818318

research-article2019
FER0010.1177/0141778918818318feminist reviewPurvi Mehta

article

Feminist Review

Dalit feminism in Tokyo:

Issue 121, 24­–36
© 2019 The Author(s)
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DOI: 10.1177/0141778918818318
https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778918818318
www.feministreview.com

in transnational Dalit
activism

Purvi Mehta

abstract

This article discusses different conceptions and translations of the devadasi system in transnational Dalit feminist
activism. I focus specifically on activist participation at the 1994 Asia Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights in Tokyo,
Japan and the construction of an analogy between the experiences and struggles of devadasis and that of ‘military
comfort women’, i.e. women from Japan’s former colonies who were abducted and raped by the Japanese military during
World War II. I argue that strategic claims of commonality are part of the process of making specific, local practices
legible to a global audience and that these sorts of claims also enable transnational feminist activism and solidarity.

keywords

activism; Basappa; Dalit studies; devadasi; Ruth Manorama; South Asia; transnational feminist activism

In 1994, two Dalit activists, Ruth Manorama, a social worker from Tamil Nadu, and Babamma Basappa, a former
devadasi from the neighbouring state of Karnataka, travelled to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Asia Tribunal on
Women’s Human Rights. Basappa had recently left work as a devadasi, a form of caste-based prostitution in which one
is dedicated to a goddess at a young age and thereafter performs sexual labour for the upper-caste men of the
community. She had come to the Tribunal to speak about her experiences. Sponsored by the Asian Women’s Human
Rights Council, the Tribunal brought together activists from across Asia with the explicit aim to both publicise crimes
against Asian women—in particular, war crimes against women and the trafficking of women—and provide a space for
survivors, activists, lawyers and scholars to come together, share their experiences and strategise for better futures.
For Manorama and Basappa, the Tribunal was an opportunity to expose the struggles of Dalit women, in particular
those like Basappa who had been dedicated into the devadasi system, to a global audience and to create ties of
solidarity with women who had experienced similar struggles in different countries.
 Purvi Mehta    121  25

Dalits—the groups both outside and at the bottom of the caste order—are amongst the poorest and most marginalised
in India, despite the constitutional abolition of untouchability and prohibition of caste-based discrimination. Over 29
per cent of the over 200 million Dalits in India live in poverty (World Bank, 2016), and there remains a significant gap
in key human development indicators such as access to safe water, sanitation and electricity between Dalit and non-
Dalit populations (Thorat, 2009, pp. 125–128). From a structural perspective, Dalit women—facing the combined
forces of caste, class and gender inequality—are among the most vulnerable in Indian society. They suffer higher rates
of malnutrition, illiteracy and infant mortality and have a dramatically lower life expectancy than their fellow citizens
(Borooah, Sabharwal and Thorat, 2012, p. 7).1 Sexual violence against Dalit women is used to reinforce caste hierarchy
and is often retribution for an individual or community’s exercise of rights; rape and sexual assault are the most
common crimes against Dalits (Paul, 2015).

Dalit activists have individually and collectively resisted caste- and gender-based discrimination, violence and
exploitation within India and have mounted powerful challenges to the cultural and religious ideologies that have
legitimised their oppression. Over the last several decades, Dalit feminists have also systematically challenged the
mainstream feminist movement in India for its caste biases and neglect of caste inequality and issues affecting Dalit
women. As part of this critique and as part of their struggles for dignity, equality and safety, many have also sought
alliances and affiliations with feminist movements and communities of women outside of India, communities with
whom they imagine a similarity of condition and struggle. A transnational orientation and an internationalist vision
of social justice have become significant aspects of Dalit activism in India.

Manorama and Basappa’s participation in the Tokyo Tribunal is one such example of transnational Dalit activism.
Manorama travelled to Japan because she had come to see the devadasi system as analogous to another practice—
military sexual slavery—and in particular to the rape and sexual abuse of women, mostly from Japan’s former
colonies, by the Japanese military during World War II. For Manorama, Dalit women like Basappa who were dedicated
into the devadasi system were trapped in similarly violent, coercive and sexually exploitative relations as those
experienced by ‘military comfort women’. The devadasi system, she claimed, was just like ‘military sexual slavery’
because caste was just like colonialism. Through these and other analogies, Manorama was able to get the devadasi
system on the agenda at the Tribunal and helped make the plight of Dalit women legible to an international
audience. For Manorama, a claim of similarity to the experiences and struggles of other marginalised women
countered the isolation of Dalit women in India and the exceptionality of caste; it also helped generate new
transnational feminist alliances for Dalit activists.

For almost a decade before the Tribunal in Tokyo, Manorama had been exploring the theoretical and practical
possibilities of transnational alliances for Dalit women. In 1985, she had participated in what she described as a
‘cultural exchange programme’ in which she studied the issues affecting African American women.2 She recalled that
the programme enabled her to discern a similarity between the struggles experienced by Dalit women and those
experienced by African American women. This recognition of similarity was powerful; as she learned that the
predicaments facing Dalit women were shared by other marginalised communities in the world, she realised that a
global perspective and alliances with groups across the world could benefit the movement for Dalit women.

