The rhetoric of empire: gender representations in Portuguese India.

Perez, Rosa Maria

The reason I can do English stuff or even sometimes French stuff is not my personal acumen. It's the history of postcolonial peoples. Our access into universality was to learn Western discourse. I call us the wild anthropologists. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spikav)

1. The Argument *

European imperial representations of India were to a considerable extent built upon notions of gender. (1) So much so that Anne McClintock has called gendering the imperial unknown; an unknown that is mostly feminine. (2) Gender and gender relations provide logical operations that contribute to the resolution of some impasses of anthropological analysis when dealing with cultural and social translation. In this article, I will show that gender, namely the role played by the dancer, devadasi (in Portuguese, bailadeira), provided a powerful tool for Portuguese colonial discourse. Additionally, the ethnographic analysis of the devadasis that I carried out in the Hindu temple of Sri Manguesh in Goa contributes some important data for the current anthropological debate on the caste system in India.

2. Colonialism and gender. Erotic exoticisms

One of the more prominent orientalist stereotypes allowing for the colonial manipulation of political functions was built upon gender. Gender asymmetry was a dominant metaphor for representing Europe and its others, colonizers and colonized, and reified differences among cultures (as when we find early nineteenth century anthropologists using gender to classify human difference, with 'minor' races compared to European women). Such stereotypes are inevitably ambiguous, if not contradictory. The processes by which groups or individuals come to be ascribed an identity are not given, innate, static, or neutral, nor are they permanent in time. (3) Indeed, to conceive them as such would be to assume, as orientalists did, that colonialism was built upon images of women rather than representations by women.

In the imperial confrontation between the orient and the occident, the European 'civilizing mission' (4) was conceived of as a gender rectification in the sense that it claimed to deliver women from severe male oppression, and in thus liberating women, Europe would release the country, feminine in its essence. (5) The barbarism of the Orient was consequently evidenced in the way that local traditions shaped the lives of their women. Within the constructed imagery of oriental (mainly Muslim) cultures, the harem, the veil, and polygamy were highly charged symbols, all of which functioned as synonyms of female oppression. In India, the oppressive and unfree condition of women was not only morally condemned, but also transformed, as Partha Chatterjee notes, into a sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of a country. (6)

One frequently cited example of the benevolent action of the British Empire was the abolition, in 1929, of sati, the practice of widows burning themselves alive upon their husbands' funeral pyres. (7) Portuguese sources also make reference to sati, and the Portuguese authors rejected it as did the British legislators. Indeed, the Portuguese abolished it at an early stage, soon after Afonso de Albuquerque established political control over a few territories (1509-1515), as an aberration of human nature. But though Catholic morality steadily opposed what it considered an assault on the woman's body, it maintained a blind eye to its own manipulations of the feminine Indian body, particularly the body of the ritual dancers.

At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the poetic exultation of the dancers' exoticism paved the way to European bewilderment when it was discovered that these women not only existed but could be found in India, and even touched. (8) That was the time when the exoticism of oriental eroticism to a large extent overlapped with the Mediterranean imagery of dancers and courtesans that haunted European fantasies; and when an imagined otherness was objectified, thus becoming tangible, in other words, particularly susceptible to domination. (9)

European sexual desire was profoundly stimulated by fantasies about Indian women's bodies, depicted by different authors as irresistible, and even more irresistible as, to give credit to a 'scientific' explanation, tropical climate was supposed to stimulate men's sexual desire. Collingham sustains that colonial desire has been a central part of British imperialism in India; thus, during the early nineteenth century we witness the very embodiment of India in the nabob, an East India Company servant, wealthy, ostentatious, even effeminate, indulging in gambling, drinking, over-eating, and native mistresses. And even when, in the nineteenth century, the nabob made way for the sahib, whose body was meant to represent British civilization and to finally discard any of the remaining Indianness embodied by the nabob, Indian beauty was still there, even though socially downgraded, to attract male imperial desires. (10)

British and Portuguese colonialisms in India are not coincident in many respects that falls beyond the scope of this article to detail. (11) In Goa, the role of the devadasi was in contradiction with a catholic morality concerned with the domestication of sexuality, and was consequently outlawed. Nevertheless, an analysis of the available sources read in the light of extensive ethnographical research leads me to conclude that the devadasi stimulated mixing feelings among the colonizers that led them to be conferred a role traditionally attributed to Hindu Brahmans.

Dancing status: devadasi

Devadasi means literally 'maidservant of the god', a woman performing the role of the temple dancer, and intimately related to the Hindu temple's rituals. Both concerning state and status, she is unique. First, because being symbolically married to the god of the temple, she does not marry any man; secondly, because, at least in theory, she is not ascribed any sociological origin, in other words, she has no caste.

