Shriya Patnaik

Disciplining Desire, Reconstituting Respectability: A Comparative Organisational Study of the AMSH and AIWC’s Regional Approaches to Subaltern Women’s Sexualities in India (1915-1956)

E-Mail
shriya.patnaik@unibe.ch
Postal Address
Universität Bern
WBKolleg / IFN
Muesmattstrasse 45
3012 Bern

Shriya Patnaik

Shriya Patnaik has a PhD in International History and Politics, with a specialisation in Gender Studies, from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Switzerland, where she defended her dissertation with the distinction of Summa cum laude. She is an IPN Junior Fellow at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg of the University of Bern. Her research is situated at the intersections of modern South Asian history, gender and women’s history, sexuality, subalternity, orality and memory, minority rights, performative cultures, and colonial and postcolonial projects of social regulation. Across this work, she examines how women’s rights and human rights projects have historically produced, policed, or displaced marginalised female subjects, while simultaneously recovering the voices, quotidian practices, and circumscribed forms of autonomy through which women have historically resisted, contested, or adapted to top-down measures imposed upon them.

Shriya’s doctoral dissertation titled “Temple Dancer, Prostitute, Celibate Nun?: The Shifting Position of the Mahari-Devadasi from Late Colonial India to the Early 21st Century” focuses on the decline and demise of the regional community of Devadasis, hereditary, ritualistic temple dancers and singers in the Jagannath Temple of Puri, Odisha, colloquially known as Maharis. Progressing chronologically from the 1860s, a period marked by the initiation of legal and policy developments that conflated Devadasis with prostitutes, to the extinction of the Mahari-Devadasi community in Odisha in 2021, the dissertation delineates the ideological factors and institutional processes that shaped the policing of temple dancing under colonial and postcolonial structures of governance. In particular, it examines how regionally distinct forms of ritual, kinship, labour, sexuality, and performance were conceptualised and categorised monolithically through the lens of prostitution; how caste structured the reach and effects of regulation projects; and how women’s voices were subsequently silenced within abolitionist policies. Across its five chapters, the dissertation traces how different sets of actors dealt with the regulation of Devadasis across colonial and postcolonial India, including colonial officials, British social reformers and missionaries, nationalists, Indian women leaders, social workers, international human rights organisations, grassroots NGOs, dancers, religious authorities, and Devadasi family members. It simultaneously asks how Devadasis resisted, contested, or adapted to the top-down measures imposed upon them, especially within the regional and spatial locale of Odisha. Incorporating oral testimonies from the last two surviving Maharis, Sashimani and Parasamani, the dissertation elucidates how these women historically mobilised against or subverted policing measures through songs of resistance, quotidian cultures, social positioning, practices of religiosity, and embodied forms of knowledge, thereby carving out circumscribed positions of autonomy for themselves in postcolonial India. The dissertation employs a multi-sited and multi-scalar ethno-historical approach, drawing on eleven archives and fieldwork conducted across India, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland. Its source base brings together colonial and postcolonial official documents, media sources, legal court cases, public health files, NGO records, United Nations and League of Nations conventions, religious texts, census surveys, Devadasi petitions, temple iconography, Odissi dance videotapes, microfilms, Devadasi songs, participant observation, and interviews with the last two surviving Maharis and regional interlocutors. By placing these materials in conversation, the project treats embodied orality and community testimony not as supplements to the official archive, but as counter-archives through which the historical silences and exclusions produced by Orientalist, nationalist, and abolitionist projects can be critically re-examined. The doctoral project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a Doc.CH grant, the Swiss Government’s Excellence Scholarship, the IHEID Community Scholarship, the Swiss Network for International Studies, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Pierre du Bois Foundation.

Since completing her PhD in June 2025, Shriya has consolidated a global research, editorial, and teaching profile. She is a Research Associate at the Pierre du Bois Foundation, a researcher with the United Nations’ Centenary of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations project in Geneva, and a Laura Bassi Junior Academic Fellow of the Editing Press. She is a Co-Editor of the Dance Chronicle (Taylor & Francis) journal’s Special Issue, “South Asia’s Courtesan, Hereditary, and Temple Performers: Expanding Discourse and Disrupting Histories”, scheduled for publication in Fall 2026. She has additionally worked as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of History at Utkal University in India, and remains affiliated with the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Gender Centre and Global Migration Centre.