These alliances required that the struggles of Dalit women be legible to a global audience; legibility required
translation and, often, analogy and comparison to make the translation more effective. This process of translating
the struggle of Dalit women into globally recognisable categories of women’s exploitation and human rights violations
is demonstrated in how Manorama and the organisation she would later establish—the National Federation of Dalit
Women—represented devadasis and the devadasi system in their human rights campaigns.

1 A recent study found that the average age of death for a Dalit woman is 39.5 years, 4.1 years less than Dalit men and 14.6 years

less than upper-caste women (Borooah, Sabharwal and Thorat, 2012, p. 7).
2 Ruth Manorama, interview with author, 2009.
26    121  Dalit feminism in Tokyo

In this article, I discuss these representations and translations, and the specific translation of the devadasi system
that led to Manorama and Basappa’s participation at the Tokyo Tribunal. I draw on an interview I conducted with
Manorama in 2009 as well as the official report of the Tribunal (see AWHRC, 1994). At the time of the interview, I had
been conducting my doctoral research on Dalit activism and had visited Manorama at the Bangalore office of the
National Federation of Dalit Women to learn about the field of Dalit feminist thought and activism. During our
conversation, Manorama made a brief mention of her participation at the Tokyo Tribunal. I pushed for more
information, and she spoke about the reasons for her involvement and her experience at the Tribunal, noting the
failure of predominant feminist groups in India to address issues facing devadasis and the camaraderie she had felt
in Tokyo. Manorama did not have any written records or official documents from the Tribunal, and her own recollections
of the specifics of the event, which had taken place fifteen years prior, were sparse. I stayed curious about the event,
however, and when I returned to the United States after my research in India, I was able to track down the official
report of the Tokyo Tribunal, which included a record of Manorama’s speech and Basappa’s testimony. Read alongside
Manorama’s recollections, the report helped fill in the larger context and many of the specifics of the Tribunal. Here,
I contextualise these accounts with scholarship on the devadasi system and its representation in human rights
campaigns to provide a reading that highlights the creative and intellectual work of translation and of forging
transnational connection by Manorama and Basappa. My discussion asks, what does ‘transnational’ look like from the
perspectives of women who are not only outside of the West but are also non-elite within their home societies? How do
strategic claims of commonality, even sisterhood, enable—rather than subvert—transnational feminist solidarity for
such a group? Viewed as an instance of transnational feminist praxis, Dalit feminist activism at the Tribunal in Tokyo
diverges from many established assumptions about transnational feminism. Here, I argue that despite parallels with
rhetoric and practices critiqued in the scholarship on transnational feminism, Dalit feminist activism at the Tokyo
Tribunal is generative of productive new ways of thinking about cross-border feminist activism.

on isolation and transnationalism

Analysis of the ‘transnational’ requires attention to the local, for it is the local that negotiates the nature and forms
of cross-border activities. In thinking of Dalit feminist transnationalism, the particularities of caste and the
impediments it creates to political solidarity and affective connection across society seem most relevant to forming
the ‘local’ that inspires the ‘transnational’. This ‘local’ context—the context of caste—is best explained by Dalit
activist and scholar B.R. Ambedkar; in particular, his writing on the political isolation of Dalits in India helps
contextualise cross-border activities from a caste-based society. In his essay ‘The problem of isolation’, Ambedkar
(1989) argued that the unique structure of caste-based society precluded allies for Dalits and made even those with
similar interests oppose cooperation with them; even labour movements and communist parties, he lamented, had
not generated the solidarity needed for the Dalit movement to succeed. ‘This want of solidarity’, he reasoned, was
because of the system of ‘graded inequality’, a system in which ‘the Brahmin is above everybody, the Shudra is below
the Brahmin and above the Untouchable’ (ibid., p. 116).

Graded inequality, as Ambedkar showed, had structured a society in which all groups, with the exception of
Dalits, had some investment in maintaining caste stratification. ‘If the Hindu social order was based on
inequality’, Ambedkar (ibid.) wrote, ‘it would have been over-thrown long ago. But it is based on graded inequality
so the Shudra while he is anxious to pull down the Brahmin, he is not prepared to see the Untouchable raised to
his level’. Ambedkar decried the result of this structure: ‘there is nobody to join the Untouchables in his struggle.
He is completely isolated. Not only is he isolated, he is opposed by the very classes who ought to be his natural
allies. This isolation is one more obstacle in the removal of untouchability’ (ibid.). For Ambedkar, the alienating
and divisive forces of caste society and its system of graded inequality guaranteed the political isolation of
Dalits. The solidarity Ambedkar found lacking was political solidarity, solidarity that countered isolation,
especially isolation in struggle. This kind of solidarity was not rooted in identity, and while it anticipated similar
interests, it also could not be reduced to a partnership based on expediency.
 Purvi Mehta    121  27

While Dalit activists have built alliances with other groups within India, I suggest that they have also strived to resolve
the problem of isolation and the want of solidarity by creating alliances with groups outside of India, by imaginatively
and concretely affiliating themselves with communities abroad.3 These cross-border activities work to counter
political isolation at home and build solidarity in struggle with communities beyond the nation. The turn outward and
abroad for solidarity by Dalit feminists seeks connection to global movements of social justice and strives for a
solidarity based on a similarity in experience and struggle with other communities of women in the world.4
‘Transnational’ in the study of Dalit feminist activism then appears as a category of relations that stunts the local—
and indeed the national—and challenges its role as the sole arbiter and bestower of political affiliation and belonging.

