo-Indian judiciary. How-
ever, the absorption of temple dancing girls into, and the rejection
of temple dancing girls from, the Hindu law were not a matter of
the textual inconsistencies of Hindu legal texts. They were produced
168
Sundari Dossee v. Nemye Charan Das, 6 C.L.J. 372, 373 (1907).
169
Subbaraya Pillai v. Ramasami Pillai, 23 Mad. 171 (1899). See also Bisheshur
v. Mata Ghulam, N.W.P.H.C.R. 300 (1870).
170
Narumayya Chetti v. Tiruvangadathan Chetti, 24 M.L.J. 223, 227 (1912).
171
Mayne, supra note 95, at 60–1 (citations omitted).
172
West and Bühler, supra note 115, at II, 886.
606 KUNAL M. PARKER
through the shifting, contradictory and inconsistent positions of

Anglo-Indian courts.
Until the 1880s, Anglo-Indian courts based their recognition of
property relationships among temple dancing girls by representing
such relationships as governed directly by the Hindu law. This stance
was quite different from either deriving analogies from the Hindu
law to resolve disputes or resorting to the Hindu law to fill interstitial
spaces within customary law. Furthermore, it was entirely without
basis in Hindu legal texts themselves. Perhaps for this reason, Anglo-
Indian legal writers differed as to precisely how the Hindu law might
govern property relationships among temple dancing girls. On the
one hand, Strange’s influential Manual of Hindoo Law treated succes-
sion to the property of a dancing girl as governed by the rules applic-
able to the devolution of stridhan, claiming that ‘[t]he property of
a dancing girl will pass to her female issue first . . . as in the case
of other females.’173 On the other hand, Cunningham’s Digest of
Hindu Law claimed that ‘succession to dancing women is the ordinary
succession of Hindu heirs to family property, except that daughters
are placed before sons in the order of succession.’174 In a somewhat
confused fashion, Anglo-Indian courts adopted the former view. They
acknowledged that joint families of dancing girls enjoyed rights to
family property in the manner of Hindu coparcenaries;175 invoked
the Hindu law with respect to the partibility of the gains of learning
in partition suits brought by dancing girls;176 and developed the posi-
tion that ‘the Hindu law of inheritance appears not to warrant any
distinction between the descent of [a dancing woman’s] property and
the descent of paternal property, except that daughters are placed
before sons in the order of succession as in the case of the succession
to stridhanum, and this without qualification.’177
While they were representing property relationships among
temple dancing girls as governed by the Hindu law, Anglo-Indian
courts continued to essentialize temple dancing girls as ‘prostitutes’.
Some courts began to ask whether, in light of the passage of the
173
Strange, supra note 116, at 89.
174
H. S. Cunningham, A Digest of Hindu Law as Administered in the Courts of the
Madras Presidency (Madras, 1877), 112.
175
Chalakonda Alasani v. Chalakonda Ratnachalam, 2 M.H.C.R. 56 (1864).
176
Ibid.; Boologam v. Swornam, 4 Mad. 330 (1881). The practice of applying the
Hindu law to the succession customs of dancing girls continued well into the twen-
tieth century. See, e.g., Subramania Ayyar v. Rathnavelu Chetty, 41 Mad. 44, 73
(1917); Narayan Pundlik v. Laxman Daji, 51 Bom. 784 (1927).
177
Kamakshi v. Nagaratnam, 5 M.H.C.R. 161, 164–5 (1870).
Indian Penal Code, it was time to withdraw the judicial sanction
given to ‘the profession of a prostitute’ represented by adjudications
of property disputes among dancing girls.178 Others responded by
declaring various provisions of the Hindu law inapplicable to dancing
girls by reason of their ‘prostitution’. For example, in 1863, the Civil
Judge of Vizagapatam turned to the Hindu law in respect of the
partibility of the gains of learning to resolve a suit brought by a
dancing girl against her adoptive daughter for the recovery of
jewelry, utensils and other movable property as compensation for the
considerable amounts expended on training her daughter to sing and
dance. Although he recognized that ‘part at least of the property in
litigation consists of the profits of prostitution’, he believed that
dancing girls also had ‘honest means of living, since they are profes-
sional singers and dancers; and no doubt much property is often
acquired in this way by women of this caste.’179 According to the
Civil Judge, the ‘learning’ in the case was, therefore, a knowledge
of singing and dancing. The Madras High Court disagreed. It consid-
ered singing and dancing vestigial to the ‘true’ source of a dancing
girl’s earnings. After a lengthy discussion of the applicable Hindu
law in respect of the partibility of the gains of learning, the Madras
High Court declared the Hindu law to be entirely inapplicable to
dancing girls because ‘[t]he gains can scarcely be said to be those
of music and dancing. They are rather the proceeds of an unfortu-
nate trade, recognized and legalized by Hindú law and carried on
for a long series of years by this family.’ Accordingly, the dispute
was resolved not on the basis of the Hindu law but rather on the
basis of ‘plain principles of law, no less than common justice.’180
After 1880, as the criminalization of temple dancing girls picked
up, Anglo-Indian courts edged away from viewing the property rela-
tionships of temple dancing girls as governed by the general Hindu
law applicable to coparcenaries, stridhan and so on. Instead, they
absorbed communities of temple dancing girls into the Hindu law
by imagining temple dancing girls as Hindu women degraded from
caste by reason of their ‘prostitution’. This was accomplished
through ‘explaining’ the succession customs of temple dancing girls
in terms of the rule invented in Bengal in the 1840s pursuant to
178
Unpublished case referred to in Note at Chalakonda Alasani v. Chalakonda
Ratnachellam, 2 M.H.C.R. 56, 78 (1864).
179
Ibid., 57.
180
Ibid., 78. A similar view was adopted in Boologam v. Swornum, 4 Mad. 330
(1881).
608 KUNAL M. PARKER
which ‘prostitute’ heirs inherited the property of ‘prostitutes’ on the

