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Clinical Encounters and Citizenship Projects in South India a

Lucinda Ramberg a

Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA Accepted author version posted online: 17 Mar 2014.Published online: 30 Sep 2014.

Click for updates To cite this article: Lucinda Ramberg (2014) Clinical Encounters and Citizenship Projects in South India, Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 33:6, 513-528, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2014.894042 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2014.894042

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Medical Anthropology, 33: 513–528, 2014 Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0145-9740 print/1545-5882 online DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2014.894042

Clinical Encounters and Citizenship Projects in South India Lucinda Ramberg

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Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

Dedicated to a South Indian goddess, devadasis are priests in a healing cult, whose nonconjugal sexuality has been designated ‘prostitution’ and subjected to eradication by the state. Drawing on ethnographic research, I consider two ways in which they cross the threshold of the clinic, as ‘vectors of disease’ and as sex worker peer educators, in order to think about the bio-politics of citizenship in postcolonial India. If biopolitical citizenship describes the way the state takes hold of their bodies, dedication describes how their bodies are claimed by the Devi Yellamma. I juxtapose these different ways of embodying power as a means to mark the limits of secular social scientific terms of recognition. Keywords biopolitics, body, devadasi, India, sex worker

Dedicated in a rite of marriage to a popular South Indian goddess as children, devadasis (servants of the deity) are priests in a healing cult. The rites conducted by these Dalit (‘outcaste’) women are seen to be crucial to the renewal of life and its conditions of possibility in the communities in which they serve. They transact in the favor and healing powers of the goddess Yellamma outside the walls of her main temple and in sex with patrons or clients outside the bounds of conjugal matrimony.1 These marginal but powerful women are widely framed as prostitutes and vectors of disease, and their alliance with the Devi (goddess) is not recognized as a matter of legitimate religion or kinship within the law. In the most recent wave of reform, the practice of dedication and all the rites it authorizes devadasis to perform have been criminalized; devadasis are enjoined to sever their ties to Yellamma and to forgo the forms of ecstatic embodiment she provokes and enables. Biopolitics is one of the terrains these criminalized women have found for refashioning their relationship to the state. At the same time, the power of the state is not the only power they acknowledge. As one pujari (priest) described Yellamma to me: “Luck is with her, she is ruling the world.” In this article, I elaborate what it means to incorporate the Devi and her powers. I also describe two ways devadasis reach for biopolitical citizenship. From the point of view of reform, devadasis

LUCINDA RAMBERG is assistant professor in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, New York. Focusing on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of sexuality, religiosity and subjectivity, she has conducted research in South India on ‘sacred prostitution’ (devadasi dedication) and Dalit conversion to Buddhism. Address correspondence to Lucinda Ramberg, Department of Anthropology, 261 McGraw Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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are either lost to superstition and disease or saved by devotional religion and rational medicine. Some devadasis accede to this logic and seek to save themselves or be saved. Others take both the Devi and the state to make claims on their bodies and mobilize the possibilities of slipping back and forth and between ‘saved’ and ‘lost.’ I juxtapose biopolitical and ecstatic embodiment, and the possibility of slippage between them, to raise questions about how anthropologists conceptualize the relationship between forms of power, modes of subject making, and the body.

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BIOPOLITICAL CITIZENSHIP Citizenship projects congeal the power of the state in different kinds of embodied personhood. They produce particular kinds of persons, forms of governance, and uneven distributions of rights, protections, and recognitions. In the context of Indian anticolonial nationalism and postcolonial state formation, the question of citizenship has had particular implications for women seen to be caught up in ‘backward’ practices. Such women must be remade to be fully admissible to the national body. Ongoing efforts to eradicate child marriage and ‘customary prostitution’ (devadasi dedication) might be framed as citizenship projects in which the postcolonial state stages its rationality, modernity, and legitimacy on the rescued and rehabilitated bodies of women. I am invoking citizenship here not only in its narrow sense as the legal right to political participation but also more broadly as a mode of national inclusion and positive state recognition: To be hailed by the state as a person endowed with rights and worthy of protections is to be a citizen. In this expanded sense, as a question of social and economic inclusion as well as political belonging, citizenship has been closely considered by scholars working at the intersection of modern forms of governance, distributions of life chances, and the politics and cunning of recognition (Ong 1999; Povinelli 2002; Taylor 1997). Citizen-making state projects of education, welfare, and civilization demonstrate the performativity and the disciplinarity of the state (Hansen and Stepputat 2005); they also illuminate projects of entrepreneurial self-making in which immigrants present themselves before the state as worthy of rights (Ong 2003). Postcolonial histories of sovereignty and citizenship have focused less on migrants seeking inclusion in the nation and more on those subjects deemed not quite yet citizens (Mamdani 1996). Lingering in the waiting room of history, these ‘not yet’ citizens and their “non-modern, rural, non-secular relationships and life practices” (Chakrabarty 2000:10) haunt postcolonial modernity. Their citizenship remains bracketed and they stand as a reminder of unfulfilled promises of democracy. This is the kind of population devadasis have been made to constitute, an internal threat to the legitimacy of the Indian nation state whose positive recognition and citizen belonging is contingent on their rehabilitation and bodily reform. Projects of rehabilitation and reform focused on devadasis combine forms of disciplinary and therapeutic address. In the most recent campaigns conducted in Karnataka, devadasis are told to give up their rites or face fines and imprisonment, and to take care of their health. Increasingly, who counts as a citizen is “negotiated and renegotiated through biological measure and whether one is seen as properly responsible for one’s health” (Ticktin 2011:142; see also Ecks 2005). As a key site in which such biological measurement and transaction occur, the clinic might be framed as a threshold of citizenship. This framing places the mattering forth of the body at the intersection of biomedical and political forms of knowledge, practice, and spatialization. The clinic, as I invoke it ethnographically here, takes shape in more and less obvious

