Book Title: Sacred Sins: Devadasis in Contemporary India Author: Arun Ezhuthachan Translator: Meera Gopinath Publisher: Hatchette India, 2023 Pages: 239 India has never been magnanimous to women. Ancient India was quite brutal in the treatment of women with such practices as sati and devadasi. If a woman was unfortunate to outlive her husband, she had to immolate herself on her man’s funeral pyre. The men who made that rule made sure that the rule, like many others of the kind, had divine sanction. The husband’s death when the wife is still alive indicates the sine of the woman’s vagina. The punishment decreed by the gods is the woman’s death. After her death, she will be made a goddess! Adolescent girls were dedicated to temples in the name of devadasis, maids of gods. These girls were expected to live their life worshipping goddess Durga in her various avatars though it could be any other deity as well. In reality, however, these girls were exploited sexually by upp
A few years back, when I was teaching Jack Finney’s story The Third Level in a section of grade 12, I put a question to the entire class: “If you get a chance to live in another time, which would you choose – past or future?” Ann [not her real name] put up her hand first. “Future,” she said. In Finney’s story, Charley chooses to go back to Galesburg of 1894. He loves those big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees with branches roofing the streets. It’s a ‘cool’ place whose evenings were “twice as long.” Life was a relaxed affair. People had time to sit out in the evenings, sipping tea and playing music on their guitars. There would be fireflies all around. Peaceful world. Charley wanted that world. My question to the class was in relation to that description of an old world. “My father speaks about the horrors of his childhood,” Ann said. “There was poverty. Not enough food to eat, no proper clothes to wear, no vehicles to carry you… Who wants to go back there?” An