From an early date, European accounts corrupted the intrinsic meaning of the devadasi, both ritually and sociologically. (12) In the Portuguese narratives on Goa the devadasi represents eroticism, and beyond that, lust--the exact embodiment of the oriental stigma referred above, and readily inscribed with the sexual fantasies of the colonizers. Repressed by a stern Judeo-Christian morality, they seemed to find in India what otherwise was not available to them: the promised Paradise of the One Thousand and One Nights. Intrinsically associated with dancing, a mixture of permissiveness and sensuality, the devadasi held an irresistible appeal of exotic eroticism. All the more since, as suggested above, in various European contexts dancers and dancing were a device through which otherness was represented from textual to visual forms. (13)

The ritual role of the devadasi was culturally speaking as fascinating as it was problematic. If cultural translation already revealed itself difficult in respect of so many other Indian themes, it proved all the more so when it came to translating one morality (the Hindu) into another (the Catholic).

Portuguese representations of devadasi ('bailadeira')

In Goa, the Konkani kalvant (from kala 'art', and hence kalvant, literally 'artist') means 'dancer', a character that went through interesting semantic transformations from Portuguese colonialism to postcolonialism. Consequently, the terms kalvant and devadasi interchange somewhat, (14) thus misleading some social analysts who conceived of them as separate entities. (15) Portuguese sources refer frequently to the existence of devadasis, for whom the term bailadeiras came to be coined. Some of these accounts are worth noting, as they reflect significant impasses in oriental representations of their time.

Despite his distortion of the devadasi's status and role Duarte Barbosa (1516) drew attention to the women living in the Hindu temples of Gujarat:

Destes templos ha muytos que tem loguo destas mulheres [viuvas] cento e mais fidalgas e algumas solteiras se metem aquy tambem por suas vontades, has que saom obrigadas a tanger e cantar diante dos idolos certas horas do dia, e ho mais do tempo que lhes fiqua ganhaom pera elles. (16)

Writing on the South Indian kingdom of Vijyaianagar, Fernao Pais (1525) mentioned the hereditary status of the dancer:

A este ydolo dao de comer cada dia; que dizem que come; e quando elle come baylhao lhe molheres diante, as quaes sao do dito pagode, e lhe dao de comer, e tudo o que he necessario, e todas as que della nacem sao do pagode. (17) With this author, and therefore as early as 1525, the distinction (to which we will return) was made between devadasis and other women working in the Hindu temple: 'Quando quer que vem a festa de qualquer destes pagodes trazem huns carros triunfaes que andao sobre suas rodas, onde amdao bailhadeyras e outras molheres com tamgeres ao pagode, o ydollo'. (18)

The overlap between devadasi and bailadeira risks blurring the meaning of the Indian devadasi. In fact, with the passage of time there was a polarization between the ritual and the public dancer, with the latter often conceived as a prostitute, which by the beginning of the seventeenth century led to the passing of preventive and prohibitive legal measures. This prohibition paralleled the broad repression of the Hindu cult in the Velhas Conquistas (Old Conquests), a title which refers to the first phase of Portuguese colonialism in India, substantiated in the seventeenth century through political control of Salcete, Bardez and Ilhas. As early as 1577, members of the clergy and other men related to them were firm in condemning the dancers as immoral women:

As balhadeiras, em que esta toda a felicidade dos infieis destas partes sao libertas de todas as tyranias e vituperios acima ditos; sao molheres publicas que por dinheiro se nao negam a ninguem, as quaes andao bem ataviadas e acompanhadas; chamao-lhe balhadeiras por que balhao, cantao, tangem, volteao, muito bem ao seu modo. (19)

A few years later, in 1603, Frei Antonio de Gouveia joined the chorus of Catholic morality: 'No segundo sobrado hiao muitas molheres, das que chamao bailadeiras dos Pagodes, que todas sao publicas, deshonestas, e ganhao com suas torpezas para o Pagode, as quaes hiao dansando e cantando, e bailando'. (20)

Eventually, at the close of the seventeenth century (12 October 1699), the vice-Roy Antonio Luis Goncalves da Camara Coutinho issued an order (alvara) which proclaimed the expulsion of the dancers from Goan territory, on account of the threat which they posed to Catholic morality. The order further stipulated the death penalty for any dancers found in Goa after the ban, and a heavy fine upon their hosts determined in accordance with their social status. (21) Interesting enough, a previous version of the order, issued in Panjim in October 1679, reported that many of the above dancers (living in the island of Manuel da Mota (22)) were held by white men (reinois (23) and some descendentes, (24) and even fidalgos (25)). This order led to a movement headed by the Archbishop of Goa, D. Frei Agostinho da Anunciacao (1691-1713), who in a letter sent to king Pedro II, wrote that: 'Sao as bailladeyras gentias nessas terras de Vossa Magestade crueis Parcas das vidas dos seus vassallos ruyna total dos seus cabedaes'. Subsequently, he expelled every dancer from Goa, arguing that the Mogor Aurangzeb (1658-1707) himself had banned them from his territory. (26) His claim was that

porque sendo estas bailladeiras huas mulheres expostas, e como tais pela Igreja toleradas, por se evitarem mais depravados vicios, nao sera inconveniente que excluindosse totalmente os seus exercicios, recorrao os pecadores para outros pecados de que mais se offende a justica de Deos. (27)

