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

migrated to Bombay, which was now called Mumbai, during the 1920s and 30s.

So my grandmothers, for example, were not attached to a temple anymore because they moved into urban areas, but they continued the practice of serial monogamy with their patrons, right?

So my grandmothers had multiple patrons, which means that my mother and father have multiple siblings with different fathers.

But they were not considered prostitutes, in quotation marks, because they were monogamous.

They were monogamous with whoever their patron was, who was normally a rich Brahmin businessman who would pay them.

It was like having a mistress, right?

So the practice gets codified, right?

So it's still sex work.

I mean, when I wrote my second book, a lot of people in my community were not happy with the fact that I was focusing, not because they had ever erased the history of sexuality.

I was always taught to be very proud of it.

But they wanted to tell a story of rags to riches, right?

They wanted to tell a story of look where we are now, look where we used to be.

And part of what I was saying is that you could tell that history, but you need to tell the history of these women who labored and continue to labor like my grandmothers.

They were ordinary women, you know, who built homes and houses because they transact, they got apartments, right?

So there's an entire street in Bombay where I grew up, which 90% of the apartments were owned by Devadasis because they were really smart.

They were like, we don't want money, give us property.

And a lot of these Devadasis would have androgynous names because according to law, women couldn't inherit.

Yeah.

So they were super smart.

So when you say transaction, that's why I think sex workers understand the power of sex as a form of transaction, right?

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