Anjali Arondekar

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496 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 1 May

Anjali Arondekar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Sex Work in Colonial India · 1 May 2026 podcast

Right.

We need to make sure we don't repeat those same mistakes.

That's a great question.

And let me give a very concrete example.

But before I go to how the arrival of the British altered the landscape, I would say previous to the arrival of the British, sexual labor was distributed across different vocations.

So, for example, the community I come from, which is spread out all over India, where I grew up and my mother was born is Portuguese India, was that it was often attached to temples and religion.

So the idea of devadasi.

So for example, the Portuguese took a long time to ban the practice of devadasis because they said it was a religious practice.

Right.

So if you look across India, a lot of these communities of sex workers who would probably call themselves other things emerged and their sexual practices were not frowned upon or not pathologized because they were either attached to kings, courtesans, to religious forms or to traditional hereditary practices like dance and performance.

Right.

So that's one end of the story.

So which doesn't mean that the sexual labor was perhaps wrong.

also exploitative, but it was folded in to systems that made it ordinary, right?

So there are many scholars who've written about Avadh, for example, this princely state in North India, where it was very ordinary for courtesans to have places of power.

As it was, to talk about my favorite subject, sodomy, right?

As it was common for there to be men who had sex with young boys and vice versa, right?

So the emergence of same-sex is, again, also part of the sexual labor.

I think we understandably focus on women, and we'll use that word as a placeholder given the period.

But there was also all kinds of other sex going on, which is something I've written about, right?

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