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ways. It might be a government-funded public health institution, a private physician’s office, or the shaded spot under a village tree where community health workers provide education. That particular space or encounter assembles transnational, government and nongovernment actors, practices, and forms of ‘expert’ knowledge around the bodies of ‘patients’—persons whose biological condition is understood to potentially, or actually, put themselves or others at risk. To frame the clinic as a threshold of citizenship is to ask about the state effects of managing, or failing to manage, the distribution of life and health among citizens. In this article, I consider encounters between an illegitimate form of life and the clinic—one of the possible sites of the remaking of this life. Within reform projects and public health discourses, devadasis are framed as ‘vectors of disease’ and sent to the clinic. As a site for the resignification of devadasi embodiment, the clinic becomes a threshold for emergent forms of devadasi subjectivity and new possibilities for relations to the state. Here, I consider two types of clinical encounters and their citizenship effects. In the first, agents of reform send devadasis to the clinic where they exchange testable blood for vitamin tonics and situate themselves favorably within flows of nongovernmental organization (NGO) capital, loans for houses, and micro credit. In the second, dedicated women become brokers of medical knowledge and prevention techniques, they distribute condoms, dispel ‘myths,’ and disperse ‘facts’ about sexual health and life across rural and urban locations, and accompany other women to the clinic. As sex worker HIV peer educators, they mediate between governmental and nongovernmental forms of knowledge and work with doctors, social workers, police, politicians and patients. They become members of an emergent transnational biosocial formation2 organizing itself around the prevention of a virus, and gain access to new forms of social mobility, travel, and recognition. Both of these clinical encounters reposition devadasis in relation to their bodies, the Devi, transnational flows of virus, discourses of risk, contagion and panic, the AIDS industry, and the state. My comments here are in conversation with analyses of the clinic as a site for the reorganization of knowledge and power in relation to the body, and thus a space for the emergence of new subject positions, modes of embodiment, and forms of authority (Biehl 2004; Fassin and d’Halluin 2005; Foucault 1973; Rose 2006). Recent work on biopolitical citizenship—or the imbrication of forms of national identity, belonging, and inclusion with biological conceptions of personhood and value—has attended to the role the clinic can play in the ability of migrants to Europe to circumvent repatriation or secure status as a refugee (Giordano 2014; Ticktin 2011). Scholars working on HIV/AIDS and its proliferations of sexual knowledge, prevention techniques, state surveillance, and research governance have documented the forms of therapeutic citizenship offered by some countries to the seroconverted, and the emergence of the patientcitizen who discovers his or her rights through the space of the clinic. In the process, he or she becomes a member of the biosocial formations of HIV-positive persons (Nguyen 2008; Biehl and Eskerod 2007). In India, where the biomedical clinic first took shape as a feature of British, Portuguese, or French indirect rule, the body early became a site of contestation and means of resistance. In the context of a nineteenth century British campaign to replace a longstanding practice of smallpox variolation with vaccination, refusing biomedicine was a means of anticolonial protest, a way to resist the imposition of what was widely construed as a ‘government mark’ denoting its claim on that body (Apffel-Marglin 1990:118; see also Arnold 1993:144). As an aspect of the civilizing mission of colonialism and in the name of health and the prevention of disease, vaccinations were forcibly administered and women were rounded up. ‘Lock hospitals’ assembled biomedical

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knowledge, imperial authority and public women to produce Indian ‘prostitutes’ as vectors of disease, from who British men should be protected (Levine 1994). These legacies notwithstanding, under the conditions of late capital, the body has become less a stable site (either for resistance or the mark of sovereignty) and increasingly a disaggregated resource of biological material. Scholars working on biocapital, biovalue, and biotechnology in relation to the uneven distributions of life chances and bodily survival suggest that forms of biological vulnerability are becoming increasingly durable grounds for citizen belonging (Cohen 2005; Copeman 2009; Novas 2006; Waldby and Mitchell 2006). What does this mean for the status of the body in relation to citizenship? In relation to the refashioning of devadasis, the politics of respectability and reform are increasingly giving way to the biopolitics of responsibility, wherein they are incited to remake themselves through biology as a condition of the body and as a material resource for transaction. I turn here to the question of who these women are, and why they must re-make themselves, or be re-made. I came to know them, and write about them here, through more than two years of ethnographic research, including more than 100 interviews and extensive participant observation conducted in southern Maharastra and northern Karnataka between 2001 and 2011.