basis of shared degradation from caste. Even as this rule was being
abandoned in other contexts as inadequately grounded in Hindu
legal texts, it was used to imagine the matriarchal succession cus-
toms of temple dancing girls, in which women inherited property
in preference to men, as existing principally because of the shared
degradation of dancing women. Various treatise writers had
expressed this view since the 1860s.181 The very existence of distinct-
ive communities of dancing girls was attributed to an originary
degradation from caste:
This wretched class seems to have been originally composed of the unfortu-
nate women outcasted by Hindu society on account of their unchastity
under such circumstances that it could not be expiated by penance or rede-
emed by atonement. The fear of social persecution that awaits indiscreet
women of respectable families, deviating from the path of virtue, does often
compel them to leave the Hindu society which sets a very high value on the
chastity of females, and to join the community of the unfortunate women.182
In 1889, the Madras High Court explicitly declared the law applic-
able to the succession of the estate of a temple dancing girl to be
the law applicable to the estate of a degraded Hindu woman.183 Two
dancing girl sisters, Pedda Narasi and Lakshmi, had each taken
shares in the disputed property, which was alleged to be family prop-
erty. (If the property had in fact been family property, it was highly
unlikely that its devolution had in the first place followed the rules
of the Hindu law, under which daughters could not inherit except
in the absence of male heirs.) After their death, their brother, the
plaintiff, claimed under the Hindu law that his sisters’ property
should revert to him as the surviving male heir of the family. Pedda
Narasi’s ‘adoptive daughter’,184 the defendant, defended her claim
on the ground that ‘the case is governed by the peculiar law applic-
able to dancing women . . .’185 Pedda Narasi had predeceased
Lakshmi, who had inherited her share. The dispute was, therefore,
about what law should apply to the devolution of Lakshmi’s share.
Instead of relying upon the succession customs of temple dancing
181
Strange, supra note 116, at 89; Reginald Thompson, A Manual of Hindu Law
(2nd ed.) (Madras, 1878), 102.
182
Golápchandra Sarkár, Sástrı́, The Hindu Law of Adoption: Tagore Law Lectures—
1888 (Calcutta, 1891), 458.
183
13 Mad. 133 (1889).
184
The defendant, ‘though not formally adopted by Pedda Narasi, was introduced
by her into the temple and [had] become a deva dasi.’ Ibid., 134.
185
Ibid.
girls as the defendant had contended, the Madras High Court con-
strued the dispute as requiring the elaboration of a relationship
between temple dancing women and Hindu society, which were ima-
gined as distinct from each other by reason of the alleged ‘degrada-
tion’ of temple dancing women:
[The property] was at the death of Lakshmi, the property of a dancing girl.
The question is who is the nearest heir to the dancing girl. The general
rule is that the legal relation between a prostitute dancing girl and her
undegraded relations remaining in caste become severed, and in this view
the defendant . . . is the only heir to Lakshmi.186
The succession customs of temple dancing girls offered no basis
for this blurring of the distinction between communities of dancing
women, on the one hand, and degraded Hindu women, on the other.
Furthermore, the very fact that men were never completely disabled
from inheriting under the succession customs of dancing girls, as
Anglo-Indian treatise writers themselves acknowledged,187 suggests
that the idea of ‘severance’ between temple dancing girls and their
‘undegraded’ male relatives simply did not exist. In fact, among the
Bogam ‘caste’ in the Godavari district of the Madras Presidency, the
property of dancing girls was proved to devolve by custom equally
to sons and daughters.188 By thus ‘explaining’ the succession customs
of temple dancing girls, Anglo-Indian law undermined claims that
communities of temple dancing girls constituted distinctive corpor-
ate groups; the Hindu law applicable to degraded women, rather
than custom, ‘explained’ the devolution of their property.
Anglo-Indian courts’ representations of temple dancing girls as
degraded Hindu women occurred despite substantial evidence, often
produced within the lower echelons of the judiciary, that the vocabu-
lary of degradation was entirely inapplicable to such women. A dis-
connected textualism overrode such evidence at will. In a suit
brought by a murali (a woman dedicated to the god Khandoba) claim-
ing to inherit her father’s estate to the exclusion of her sisters, the
Subordinate Judge rejected arguments that muralis were disabled
from inheriting as follows:
The defendants have cited no authorities for holding that a Murali is dis-
qualified from inheriting the property of her father. Muralis and Vaghyas do
not relinquish their worldly affairs. They own property. In fact they lead
186
Ibid.
187
See, e.g., Strange, supra note 116, at 89.
188
Chandrareka v. Secretary of State for India, 14 Mad. 163, 165 (1890).
610 KUNAL M. PARKER
lives just like other people. I, therefore, hold that a Murali can inherit, just
like other women. The defendants further contend that plaintiff is
unchaste, that she maintains herself by prostitution, that she is an outcaste,
and that consequently she is disqualified from inheriting the property in
suit. There is no satisfactory evidence on record to show that plaintiff is an
outcaste. On the contrary the evidence satisfactorily shows that the Maratha
or Kunbi people and even her relatives (plaintiff is of Maratha or Kunbi caste)
mix and dine with plaintiff and that she is respected by the Kunbi people.
It is, therefore, evident that plaintiff is not an outcaste.189
The murali’s claim had been that she, as an unmarried daughter
under the Hindu law, inherited to the exclusion of her married sis-
ters under the Mitakshara law. She had also, however, had four chil-
dren, ‘begotten by promiscuous intercourse . . .’.190 The question was,
therefore, how the Hindu legal concept of an ‘unmarried daughter’
should be interpreted. The Bombay High Court acknowledged that
it had held almost forty years earlier that the Hindu law, as received
in Bombay, did not bar a daughter from inheriting by reason of
‘unchastity’.191 However, the question of a daughter’s absolute dis-
qualification to inherit by reason of ‘unchastity’ was distinguished
from the question of a daughter’s claim to inherit on the specific
basis of her status as an ‘unmarried daughter’. According to the
Bombay High Court, the Hindu law drew a sharp distinction between
the status of a kanya or maiden and the status of a sadharan stri or
prostitute; a kanya could cease to be a kanya either by marrying (and
becoming a kulastri or married woman) or by leading a life of
unchastity (and becoming a sadharan stri or prostitute); because only
kulastris and kanyas were designated as heirs, the term ‘unmarried
daughters’ mean kanyas only.192 According to the Bombay High
Court, the Hindu law did not mention the sadharan stri as an heir
‘for the simple reason that, according to [the Hindu lawgivers] such
a daughter as any other woman lapsing into prostitution, became a
disqualified heir as either a patit (outcaste) or upapataki (vicious
woman) and forfeited absolutely all right of inheritance.’193 As a sad-
haran stri within the meaning of the Hindu law, the murali could
not inherit at all while heirs who were kulastris stood ready to take
the estate.
189
Tara v. Krishna, 31 Bom. 495, 497 (1907).
190
Ibid., 501.
191
See supra note 156.
192
Tara v. Krishna, 31 Bom. 495, 506–10 (1907).
193
Ibid., 510.
In an unexpected appropriation of arguments made by Anglo-
Indian judges and legal commentators, degraded Hindu women in
Bengal and Madras began to claim to be governed by the customs
of dancing girls in contests for each other’s estates. In Bengal, the
customs of dancing girls were invoked specifically because sisters
were not recognized as heirs under the Dayabhaga law. Thus, in a
contest for the estate of Sabachari Bewa, described as a ‘woman of
the town’, her sister, also a degraded woman, invoked precedents
from Madras applying to dancing girls in support of her claim. The
Calcutta High Court resolutely dismissed this argument by repres-
enting the ‘caste custom’ of dancing girls in Bombay and Madras as
completely distinct from the law applicable to degraded Hindu
women in Bengal:
It was ingeniously argued upon the authority of a text . . . cited in the
Mitakshara . . . that treats prostitutes as forming a fifth class or caste, that
prostitutes belong to one caste or community all over India, and that if a
degraded sister of a prostitute is her heir in Madras . . ., the same rule
should be held to be true for Bengal. . . . [W]e need not add that a custom
obtaining amongst any caste in Madras or Bombay cannot, in the absence
of evidence, be assumed to [prevail amongst] the same class in Bengal.194
A similar position was adopted by the Madras High Court in dis-
missing claims by degraded Hindu women who argued that they
should be governed by the succession customs of dancing girls.195
Although courts rejected such arguments, the very fact that they
were made constitutes evidence of Anglo-Indian courts’ successful
representation of temple dancing girls as degraded Hindu women.
As a result of their successful representation of temple dancing
girls as degraded Hindu women, Anglo-Indian courts and legal com-
mentators felt justified in cutting back explicitly on their former
application of the general Hindu law to property relationships among
temple dancing girls. This was particularly true with respect to earl-
ier positions that the family property of temple dancing girls was
governed by the Hindu law in respect of coparcenaries. Because the
Hindu law in respect of coparcenaries tended to be invoked in parti-
tion suits, Anglo-Indian courts and legal commentators were uncom-
fortable with the notion that they might be instrumentalities in the
division of the profits of ‘prostitution’. Accordingly, it was asserted
194
Sarna Moyee Bewa v. Secretary of State for India in Council, 25 Cal. 254,
257–8 (1897). See also In the Goods of Kamineymoney Bewah, 21 Cal. 697, 701
(1894).
195
Meenakshi v. Muniandi Panikkan, 38 Mad. 1144, 1145 (1914).
612 KUNAL M. PARKER
that ‘[a] true joint family could not possibly spring from a prostitute
mother . . .’196 Madras courts began to express hesitation as to
whether joint families of dancing girls could in fact be governed by
the Hindu law in respect of coparcenaries because ‘as we know . . .
from the nature of their profession it could not be expected that
the sisters would ordinarily live together long . . .’197 Although courts
sometimes appeared to recognize the existence of coparcenary-like
arrangements among temple dancing girls,198 the existence of Hindu
coparcenaries among temple dancing girls was definitively rejected
on the grounds that, inter alia, ‘[t]here is . . . no text of Hindu law
which recognizes the acquisition by birth of the daughter of a danc-
ing girl of a right in the ancestral property of her mother’ and the
parties had not successfully proved a custom to that effect.199 Indian
legal commentators were particularly anxious to salvage the image
of the Hindu law itself. For example, Sir Gooroodass Banerjee called
for a definitive excision of temple dancing girls from the Hindu law:
You must not imagine that the Hindu law which visits unchastity in a
woman with the direst penalties, and which declares the disloyal wife to be
unworthy of stridhana, could have ever cared to lay down any order of succes-
sion to the property of such women. The Anglo-Indian courts being now
and then called upon to decide contested questions of inheritance to such
property, have been obliged to lay down some rules; and these constitute
the whole law on the subject.200
The representation of temple dancing girls as degraded Hindu
women was by no means unambiguous. In 1915, the Madras High
Court itself admitted that it had in the past erroneously extended
the vocabulary of degradation to communities of temple dancing
girls. However, because of a general judicial reluctance to extend
the Hindu law to property relationships among temple dancing girls,
its characterization of dancing girls rested upon the alternative
vocabulary of ‘caste’. In dealing with a dispute over the estate of a
deceased dancing girl, it stated:
That male members of this caste are usually governed by the Hindu law
. . . does not seem to have been questioned; so also when female members
marry and have children, as they sometimes do, their family relation is
governed by the Hindu law. . . . At the same time their female children may
196
West and Bühler, supra note 116, at II, 601.
197
Viralakshmi Ammal v. Dorasinga Pilla, 29 I.C. 974, 975 (1914).
198
Kokilambal v. Sundarammal, 21 M.L.W. 259 (1924).
199
Gangamma v. Kuppammal, Mad. 789, 800–1 (1938).
200
Banerjee, supra note 149, at 458–9.
remain unmarried and become professional dasis without any degradation
or stigma attaching to them so long as they observe the caste customs. . . .
We are led to make these observations for showing that there is no such thing as a
dissolution of the natural tie of relationship between the members of the caste who
remain unmarried and follow their trade and their married relations who lead a respect-
able life.201
Dismissing Hindu rules of succession applicable to women as hinging
upon marital status (and therefore as inapplicable to communities
of women who did not marry), the Court preferred to rely upon the
‘caste custom’ of temple dancing girls to prefer the claimant who
was a dancing girl over the male claimant. Its ruling, it declared,
was ‘in accordance with the consciousness of the parties . . .’.202
C. THE ‘CRIME’ OF ‘DEDICATING GIRLS TO A LIFE OF TEMPLE-HARLOTRY’
Ostensibly a simple application of Sections 372 and 373 of the