The justification of the penalties to be imposed upon transgressions argued that:

impondo so a penna de excomunhao contra aquellas bailadeiras e pessoas que uzarem de bailes publicos nocivos a Christandade e para que esta publicidade prejudicial por todos os meios se evite deve Vossa majestade ordenar ao vizorey que mande publicar hum eddital com penas pecuniarias, e de degredo contra todas aqellas pessoas que uzarem destes bailles publicos ou se vestirem publicamente com semelhantes trajes de bayladeiras. (28)

Ecclesiastical orders (concilios) and royal letters (cartas regias), as a short selection will show, display the same sentiment towards threatening erotic practices. Thus: 'nem havera nos ditos cazamentos bailadeiras, autos de Pagodes, cantigas suas, e couzas semelhantes' (Terceiro Concilio de Goa, 1585); 'Para poderem celebrar os seus casamentos com assistencia dos seus Bottos e balhadeiras, mas a portas fechadas, e sem assistencia dos Christaos' (Carta Regia, 1707); 'Me pareceo ordenarvos expulseis logo da ilha se santo estevao a estas balhadeiras, e facaes observar a ley de 20 de Outubro de 1700' (Carta Regia, 1729).

During the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the mixed feelings stimulated by the devadasis patent in the work of the more famous Goan writers and poets (Nascimento Mendonca's Vatsala, Mariano Garcias's Terra de Rajahs, Floriano Barreto's Phalenas, and Vimala Devi's Moncao) also left its mark on writings on gender and women's status. Two authors in particular can be mentioned in this respect. Propercia Correia Afonso's 'A bailadeira' contains what is probably the most representative statement of colonial Catholic morality towards the bailadeira:

Bailadeiras chamam-se as mulheres que, habitando geralmente perto dos pagodes, tem a profissao de danca e exercem a prostituicao como deveres inerentes a sua casta [...]. Vitima ela propria do sistema social e religioso em que nasceu, a sua existencia e uma ameaca constante para a moral da sociedade, que nao so permite a sua existencia como a condena irremissivelmente ao seu triste modo de vida. (29)

Telo de Mascarenhas, on the other hand, who dedicated two chapters of his book, A mulher Hindu, to dancing and singing, activities which he describes at length and whose Hindu cosmogonies he was clearly familiar with, despite his emphasis on the fundamental role played by dancing to guarantee the cosmic balance of the universe (a role that in Hindu mythology is played by Natraj, a form of Shiva) never actually used the word devadasi to designate the dancer. (30)

To summarize, all throughout the period of Portuguese colonialism in India the male representations of the bailadeiras were ambivalent if not contradictory; as ambivalent as their relations with these women were. Both religion and colonial ideology repressed what effectively was not repressible: the appeal that colonized bodies stimulated in colonial ones. The ethnographic analysis of the devadasis, to which I will now turn, confirms this ambiguity and social contradictions.

Anthropological theory and gender contradictions

Two arguments which I have developed elsewhere are pertinent here. In an earlier piece I have shown that both socially and ritually the devadasi/ bailadeira is a significant device of Portuguese orientalism. (31) In another, where I discussed the theoretical impact of colonial studies on anthropological analysis of caste in India, I argued that the influence of Edward Said's thesis and his critique of essentialism led scholars to reconceive caste as a colonial construct deriving from the need for political control rather than as an intrinsically Hindu phenomenon. (32) But as I will try to show now, this too is an essentialist perspective, supported, as other sociological categorizations are, by a dichotomous polarization according to which a supposed western continuum is structurally opposed to an oriental one. In thus favouring a dichotomization between categories taken as stable, permanent, and, moreover, irreducible to one another, we reach, conceptually speaking, a crucial impasse of anthropological categorization. Hence the difficulty of any polarization for the analysis of the shadow zones of social systems, such as is the case of the devadasis. We should therefore give theoretical credit to the fact that central components of orientalism, the dancers, instead of trying to get rid of their stigma tried to restructure it (during and after colonialism) according, precisely, to caste components.

When examining the texts written on devadasis, we have to take into account two main factors that influenced the perceptions developed about them. First, the very nature of the sources, as ecclesiastical and administrative documents, travel accounts, essays, literature, and poetry. Secondly, their authors: mostly Catholic Goans with no personal knowledge of the devadasis, not to mention of Hinduism, and who were culturally biased by a long tradition of cultural devaluation of their subject, from painting to travel writing, and from literature to theatre. It should also not be neglected the facts that some Catholics kept a very close relationship with devadasis, as different sources illustrate; on the other hand, some of those who wrote on these women were actual or potential customers of temple women who were not devadasis--a fact that led them to erroneous generalizations. To shed light on this data we should now enter a Hindu temple, and get acquainted with their ritualists, which will better allow us to recognize the gap which exists between Portuguese representations of the devadasi and their status within the Hindu social and religious system.