YELLAMMA WOMEN AS HEALERS Tens of thousands of devadasis live and work throughout Maharastra, Karnataka and Andra Pradesh today. As wives of the Devi, whom they embody, they mediate between her and her devotees, ward off affliction, and cultivate all forms of prosperity and flourishing. They ‘keep’ Yellamma in small temples and enact household, temple, and festival rites. They accompany the Devi wherever she goes, play her instruments, and sing devotional songs (bhajans) in the upper caste (Lingayat) households of landholding farmers and at public gatherings. At the main temple of this regionally extremely popular Devi, Lingayat men conduct her puja (worship, rites), but in towns and villages across the central Deccan plateau, Dalit devadasis do so. In order to gain the favor of this Devi, upper caste devotees must call upon the women who keep her. Devotees transact with devadasis. They give the fruits of the harvest, new cloth and money, and receive the mediated presence of the Devi. The value of this presence is best understood through the Hindu concept of auspiciousness—fertility and its cultivations, all forms of well-being and flourishing. Never widowed, always married, devadasis are ‘ever auspicious’ (nityasumangali) and devotees seek their presence. For instance, one day in 2002, the devadasis with whom I conducted much of my research asked me to accompany them to a celebration of a rite called udi tumbuwudu (filling the lap/womb), to which a landholding farming family had called them. This was in a village I call Nandipur, in the Belgaum district of Northern Karnataka. Devotees regularly performed udi tumbuwudu on auspicious occasions such as the birth of a female buffalo calf, the fixing of a marriage, or, as in this case, the successful resolution of serious affliction. To celebrate the rite, devotees would call the four active Yellamma pujaris in that village to come to their home, bring the Devi, and officiate. It was a beautiful day in the middle of the late summer harvest season. As we walked to the farmhouse through fields of tall golden millet, Yamuna told me about the family. A widely respected pujari, Yamuna supported an extended family of seven with her earnings from ritual work. She regularly responded to calls from dominant caste landholding farmers

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who sought her auspicious presence at life cycle and fertility rites and touched her feet when she came bearing the Devi. The youngest boy in this household had fallen seriously ill the previous spring. He was so ill he began to lose his sight. His family, Yamuna told me, had taken him to many doctors to no avail. He fell still more ill. The family began to despair. The boy’s grandmother brought offerings to Yellamma on the next new moon day, cloth, and freshly cooked food. Yamuna, who was tending Yellamma that day in the temple, placed these offerings in Yellamma’s udi, sang a bhajan praising Yellamma’s power, and called on her to “look at” the boy, and then sent the woman home with turmeric that she had touched to the body of the devi Yellamma: “Give the boy a pinch every day in water to drink, he will become well.” He did. The joy and the gratitude they felt was palpable to me at the celebration of udi tumbuwudu that day, as they proudly fussed over him, passing him around and describing to me how terribly ill he had been, how frightened they were. “It is her great power (mahima),” one of the devadasis said to me, now legible in the healed body of the boy and the restoration of his family’s peace of mind. Devadasis do not marry in the conventional way—as one dedicated woman put it to me: “I am already married to her, how many husbands do you think I should have?” They may take patrons with whom they are typically sexually exclusive, or work in brothels. As women married to a deity, devadasis have proven inassimilable to the norms of secularity, conjugality, and bodily containment delimiting the terms of citizenship.3 The social, political, and economic rights devadasis once held as highly sophisticated choreographers, musicians, and ritual performers whose presence was crucial to the wider political life of the deities, temple economies, and the institution of kingship, have been all but eliminated through reform. Histories of temple women place the practice of dedicating girls to deities and temples across South India from about the ninth century (Kersenboom-Story 1987; Orr 2000). The practice reached its height in the tenth and eleventh centuries at the peak of the importance of the Hindu temple complex as a political institution. The performing arts, to which devadasis were then dedicated, contributed to the reproduction of kingship, itself inseparable from the temple (Dirks 1993).4 As royal patronage diminished and reform intensified, the institution shrank, but continued as an integral aspect of temple life and performing arts outside the temple into the twentieth century.5 Shifts in the organization of sovereignty, sexuality, and the place of the gods in public life have had enormous implications for the viability of devadasi communities and practices. In Karnataka where the practice of dedicating daughters is extant, all the rites belonging to devadasis have been criminalized in an effort to eradicate what is framed as a backward practice exploitative of Dalit women, perpetuated by ignorance and superstition, and productive of disease. Reform projects begun by the Karnataka State Women’s Development Corporation (KSWDC) in the 1980s focused on economic uplift and alternative income generation. Courses in animal husbandry, vegetable selling, and tailoring, widely acknowledged as failures, were largely displaced in the 1990s by a new kind of campaign. Commissioned by the KSWDC, this campaign was designed and implemented by the Mysore Resettlement and Development Agency (MYRADA). The architects of this campaign, whom I interviewed in their Bangalore offices, framed their efforts in terms of the ‘empowerment’ and ‘self-help organization’ of devadasis. The NGO determined that alternative income generation was insufficient and that in order for the devadasi ‘system’ to be eradicated, the auspicious status of dedicated women as ecstatic representatives of the Devi and her powers in the world would have to be undermined. The primary agents of this campaign are maji devadasis (ex-devadasis). They are warned, and in turn warn others, to break the beads tied at dedication and to throw them in the river; to stop roaming with the

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Devi, playing sacred instruments, singing devotional songs and asking for grain, conducting rites of healing and fertility, and practices of divination and possession; and to cut the matted locks of hair taken to be a sign of Yellamma’s presence in their bodies. Those devadasis who continue to adopt the modes of embodiment and to practice the rites to which they were dedicated are threatened with fines of up to 500 rupees and five years’ imprisonment. Within this current configuration of reform, devadasis have become one of those unworthy populations whose ‘protection’ justifies the abrogation of their rights and the government has only negative forms of recognition to offer devadasis, as devadasis. By contrast, ‘exdevadasis’—women who have refashioned themselves through renunciation of their dedication and participation in reform—gain access to flows of micro-credit, respectability, and positive state recognition. Across the threshold of the clinic, still other possibilities await.