In conceptualising these relations, Nathaniel Roberts’ (2016) work on religious conversion of Dalits in a slum in
Chennai proves particularly insightful. Roberts describes the affective states of the converts through the concept of
the ‘foreignness of belonging’. He discusses what it means to belong, a notion fundamentally about insiders and
outsiders and about care. He writes, ‘belonging was itself foreign to these slum dwellers’ experience in the land of
their birth, but they also perceived a world in which they did truly belong, and which awaited them in the form of a
larger humanity that was “foreign” in the sense of existing beyond national borders’ (ibid., p. 6). It is this sense of the
‘foreignness of belonging’—of isolation within India and the imagining of affective and political solidarity with
communities outside of India—that seems to animate the cross-border activism I discuss in this article.

By fostering affective connection and political solidarity between women marginalised and abused in their home
societies, this activism presents a form of feminist transnationalism not often analysed in the study of transnational
feminism. The designation ‘transnational’ in the field of feminist scholarship and activism has emerged as both a
critique of and corrective to previous forms of engaging the world outside of the West, namely international feminisms
and global feminisms (Tambe, 2010; Desai, Bouchard and Detournay, 2015; Nagar and Lock Swarr, 2015).
‘Transnational’ feminism has challenged the centrality of the nation state as the unit of analysis in ‘international’
feminism and has called attention to processes of colonialism, imperialism and global capitalism in structuring the
forces that oppress women across the world (Mohanty, 2003). It has also tried to unsettle the centrality of Western
feminist perspectives and the assumptions of a similarity in struggles and the universality of liberatory visions often
at the heart of ‘global’ feminism. Transnational feminism, as Srila Roy (2016, p. 292) writes, ‘attends to (a) differences
rather than commonalities among women while (b) situating those differences and inequalities in historical
formations and (globalizing) “flows”’; ‘women are, in other words, different but inhabit an interconnected and
interdependent world riveted with clear symmetries of power and privilege’.

While some scholars, such as Roy (ibid.), define transnational feminism as those practices that enable ‘South–South
feminist dialogues and collaborations’ while displacing ‘Northern feminist agendas and privileges’, others in the field,
such as Leela Fernandes (2013), argue that ‘transnational feminism’ fails to avoid the problems of international and
global feminism. Fernandes (ibid., pp. 14, 20) maintains that the field of transnational feminism often recuperates a
‘U.S. national imagination’ that does not avoid a ‘U.S. epistemic project’ and, among other features, reproduces a
‘missionary impulse’ in its engagement with women outside of the United States. ‘Transnational’, Fernandes (ibid.,
pp. 108, 115) argues, has also largely become a territorial concept, a category that refers either to geographic areas
outside of the United States or to spaces of particular kinds of border-crossings—notably ‘visible’ sites that showcase
‘movement’ and changes in political economy through the effects of transnational flows of capital and labour.

Neither Fernandes nor Roy, however, offers a conceptualisation of ‘transnational feminism’ that could provide a
framework for understanding Dalit women’s cross-border activism. As I have argued elsewhere, Dalit feminist

3 An example of this is the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which aims to represent religious minorities and people from the Scheduled

Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.

4 Matthew Baxter (2016) provides a compelling discussion of the lower-caste embracing of global visions of social justice as

opposed to national visions of freedom.

28    121  Dalit feminism in Tokyo

transnationalism completely sidesteps the ‘missionary impulse’ and common trope of rescue and saving the ‘third world
woman’ from her culture still found in studies of transnational feminism (Mehta, 2017). Rather, as evidenced by the
meeting in Tokyo, Dalit feminists reach out beyond national borders for partnership and solidarity with women who are
imagined as facing similar obstacles, women imagined as being similarly marginalised in their home societies.5 While Roy
highlights South–South connections as a critical aspect of transnational feminism, the ‘South’ is not always sufficiently
differentiated across caste and class lines. Dalit women’s engagement in South–South dialogues not only displaces the
‘hegemony of the West as our default reference’ but also displaces the hegemony of savarna, middle-class feminism
within India (John, 1998, p. 546). The creative process of imagining cross-border kinship and developing transnational
alliances by Dalit activists reveals a transnational feminism that is not nationalised, that does not reproduce Western
frames of viewing the global and that counters political isolation at home with cross-border solidarity.