I carried out fieldwork in the temple of Sri Manguesh in Mardol, Ponda taluka, (33) in the Novas Conquistas (New Conquests), territories which in contrast to the Velhas Conquistas (Old Conquests), were only brought under colonial control in the eighteenth century. These territories were the target of severe persecution and repression directed against the Hindu cult in response to Hindu resistance to Portuguese rule. (34) The cosmogony of this temple (as of other temples in Goa) replicates this history of colonial repression. According to it, Manguesh, a form of Shiva, (35) was brought from Cortalim (a village in the Old Conquests) by a gauddo, (36) Mulkeshwar, who consequently protected the god from Portuguese annihilation. (37) For this reason, a temple was dedicated to the gauddo, on the back of the big temple of Sri Manguesh. It was not only the god that the gauddo had rescued: in his village, a small mount of soil had unexpectedly arisen on which his cow day after day came to pour milk, this was a linga that grew up spontaneously, the more powerful type of linga in Hinduism, and this too he had carried to safety in his long trek from Velhas to Novas Conquistas.

Every Monday, the day of the week when the gauddo is said to have arrived at the place where the temple now stands, the palqui takes place before the religious fervour of the devotees. (38) In the zatra (Sanskrit yatra), the annual festival of the temple that also takes place on a Monday, the circumvolution of the temple acquires an exceptional pace that is supposed to reproduce the run of Mulkeshwar from Cortalim, in Velhas Conquistas, to Mardol in Novas Conquistas. This pace slows down when the palqui passes by the icon of Mulkeshwar; at this moment, the palqui and the devotees stop, and the devadasi (who punctuated the different stages of the zatra) sing some mantra. (39) When the palanquin transporting the god leaves the temple, the drummers play frantically and noisily; the palanquin is followed by some men carrying flags, the mahajan (40), the pujari (41) and the devadasi, and lastly the devotees. All along the circumvolution the only sonorities that suspend the sound of fast steps are the songs of the devadasi--thereby introducing in the zatra the order that Shiva, their divine husband, is supposed to introduce in the universe, as Natraj, the god of dance.

So far, I have not mentioned other people participating in the preparation of the ritual. Some women light lamps fed by ghee (42) that they will put on the steps of the tower of candles and that they will keep glowing all through the ritual; they also have to light all lamps placed outside the temple but are not allowed to tend to the ones inside. They have vermillion (sindur) on their foreheads and wear mangalsutra, a necklace used only by married women, but, like the kunbi they wear the sari crossed between their legs. (43) These women are the bhavins, who don't perform their task before other women meticulously sweep the ground surrounding the temple--inside the temple the sweepers are men. Apart from the gender divide between men and women in the ritual, we must also consider the gender hierarchy among the women, by which the women's status is stratified. This stratification is made visibly clear in the ritual food distribution: after the puja, the prasad (vegetables and fruits consecrated to the god and blessed by him) is firstly offered by the pujari to men, following a hierarchical order; it is then offered to women: devadasis, bhavin, sweepers, flower sellers, and menial temple workers. Informed by this ethnographic material, let us return to the asymmetry mentioned above between the Portuguese representations of the devadasis, intrinsically linked to orientalist gender stigmatization, and their status within Goan religious and social structure. The first fact that I want to underscore is that among the temple women the devadasi is the only one that performs a ritual role. She is symbolically married to a god--in ritual forms that both in Goa and in India are not uniform--which makes her unique when considered from the perspective of gender representations. (44) She can't ever marry a man (45) and, precisely for this reason, she will never be inauspicious since she will never be a widow, one of the more inauspicious states that a Hindu woman can go through. Unlike widows and other inauspicious women, she may participate in the rituals of the Hindu calendar, the most auspicious being the wedding, and is ascribed a permanent fertility, unaffected by the biological constraints that a Hindu woman faces from menarche to menopause. The circumstance of her specific connection with shakti, the feminine principle of Shiva, her husband, stresses her symbolic fertility. (46)

In Goa, a devadasi is never attached to a man who is not a Brahman (and as a rule a Hindu, although historical and ethnographical sources also report Catholic Brahmans keeping devadasis), in contrast to the bhavanis who accept lower caste men, to whom they remain faithful throughout their lives. (47) The label of prostitutes, which is sometimes ascribed to them is systematically dismissed by everyone living in the temple or in any way connected to it. From the perspective of ritual pollution, also, the devadasi seem to elude the interdictions affecting female sexuality, and more specifically sexual intercourse. As we know the Hindu caste system is traditionally endogamous; and we also know that, given that biological fluids are extremely polluting, adultery implies the pollution of the adulterer, of his/her spouse, and in the more orthodox contexts, also that of his/her family or even his/her group. The impurity resulting from irregular intercourse is the more severe in proportion to the social difference between the persons involved, which in the most sensitive cases results in excommunication. The conjugality existing between a devadasi and a Brahman, which to some extent parallels a Brahman's official one, is only broken up when he dies. Moreover, it is accepted by his wife and by his family, in otherwise clear contradiction of the Hindu conception of adultery, from which his legal family seems to be immune. As concerns status too, the Brahmans in these situations do not suffer the social devaluation which affects other Brahmans under ritual pollution in consequence of lesser and much more precarious contacts with lower caste women.