THE PROSTITUTE AS A ‘VECTOR OF DISEASE’ Many devadasis criticize projects of reform and reject the idea that they are especially vulnerable to, or responsible for, HIV transmission. Durgabai, an active pujari in her forties who has had three successive patrons in her lifetime, did not mince words: What is this government that has come in between us and the Devi? That brings laws [banning dedication] saying this AIDS comes from jogatis [devadasis]. Aaa! But we ask, “Why should it come from jogatis? What about gandullavalu [conventionally married women]? They do all these things [pursue sexual liasons], why shouldn’t it come from them?”

Devadasis might explicitly reject the government’s view of them, but this did not mean that they did not see the possibilities of being hailed as a vector of disease. I was never more aware of these possibilities than the time I accompanied Yamuna to the clinic in 2003. She was the most powerful devadasi I ever knew. Having witnessed her conduct rites with great dignity, authority, and expertise on innumerable occasions, I was surprised to observe her bent shouldered comportment in the space of the clinic. Her first trip to the clinic in question occurred while I was away from Nadipur. She went with Durgabai and one other devadasi, Mahadevi; they told me all about it upon my return. A social worker from MYRADA came to Nandipur and told them to come with her for a “medical checkup.” She used the English language phrase. They were taken to a government hospital where a technician from a private doctor’s office drew their blood. A government hospital nurse listened to their bodily concerns, administered injections, and sent them home with vitamins purchased by the woman from the NGO. In this case, the clinic came together as an event comprised of government, NGO, and private medical and social experts working on patient bodies. After describing this encounter, Yamuna asked me, “Why did they take my blood? All they said was ‘to check for diseases.’” She showed me the bruise marking the site of the blood draw, complained about the ache in her arm, and worried aloud about what she might have lost: “What will happen to us since they have taken this blood? It takes lots of energy to make this much blood. They think this AIDS is coming from devadasis, this is why they took our blood.” “What do you make of their taking your blood?” I asked. “Maybe they will sell it, maybe they will put it together and sell it in order to pay for the lunch they treated us to. What benefit to them could our blood be?” she replied.

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Yamuna frames blood as a form of bodily wealth and well-being, expropriated at the clinic and transformable, perhaps, into a commodity of benefit to the NGO. She recognized that she had been hailed as a vector of disease, a potential carrier of HIV in this encounter. As a woman who has spent her whole life living in her natal village, whose sexual life has been circumscribed within two successive long-term relationships with patrons, Yamuna did not see herself as a prostitute. She understood, however, that she was seen as one. As she taught me, she also saw that this stigmatizing misrecognition might have its possibilities. Three weeks later the social worker from MYRADA, conspicuous in her store bought kurta (tunic), came back to the village to tell Yamuna that her VDRL6 test was positive and that she should come to town and go to the clinic for treatment. “We will cover the cost of treatment, so why don’t you come, it’s good for your health,” she said. Resting our backs against the wall, the social worker, Durgabai, Mahadevi, Yamuna, and I sat on the mats Mahadevi had spread for us in her home. We listened as Yamuna contemplated what might be “good for her health”: “You took our blood and it wounded us, every time we came you took our blood and you are not telling us what disease we have. Is it HIV?” “It’s not for HIV,” the social worker insisted. “Look, you are getting the treatment for free from the office [NGO], if you are willing to come, come Friday at eleven to the clinic. If you don’t want to come, don’t come.” Yamuna presented a loss, a wound, a lack. She dared a critique: “You took . . . it wounded . . . you are not telling.” The social worker’s response admitted none of this. She presented Yamuna with a choice: “Come for free treatment at the clinic or don’t, it’s up to you. The responsibility is yours, we are not asking for anything—‘the treatment [is] free.’” On the day I went with her for the ‘treatment,’ Yamuna moved with characteristic selfpossession through the Gandhi market area, asking for directions to the doctor’s clinic along the way. A wide hand painted board hung above the entrance announcing the clinic of Dr. Nimbarkhar. We proceeded through the door and up a narrow flight of steps into the waiting area where six other women and the social worker from MYRADA sat on facing wooden benches. In this case, the clinic came together as an event in the private office of a physician where a general appointment for all the women had been made by the NGO, who paid him with a government check. The women called us to sit with them, where we exchanged gossip while one by one the women went behind a curtain into the examining room. Ten minutes later they emerged by turn clutching a prescription for doxycycline and vitamin tonics in one hand and a medical record in the other. On the way to the medical shop to fill the prescriptions, in a humble affect I had never before seen her adopt, Yamuna asked the social worker what documents were required in order to apply for a house loan thorough MYRADA. A week later, she sat patiently through a half-day didactic meeting of an ex-devadasi sangha or ‘self-help group.’ The leader of the meeting, an ex-devadasi, admonished the women to recruit more members, boost attendance, and the frequency of their meetings. The sangha was explicitly framed as a platform for raising a collective voice of demand for government benefits and a vehicle for accessing them. Access to these benefits was contingent on (1) repayment of previous loans (for dairy buffaloes), (2) sufficient recruitment and retention of membership from their respective village, and (3) perfect attendance meetings and trainings. The women were unruly, defiant even. They shouted over each other: “The houses you gave before are no good!” “How can we repay those loans?” “Take the bricks back.” “That buffalo died on me,” but Yamuna was calm. As I listened to her questions, all about the housing loan benefit, I saw that her compliance with the therapeutic regimes of blood