Indian Penal Code, the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life of temple
harlotry’ developed entirely independently of other offenses under
the same provisions. Anglo-Indian legal rhetoric surrounding the
‘crime’ reveals occasional expressions of solicitude for the autonomy
of the young girls who were dedicated as temple dancing girls; they
were represented as being deprived of their ability to determine their
lives as a consequence of dedication at a very young age. However,
the form in which this autonomy was imagined reveals the extreme
specificity of the ‘crime’.
The ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life of temple-harlotry’ differed
from other offenses under Sections 372 and 373 in at least two
important ways. First, the criminal law’s deployment of the concept
of ‘prostitution’ with respect to temple dancing girls reveals its heavy
reliance upon the Hindu law. The ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life
of temple-harlotry’ was directed towards the eradication of temple
dancing girls as a group on the basis of an assumed identity between
the status of temple dancing girls and ‘prostitution’. (This assumed
identity was transformed into a rebuttable legal presumption in the
early twentieth century.) However, in the context of temple dancing
girls, Anglo-Indian courts neither discussed what specific activities
201
Subbaratna Mudali v. Balakrishnaswami Naidu, 33 M.L.J. 207, 208–9 (1917)
(emphasis added).
202
Ibid., 211. See also Narayan Pundlik v. Laxman Daji, 51 Bom. 784 (1924);
Shanmugathammal v. Gomathi Ammal, 67 M.L.J. 861 (1934).
614 KUNAL M. PARKER
might constitute ‘prostitution’ nor required evidence of specific

instances of ‘prostitution’. In addition to being taken as given, the
‘prostitution’ of temple dancing girls was seen as a condition.
It is hardly accidental that temple dancing girls, temple servants
and others were found guilty under Section 372 of ‘dispos[ing] of
minors . . . with intent that such minor shall be employed or used
for the purpose of prostitution’ when they participated in the dedica-
tion of young girls to temple idols. Although they varied widely, cere-
monies of dedication generally replicated Hindu marriage rites; the
dedicated girl was deemed ‘married’ to a temple idol, thereby becom-
ing incapable of contracting a ‘real’ marriage. Absent specific evid-
ence of prostitution, the foreclosing of marriage as an option for
young girls could only amount to a disposal ‘for the purpose of prosti-
tution’ within the meaning of the criminal law if ‘prostitution’ itself
were understood as a vast residual category defined as sexual activity
‘outside’ marriage. This specific relationship between ‘prostitution’
and marriage was, however, highly peculiar to the Hindu law. There-
fore, albeit expressed in terms of a liberal judicial solicitude for the
autonomy of young girls, the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life of
temple-harlotry’ should be seen as instantiating the specific valoriza-
tion of marriage reflected in Hindu legal norms.
Occasionally, arguments were made by temple dancing girls in
their own defense that they did not practice ‘prostitution’. Employed
in this sense, ‘prostitution’ referred presumably to the urban sex
trade that had been developing in colonial centers since the early
nineteenth century. Such arguments typically drew distinctions
between the concubinage of temple dancing girls and the ‘prostitu-
tion’ of others. Accordingly, Anglo-Indian courts heard arguments
that temple dancing girls were not ‘prostitutes’ because they were
‘kept by the same man for a year or more . . .’203 However, such
arguments uniformly failed, precisely because they mistook the
nature of the ‘prostitution’ of which temple dancing girls were
accused:
The distinction sought to be made between prostitution and concubinage is
. . . without any basis. [T]he life most likely to be led by the girl in con-
sequence of the dedication would be an immoral life, being of the same
203
Regina v. Arunáchellam, 1 Mad. 164, 165 (1876). See also Queen-Empress
v. Baku, 24 Bom. 287, 293 (1899); Public Prosecutor v. Kannammal, 24 M.L.J. 211,
217 (1913).
kind as that of the Bhavins . . . or Basvis . . ., among whom married life was
impossible, and prostitution the usual means of livelihood.204
Second, Anglo-Indian courts were compelled to employ an
extremely loose notion of ‘disposing’ of a minor. Section 372 targeted
an individual who ‘sells, lets to hire, or otherwise disposes of any
minor . . .’. It was intended to suppress a traffic in children. Under
interpretive principles of ejusdem generis, the term ‘otherwise disposes’
might have been read as akin to selling and letting to hire. However,
this would have required evidence of an actual transfer of control
over the child by its parents. Although temple dancing girls were
occasionally involved in the purchase of children, dedication itself,
which was often performed voluntarily by parents, involved no formal
transfer of control over a child. Anglo-Indian courts responded by
reading the term ‘otherwise disposes of ’ extremely broadly to cover
an ever widening range of acts in which even the remotest hint that
a young girl had been associated with service in a temple as a danc-
ing girl became sufficient to complete the offense. The judicial initi-
ative to recuperate young girls for marriage was not fettered by the
technicalities of statutory interpretation.
The first conviction of a temple dancing girl under the Indian
Penal Code took place in Bombay. On 10 May, 1869, the Session
Judge of Ratnágiri sentenced Jailı́ Bhávin and five others to ‘one
day’s simple imprisonment and . . . a fine of one hundred rupees
. . .’205 Jailı́ Bhávin was convicted of performing the shej ceremony
upon a child, Súndri, that she had adopted. The shej ceremony was
described by the Session Judge:
A khangira, or knife, is put on the ground before the idol, and the girl who
is to undergo the ceremony puts a garland on the knife, her mother then
puts rice on the girl’s forehead, and the officiating priest then weds the girl
to a knife, just as if he were to unite her to a boy in marriage, by reciting
the mantrás, while a curtain is held between the girl and the knife. The girl
thus becomes a Bhávin, and dedicated to the service of the temple, and
cannot marry again, and subsists generally by prostitution after attaining
majority.206
The Session Judge noted that the ‘ostensible’ purpose of this cere-
mony was to enable the girl to perform menial temple services. Only
204
Queen-Empress v. Baku, 24 Bom. at 293 (1899).
205
Regina v. Jailı́ Bhávin, 6 B.H.C.R. 60 (1869).
206
Ibid., 60–1.
616 KUNAL M. PARKER
Bhávins were permitted to perform certain temple services, for