It is a generally accepted fact that a devadasi is extremely faithful to her Brahman, normally a bahktar who also acts as her patron, supporting and stimulating her studies in music and in dance. (48) This support extended to her daughters (who were his daughters), who often studied in academies in Bombay and in other centres for the performing arts, sometimes excelling in their skills--as is the case with Lata Mangueshkar, a daughter from Sri Mangueshi's temple, one of the most renowned Indian popular singers. (49) And those young women who did not succeeded, at least tried to evade a stigma that, as we will see, is difficult to erase from social memory. The children born from the liaison between a devadasi and a Brahman may or may not get their fathers' surnames (which is in fact a caste name); many Brahmans gave their surname to the children born from relations with devadasi, and today in Goa men without obvious blood relations with Brahman families bear the surnames of such families, given to their fathers, grandfathers or great-grandfathers by a Brahman who had a lifetime relationship with a devadasi.

A further historical point is worth making: the claim that a devadasi is hereditarily born a-casted obscures the fact that all throughout time different castes dumped their unwanted or inopportune daughters--the children of illicit liaisons (exogamous or adulterous), or simply the unmarriageable in a saturated matrimonial market, especially in families with a large number of female offspring, or high caste families with narrow choices of suitable bridegrooms--at the doors of the devadasis house. Catholic orphans, abandoned and illegitimate girls that colonial institutions such as Misericordias, Orfanatos, and Recolhimentos were unable to receive, no less than girls of ill-repute were all also raised by devadasis who, within a short time, would reshape their social memories and uncertain origins. (50)

So far we have enough data to identify in the Goan devadasis singularities that do not fit into the analytical tools that we tend to use when analysing the caste system in India. The wife of a god and of a Brahman, she may evade social rules without perceptible punishment. But her singularity also makes for her social fragility which results, first of all, from her lack of social standing: as I suggested previously, the devadasi is a-casted, a problematic condition since Hinduism tends to consider unclear status as lesser status, assimilated into untouchability (the exception being the sannyasi, the Hindu ascet who renounced social status). This was the reason why in the 1910s the devadasis made a plea that forced the colonial government to recognize the right of their sons to get officially married. Subsequent legalization stimulated them to initiate a movement aiming for full social integration, by recourse precisely to the most efficient instrument for social codification: caste. As a result, in 1927, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj was officially created and integrated in the colonial constitution. (51) It was formed by all those who worked in the temples, therefore integrating both ritual and non-ritual members, some of them associated with the devadasis and named as such by people with little accurate knowledge, to the extent that Gomantak Maratha Samaj may alternate with Devadasi [Caste] in everyday language and common sense understanding.

In its beginning, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj also incorporated: the bhavins, who, as was earlier mentioned, performed the functions of lighting the lamps, cleaning the palanquin and fanning the deity with the chowry; the devli (from deul, 'temple'), musicians who replicate some of the bhavin's tasks (and with whom they maintain intimate relationships), and additionally light the torches (mashal), perform devdanda, and assist the pujari; the guards of the temple, who recite passages of sacred texts like the Purana and the Kirtankar, and improvise religious songs during the rituals or when people gather in the temple compound for religious purposes; fulkars, without whom the rituals cannot take place, since they sell the flowers that the devotees offer to the deities, and they themselves offer flowers to the temple, they live in small houses in the temple compound, and their sons perform some roles in the festivities (the most significant being the sacrifice of goats to the goddess during Navrati, the festival of the 'nine nights', held during the autumn equinox). The Gomantak Marath Samaj also includes the chede and other groups of low status indirectly related to the temple rituals but closely connected to its mahajan (in whose lands they work): bande, literally meaning 'tied to', in this case to the mahajan, through male and female menial work; farjand ou frejent, a Persian word meaning 'boy', in fact applied to 'boys' of single mothers sometimes blamed for having sexual intercourse with their employers; perini, acrobats, and zagar players. These groups call themselves devli, a term that the groups performing ritual tasks categorically reject. Their integration in the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, therefore, was from the beginning contested by the other groups on the grounds that they would downgrade the caste status of the whole (52), an issue that led to a noticeable effort from the devli to raise their status, by giving-up previous stigmatized activities and by educating their children to the best of their means. However, in Goa as in India, a term persists long after the activity that it covers has been abandoned, thus ensuring the continuity of the stigma in social memory, which it is hard to discard. More than for any others, this is the case of the devadasis.

At the time of its formation, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj tried to bound its members to observe endogamy, to adopt vegetarianism and to give-up alcoholic drinks. This apparent orthodoxy should not surprise us: it was a stage when a disparate group of people was struggling to be socially recognized as a caste, thus embracing conservative practices and principles of the caste system. Marriage became patrilocal and under colonial rule it had to incorporate the principles of Portuguese law: interdiction of marriage before the legal age, window's remarriage, and inheritance.