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testing and self-help group formation were aimed at garnering NGO support for a government loan program. For Yamuna, crossing the threshold of the clinic was not so much an exercise in the pursuit of biomedical remedy as a means to reach for the possibility of positive state recognition. Over the course of the many conversations we had about what treatment to pursue for her persistent cough and growing weakness, she repeatedly identified and described the clinic as a space of surveillance, appropriation, and ‘caste-ism’: “Those government doctors will not look at us, they will not give us proper treatment.” Parsing medical surveillance from positive regard, Yamuna drew on an idiom often used to describe the favor of the Devi, “She looked at me.” Yamuna sought diagnosis and accepted treatment from the clinic when her eldest son insisted, but she placed no hope in the clinic as a resource for the remedy for her illness. When she was hailed as a potential vector of disease, as a member of population seen to be ‘at risk,’ of potential danger to others and therefore of interest to the state as a body in need of testing and surveillance, however, she stepped forward as a means of remaking the possibilities of her own life and its material condition. In 2004, when I returned to Nandipur, Yamuna’s eldest son showed me the spot where she had been laid to rest in the burial ground after her death from the cancer that was finally diagnosed. After telling me that the crow had come quickly to eat food from the plate placed on her body and explaining that this meant that all the desires of her life had been satisfied, he took me to the house built with the government loan she had secured, where he and his brother were now living with their two wives and four children. I was never able to establish whether the testing MYRADA organized was for HIV. The women thought it was. Dr. Nimbarkhar said it was when I asked him what he was testing for. “They are like that, no? They do this to earn. They will have HIV,” he said turning his hands up in what I took to be a gesture of resignation. When I spoke to Shobha Gasti, chairwoman of the NGO’s devadasi project, she situated the ‘health check’ as one of three programs designed to improve the lot of devadasis. Along with publicity against the rites and sangha organization, medical testing for syphilis had been sponsored by the state and funded by the Dutch. Whatever kind of truth the blood of devadasis was being made to speak, the state health promotion trust, the Dutch funder, the provincial doctor, and the women were all caught in the flow of a virus and its significations—stigma, contagion, and humanitarian redress (Treichler 1999). Devadasis who step forward as prostitute-vectors of disease surrendering their blood for testing become ‘patient-citizens,’ persons seen to be taking care of their health for their own good and that of the population. Another way devadasis may step forward into the flow of an epidemic and before the state is as sex worker peer educators.

SEX WORKER PEER EDUCATORS Sex workers must be treated as social workers if the threat of an HIV epidemic is to be contained. (Indian Minister of Health, quoted in National Commission for Women 1995–1996:24) Are we not citizens of India? Are we not human? (Shabana Kazi, general secretary, Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad or vamp, quoted in Datta, Ganesh, and Sheede n.d.:23)

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Sex worker peer educators emerged in the mid-1990s in India at the crossroads of the movements for women’s and labor rights, histories of the medical management of prostitutes and the AIDS pandemic. In Kolkota, where the largest collective of sex workers in the world exists (65,000 members in 2013), the research and surveillance interests of the All India Institute of Hygiene & Public Health came together with the self-organizing genius of women working to situate their sex for cash transactions as a form of labor worthy of rights and protections. What began in 1992 as a government-run peer education health prevention program, called the Sonagachi Project, became a part of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in 1999—a collective of sex workers who had organized themselves as a state registered cooperative society. In India, sero-conversion prevalence rates among urban sex workers have been estimated as ranging from 50% to 90% in Bombay, Delhi, and Chennai (Basu et al. 2004). However, HIV rates of only 10% have been documented among sex workers in Kolkota where reported condom use rose from 3% in 1992 to 90% in 1999 (UNAIDS 2000). The relatively low rate of HIV infection and high rate of condom use among sex workers in Kolkota has been widely attributed to the work of the Sonagachi Project. Its model includes (1) a definition of HIV as an occupational health hazard, (2) an articulation of sex worker rights as human rights, (3) the provision of access to condoms and STD treatment, and (4) the creation of a politicized community (Basu et al. 2004:845). The collectivization of sex workers followed the flow of the epidemic and its trailing logics of surveillance, control, and containment. The aims of the Kolkota-based sex workers’ forum, like similar collectives, built upon and exceed those defined by the public health interests of the central government, the World Health Organization, and UNAIDS. Across India, collective members fought against stigma, police raids, remand, and violence (Ghosh 2006; SANGRAM/VAMP team 2008). The advent of the sex worker peer educators and the process of collectivization marked the possibility of a shift in subject position and moral location—from criminalized and stigmatized prostitute to the rights-claiming (sex) worker/educator. Government supplied condoms and surveillance projects combined with sex worker community organizing and advocacy and sexual knowledge across India in what became the basic model for HIV peer educator programs (Swendeman et al. 2009). In northern Karnataka and southern Maharastra, the two most active programs are SANGRAM/VAMP and the Belgaum Rural Development Society (BIRDS). The sex worker HIV peer educator collective VAMP, together with the NGO SANGRAM, has organized brilliantly in Maharastra and northern Karnataka against the state remand and rehabilitation of sex workers as violations of their right to work and forms of state violence. In northern Karnataka, BIRDS teamed up with Vijay Thakur, a medical doctor who has worked exhaustively toward collectivization across South India. Access to health care was and is a key demand of these collectives: “Collectively we went and demanded that the times for hospital visits be changed because we work through the night. So the health clinic changed appointment times so it could work for us. It is our right to get health services in the public hospitals” (CASAM 2008:17). In 2003 I met with members of VAMP collective located in the center of the market district. We sat in a circle on a cotton dhurrie as Margoawwa described her work as a peer educator: “I teach women how to use condoms and all about their health and if somebody is ill we will take them to the civil hospital, and keep teaching because we are worried about their health. Before people didn’t know about cleanliness and they didn’t know how to live. After the establishment of SANGRAM people have come to know many things.” An imposing woman who sat straight backed, hand on her hip, added “we