which the state itself appropriated revenues. However, the remu-
neration attached to these services was too small, inevitably inducing
Bhávins to become ‘prostitutes’. Therefore, ‘it may almost be
assumed that all who took part in the performance of this ceremony
on the girl Súndri must have been well aware that, in all probability,
Súndri in course of time, by reason of this dedication, will become a
prostitute.’207 However, the sentence was very deliberately moderate
because ‘they who performed it were acting in conformity with a
long-established usage, and one which had indirectly received the
sanction of the ruling power.’208 On appeal, Jailı́ Bhávin argued that
the dedication ceremony itself was innocent; that the words ‘dispos-
ing of ’ in Section 372 required a disposing of the minor to a third
person; and that ‘the Legislature could not have intended covertly
to render illegal an act in itself innocent, sanctioned by long usage,
recognised by the Government itself in setting apart provision for
these girls, and approved by the general religious sentiments of the
Hindú community.’209 The Bombay High Court rejected all these
arguments. ‘Disposal’ within the meaning of Section 372 did not
require that Jailı́ ‘should have given up present possession of the
child in order to render herself amenable to the law . . .’;210 dedica-
tion in a temple was held to be sufficient to constitute a ‘disposal’
within the meaning of the criminal law because ‘by her dedication
to the temple Súndri was doomed to be a Bhávin, and in all likelihood
a prostitute for life . . .’.211
The Madras High Court followed suit a year later when it heard
an appeal from a decision of the Acting Session Judge of Chingle-
put.212 A woman named Tayee had sold her daughters to dancing
girls attached to the Soobramania Swamy Pagoda of Triperoor for
‘the consideration of a neck ornament and Rupees 35’; the names
of Tayee’s daughters were entered in the accounts of the pagoda;
evidence was taken ‘which tended to prove that the dancing girls
(who never married) gained their livelihood by the performance of
certain offices in pagodas, by assisting in the performance of cere-
monies in private houses, by dancing and singing upon occasions of
207
Ibid., 61.
208
Ibid., 62.
209
Ibid., 63.
210
Ibid., 64.
211
Ibid.
212
Ex parte Padmavati, 5 M.H.C.R. 415 (1870).
marriage, and by prostitution.’213 From the perspective of the Court,
‘prostitution’ clearly eclipsed all these other activities. Tayee was
convicted under Section 372, the dancing girls under Section 373.
On appeal, the Madras High Court decided that ‘the evidence
renders it abundantly clear that girls so sold and registered are
brought up as prostitutes . . .’ and that ‘[t]he Abbé Dubois and many
other authorities had placed the matter beyond historical doubt.’214
It dismissed arguments that it was encroaching upon religious prac-
tice and custom by criminalizing the registration of girls as temple
dancing girls. However, it reduced the sentences of each prisoner to
eighteen months’ imprisonment because this was the first case of its
kind in Madras.215
Although Anglo-Indian courts continued to focus upon the ded-
ication ceremony because it most starkly represented a foreclosure
of the possibility of marriage,216 the evidentiary uses of dedication
ceremonies in criminal prosecutions had the unsurprising effect of
driving them underground. Legal materials cannot provide a sense
of the precise impact of criminal prosecutions on the incidence of
dedication ceremonies. However, by the early twentieth century,
the Madras High Court reported that ‘it [was] possible . . . that
. . . temple authorities would not now venture on any formal ded-
ication of a minor to the dasi service.’217 An index of the reluctance
of temple servants is perhaps furnished by occasional suits by
temple dancing girls to compel them to perform dedication cere-
monies.218 Initially, the ‘disappearance’ of dedication ceremonies
appears to have assisted temple dancing girls, temple officials and
others. Based on a mechanical adherence to precedent, lower
courts refused to find offenses where no formal dedication cere-
mony had taken place. Accordingly, in the early 1890s, the Acting
Head Assistant Magistrate of Madura refused to convict on the
following grounds:
The tying of bottu to show dedication or the enrollment of this girl among
the dancing girls of the temple is the most important ingredient of the
offence. . . . It does not appear that [the girl] had been dedicated with the
213
Ibid., 415–16.
214
Ibid., 416.
215
Ibid., 417.
216
See, e.g., Regina v. Arunáchellam, 1 Mad. 164 (1876); Srinivasa v. Annasami,
15 Mad. 41 (1891); Emperor v. Sahebava Birappa, 27 Bom. L.R. 1022 (1925).
217
Public Prosecutor v. Kannammal, 24 M.L.J. 211, 213 (1913).
218
Kamalakshi v. Ramasami Chetti, 19 Mad. 127, 128 (1895).
618 KUNAL M. PARKER
formal ceremonies pertaining to the occasion. . . . [The girl] is at liberty to

marry . . .219
On appeal, the Madras High Court reversed. Rejecting legal fetish-
izations of the dedication ceremony itself, it declared that evidence
that the Tahsildar of the temple had ordered that the girl’s name
be entered in the pay abstracts of the temple like other dancing
girls, the actual entry of the girl’s name in the pay abstracts of the
temple and proof of services performed by the girl in the temple
constituted prima facie evidence of criminal intent under Section
372.220 This case suggests how, as a result of the ‘disappearance’ of
the dedication ceremony, Anglo-Indian courts began to cast wider
nets for proxies for the dedication ceremony itself.
The consequence of the search for proxies for the dedication cere-
mony was that the legal interpretation of the term ‘otherwise dis-
poses of ’ in Section 372 became almost impossibly diffuse, covering
even the slightest act that might stand for the possibility that a
young girl might become a dancing girl. The search for proxies
became a frenzied uncovering of traces. In 1905, the Bombay High
Court convicted Bhimde Pandu Deoli of ‘disposing of ’ minors
because he had planned to perform the shej ceremony in respect of
several girls; Bhimde Pandu Deoli argued unsuccessfully that,
although he had planned to perform the ceremony, the girls had
proceeded to the temple of their own accord ‘in a religious frenzy’
entirely without his knowledge.221 There were occasional dissenting
voices as, for instance, when an offense under Section 372 was
deemed to have occurred when a young girl’s name was registered
in (but subsequently removed from) the accounts of a temple:
Seeing that the term [‘dispose of ’] in section 372 . . . is used in conjunction
with selling and letting to hire, it would seem that the Legislature rather
contemplated some physical disposal for a mercenary purpose or the exer-
cise of some power of control which would be final and irrevocable in its
moral effects. . . .
In this case there has clearly been no irrevocable disposal. The girl is not
dedicated; there is no change in her status, and she is still free to marry; no
physical possession of her person has been handed over; all that has been
done is to register her name among the servants of the temple pro tempore
and remove it when found unqualified.222
219
Srinivasa v. Annasami, 15 Mad. 41, 41–2 (1891).
220
Ibid., 43. This position was reiterated when the case returned on petition to
the Madras High Court. Srinivasa v. Annasami, 15 Mad. 323, 327 (1892).
221
Emperor v. Bhimde, 7 Bom. L.R. 562, 565 (1905).
222
Srinivasa v. Annasami, 15 Mad. 323, 329–30 (1892) (Parker, J.) (emphasis
in original).
The casting of wider nets for proxies for the dedication ceremony
also reached the custom of adopting daughters. In Venku v. Mahalinga,
the Madras High Court prevented the Indian Penal Code from sup-
pressing the adoption customs of dancing girls in their entirety
through its refusal to essentialize dancing girls as ‘prostitutes’.
According to the Court, the alleged ‘prostitution’ of dancing girls
was ‘neither [their] essential condition nor necessary consequence, but
an incident due to social influences.’223 The Indian Penal Code was
not intended to suppress customs of adopting daughters among com-
munities of dancing girls that might be directed, like the Hindu law
of adoption, at procuring daughters to perpetuate a family, transmit
property and perform funeral obsequies; it would, however, ‘prevent
[a dancing girl] from prostituting or from entering into a contract
for prostituting the adopted daughter so long as she is under sixteen
years of age.’224 Even in the course of articulating this protective
posture with respect to the adoption customs of dancing girls, how-
ever, the Madras High Court’s understanding of ‘prostitution’
remained defined residually in opposition to marriage. There would
be no ‘crime’ if the girl was free to ‘choose’.
The policy of the Penal Code . . . is not to obliterate altogether the distinc-
tion between the province of ethics and that of law, but to protect the chastity
of minors and to assure to them the freedom of choosing married life when they attain
their age, whether they are the natural or adopted daughters of dancing
girls, and to leave otherwise the incidents of their legal status as daughters
untouched, whether the parties concerned are dancing women or ordinary
Hindus.225
Nevertheless, the Madras High Court’s protective posture towards
dancing girls had the important consequence of preventing courts
from constructing a rebuttable legal presumption that adoptions by
dancing girls were offenses under Section 373. In a subsequent case,
the Madras High Court required that in each instance of adoption
by a dancing girl, the ‘criminal’ intent of the adoptive mother had
to be established by cogent evidence because adoptions by dancing
girls were not criminal per se. Furthermore, intent to ‘prostitute’ a
girl was criminal only if the girl was intended to be employed as a
‘prostitute’ during her minority. There was nothing wrong with a
dancing girl’s bringing up a girl so long as the girl could ‘choose’
upon reaching the age of sixteen.
223
Venku v. Mahalinga, 11 Mad. at 402 (emphasis in orginal).
224
Ibid.
225
620 KUNAL M. PARKER
It is reasonable to infer that there was no intention at the time of adoption