Political isolation is countered and solidarity created in part through the imagining of a similarity of experience and
struggle with other oppressed people. By highlighting similarity across borders rather than difference, Dalit feminist
transnationalism again defies most characterisations of transnational feminism. As I show in my discussion of Dalit
activism at the Tokyo Tribunal, for Dalit feminists like Manorama, the assumption of a shared distress and a shared
hope with women outside of one’s home society—a premise of much global feminism that has been strongly critiqued
as homogenising and essentialising—counteracts both the political isolation of caste-based society and the assumed
exceptionality of caste in global arenas: not only does this assumption affectively and politically connect Dalit women
to other women in the world, but it also helps make caste-based violence and discrimination legible to a global
audience. The assumption of a shared condition also reveals the limits of the nation, but whereas the field of
transnational feminism does this by calling attention to the dominant concerns of contemporary globalisation—such
as the flow of capital across borders and the growth of transnational corporations and international financial
institutions—here, an assumption of cross-border similarity reveals the limits of the nation in creating affective and
political belonging (Fernandes, 2013). In Dalit feminist activism at the Tribunal in Tokyo, and specifically in its
representation of devadasis and the devadasi system, the assertion of similarity, as well as of sisterhood, functions
entirely differently from how it has done so in global or international feminisms, while also revealing a logic to
transnational feminism that is specific to the struggles and aspirations of a non-elite group in the Global South.

devadasi as translation
As scholars have shown, the very term ‘devadasi’ was not in wide use prior to the colonial period (Vijaisri, 2004;
Soneji, 2012). Rather, multiple terms circulated for the practices and identities of what would be collapsed into
the categories of the ‘devadasi’ and the ‘devadasi system’. Sule, sani, matangi, jogatis and basavi were local
terms that indexed a particular caste identity and position in the temple structure, but these distinctions were lost
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Sanskritised term ‘devadasi’ came to stand for women who were
identified by non-conjugal sexuality (Soneji, 2012). Some of these women were high caste, some courtesans, some
artists and performers; jogatis and basavis, however, were mostly Dalit women, and their sexual labour occurred
largely in rural areas and on the periphery of the temple structure. It was, as Davesh Soneji (ibid., p. 7) writes,
through colonial ‘processes of data collection’ that many different practices and identities were collapsed and the
category of the ‘transregional “devadasi”’ fashioned.

It is this category that was used by Indian socio-religious reform movements in the early twentieth century. Cast as a
custom that in ancient times was related to rituals of piety and performed by virgins, the devadasi system was assumed
to have undergone a process of degeneration, a fall from a once high tradition (Vijaisri, 2004; Soneji, 2012). Reformist

5 The history of Dalit feminism reveals many other examples of Dalit feminists reaching beyond national borders for partnership and

solidarity (Mehta, 2017). A recent meeting between activists from All-India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (All-India Dalit Women’s
Rights Forum), Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName is a more recent example of the transnational turn in activism (Chitnis, 2015;
Paul, 2015).
 Purvi Mehta    121  29

condemnation of the devadasi system rested on this interpretation, and the devadasi was to be domesticated, purified
and metamorphosed into the ‘new woman’ (Vijaisri, 2004, pp. 135–141). The Bramo Samaj, Arya Samaj and Ramkrishna
Mission were among the groups spearheading the reformist movement and, as Priyadarshini Vijaisri (ibid.) shows, were
driven by the goal of resuscitating Hinduism and restoring purity and morality to its customs.

While these reform efforts did not address the caste-based dimensions of these various practices, anti-caste
activists, such as Jotirao Phule in the nineteenth century and Periyar in the twentieth century, advocated for legal
intervention because the practice perpetuated upper-caste dominance over lower-caste women. In anti-caste
efforts, reform was not part of an attempt to revitalise religious tradition but, rather, was to stop the sexual
exploitation of lower-caste women. It was also part of the project to uplift lower-caste women and, consequently,
their communities into new standards of respectability. For example, in the early twentieth century, Shivaram
Janaba Kamble preached against the dedication of girls and asked members of the community to marry devadasis
(Moon and Pawar, 2003). His advocacy of marriage to devadasis can be seen as an attempt both to remove the social
stigma attached to these women and to achieve their respectability in accordance with upper-caste conventions.
The devadasi system was outlawed in 1947 after India’s independence, but the practice of dedicating girls persists.
In the 1980s, the practice of dedication gained more attention within India and abroad as Dalit activists and
women’s rights organisations sought legal and non-legal interventions to stop the practice (Soneji, 2012, p. 8).
These activist efforts focused on Dalit devadasi communities.

However, as Soneji (ibid., pp. 8–9) observes, the use of the term ‘devadasi’ for Dalit women, rather than more specific
ones such as jogati, ‘falsely links them to upper caste temples, lost art forms, and sometimes idealized forms of
sexual difference’, and this ‘obfuscates the complexities of Dalit women’s experiences and does little in terms of
foregrounding issues of gender justice for Dalit women’. Despite the problems with the category of ‘devadasi’ and its
associations, it is the term that has been inherited by contemporary Dalit activists and the one that is used to identify
women like Basappa and make sense of their struggles. Activists like Manorama, however, have re-signified the term;
by centring caste and caste-based exploitation in the practice, the devadasi system appears not as a uniquely Indian
cultural practice that has degenerated over the centuries, but rather as a human rights violation and a form of sexual
exploitation in a social context of extreme differences in power and wealth.

translating devadasi for a global audience

In contemporary Dalit human rights campaigns, the devadasi system appears as a traditional form of oppression that
results in modern human rights violations. The term ‘system’ itself suggests a closed, static and clearly structured
cultural mechanism that subordinates women. One circular represented it as the ‘infamous … temple prostitution
system’ in which ‘little prepubescent girls are dedicated to the goddess’ and then ‘raped by temple priests and then
any man who wishes to do so’ (NCDHR, 2006). Another statement, playing off tropes of mysterious ritual and timeless
tradition, states that the practice takes place ‘secretly’ and sexually exploits Dalit women under the ‘guise of religious
custom’ (NFDW, 2001). The practice is also often referred to as ‘ritualized prostitution in temples’ (CERD, 1996). The
key terms and their associations describing the devadasi system frame the practice for global audiences in a manner
reminiscent of Western feminist critiques of cultural practices such as female genital cutting and foot binding. These
campaigns seem to draw from the genres of representation that have historically been successful in gaining attention
from the West, especially from feminists in the West.