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learned about hygiene, about health, we learned so much from SANGRAM, so much confidence.” “Before working for SANGRAM, we used to sit like you,” she said, gesturing to Jyoti, my demure married research assistant. “Now we can go anywhere, talk with anyone, sit confidently.” “How did you sit before?” I asked. Adopting a collapsed posture, Bandawwa pulled the loose end of her sari over to cover her head and everyone burst into laughter. Links between hygiene, education, safe sex, and female self-assertion are established here in a chain of practical labor for the health and empowerment of women who exchange sex for money. Around that circle, health know-how trumped respectable feminine comportment. In 2002, I participated in a three-day workshop with members of Shakti (woman/goddess power), a collective begun in 1996. That year members traveled to Delhi to give testimony for a Commission on the Status of Women Report on Violence against Women and Children. They had tea with the Prime Minister. Initially funded by HIVOS (a Dutch humanitarian aid agency), their collectivization process was led by a Dr. Thakur and supported by BIRDS. As both the director of BIRDS, B. K. Barlaya, and Dr. Thakur stressed to me in interviews, the funding was aimed at HIV prevention, but BIRD’s programming emphasized the importance of broader issues such as ration cards, education, and political participation. In 2002, the district had 14 collectives of sex workers, whose members offered safer sex education and condom demonstrations, accompanied women to the clinic, interceded with the police, and participated in capacity building workshops and research projects. The condoms were provided by the state district health officer and were distributed by peer educators to women in the community. For the workshop in 2002, the women traveled from all over the district to a hotel in Pune. Among other activities, the peer educators brainstormed ways they might teach women to convince customers to wear a condom (nirodh): 1. Take the client inside, massage him, kiss him, remove his clothes, and then present the condom once he becomes erect. 2. Educate the client, tell him you have many clients, that if he wears nirodh, he will be protecting his family. 3. Do not mention the nirodh in the beginning, get some food, some drinks, once he becomes erect and drunk, then put the nirodh on. “If he becomes fully drunk, he won’t get erect,” one woman quipped; the room erupted in laughter. Placing themselves on the side of knowledge, these peer educators combined their expertise as purveyors of sex with a moral campaign against viral contagion and ignorance (“we must educate the village people”) and the pleasure of each other’s company in the biosocial formation– sex worker/HIV peer educator. In contrast to ex-devadasis who speak of becoming better (in a moral sense), sex worker peer educators talk about becoming aware of their rights, of becoming educated and becoming an educator, of helping to safeguard the health of their communities. They are becoming modern subjects, but not necessarily in terms of respectable womanhood. They place their bodies in the way of a virus. They enter partnerships with the state in order to stem the flow of the virus and to find means to lay their rights claims at its door. Since 2000, two major research initiatives were launched focusing on ‘commercial sex workers,’ truck drivers, and ‘men who have sex with men’—one an Indo-Canadian collaboration, the other a Gates Foundation project. Both worked in partnership with the state government and sex worker collectives. Peer educators thus also facilitated the entry of sex workers into research streams and clinical encounters extending from rural northern Karnataka to Manitoba Canada and UCLA. Collectives of sex worker peer educators produce forms of ‘empowerment, capacity

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building, rights organizing’ as their reports proclaim, they also facilitate circuits of surveillance, audit, and research, in the name of health and enhancement of life (Ghosh 2006; Van Hollen 2007). These possibilities all find their footing on the ground of a medical and secular conception of the prostitute as defined by her sexual acts, promiscuous, and transactional and thus a critical channel and incubator of a deadly virus whose containment might be accomplished through the management and cultivation of her body, a project in which the sex worker peer educator might participate. Both the patient-citizen and the worker-educator draw on the body as a biological resource that derives its value from the flow of a virus and meanings to which it is put. Both situate the body as a potential conduit of a deadly virus, a materiality that might be penetrated by the medical gaze and circumscribed by state projects of surveillance and containment. Both rely on and work through a chain of substitutions in which the devadasi is a prostitute is an open system of indiscriminate sex acts is an infectious bodily substance. As a means of elaborating the status of the body in these citizen-making projects, I turn now to devadasi embodiment as a distinct site for the resolution of affliction and organization of sovereignty.