to employ [the adopted daughter] at once for the purposes of prostitution.
It would also be no offence if the intention was that the girl should be
brought up as a daughter and that, when she attains her age, she should
be allowed to elect either to marry or to follow the profession of her prosti-
tute mother. If, on the other hand, the intention was that the girl should
be employed as a prostitute whilst she continues to be a minor, the accused
might then be liable.226
By the early twentieth century, this more protective posture
towards dancing girls unraveled. First, the Madras High Court form-
ally abandoned the position that ‘criminal’ intent had to be proved
by the prosecution in each instance of adoption by a dancing girl.227
However, the facts of the case were somewhat peculiar, which
explains why Madras courts did not regularly invoke it as precedent
in subsequent civil adjudications of adoption customs. A dancing girl
had adopted a girl who was under the age of sixteen at the time of
the adoption; the girl had received prasadam in the temple at Srivilli-
puttur as the dancing girl’s daughter; there was contradictory evid-
ence with respect to whether any dedication ceremony had been per-
formed with respect to the girl; more importantly, there was no
evidence that the dancing girls of the temple lived by ‘prostitution’
(or that the girl had been ‘debauched’). The Madras High Court
declared that these facts were sufficient to shift the burden of proof
to the accused; it stated that ‘it is . . . for the accused to shew that
her temple is an exception to what is generally known to be the
rule. . .’228 Second, the Madras High Court abandoned the older view
that there would be no offense under Sections 372 and 373 if there
was no intent to ‘prostitute’ the minor before she reached the age
of sixteen.229 A concern for the ‘education’ of the child was articu-
lated; if a child were brought up in an atmosphere of immorality,
any ‘meaningful choice’ she might make upon reaching the age of
sixteen would automatically be vitiated:
The view that all that is necessary in the interest of morality is to leave the
minor a virgin till 16 years of age so that she may then make her choice
between prostitution and a decent life, seems to me to give too little weight
to the probable effect of training and surroundings—and those who acquire
possession of minors in order to prostitute them on their reaching the age
226
Queen-Empress v. Ramanna, 12 Mad. 273, 276 (1888) (per Muttasami
Ayyar, J.).
227
Public Prosecutor v. Kannammal, 24 M.L.J. 211 (1913).
228
Ibid., 214.
229
Ibid., 216.
of 16 may be trusted to see that their training and surroundings during
minority are such as to assist the fulfillment of the intention.230
Accordingly, it was held that defendants could not save themselves
by showing that they had no intention of prostituting minors during
their minority. Sections 372 and 373 were interpreted to be directed
at preventing the ‘degradation’ of minors; it was deemed irrelevant
from the perspective of the criminal law when such ‘degradation’
occurred because ‘[t]he person that moulds the life of immature
women to immoral conduct is no less a pest to society than he that
prostitutes them while they are minors.’231
Although Anglo-Indian courts had cast evidentiary nets that
extended far beyond the dedication ceremony, their understanding
of ‘prostitution’ did not change. The alteration in marriageable
status effected by the dedication ceremony remained the ever more
elusive core of the ‘crime’. This was readily grasped by those affected.
The proliferating defensive arguments made on behalf of temple
dancing girls, all of which centered around marriage, reveal the
extent of their grasp. Dancing girls who had purchased young girls
argued that they had acquired the young girls in order to marry
them; in such instances, courts directed that evidence be produced
as to whether girls brought up by dancing girls were ever married;
predictably enough, courts upheld convictions.232 Individuals who had
been accused of performing a kashi ceremony on a young girl who
had subsequently danced in a temple claimed in their own defense
that, because the kashi ceremony did not prevent the girl from get-
ting married, they should not be convicted under Section 372.233 This
argument failed before the Bombay High Court, which found ‘abund-
ant evidence that dancing girls usually become prostitutes, although
it may doubtless happen that some of them marry either before or
after they have begun a life of prostitution.’234 In this instance, the
possibility of marriage as a mere event did not save individuals from
conviction under Section 372; ‘prostitution’ was a more specific
understanding of the relationship between permissible female sexual
activity and marriage.235
230
Ibid.
231
Ibid., 222 (per Sundara Aiyar, J.).
232
Queen-Empress v. Papa Sani, 23 Mad. 159 (1899).
233
Queen-Empress v. Tippa, 16 Bom. 737, 740–1 (1892).
234
Ibid., 742.
235
In Emperor v. Parmeshwari Subbi, 22 Bom. L.R. 894 (1920), the Bombay
High Court ruled that the gejjee ceremony performed on a girl did not constitute an
622 KUNAL M. PARKER
The valorization of marriage through the criminalization of

temple dancing girls was part of constructing a Hindu community
through the dissemination of patriarchal Hindu legal norms. In
applying this understanding of ‘prostitution’, appellate courts were
utterly dismissive of local understandings of the meaning of foreclos-
ure of marriage even when such understandings were made available
to them. In 1891, the Session Judge of Bellary reversed the convic-
tion under Section 372 of a Madiga who was charged with dedicating
his daughter to a temple idol as a Basivi on the ground that ‘the
record was silent as to the effect of the Basivi marriage ceremony
save that it prevented a subsequent marriage . . .’236 The Session
Judge claimed that the dedication ceremony did not amount to
‘prostitution’:
The Basivis seem in some cases to become prostitutes, but the language
used by the witnesses generally points only to free intercourse with men,
and not necessarily to receipt of payment for use of their bodies. In fact
they seem to acquire the right of intercourse with men without more dis-
credit than accrues to the men of their caste for intercourse with women
who are not their wives.237
The Madras High Court reinstated the conviction on the ground
that, because a Basivi became incapable of contracting a real mar-
riage, the parents of the girl in question ‘cannot but be aware that
the minor will in consequence live a life which is recognized as
immoral.’238
When juxtaposed against other offenses under Sections 372 and
373, the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life of temple harlotry’
reveals its peculiarity. Although such offenses developed alongside
the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life of temple-harlotry’, they never
served as precedent for, or invoked as precedent, the criminalization
of temple dancing girls. They are marked by a painstaking judicial
search for appropriate definitions of ‘prostitution’ and ‘disposing of ’
(or ‘obtaining possession of ’) young girls. Undoubtedly as a con-
sequence of the early age of marriage in India, this judicial quest
for ‘correct’ statutory interpretation was accompanied by a certain
reticence in stamping out the sexual use of minors, even when evid-
ence of traffic in minors was glaring.
offense under Section 372 because the ceremony was shown not to foreclose the
possibility of marriage.
236
Queen-Empress v. Basava, 15 Mad. 75, 75–6 (1891).
237
Ibid., 76.
238
Ibid., 77.
In 1870, around the same period that the Madras High Court
came down with the first convictions of temple dancing girls, Shaik
Ally was charged under Section 373 with having induced an eleven
year-old girl, Dowlath Bee, to accompany him into an uninhabited
house to have sexual intercourse with him by offering her money;
Dowlath Bee had apparently followed him willingly; the two had been
apprehended in the act of having sexual intercourse. The Madras
High court declined to convict Shaik Ally under Section 373 for two
reasons. First, the Court did not find that Shaik Ally had bought,
hired or otherwise obtained possession of Dowlath Bee within the
meaning of Section 373. In order to prove an offense under Section
373, ‘it [was] . . . essential to show that possession of the minor has
been obtained under a distinct arrangement come to between the
parties that the minor’s person should be for sometime [sic] com-
pletely in the keeping and under the control and direction of the
party having the possession’;239 this interpretation of Section 373
was claimed to be bolstered by the correlative terms ‘sells, lets to
hire or otherwise disposes of ’ in Section 372.240 Mere sexual inter-
course with a minor was not ‘obtaining possession’ of such minor.241
Therefore, in order to make out an offense under Sections 372 and
373, evidence of a contractual arrangement between two parties had
to be produced. Second, the Court found that there was no employ-
ment or use of the girl ‘for the purpose of prostitution’ within the
meaning of Section 373. According to the Court, it was obliged to
follow the ‘ordinary and commonly understood’ meaning of prostitu-
tion as ‘the offering of the person for promiscuous sexual intercourse
with men . . .’242 It would be dangerous to convict all men of having
casual sexual intercourse with ‘a willing girl under the age of 16,
capable of giving consent . . .’.243
These interpretations of ‘obtaining possession’ (or ‘disposing’) of
a minor, on the one hand, and ‘prostitution’, on the other, came to
be regularly employed in the construction of ordinary offenses under
Sections 372 and 373. Interpretations of ‘obtaining possession’ (or
‘disposing’) of a minor became even more favorable towards defend-
ants. First, the requirements for ‘obtaining possession’ of a minor
under Section 373 were deemed to have been met only in ‘cases
239
Dowlath Bee v. Shaik Ally, 5 M.H.C.R. 473, 475 (1870).
240
Ibid., 476.
241
See also Queen v. Mussamut Bhutia, N.W.P.H.C.R. 294, 298 (1875).
242
Dowlath Bee v. Shaik Ally, 5 M.H.C.R. at 476.
243
Ibid., 477.
624 KUNAL M. PARKER
where the possession is obtained by purchase or hire . . . involving