In addition to the condemnation of the devadasi system as a religious tradition that victimises girls, human rights
campaigns also draw from the discourse around the modern problem of the sexual trafficking of women. In these
discussions, ‘temple prostitution’ links up with commercial prostitution. ‘The Devadasi system’, the NFDW (2001)
argued at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, ‘forces 5000 to 15,000 girls to be secretly auctioned every year
in the commercial sex market into a distinct form of ritually sanctioned prostitution that is centuries old’. The girls are
also ‘eventually auctioned secretly into urban brothels for prostitution’ (ibid.). The use of the verb ‘auction’ conjures
30    121  Dalit feminism in Tokyo

associations with both the transatlantic slave trade and other forms of human trafficking. Interestingly, Anti-Slavery
International, a London-based international NGO that traces its history to the Anti-Slavery Society, which campaigned
for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, campaigns today for the
eradication of the devadasi system, which it describes as ‘ritual slavery’ (Black, 2007). Moreover, activists have
explicitly stated that the devadasi system is a form of ‘trafficking in women’ and constitutes ‘forced prostitution’
(NCDHR and NFDW, 2006). As Jo Doezema (2001, pp. 31, 30) argues, the denial of agency to the ‘third-world prostitute’
is critical to ‘first-world’ feminist anti-trafficking campaigns; the ‘“third world” sex worker is presented as backward,
innocent and above all helpless—in need of rescue’. Since increasing global awareness about caste and untouchability
and thereby inspiring international outrage is a goal for Dalit human rights activists, framing devadasis and the
devadasi system in this way not only makes the struggles of Dalit women like Basappa legible but also communicates
the problems of caste in a manner that has proven effective for courting social justice organisations in the West.

The translation of the devadasi system into terms that are recognisable to Western audiences has not only helped
increase the global visibility of the problems of caste and untouchability but has also, as evidenced by Manorama’s
activism in Tokyo, enabled affective connection and political solidarity with communities of activists and survivors
of violence, and has brought support to women who have endured the exploitation and exclusion of devadasi work.
In an analytical move that supplemented what was being represented in Dalit human rights campaigns, Manorama
suggested at the 1994 Tokyo Tribunal that the devadasi system cannot be seen as equivalent to prostitution, and
that it can only be properly analysed as part of a social hierarchy where sexual exploitation is a mechanism of caste
inequality (AWHRC, 1994, pp. 16–17). Manorama deemed the devadasi system functionally equivalent to the rape
of Dalit women by upper-caste men: both are a manifestation of caste-based subordination that ‘results in the
violent appropriation of and sexual control over Dalit women by men of the dominant castes’, and both maintain
‘the patriarchal caste complex’ (NFDW, 2001). By calling attention to how caste is inscribed in sexual relations,
whether paid or unpaid, Manorama showed how the devadasi system is both a product of caste hierarchy and a
cultural mechanism for its perpetuation. There is a clear ‘nexus between being an untouchable and prostitution’,
Manorama asserted at the Tribunal, and this nexus precludes an analysis of prostitution that ignores caste (AWHRC,
1994, p. 17); therefore, she argued, the sexual labour provided by devadasis is not comparable to prostitution.
Since mainstream feminist organisations in India had neglected this dimension of caste, Manorama claimed, they
could not competently advocate for Dalit women.

During her interview with me in 2009, Manorama recounted a study she conducted of a rehabilitation programme run
by Catholic nuns for devadasis in rural areas of Karnataka.6 While she found that the ‘sisters’ were empowering the
devadasis and making their lives ‘a little better’, other feminists condemned the rehabilitation programme on
‘moralistic grounds’. She recounted how ‘the upper caste women said, “all these sisters are converting them, changing
their lives”’. The women, according to Manorama, took issue not only with the religious background of the individuals
running the rehabilitation scheme but also with the ideology underlying the project; they called for viewing the
devadasi’s labour as legitimate work, asking, ‘What is wrong with selling their bodies? […] If we are able to sell our
minds, why shouldn’t they be able to sell their bodies?’. Manorama recalled, ‘So I said “everybody, everyone can sell
their body very easily. Why we don’t sell our bodies? Why they have to sell their bodies?”’.