Rajaran Rongogi Paingankar played a crucial role in this process, as a reformer and as an efficient mediator with colonial bodies. (53) The son of a devadasi, he committed himself socially and politically to the devadasis' de-stigmatization through education, that within a short time opened up higher education to these women, mainly in Bombay and other Indian universities. Within two generations, gender professional asymmetry was significantly shaken, all the more so given the context of Portuguese gendered educational backwardness in the colony at the time. Furthermore, the high level of literacy achieved by members of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj (whose politics in respect of education fall outside the scope of this article) resulted in the making of a professional elite, which contributed to an effective transformation of Goa's economic and political landscape. Some of the most prestigious doctors and lawyers are today members of the caste as are some politicians, sometimes still facing negative social preconceptions. Nevertheless, educational achievement led to exogamy--since intra-religious marriages are much more frequent than intra-caste marriages, as it is the norm in Goa --independently of some rural Hindus' objections to their children marrying the children of devadasis. (54)

On a broader social basis, the remarkable economic and political success of the caste offers an important tool for examining the subtle transformation of caste into class, even though, as already referred, stigmatization remains, and puts into evidence the supremacy of social and ritual evaluation in the definition of status in India. In addition, the cosmopolitanism of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj and the skills of some of its members in dealing with change and modernization put it at the forefront of the rapid transformations that tourism has brought upon the territory. (55)

A long way for the devadasis to have moved in a short time, from temple to society. A long way for anthropologists too, from text to context, attempting simultaneously to recapture the risks of anthropological representation in the past and to answer to the theoretical challenges of the present. But then again, past and present are not so discontinuous and, as Frederic Jameson suggested, whether in the age marked by imperialism or in postcolonial times, culture is an effective tool to normalize power relations when discussing patterns of domination. (56)

ISCTE/ Brown University

* To Lina Fruzzetti for frienship and intellectual challenge. I am grateful to Jorge Flores for his assistance with rendering official Portuguese terminology in English, and to Joao Telles e Cunha for the suggestion of relevant useful documents .

(1) I follow Said's usage here to the effect that 'the term "imperialism" means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; "colonialism" which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory [...] In our time, direct colonialism has largely ended; imperialism [...] lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices', Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1993), p. 9.

(2) Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 24. A colonial scene cited by this author is of particular interest here: in 1492, Christopher Columbus, blundering about the Caribbean in search of India, wrote home to say that the ancient mariners had erred in thinking the earth was round. Rather, he said, it was shaped like a woman's breast, with a protuberance upon its summit in the unmistakable shape of a nipple, toward which he was slowly sailing (p. 21).

(3) Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism (New York, Rutledge, 1996).

(4) In Kipling's expression, 'the white man's burden': 'Take up the white man's burden / Send for the best ye breed / Go bind your sons in exile / To serve your captives' need' (Kipling 1899).

(5) The construct of a feminine India pre-dates Indian proto-nationalism and nationalism, and it is not intrinsically Indian. Indeed, European pre-colonial conceptions of India depicted the land in its various aspects as a female both physically and 'psychologically'. The very idea of 'Mother India' that the Indian nationalists used as an identitarian emblem had its origin in German Romanticism, whose proponents dreamed of breaking from the yoke of European law and culture, and reconnecting with an earlier time when human beings lived freely, following the laws of 'Mother Nature', and projected such a dreamland onto the mysterious mountains of Himalayas. While they rejected the Christian-spiritual and 'masculine' genealogy of religion, the material and maternal India had great appeal. The maternal images projected onto India facilitated the dream of a golden age when the entire human race was unified and integrated with a peaceful and innocent universe. See Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, ed. by Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 18.

(6) Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

(7) In Sanskrit, the word sati means 'virtuous, pious', and it is applied in Hindu terminology to a specific type of woman. In order to act upon these women (or better put, this culture), the British transformed it into a practice, 'to commit sati'; see Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India, ed. by John Starton Hawley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

(8) Jackie Assayag, 'Aurore et crepuscule de l'Eve indienne: l'imaginaire de la danseuse de temple entre Theophile Gautier et Pierre Loti', in Rever l'Asie. Exotisme et litterature coloniale aux Indes, en Indochine et en Insulinde, ed. by Denis Lombard (Paris : Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993), p. 252.

(9) Said, Orientalism. The topic of exoticism calls for a longer and more complex discussion than cannot be attempted here, but at the very least I would like to suggest that the exotic and exoticism have more to do with the nature of the observer than that of the observed. The etymology of the word supports this argument. From ex (a prefix referring to something or someone who comes from outside) and otic (or optic, a root semantically linked to sight, vision), the term leads us back to the issue of representation, and more precisely to the representation of otherness. The exotic is therefore the other, whose features are external, alien to the observer's categories and conceptual references. The ultimate aim of colonialism would be to translate these categories into the colonizer's familiar perspectives and perceptions.

(10) The feminine British body was not meant to incorporate India; British women should be sober, stern, and being 'the repositories of morality meant that in India they acted as the ultimate symbols of western refinement and high culture', E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: the physical experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 42.