an agreement . . . as to the use or employment to which the minor
will be subject.’244 In other words, in addition to evidence of purchase,
hire or obtaining possession, there had to be evidence of a separate
agreement in respect of the uses to which the minor would be put,
presumably as evidence of intent to prostitute. Therefore, where a
defendant had absconded with a minor whom he had then hired out
to strangers, he was deemed not to have ‘obtained possession’ of the
minor within the meaning of Section 373; the rationale was that
there had been no separate agreement between the defendant and
the minor that she should be prostituted at the time that he had
obtained possession of her.245 Second, the requirements of selling,
letting to hire or ‘disposing’ of a minor under Section 372 were held
to be met only when the minor was sold, let to hire or ‘disposed’ for
a definite period of employment (or when the purchaser intended to
employ the minor as a prostitute).246 Individuals who arranged upon
receiving a fee to procure minors for third parties for the purpose
of sexual intercourse on a single occasion were deemed not to have
‘disposed’ of a minor for purposes of prostitution. Advancing this
egregious misreading of Section 372, the Calcutta High Court ruled
that a procurer could not be convicted under Section 372 because
‘[t]he only offence, if any, committed, was in bringing the girl to the
house, in order that she might have an immoral interview with the
supposed customer on that one occasion.’247 Finally, courts were often
willing to find that a minor had acted as a ‘free agent’ in consenting
to sexual relationships with men.248 There could be no ‘obtaining
possession’ (or ‘disposing’) of a minor if the minor consented to the
sexual relationship.
‘Prostitution’ was resolutely held to consist only of ‘promiscuous
sexual intercourse with men.’249 All sorts of sexual use of minors
were excluded by this restrictive definition. First, single instances
of sexual intercourse with minors were deemed not to constitute
‘prostitution’ of minors. As a result, even individuals who had actu-
ally hired young girls for sexual intercourse were absolved of crime.
244
Hardeo v. Empress, 1880 P.R. 13, 14 (1880).
245
Ibid.
246
Queen-Empress v. Sukee Raur, 21 Cal. 97 (1893).
247
248
See, e.g., Queen v. Nourjan and Jaggat Tara, 6 B.L.R. App. 34, 35–7 (1870)
(per Jackson, J.); Hardeo v. Empress, 1880 P.R. 13, 15 (1880).
249
Khushala v. Empress, 1880 P.R. 48, 51 (1880).
For example, the Chief Court of the Punjab reversed the conviction
of a man who had hired an eleven-year-old girl to have sexual inter-
course with him on one occasion because ‘[t]here is nothing to lead
to the supposition that [the man in question] had any intention
beyond this.’250 Second, because sexual intercourse within marriage
was deemed not to constitute ‘prostitution’, individuals who had kid-
napped women under the age of sixteen in order to sell them off in
marriage were held not to have committed an offense under Section
372.251 However, ‘prostitutes’ who had purchased, adopted or edu-
cated young girls were regularly convicted under Section 373; the
otherwise applicable requirements of distinct arrangements arrived
at with respect to the transfer of control over the young girls’ persons
were waived.252
The criminalization of temple dancing girls would have been
impossible if Anglo-Indian courts had treated temple dancing girls
like other defendants. On the one hand, if ‘obtaining possession’ (or
‘disposing’) of a minor had been interpreted as requiring distinct
contractual arrangements to transfer possession of the minor’s person,
dedication ceremonies, registering minors’ names in the accounts of
temples, employing minors to perform services in temples and so on
could not possibly have constituted ‘disposing of ’ a minor for pur-
poses of prostitution. Furthermore, there was no instance of a court
examining whether a minor had acted as a ‘free agent’ in consenting
to dedication as a temple dancing girl. On the other hand, if ‘prosti-
tution’ had been understood as ‘promiscuous sexual intercourse with
men’, temple dancing girls would not have been criminalized because
they normally engaged in concubinage, as they occasionally argued
with very little success before Anglo-Indian courts. On the rare occa-
sions when attempts were made by the state to collapse the carefully
constructed barrier between the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a life
of temple-harlotry’ and other offenses under Sections 372 and 373,
Anglo-Indian courts resisted them. In 1920, the Madras High Court
was required to determine whether performance of the kanyarikam
ceremony might be criminal.253 The ceremony had been performed
250
Crown v. Mohubbut, 1873 P.R. 19 (1873).
251
Khushala v. Empress, 1880 P.R. 48 (1880); Mula v. Empress, 1887 P.R. 18
(1887).
252
Deputy Legal Remembrancer v. Karuna Baistobi, 21 Cal. 164 (1894); Queen-
Empress v. Chanda, 18 All. 24 (1895); King-Emperor v. Mussamut Sunder, 1 A.L.J.
559 (1904).
253
Public Prosecutor v. Maddila Mutyalu, 35 M.L.J. 157 (1918).
626 KUNAL M. PARKER
on a young girl who was under the age of sixteen. The girl’s mother,
the first accused, and the man who performed the ceremony, the
second accused, were charged under Sections 372 and 373, respect-
ively. The ceremony was described as follows:
[The second accused] performed the kanyarikam ceremony which means
her nuptials. The man that performed the ceremony enjoys the girl’s bed
for three days successively. They may afterwards continue their friendship
or may separate.254
The Session Judge of Ganjam had acquitted both defendants. The
state appealed to the Madras High Court, which treated the case like
any ordinary offense under Sections 372 and 373. The kanyarikam
ceremony was not an offense under the criminal law because ‘the
language of the two sections is sufficiently clear . . . that there must
be making over of possession of the minor girl either by sale or by
hire or by similar arrangement . . .’255 Furthermore, the making over
of a minor for a single instance of sexual intercourse did not amount
to ‘prostitution’ within the meaning of the Sections 372 and 373.
From a certain perspective, however, the kanyarikam ceremony was
not unlike the (now criminal) dedication ceremonies performed in
respect of temple dancing girls. When the state presented the Court
with this analogy, the Court dismissed the analogy as not having ‘a
very close bearing on the present question.’256 Therefore, the Madras
High Court resolutely marked off the criminalization of temple danc-
ing girls as separate from other offenses under Sections 372 and
373. It recognized that the criminal law, as applied to temple danc-
ing girls, could not be carried over into other contexts.
IV. Conclusion
It is not the object of this paper to provide a detailed account of