Manorama explained that by highlighting the internal stratifications among women, her response underscored the
significance of caste-based power relations to any assessment of prostitution in India. While the dominant discussion
of prostitution frames the devadasi system as either legitimate work or a form of violence, Manorama made evident
the need to incorporate other social categories into the assessment of prostitution: who performs the labour, she
argued, is as critical to the evaluation as any theoretical perspective on women’s bodies and their work. Thus,
according to Manorama, the devadasi system must be analytically separated from other forms of sex work. She argued

6 Ruth Manorama, interview with author, 2009.

 Purvi Mehta    121  31

that women working in prostitution can ‘make money’; they can ‘make two rupees or … thirty lakhs … [depending on]
class background, where you are put in, what kind of skin you have, what kind of features you have’. In contrast,
devadasis are mandated to provide sexual services and are not paid: ‘even though they sell their bodies every day’,
she explained, ‘they are not even given a penny because the village landlords, village upper caste people think that
these women are meant only for us. They have to do a free service’.7

Manorama argued that although the devadasi system is legitimised through ‘religious symbols and paradigms’, it can
only be understood in terms of both the subordination of women in society and a system of social hierarchy that
encourages the sexual appropriation of Dalit women by upper-caste men.8 The power and entitlement of the upper
castes over others in society is inscribed in the functioning of the system. This form of sex work did not fall within the
understandings of prostitution offered in the mainstream women’s movement at the time of the 1994 Tokyo Tribunal;
however, Manorama’s conceptualisation of the devadasi system as ‘free sexual labour’ enabled the use of different
categories of analysis to make sense of the practice. The emphasis on a caste-inflected difference transformed the sex
work of the devadasi into an obligatory ‘free service’ located within a social hierarchy where sexual exploitation is a
mechanism of social inequality. Manorama used this conceptualisation of the devadasi system to forge an equivalence
between the sexual labour performed by devadasis and that performed by ‘military comfort women’, women from
occupied territories who were forced to provide sexual services to the Japanese military during World War II:

… devadasis provide free sexual labor. I equated this with free military sexual labor in the case of Korean women, Korean
women for the Japanese … Comfort women … I took one of the devadasi women to a tribunal conducted in Japan in 1994. […]
Tribunal was on sexual slavery. Women being enslaved by Japanese men. The Korean, Filipino, wherever the Japanese military
went. Comfort women. I then saw [that devadasis are like] comfort women in the name of religion for the upper caste.9

Manorama explained to me that Dalit women who were dedicated into the devadasi system were trapped in similarly
violent, coercive and sexually exploitative relations as that experienced by ‘comfort women’; the devadasi system,
she claimed, was just like ‘military sexual slavery’ because caste was just like colonialism.

One of the stated goals of the Tribunal was ‘to generate support from the national and international public for the
victims and survivors’ (AWHRC, 1994, p. 5). Towards this end, it, like most human rights tribunals, included testimonies
from survivors of war crimes and trafficking. Basappa testified to her experience as a devadasi and Kim Bok-Dong and
Victoria Canlas Lopez, women respectively from Korea and the Philippines who had been abducted and raped by the
Japanese military in the 1940s, testified to their experiences of military sexual slavery. Despite their differences in
age, historical context and national identity, the presence of the three women together and their testimonies
suggested an implicit analogy between Dalit women and colonised women, between caste and colonialism.

By centring the sexual violence and exploitation experienced by subaltern women, Manorama was able to build a
compelling analogy between caste and colonialism. Here, the recognition of similarity between the work and
social position of devadasis and military comfort women also provided the basis for affective connection and
political solidarity. Analogy helped Manorama to present the case of the devadasi system at the 1994 Asia
Tribunal on Women’s Rights. It also made the struggles of Dalit women legible to a global audience. This not only
facilitated its discussion at the Tribunal in Tokyo but also, according to Manorama, created a sense of solidarity
with other survivors of sexual exploitation and deepened transnational linkages and connections for activism
around issues affecting Dalit women.10

7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
32    121  Dalit feminism in Tokyo

analogies and activism

Analogies—like the ones Manorama used in Tokyo—are always purposeful and strategic; they emphasise
similarities and obscure differences. Analogies enable comparison and, like translation, they do not require a
perfect one-to-one correspondence of experiences, histories and categories; rather, the analogies themselves
are part of a creative process of constructing connection and legibility. Carolyn Pedwell (2010) discusses the
rise of ‘cross-cultural comparison’ in feminist discussions and specifically the comparison of non-Western
practices to Western ones as part of an effort to counter ethnocentric essentialism, an effort she claims is
unsuccessful and fraught with other issues. For Manorama, strategic analogies and assertions of similarities to
the struggles of other non-elite women countered both the exceptionality of caste and the political isolation of
Dalits in India; they also strove to build affective and political relations of solidarity between Dalit women in
India and other women marginalised in their home societies. At the same time, while Manorama’s analogies
generated a transnational politics that countered the isolation of Dalit women, they also flattened differences
and did not capture critical aspects of Basappa’s struggle.

As many scholars have pointed out, survivor testimonies play a role in authenticating the claims of activists at
events such as the Tokyo Tribunal. Meg McLagan (1995, p. 193) argues that survivor testimonies have become an
essential part of human rights practice, stating that testimony ‘has become a transnational cultural form, one that
plays a crucial role in almost every human rights campaign’. Expressed ‘through the idiom of suffering’, testimony
establishes ‘claims for recognition and redress on the basis of one’s humanity’ (ibid.). At the Tribunal, Basappa told
her life story, replete with accounts of the adversity, pain and suffering she had endured. Although scholars have
found that testimonies in human rights campaigns often offer instrumentalist renderings of violence and suffering,
Basappa’s testimony seemed to exceed the terms and analogies framing it. It imparted more than what activists/
experts ascribed to it; her testimony provided a surplus of meaning that spilled beyond the parameters used to
contextualise and produce meaning from her experiences.

