Anjali Arondekar

speaker

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

The division of India and Pakistan where so many people died because of religion was a manufactured feud that was, you know, lubricated by the British colonial state, right?

So...

So the Devadasi tradition was left alone for a long time by the Brits because they were like, this has to do with religion.

And it allows us to do different things and allows us to continue sex work in a different practice because we can say, look, it's already here.

You guys are already doing it.

And there's been a lot of work about this.

But I think it's worth thinking about.

It goes back to the question you asked me before.

Was it different before the Brits arrived?

Yes, it was a bit different, but it was also hierarchicalized.

It was also exploitative.

Even as, you know, like you look at the Greek texts, any other texts, they have fantastic efflorescence of sexual practices.

Do they do them now?

No, they don't.

Why don't they go colonize Greece?

It's a balancing act between those stories.

So I think that's how I would address your question.

Quite.

But what's an interesting kind of wrinkle in that story is that once 1920s come along or 1900s, once we have more modernization, people are migrating more.

So for example, my community, which originated in Portuguese India, a lot of people like my mother and father's mothers – I don't have any grandfathers because we don't know who the biological fathers were –

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