state activities with respect to temple dancing girls after World War
I. During this period, as the colonial state sought aggressively to
suppress temple dancing girls as a group within Hindu society, the
locus of reformist activity shifted away from Anglo-Indian courts.
Scholars have described at length legislative activity with respect to
temple dancing girls; emphasized the occasionally brutal use of state
254
Ibid.
255
Ibid., 158.
256
Ibid., 159.
force to break up communities of temple dancing girls; and recuper-
ated competing representations of temple dancing girls in the liter-
ature of the period.257 Although there is no suggestion here that
public debates in respect of temple dancing girls constitute a cul-
mination of judicial reformist activity, it is instructive to examine
how such debates, which occupy a certain privileged status in the
historiography of social reform relating to women in colonial India,
drew upon approximately three quarters of a century of judicial
reformist activity.
Although sporadic attempts had been made to force the colonial
state to legislate on the subject of temple dancing girls as early as
1868, the colonial state resisted such attempts out of a fear of inter-
fering with religious practice. Instead, it acquiesced in judicial
reformist activity until legislation on the subject began in the 1920s.
This did not, of course, preclude other forms of reformist activity. In
the 1890s, the newly-formed Madras Hindu Social Reform Associ-
ation launched the so-called Anti-Nautch movement. Although the
movement was directed primarily at suppressing the practice of invit-
ing dancing girls to perform dances at social gatherings, certain
members of the movement also expressed dissatisfaction with the
‘silent’ judicial reformist activity that had been taking place with
respect to temple dancing girls. T. Ramachendriar, the District
Judge of Nellore, articulated their concerns as follows:
After the introduction of the Penal Code, Sections 372 and 373 had for a
few years the effect of preventing the dedication of minor girls and adoption
of infant girls by dancing women for the purpose of making them Deva-
Dassees, as such were treated as penal offences. The dancing girls, however,
have contrived to carry out their object without rendering themselves amen-
able to criminal prosecution. In all cases of dedication, they obtain a Med-
ical Officer’s certificate as to the age of the girl being above 16, and then
adopt and dedicate them.258
In addition to obtaining ‘fake’ medical certificates as to the minor’s
age, temple dancing girls were accused of spiriting minors outside
British territories with the object of performing dedication ceremon-
257
See note 3. Kay Jordan provides an account of legislation in the post-
Independence period. See also Anandhi S., ‘Representing Devadasis: ‘‘Dasigal Mosa-
valai’’ as a Radical Text’, Economic and Political Weekly (Annual Number) (1991),
739.
258
T. Ramachendriar, Collection of the Decisions of the High Courts and Privy Council
on the Law of Succession, Maintenance, &c. Applicable to Dancing Girls and their issues,
Prostitutes not belonging to the Dancing Girls’ community, Illegitimate Sons and Bastards, and
Illatom affiliation Up to December 1891 (Madras, 1892), v.
628 KUNAL M. PARKER
ies. Bills introduced immediately prior to the outbreak of World War

I specifically targeted the removal of minors from British territories
with the intention of dedicating them to idols.259 However, World
War I diverted the attentions of the colonial state from matters of
social reform.
The colonial government resisted interfering with the issue of
temple dancing girls until 1924. Even then, it expressed itself hesit-
antly. While introducing a bill to amend the Indian Penal Code in
the Legislative Assembly, Sir Malcolm Hailey stated:
We have tried to avoid as far as possible the more contentious issues raised
in the previous proposals for legislation. . . . We have not, for instance,
definitely assumed that employment as Devadasis is equivalent to employ-
ment for purposes of prostitution; but should such employment actually
prove to come within that definition, our Bill will enable it to be dealt with
more effectively than hitherto.260
Apart from raising the age limit of minors from sixteen to eight-
een,261 the relevant amendments of 1924 merely brought Sections
372 and 373 in line with existing judicial interpretations of those
provisions with respect to temple dancing girls. Judicial interpreta-
tions were actualized in statutory amendments in two ways. First,
in the early twentieth century, Anglo-Indian courts had interpreted
Sections 372 and 373 to target the disposition of a minor to a temple
dancing girl with intent to use or employ the minor ‘for the purpose
of prostitution’ at any age; it was no longer sufficient to show that
there had been no intent to use or employ the minor ‘for the purpose
of prostitution’ while such minor was under sixteen. According to
this application of Sections 372 and 373, it was necessary, in order
to preserve the autonomy of the minor, to target the education,
training and other environmental influences that such a minor might
receive from a temple dancing girl; a minor brought up by a temple
dancing girl was thought to be precluded from making a ‘meaningful
choice’ with respect to life-options even if there had been no ‘prosti-
tution’ during minority. After the passage of the Indian Criminal
Law Amendment Act (Act VIII of 1924), Section 372 read: ‘Whoever
sells, lets to hire, or otherwise disposes of any person under the age
of eighteen years with intent that such person shall at any age be
employed or used for the purpose of prostitution . . . (emphasis
259
M. Sundara Raj, supra note 3, at 126–7.
260
Legislative Assembly Debates (Official Report), Vol. IV, Part I (30 Jan., 1924 to 18
Feb., 1924) (Delhi, 1924), 447.
261
Indian Penal Code (Amendment) Act (Act V of 1924).
added).’ Corresponding changes were made to Section 373. Second,
by the early twentieth century, judicial interpretations of Sections
372 and 373 as applied to temple dancing girls had created a rebut-
table presumption that temple dancing girls were ‘prostitutes’. This
position was formalized statutorily by adding an ‘explanation’ or
gloss to Sections 372 and 373. Although references to temple danc-
ing girls were scrupulously avoided, there could be little doubt about
what was intended in light of Anglo-Indian courts’ willingness to
equate temple dancing girls with ‘prostitution’. The explanation to
Section 372 read:
When a female under the age of eighteen years is sold, let for hire, or
otherwise disposed of to a prostitute or to any person who keeps or manages
a brothel, the person so disposing of such female shall, until the contrary
is proved, be presumed to have disposed of her with the intent that she
shall be used for the purpose of prostitution.
Therefore, the amendments to the Indian Penal Code closely tracked
judicial applications of Sections 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal
Code to temple dancing girls.
Provincial governments were far more aggressive in their attempts
to suppress temple dancing girls as a group within Hindu society.
Their first attempts, however, were incremental. In 1929, the
Madras Legislative Council amended the Hindu Religious Endow-
ments Act of 1926 to grant in perpetuity to temple dancing girls
such lands as had been attached to their offices; the theory underly-
ing the legislation was that aging temple dancing girls were driven
to dedicate young girls as temple dancing girls out of fear of losing
lands attached to their offices when they became too old to perform
temple duties; granting lands attached to the offices of temple danc-
ing girls in perpetuity was believed to reduce incentives to perpet-
uate the devadasi system.
By the 1930s, provincial governments had become bolder. The
terms in which they formulated their concerns reveal the stamp of
decades of judicial reformist activity. The culmination of legislative
hostility towards temple dancing girls, the Bombay Devadasis Protec-
tion Act (Act X of 1934) and the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of
Dedication) Act (Act XXXI of 1947), reflected concerns with mar-
riage, prostitution and the construction of a Hindu community. For
purposes of illustration, the legislative debates over the Bombay
Devadasis Protection Act (Act X of 1934) will be considered briefly.
In introducing the bill, Rao Bahadur S. K. Bole represented the prac-
tice of dedicating young girls to temple idols as follows:
630 KUNAL M. PARKER
Doubts have been expressed by experts whether this practice has any sanc-
tion in Vedic Hinduism. Many ascribe it to an aboriginal origin. But
whatever its source or original purity, there is no doubt that in recent times,
the practice has degenerated into a method of initiating young women to a
life of immorality and prostitution, which in many cases become compulsory
by reason of the cruel custom that a girl so dedicated cannot contract a
valid marriage. It is, therefore, highly desirable and expedient to terminate
this practice and permit the girl to contract a valid marriage.262
Bole’s characterization of temple dancing girls replicated judicial
characterizations of temple dancing girls in several different ways.
First, as the above extract illustrates, the ‘problem’ with dedication
was the foreclosure of the possibility of marriage for young girls;
‘prostitution’ was described as being ‘compulsory’ once marriage
became impossible. Second, just as Anglo-Indian courts and others
had done decades earlier, the ritual practices of dancing girls were
deemed vestigial to the exercise of their ‘profession’. Bole accused
temple dancing girls of ‘vitiat[ing] the whole religious atmosphere
and serv[ing] as object-lessons first to the priests and then to the
worshippers. . .’.263 Finally, as certain Anglo-Indian courts had done,
Bole rejected any notion that the practices prevailing among com-
munities of temple dancing girls might be defended as ‘caste
customs’. For him, temple dancing girls were not a ‘caste’ but a
‘profession’:
This evil and unnatural custom of dedication is responsible for creating a
number of castes which subsist on the gains of prostitution. Thus, it has
become a source of perennial supply of prostitutes, who pest their own
villages and almost every town to which they resort for the purpose of carry-
ing on their nefarious trade.264
The debate over the draft bill reveals the deep concern with dis-
seminating Hindu legal norms in respect of marriage with a view to
constructing a cohesive Hindu community governed by a uniform set
of patriarchal norms. The draft bill had defined ‘devadasi’ as ‘any
Hindu unmarried woman who is dedicated to service in a temple
. . .’.265 Certain members of the Legislative Council objected that this
definition of ‘devadasi’ was too restrictive because it would not cover
‘prostitutes’ of lower castes who had been dedicated to idols but who
could not, by reason of their caste, serve in Hindu temples. Dr
262
Bombay Legislative Council Debates, Vol. 39 (Bombay, 1934), pp. 1337–8.
263
Ibid., 1337.
264
Ibid., 1339.
265
Ibid., 1700 (Bill No. XXVII of 1933, Section 2(a)).
Solanki, who moved to expand the definition of ‘devadasi’ to cover
such women, argued his case as follows:
I do believe that a similar system which is prevailing among the depressed
classes should also stop, because it has been fully approved by the leaders
of the Hindu community, even by Mahatma Gandhi, that the depressed
classes are part and parcel of the Hindu community. . . . I do not see any
difficulty if these particular girls dedicated from these particular communit-
ies should have [the] benefit of this legislation.266
The final definition of ‘devadasi’ in the Bombay Act excised the refer-
ence to service in a temple. ‘Devadasi’ was defined as ‘any unmarried
woman who is dedicated to any Hindu deity, idol, object of worship,
temple or other religious institution . . .’.267
Although legislation in Bombay and Madras was represented as
conferring a ‘benefit’ upon young women subjected to dedication,
this ‘benefit’ was never accompanied by the vocabulary of autonomy,
choice, consent and so on. In this respect, legislators in Bombay and
Madras reenacted with breathtaking clarity the profoundly ‘illiberal’
patriarchal politics behind the judicial suppression of temple dancing
girls inaugurated in the 1860s. In constructing the ‘crime’ of ‘dedic-
ating girls to a life of temple-harlotry’, Anglo-Indian courts had pro-
fessed a concern for the autonomy of young girls. However, insofar
as this concern for the autonomy of young girls culminated in the
suppression of one of the options available to young girls, this con-
cern revealed itself as the instantiation of patriarchal Hindu legal
norms with respect to marriage; the criminal law was deployed, in
the guise of solicitude for the autonomy of young girls, to construct
a desired Hindu community organized around marriage. It is worth
reproducing Section 3 of the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of
Dedication) Act (Act XXXI of 1947) at some length to reveal the
extent to which legislation went in reenacting these ‘illiberal’ patri-
archal politics:
(1) The dedication of a woman as a devadasi, whether before or after the
commencement of this Act and whether she has consented to such dedication or
not, is hereby declared unlawful and void; and any woman so dedicated shall
not thereby be deemed to have become incapable of entering into a valid
marriage . . .
(2) Any custom or usage prevailing in any Hindu community such as the
Bogum, Kalavanthula, Sani, Nagavasulu, Devadasi and Kurmapulu, that a
woman of that community who gives or takes part in any melam (nautch),
266
Ibid., 1346.
267
The Bombay Code, Vol. II, 1947 (6th ed.) (Bombay, 1971).
632 KUNAL M. PARKER
dancing or music performance in the course of any procession or otherwise