For example, in Basappa’s testimony, work as a devadasi was strongly associated with poverty and a lack of
opportunities for survival. Basappa illustrated how poverty, more than ‘ritual’, was the predominant causal
factor in her entrance into the devadasi system. Basappa was her parents’ only child, and after her father died,
her mother dedicated her because she did not want her to marry and join another family. Here, poverty and the
more general structure of gender relations in India, where a girl’s marriage is deemed a loss of labour and a
financial burden to her family, provide a critical context for understanding Basappa’s work as a devadasi. As
Basappa explained to the Tribunal, ‘The devadasi system is forced on poor girls who have to accept it precisely
because of poverty. […] Some educated girls do not follow the devadasi practice instead they prefer to work in
the fields and the mills’ (AWHRC, 1994, p. 15). Although poverty and limited opportunities for education are
central foci of Dalit feminist activities, locally and nationally, they are largely omitted in the context provided
for the devadasi system in international human rights campaigns and are replaced with ‘ritual’ and/or ‘forced
prostitution/sexual slavery’.

Basappa’s testimony in Tokyo included a description of how the devadasi system functioned and an account of
critical experiences and events in her life. Her account significantly departed from the description of the devadasi
system as forced prostitution directed by upper-caste men in temples. Basappa explained that life as a devadasi
is initiated with a ‘ceremonial puja’, after which upper-caste men negotiate payments with the parents of the girl.
Once it is decided ‘whether payment would be in full or instalment’, the men ‘would start having regular sexual
intercourse with the girls’ (ibid.). Basappa worked as both a labourer and a devadasi. Describing the violence and
anguish she experienced, she stated:

At night we have to share our bodies with the men who work with us as coolies during the day. We are treated like animals
and sometimes beaten up. We are like wives imprisoned within four walls. Even if the men see the children born out of our
 Purvi Mehta    121  33

relationship with them, they don’t show any care or love for them. Our children do not have the right to use their father’s
name. (ibid., p. 14)

The analogy to ‘wives’ in terms of the denial of mobility is striking in Basappa’s testimony. Basappa also explained
that ‘the men who had relations with us did not always keep their promises’ (ibid.). Basappa had three children—
two girls and one boy—with a ‘Muslim driver’ who regularly gave her money. When his wife found out about their
relationship, however, the payments ceased. The driver died soon after, in a car accident, leaving Basappa
without any support.

After the death of the driver, Basappa began having sexual relations with her maternal uncle who, as she described,
‘was a drunkard’ (ibid.). Basappa’s discussion of her uncle and the events related to him provide the climax in her
testimony. When Basappa received a bank loan to buy cattle, her uncle made claims to half of the money. One
evening, he came to her house with a friend and demanded the money but then suddenly collapsed and died.
Basappa and her mother were blamed for his death, arrested and detained by the police. ‘We were beaten up by the
police’, Basappa said, ‘who have no respect for devadasis’ (ibid.). A Catholic priest and nun, who had been working
with devadasis in Manvi, posted bail for Basappa and her mother. Although an autopsy later found that Basappa
was not to blame for her uncle’s death and that he had died of a heart attack, the incident was emotionally,
socially, physically and financially damaging: ‘After the incident, no man ever came to my house. We were
completely isolated. I used to cry a lot after the incident which also resulted in a lot of psychological problems for
me. I was sent to a doctor for treatment and then to a convent in Poona’ (ibid.).

The story about her uncle and his death was the central episode in Basappa’s testimony; although her status
as a devadasi was at play in the sexual exploitation she experienced and the harassment she received from the
police, Basappa’s narrative did not bear close resemblance to activists/experts’ representations of the
devadasi system as ‘ritual’ or ‘forced prostitution/sexual slavery’. According to her testimony, Basappa’s
crisis found resolution through the intervention of the Catholic nuns working in Manvi: they helped send
Basappa to Pune and then moved her to a convent in Andhra Pradesh where her children could attend school.
After hearing that her mother was ill, Basappa returned to Manvi, where she found work as a helper in the
convent and enrolled her children in boarding school. After narrating this life story, Basappa discussed her own
change in perspective and empowerment:

I now realize what a devadasi is. It is a heinous crime that robs a woman of her dignity as a human being. A woman’s group
organized by the sisters had given me an orientation [on women’s rights] and advised me to give up being a devadasi. Other
devadasis say that if they can earn 300 rupees (US $10) a month in a factory or anywhere, they would give up being a devadasi.
Government, however, has not provided any help in rehabilitating these women. I ceased being a devadasi after I was made
awareness [of what the practice was doing to me as a woman] […]. My dream is to help other devadasis change their lives so
they may have a better future. Corrupt religious practices have made them victims. (AWHRC, 1994, p. 15)

Basappa’s reference to ‘corrupt religious practices’ overlaps with some activists’ representations and may reflect the
influence that activist discourse had on her narrative; however, she seemed to focus more on the structural constraints
on women’s agency. She called attention to the lack of government rehabilitation schemes and the lack of options for
women like herself to provide for themselves. Her discussion illustrated a world of few options for basic survival, of
limited opportunities for education and advancement, of poverty and of loss and isolation that does not easily map
onto the picture of ritual or sexual slavery.