EMBODYING THE DEVI In 2001 on a visit to Yellamma’s main temple in Saundatti, I encountered a dedicated woman who told me she had lived here for more than 30 years. I asked her what she had seen change over the time: “There is more and more sin (paapa) in the world and less jogammas and jogappas [female and male bodied dedicated women] coming to the hill, many have died. Sin is increasing day by day. The Devi has become angry and people are dying of disease and earthquakes.” After saying this, she gently turned and walked away. With this speech act, she occupied a place of moral authority, theological insight, and nonclinical diagnostic knowledge. She appraised the consequences of reform, the bodily and moral condition of humanity, and the affective state of the Devi and her power over life and death. The subject position her speech act performed takes the world—not the nation—as its frame of reference. She invoked a moral economy in which sin varies in direct proportion to devotion, and the anger of the Devi is legible in the miserable condition of humanity.7 The authority she assumed rests in her relationship to Yellamma, for whom she spoke, and who speaks through her rites of possession and divination. The power of her position was embodied; indeed it was marked on her body by the red and white beads tied at dedication, and by the long matted locks hanging down her back, which signify the Devi had come into her body. Devadasis cultivate their ties to the Devi by embodying her in various ways and performing the rites to which they are dedicated. In particular, twice weekly, they rise early, bathe, open the temple, and wash the murti and all the ornaments of the Devi. They play her instruments, sing her songs, receive devotees’ offerings, and give the Devi’s blessing in the form of turmeric and prasada (blessed food). They accompany the Devi to the homes of devotees and wherever she might travel outside the village for a festival. They are dedicated to perform these forms of affective labor for the body of the Devi, which they learn over time in apprenticeship relationships. They wear her beads on their necks, and if they get them, her matted locks of hair down their backs.

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As one of its key efforts at reform, MYRADA organized campaigns to cut the matted locks of hair (jade) worn by dedicated women. Jade cutting campaigns frame themselves as projects of hygiene and social uplift that seek to liberate women from false belief and promote health. I quote from a flyer handed out at the main temple during the pilgrimage season: “Thousands of people have gotten their knotted, dirty hair cleaned and are now living a healthy life. This is evidence that the appearance of jade or knotted hair is not due to the Goddess.” Reformers act on hair not as a materialization of the extended sexuality and ecstatic religiosity of Yellamma women but as dirt, a threat to hygiene and health, and thus a proper object of secular medical and humanitarian concern. As I have argued elsewhere (Ramberg 2009), a radical and violent refashioning of the sexuality and religiosity of the body is at stake in these campaigns, as well as the very nature of the body itself. The body figured in jade cutting campaigns is whole in itself, atomistic and self-contained; matted hair is the unwanted intrusion of dirt and disease. By contrast, the ecstatic body is open to incursion, which can manifest as affliction but may be cultivated as a form of power. One may renounce this possibility of ecstatic embodiment and undertake this refashioning voluntarily as a modern subject of reform or be forcibly subjected to it as an object of reform. To submit one’s jade to the scissors of the state is a means of becoming assimilable as a citizen-subject, to become embraced, rather than censored by the law. Jade cutting campaigns might be framed as clinical encounters in which the logics of biomedicine and hygiene combine with the surgical efficacy of cutting to shear superstition and disease from the bodies of dedicated women. Both superstition and disease here are understood to be conditions of the body. These campaigns claim that the body does not matter, in the sense that it cannot conjure a world that centers Yellamma, as devadasi embodiment does. And yet, it does matter as a biological substance that can be offered up to medical regimes of knowledge and citizen projects of the state. Give us your hair for cutting, blood for testing. This is a story about how the body matters and what forms of power the body can legitimately incorporate under conditions of late capital in the postcolony. Throughout her life, Yamuna understood her body as a materiality claimed by and in some sense, owed to Yellamma, the goddess to whom she had been given. For Yamuna, Yellamma’s claim existed alongside the claim Yamuna took the clinic to make on her body. She gave herself over, again and again, to different ends. The logic of reform, by contrast, is not transactional. It is disciplinary and therapeutic by turns. It calls her forth to act on her own behalf: “[Y]ou are getting the treatment for free. . . . If you don’t want to come, don’t.” Stay lost or save yourself. Devadasis qua devadasis can only receive negative recognition, criminalization, and policing. They must become ex-devadasis or prostitutes who, by ‘taking responsibility’ in an epidemic, become good subjects of modernity. Devadasis incorporate the state and become citizens by being enterprising with their biology. They ‘take care’ of themselves, or others, as biological systems vulnerable to disease and capable of contagion by submitting to regimes of testing and checkups. This participation is a sign of their willingness to renounce backwardness, and become responsible—morally and biologically. As patient-citizens, this possibility is contingent on their self-presentation or willingness to be hailed as victims, as backward, as potential bodies of contagion. Their enterprising self-abjection is the entry point for the possibility of their biological remediation and citizen becoming. Rather than opening up life chances, however, the chain of substitutions can become a self-enclosed loop. In their bid for biological citizenship, devadasis substitute one kind of stigma for another, one kind of precarity for another.8 Or, as in the case

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of Yamuna, they move back and forth, carrying the chain of substitutions forward. Now a pujari, now an ex-devadasi, now a prostitute, now a vector of disease, now an educator, now a healer, they mobilize the possibilities of slippage between the terms of recognition modernity offers and those surrounding the Devi Yellamma.