(11) This comparison has been the object of collaborative teaching and research over the last few years by Lina Fruzzetti and myself, which will be more fully developed in published form as Colonial Dreams. Women in British and Portuguese India, forthcoming. For a comparison between nationalism and gender in British and Portuguese Colonialism, see Lina M Fruzzetti and Rosa Maria Perez, 'Engendering the Nation: Allegoric Femininity and Women's Roles in Bengal and Goa', in Mirrors of the Empire, ed. by Rosa Maria Perez and Clara Carvalho (= Etnografica, 6.1 (2002)), pp. 41-58.

(12) Interestingly, Orrs historical study of the temple women in medieval Tamil Nadu brings refreshing data to the analytical polarization between Europe and India when stating that both indologists/ orientalists and Indian nationalists and reformers have shared the view that Indias political, social and religious integrity degenerated over time. The devadasi, considered a pan-Indian institution, is analysed in her study as a central topic of the degeneration of Indian civilization, beginning in the early medieval era; see Leslie C. Orr, Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God. Temple Women in Medieval Tamil Nadu (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000).

(13) A few examples can be cited: The Boda painted by Brueghel in late 15th centur: The Cabaret by Toulouse-Lautrec; A Fiesta Scene in the South of Spain--Peasants of Granada dancing the Bolero, by John Frederick Lewis or The Gypsy Women by Goya. Moreover, during the European Renaissance the naked female body was painted as a form of otherness, biblical, Jewish, Greek, and Roman.

(14) In this article, I will use the term devadasi; bailadeira and kalvant will be used respectively to reproduce sources or specific ethnographical circumstances.

(15) In an even more corrupted interpretation, the word kalvant was used to signify the nautch, a venal dancer, a prostitute.

(16) Livro em que da relacao do que viu e ouviu no oriente Duarte Barbosa (Lisboa: Agencia Geral das Colonias, 1946), 2nd edn, p. 306

(17) Fernao Pais, Chronica dos Reis de Bisnaga, ed. by David Lopes (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1897), p. 85.

(18) Chronica dos Reis de Bisnaga, p. 100

(19) Arquivo Historico Ultramarino, India, Cx 68, Primor e Honra, fol. 9.

(20) Arquivo Historico Ultramarino, India, Cx 68, Jornada do Arcebispo, fol. 39.

(21) 'Os fidalgos ou quem tivesse foro de fidalguia pagaria uma coima de 1.000 xerafins e perderia as merces que tivesse, podendo ainda, ser desterrado para onde o arbitrio do vice-rei escolhesse. Os naturais, isto e, os "cristaos da terra", seriam acoitados e desterrados para as gales por 9 anos. Aos gentios ser-hes-ia cortado o sendi, para ale de serem acoitados em publico e condenados as gales oor 10 anos', AHU, India, Cx. 68 [38], doc. 4.

(22) On the basis of maps dating from that time, this island was situated in Ilhas, one of the three provinces of Velhas Conquistas.

(23) From reino, kingdom; the term refers to those Portuguese who were born in the metropolis.

(24) The descendentes were at the time the offspring of marriages between Portuguese and Goans, as a consequence of policy formulated at an early stage of Portuguese colonialism to create strong ties to Portugal in the colony; latter, the term became derogatory, and today it is used in a strongly vituperative sense.

(25) Plural form of fidalgo, 'son of somebody', a member of the Portuguese upper nobility.

(26) This matter was debated in the metropolis and the Procurador da Coroa, in spite of formally praising the Archbishop, pointed out the undesirable consequences that this attitude could lead to--an intelligent perspective of the complexities of colonial negotiation.

(27) In AHU, India, cx. 68.

(28) In AHU, India, cx. 68.

(29) Propercia de Figueiredo Correia Afonso, 'A Bailadeira', Boletim do Instituto Vasco da Gama, 5 (1929), pp. 47-60 (47).

(30) Tello Mascarenhas, A Mulher Hindu (Lisboa, 1943).

(31) Rosa Maria Perez, 'Portuguese orientalism. Some problems on sociological classification', in The Portuguese and the Socio Cultural Changes in India, ed. by Teotonio de Souza, (Delhi: Manohar, 2002).

(32) Rosa Maria Perez, Kings and Untouchables. A Study of the Caste System in Western India (Delhi, Cronicle Books, 2004), pp. xi-xvi; cf. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), and Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind. Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002).

(33) The taluka is an administrative body comprehending a certain number of villages.

(34) A systematic analysis of the sources available (which has yet to be carried out) would reveal the disparity existing between political and religious rule. If the Velhas Conquistas were taken over (though also not without resistance) and conversion to a large extent achieved, the Novas Conquistas were far from being converted, and resistance to Portuguese cultural occupation persisted.

(35) Manguesh is also known by the name Girish, from Girija, 'born from the mountain', a name for Parvati, wife of Shiva, who when attacked by the assura (demons) called him to rescue her.

(36) Singular of gaudde, a group at times considered a 'tribe' (who lived in Goa long before the arrival of the Portuguese) at other times a caste, but in both cases socially devalued. The gaudde elucidate local negotiation and adaptation to foreign rule: being originally Hindus, some of them converted to Christianity; eventually, in the beginning of twentieth century, they converted back to Hinduism, as nav ('new') gaudde thus leading to the split of one original caste in three: Hindu gaudde, Catholic gaudde and nav gaudde.