Basappa’s testimony revealed dimensions of caste—poverty, police harassment and governmental neglect—that were
more powerful in shaping her experience as a devadasi than power dynamics based on temple ritual or religion,
phenomena, which often get centred in human rights campaigns. Ritual and religion, especially in the Global South,
may draw the attention of a Western audience much more than poverty and neglect. The poverty and neglect Basappa
34    121  Dalit feminism in Tokyo

experienced, however, were functions of and aspects of caste; so, while her testimony challenges representations of
the devadasi system in many human rights campaigns, it does not contradict Manorama’s framing of the practice.
Manorama’s analogy between the devadasi system and military sexual slavery highlights relations of power that
manifest in sexual violence by upper-caste men towards Dalit women in a caste-based society; Basappa’s testimony
highlights the economic relations that create Dalit women’s vulnerability. Both relations are analogous to power
dynamics found in colonial situations. Basappa’s testimony thus does not substantially challenge Manorama’s
framing of the devadasi system as analogous to military sexual slavery, nor does it contradict the analogy between
caste and colonialism; rather, it elaborates on these analogies by revealing the everyday forms of exploitation and
oppression that create the caste structure that endangers Dalit women.

concluding thoughts
The official report from the Tribunal discussed the event as offering a new vision of feminism and human rights, a
vision that was from a distinctly ‘South perspective’, one that put the experiences of marginalised women at the
centre of analysis and activism (AWHRC, 1994, p. 5). The Tribunal brought together non-elite women from the
Global South, those often neglected by the predominant feminist movements in their home nations. It welcomed
Manorama and Basappa, created a space for their dialogue with other activists and, in the process, generated
alliances for Dalit women with activists from Japan, Korea, the Philippines and across Asia, and incorporated a
Dalit feminist view of the possibilities of transnational activism. As stated by one of the activists at the
conference, ‘it is from the edges that the women are speaking, knowing that from the margins of power, we see
the world differently. We need to find a new terrain, walking with other people on the edges—the indigenous, the
[D]alits, the disabled and the dispossessed’ (ibid., p. 81).

As the spokesperson for devadasis and other Dalit women back in India, Manorama looked abroad for ‘sisterhood’
and solidarity and asked the audience of activists and survivors gathered at the Tribunal, ‘will you be our
sisters?’. While grounded in an assertion of commonality, sisterhood at the Tribunal did not gloss over differences
in social contexts or histories but, rather, strategically claimed similarity to connect Dalit women isolated in
India to a larger community of women and to global struggles for social justice. Manorama was not asserting
sameness with her co-nationals, the ‘mainstream’ or the powerful but, rather, with non-elite women outside of
India, women also marked by difference in their home societies. Her notion of transnational sisterhood reveals
the spatial and temporal contours of the imagining of cross-border affinity and alliance, of solidarity, from the
perspectives of non-elite women in the Global South. By affectively identifying with groups—such as ‘comfort
women’—seen as sharing comparable histories of violence and exploitation and similar structural positions in
their home societies, Dalit feminists countered their political isolation at home with a politics that transcended
state borders. These kinds of cross-border activities diverged from many of the prevailing paradigms in the
study of transnational feminism. Removed from both the ‘missionary impulse’ and strategic interest in
globalisation behind much of the field of transnational feminism, the study of activities such as Dalit feminist
activism at the Tokyo Tribunal reveal affiliations and alliances that stunt the nation as the primary space of
belonging and offer a non-elite vision of transnational feminist solidarity.

‘Solidarity’, Vijay Prashad (2000, p. 197) writes, ‘is a desire, a promise, an aspiration. It speaks to our wish for a kind
of unity, one that does not exist now but that we want to produce’. Manorama and Basappa’s cross-border engagements
reveal this aspiration for unity, for affiliations that break through the isolation of caste society, and connect them
with other struggling groups. These affiliations build from a discernment of similarity in struggle and a mutual hope
for liberation. ‘Transnational’ here appears as a category of relations that brings into view the cosmopolitan and
internationalist visions of liberation of struggling, non-elite populations. ‘Transnational’ does not refer to a
geographical location (i.e. outside of the ‘West’), nor is it framed through national interests. Rather, ‘transnational’
is used to highlight a critical orientation, a perspective that, to borrow from historian Jean Quataert’s (2009, p. 7)
work on human rights, constitutes a form of ‘globalization from below’. This perspective links the local with the global,
 Purvi Mehta    121  35

drawing attention to processes of exclusion and marginalisation and to strivings to connect with people from different
histories and in different places in the hope of the possibility of a shared politics, and of solidarity.11

author biography
Purvi Mehta is an assistant professor of history at Colorado College, USA. Her teaching and research focus on caste,
gender and human rights activism in India.

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