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CONCLUSION Theorists of biopolitical citizenship have illuminated a relationship to the state through forms of modern power, especially medicine and science. By embodying the sovereign power of the state as an aspect of the self, citizens become self-disciplined. Crossing the threshold of the clinic, they become patients, persons who take care of their health. They make rational decisions about their reproductive capacity, risk of infection, and contagion. Working through the concept of biopolitical citizenship helps me to bring into focus the ways that devadasis, widely maligned and dismissed as ‘bad subjects,’ can be ‘good subjects.’ As a concept, biopolitical citizenship clarifies the fact that people are not simply at the effect of state power, or disciplined by the state. Biopower produces avenues for self-fashioning, some of which run through the space of the clinic. People are “enterprising” with their biology and not the only first world moderns described by Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas (2004:441) but also socially and economically marginalized ‘customary prostitutes,’ as devadasis are often framed. Both ‘biopolitical citizenship’ and ‘therapeutic citizenship’ (Vinh Kim Nguyen 2005) as concepts help me frame for the reader the subject-making capacities of devadasis in relationship to extraordinarily powerful institutions and hegemonic discourses of rational modernity.9 These concepts conceptualize configurations among modes of embodiment, subject making projects, and forms of power in ways that make it possible to articulate the different ways power takes hold of the body, or people give themselves over to power in relations of self-subjection but remain meaningfully and recognizably subjects. But when I cross with them into their other world, where the ruling sovereign is their Devi, these conceptual categories fail me. They can only be ‘lost’ or ‘saved,’ ‘subjected’ or ‘freed.’ How am I to situate their relationship to a devi—a giving over of the body, a form of discipline and mode of subjection—as an ethical relationship, one that (also) manifests the care of the self? To the extent that our social scientific categories of recognition are delimited by the terms of rational epistemology, we have consigned such relationships between deities and humans to the archaic—as worthy of analysis, perhaps, but not resonant with the critical concerns of the contemporary. As women reaching for biopolitical citizenship, devadasis can be seen to be emerging from the waiting room of history. As ecstatic women they cannot. They remain ‘lost,’ subjected by nonmodern religion. However, consider those devadasis who move between the temple and the clinic, situating themselves in different trajectories of sovereignty and recognition, mobilizing the possibilities of both. Within both the clinic and the temple, they find themselves subjected to power and beckoned into projects of ethical self-fashioning—lost and saved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am first and foremost grateful to the dedicated women who brought me into their world. I thank B. K. Barlaya, Meena Sesho, and Vijay Thakur for introducing me to the collectives of sex

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worker peer educators with whom they worked, and the members of Shakti and VAMP who taught me about their work. Comments on this material from Cristiana Giordano, Saida Hodži´c, Stacey Langwick, Stefania Panfolfo, Stacey Pigg, Chris Roebuck, Neelam Sethi, members of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and the South Asia Program at Syracuse University, and three anonymous reviewers, have helped me to nuance and elaborate my thinking here.

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NOTES 1. Dalit (lit. crushed or broken in Marathi) is the self-designation of politicized members of communities formerly labeled ‘untouchable.’ 2. Building on the work of Foucault, Paul Rabinow coined the term ‘biosocial’ to refer to collectivities formed around a biological conception of a shared identity: “These collectivities are brought to work on themselves, under certain forms of authority, in relation to truth discourses, by means of practices of the self, in the name of their own life or health, that of their family or some other collectivity, or indeed in the name of the life or health of the population as a whole” (Rabinow and Rose 2006:197). 3. I invoke the secular here in Talal Asad’s (2003) terms, not as something external to religion but as an aspect of modernity that has come to configure the character of modern religion. In India, ecstatic forms of Hinduism do not conform to norms of secular comportment, whereas modern, devotional forms of Hinduism do. 4. The Hindu temple complex describes a political, economic, and religious institution that revolved around the sovereignty of the king (Dirks 1993). The importance of devadasis to the symbolic and political life of temples has been most closely examined in the work of Kersenboom-Story (1987) and Apffel-Marglin (1985). 5. For histories of devadasi reform, see especially Nair (1994), Soneji (2012), and Vijaisri (2004). 6. The Venereal Disease Research Laboratory Test is a blood test was designed in 1946 to detect syphilis. 7. Kalpana Ram (2013) beautifully elaborates a similar point in her work on possession as a cultivated comportment and ‘body of habit’ that makes present forms of justice and recognition that the state does not offer. 8. As Cecilia Van Hollen (2010) has shown in her work on stigma in the lives of women living with HIV in Tamil Nadu, stigma is highly gendered. Women are more likely to be held responsible for transmission than men, even though prevalence rates and gendered patterns of nonmonogamy strongly suggest that men are more likely vectors than women. And, as she further reminds us, in Goffman’s terms, stigma reduces life chances. 9. With the concept of therapeutic citizenship, Vinh Kim Nguyen (2005) captured the ways transnational research projects and patients’ rights organizing produce avenues for the seroconverted to demonstrate they are ‘worthy’ of treatment through participation in clinical trials. This ‘citizenship’ grounds itself in an ambivalent relationship, not with the state but with the pharmaceutical industry, whose power over life and death in the midst of an epidemic is real.

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