(37) Moreover, in Goa the cosmogony of Hindu temples and of their deities frequently reproduce colonial incidents: their current place often corresponds to the place to where the deities were transported from their place of origin eluding Portuguese persecution; as I showed in another paper, some Catholics supported the flight of the Hindu deities, therefore protecting their own deities prior to conversion; see Rosa Maria Perez, 'Hinduismo e Cristianismo em Goa (II): Deuses Clandestinos e Devotos e fieis', in Culturas do Indico, ed. by Rosa Maria Perez, K.N. Chaudhuri and Jorge Flores (= Oceanos, 34 (April/June 1998), pp. 174-80.

(38) The ceremony during which the deity is taken out of the temple to be transported by the priests in circumvolution. This is also the day when the devadasi sing, moving her body rhythmically in front of the image of Sri Manguesh. In Goa, the devadasis are supposed to excel in singing, and the dance is sometimes subsumed to a rhythmic movement of the body.

(39) At the start of my research there were three devadasis in the temple, but after a few years two of them fell sick and only one continued performing.

(40) The mahajan is a Brahman, keeper of the temple. In spite the fact that in post-colonial Goa a mahajan must be elected by other Brahmans, most of the temples tend to keep the mahajan as a lifetime appointment.

(41) The men (generally Brahmans) who perform puja, worship.

(42) Clarified butter used for ritual and human diet.

(43) The kunbis are considered groups with law status, normally a tribe or a caste, whose women dress in a particular way; when dressing sari, they wear it short and crossed between their legs --a way of dressing that in Goa is associated to low status women.

(44) See Frederique Apffel Marglin, Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1985); Saskia C. Kersenboom, Nityasumangali. Devadasi Tradition in South India (Delhi: Motilal, 1987); Leslie C. Orr, Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamil Nadu (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), and Kay K. Jordan, From Sacred Servant to Profane Prostitute: A History of the Changing Legal Status of the Devadasis in India, 1857-1947 (Delhi: Manohar, 2003).

(45) Transgressions of this norm would carry heavy consequences for her: from an a-casted (which, as we will see below, makes status negotiation possible) she would became an outcaste, an Untouchable, the lowest status ascribed by Hinduism to a member of society.

(46) I am referring to the specific link between this devadasi and Manguesh (Shiva); further generalization within India is problematic; see Orr, Donors.

(47) According to a prominent Hindu Brahman whose father and grand father had lifetime liaisons with devadasi, 'it is the blood of Brahmans that runs in the children of devadasis'.

(48) A bahktar is a Brahman who holds a large share, if not the only share, of his family's properties, mostly cultivated land.

(49) I am using the past tense not because this is a thing of the past in Goa, but because it became less and less frequent, as I will show shortly.

(50) See Acta de Instalacao do Recolhimento de Birondem: 'Aos onze de Abril de mil novecentos e quarenta e sete [...] procedeu-se a cerimonia de inauguracao do Recolhimento de Birondem, do Valpoi, com quatro seccoes distintas, a saber: Abrigo, Maternidade, Creche e Orfanato. O Abrigo destina-se a acolher mulheres e raparigas que por influencia de companhias perniciosas se desviaram ou estao em risco de se perderem. A Maternidade recolhera as raparigas que por seducao, violencia ou fraqueza se encontram numa situacao humilhante, causando escandalo no meio em que vivem (Acta de Instalacao do Recolhimento de Birondem (Nova Goa, 1947), p. 5).

(51) The word maratha is interchangeable in Goa with kshatrya (in Portuguese chardo); the appropriation of the name of an upper caste by castes of lower status is frequent in India as an attempt to raise social status (Perez, Kings and Untouchables).

(52) All along the history of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj we can note its internal fracture on behalf of status and of status negotiation, the more insistent being the one held by the offspring of devadasis, at times trying even to constitute a different caste. But then again, this does not make their singularity, being status and status negotiation at the core at the caste system (Perez, Kings and Untouchables).

(53) He is the author Mee Konn? [Who am I?] unpublished MS, Goa, Margao, n.d., an English edition of which would be an important contribution to a better understanding of caste and of Hinduism in Goa.

(54) Social antagonism against devadasis manifests itself in many diverse ways that deserve further analysis. A few years ago, for example, the guest house that the Gomantak Marath Samaj opened in Pangim to house young women studding or travelling to the city had to be closed, after being attacked by other Goans on the pretext that the guest house was a brothel.

(55) The Gomantak Maratha Samaj showed from its inception a singular capacity for social and humanitarian work: the caste has a building in central Panjim, whose hall is frequently rented for different celebrations, especially the wedding of members and of other castes; regular cultural programs are organized for Goans, with the profits going towards supporting women and abandoned children, and for the provision of scholarships for students whose families cannot afford to pay their studies. Interestingly, one of the last legal measures of the colonial regime was in support of this building, through the last governor of Goa, Manuel Antonio Vassalo e Silva, in Ponda, April 1961.

(56) Frederic Jameson, 'Modernism and Imperialism', in Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1990).