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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As I said before, the caste system is hierarchical.

So I am from a caste-oppressed community.

We use the word bahujan, which means many, or dalit, instead of the word untouchable, which is a word that degrades us rather than empowers us.

So devadasis exist from all, but they are lower caste, and they are...

you know, different depending on which part of India you come from.

And there was many efforts in the 1930s to disestablish this tradition, and it has had some success, but not entirely.

So that would be one way of, a very shorthand way of describing that tradition.

That is one way words.

The phrase that we would use is called given to the goddess.

It's always a goddess, right?

And there's a wonderful book by Lucinda Ramberg about this.

So the idea is you give your labor to the goddess, right?

And your labor can be anything that has to do with the temple.

You could be sweeping, you could be picking flowers.

And the priests, the Yajmans, the Mahajans, who are the Brahmins, who are the, we love to call them the white people of the caste system, right?

Are the ones who extract your labor for their own benefit.

You don't get anything in exchange except shelter.

But you don't get prosecuted because tradition, right?

So remember, colonial states like to stay away from religion.

They want to use religion to build divides, right?

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