is thereby regarded as having adopted a life of prostitution and becomes
incapable of entering into a valid marriage . . ., whether before or after the
commencement of the Act and whether the woman concerned has consented to such
performance or not, are hereby declared unlawful and void.
(3) Dancing by a woman, with or without kumbhaharathy, in the precincts of any
temple or other religious institution, or in any procession of a Hindu deity, idol or object
of worship installed in any such temple or institution or at any festival or ceremony held
in respect of such deity, idol or object of worship is hereby declared unlawful.268
As the above extract illustrates, the stated concern for the autonomy
of young girls dissolved into legislation that rendered the volition of
young girls simply irrelevant. Unlike their counterparts in the judi-
ciary, legislators in Madras abandoned any pretension that their
reformist activity with respect to temple dancing girls was directed
towards protecting the ‘meaningful choice’ of young girls; their
efforts were directed explicitly towards the valorization of marriage,
the construction of a Hindu community organized around marriage
and the sanitization of Hindu religious practice. In this respect, they
represented, with immeasurably greater confidence than Anglo-
Indian courts, the ‘essence’ of the ‘crime’ of ‘dedicating girls to a
life of temple-harlotry’.
Abbreviations to Reporters Consulted
A.L.J. Allahabad Law Journal

All. Indian Law Reports (Allahabad Series)
B. L. R. Bengal Law Reports
Bom. Indian Law Reports (Bombay Series)
Bom. L.R. Bombay Law Reporter
C. L. J. Calcutta Law Journal
C. W. N. Calcutta Weekly Notes
Cal. Indian Law Reports (Calcutta Series)
F. U. Foujdaree Udalut
I. C. Indian Cases
Ind. Dec. (O. S.) Indian Decisions (Old Series)
M.I.A. Moore’s Indian Appeals
M. H. C. R. Madras High Court Reports
M. L. J. Madras Law Journal
268
The Madras Code Vol. III. Unrepealed Madras Acts 1922 to 1948 (Madras, 1958),
pp. 795–7.
M.L.W. Madras Law Weekly
M.W.N. Madras Weekly Notes
Mad. Indian Law Reports (Madras Series)
N.W.P.H.C.R. Northwest Provinces High Court Reports
P. R. Punjab Records
R. N. A. Reports of the Nizamut Adawlut (Bengal)
S. C. Supreme Court
S. D. A. Sudder Dewanny Adawlut
S. F. A. Sudder Foujdaree Adawlut
S. U. Sudder Udalut
W. R. Sutherland’s Weekly Reports (Bengal)
Morley: William H. Morley, An Analytical Digest of All the Reported Cases
Decided in the Supreme Court of Judicature in India, in the Courts of the
Hon. East-India Company, and on Appeal from India, By Her Majesty In
Council (2 Vols) (London, W. H. Allen & Co., 1850).

Kunal M. Parker, A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Kunal M. Parker, A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Kunal M. Parker, A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Modern Asian Studies 32, 3 (1998), pp. 559–633.

 1998 Cambridge University Press

‘A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes’

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University

Contemporary historians imagine reformist activity relating to women

as ‘eternally auspicious’ women ‘married’ to temple deities.2 By the

373. Whoever buys, hires, or otherwise obtains possession of any minor

imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten

The legislative history of these provisions reveals no intention on the

of ‘caste’. What was at stake was the recognition of customs at vari-

Anglo-Indian judiciary to protect temple dancing girls against the

communities of women in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies that

II. Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls,

The two interrelated interpretive devices developed by Anglo-Indian

Anglo-Indian law’s attempts to interpret dancing girls in terms of

by the ceremony of applying Misee (a powder made out of vitriol) to

behavior might be visited with degradation resulting in a permanent

level allegations of unchastity against women when an estate opened

B. THE ORIGINS OF ‘CRIME’

This section is intended primarily to illustrate that the ‘crime’ of

Steele was correct in pointing to the incidence of suits brought by

of a Magistrate to punish persons of the offence of leasing young

III. Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls,

A. TEMPLE DANCING GIRLS AND ‘CASTE’

A highly systematized knowledge about ‘caste’ developed over the

voluminous pseudo-ethnographic compilations commissioned by pro-

ambiguous status as a ‘caste’ was recognized, interpreted and judged.

The implications of empowering the ‘nobler’ elements of the

community by determining the validity of customs in terms of Hindu

refused to let a married woman invoke the ‘caste custom’ of dancing

B. TEMPLE DANCING GIRLS AND THE HINDU LAW

only so long as she remained ‘chaste’, the Caste Disabilities Removal

through the shifting, contradictory and inconsistent positions of

which ‘prostitute’ heirs inherited the property of ‘prostitutes’ on the

C. THE ‘CRIME’ OF ‘DEDICATING GIRLS TO A LIFE OF TEMPLE-HARLOTRY’

Ostensibly a simple application of Sections 372 and 373 of the

might constitute ‘prostitution’ nor required evidence of specific

Bhávins were permitted to perform certain temple services, for

formal ceremonies pertaining to the occasion. . . . [The girl] is at liberty to

It is reasonable to infer that there was no intention at the time of adoption

The valorization of marriage through the criminalization of

where the possession is obtained by purchase or hire . . . involving

It is not the object of this paper to provide a detailed account of

ies. Bills introduced immediately prior to the outbreak of World War

dancing or music performance in the course of any procession or otherwise

Abbreviations to Reporters Consulted

A.L.J. Allahabad Law Journal

You might also like