Shriya has recently been awarded the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Postdoc.Mobility fellowship for her project, “Disciplining Desire, Reconstituting Respectability: A Comparative Organisational Study of the AMSH and AIWC’s Regional Approaches to Subaltern Women’s Sexualities in India (1915-1956),” to be pursued at the Universities of Nottingham and Heidelberg from summer 2027. During her fellowship at the University of Bern, she will work on her SNSF Return Phase application to Bern, build academic networks across the University, and conceptualise the development of this research into a longer-term, larger-scale project for future Horizon Europe and European Research Council applications.

Shriya received her Bachelor’s degree in History and Political Science from Cornell University in 2014 as a Cornell Tata Scholar, graduating Magna cum laude. During her undergraduate years, she was selected for a full-scholarship exchange programme at Mansfield College at the University of Oxford, where she undertook tutorials in History, Anthropology, and Political Science. She subsequently completed the Columbia University-London School of Economics Dual Degree MA-MSc programme in International and World History in 2017, receiving a Distinction. Through her academic work so far, Shriya has been closely involved in archival, ethnographic, oral historical, palaeographic, qualitative, and quantitative research for data-driven projects across India, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her research has included work with Cornell University’s Language Acquisition Lab and Future of Minority Studies Project, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the LSE Women’s Library, the British Library’s India Office Records, the International Labour Organization Archives, the United Nations Library and Archives in Geneva, the Heidelberg Odisha Research Project Collections, the National Archives of India, the Odisha State Archives, and the Odisha High Court and Judicial Archives. This multi-sited research experience informs her sustained methodological commitment to reading official and institutional archives alongside oral testimonies, embodied practices, visual and performative sources, and records produced from within marginalised communities. In addition to her scholarly interests, Shriya has worked in the public policy and NGO sectors on gender, education, trafficking, women’s rights, and human rights projects across India, Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. These experiences have played a key role in shaping her research focus on women’s rights and minority rights initiatives at a transnational scale, as well as shaped her interests in tracing the disjunctures between institutional reform projects and the lived experiences of the communities upon whom such projects act.

Research Project

Disciplining Desire, Reconstituting Respectability: A Comparative Organisational Study of the AMSH and AIWC’s Regional Approaches to Subaltern Women’s Sexualities in India (1915-1956)

Shriya’s postdoctoral project extends her doctoral focus on the histories of sexual regulation, women’s reform, and subaltern female subjectivities through a comparative organisational study of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene and the All India Women’s Conference’s regional approaches to subaltern women’s sexualities in the region of Odisha between 1915 and 1956. It examines the institutional processes through which desire was disciplined and respectability reconstituted within women’s organisational and reform projects, while remaining attentive to the regional differences, historical contingencies, and uneven social positions that shaped these approaches. The project develops a longer research trajectory concerned with the tensions between women’s rights initiatives and the voices of the women made subject to them. Moving from the community-centered history of the Mahari-Devadasis to a comparative history of institutional reform and organisational practice, it places the regulation of sexuality within the wider histories of Indian women’s movements, colonial governance, nationalist reform, caste, class, and the transition from late colonial rule to the early postcolonial state. In doing so, it asks how different regional approaches to subaltern women’s sexualities both produced normative categories of respectable womanhood and shaped the possibilities through which subaltern women could negotiate, contest, or inhabit them. Shriya has been awarded an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility fellowship to pursue this project at the Universities of Nottingham and Heidelberg beginning in summer 2027. At the Walter Benjamin Kolleg, she will use the IPN Junior Fellowship to prepare the project’s longer institutional trajectory: developing an SNSF Return Phase application to the University of Bern, building academic networks at Bern across history, anthropology, gender studies, and related interdisciplinary fields, and expanding the research into a larger and longer-term project for future Horizon Europe and ERC applications.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • Shriya Patnaik and Sinjini Chatterjee, co-editors, “South Asia’s Courtesan, Hereditary, and Temple Performers: Expanding Discourse and Disrupting Histories,” Dance Chronicle, Special Issue (Taylor & Francis, forthcoming 2026).
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Voicing the Last Maharis: Oral Testimonies and the Politics of Devadasi Sexual Regulation Projects in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” Dance Chronicle, Special Issue (Taylor & Francis, forthcoming 2026).
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Mutating Modalities of Performative Culture and Social Regulation in Conceptualizing Histories of Tawaifs in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” in Anurima Banerji, Royona Mitra, and Jasmine Johnson (eds), Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026).
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Embodied Orality as Counter-Archives: Disrupting Orientalist and Nationalist Imaginations of the Mahari-Devadasi in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” Dastavezi: The Audio-Visual South Asia (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, forthcoming 2026).
  • Shriya Patnaik and Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, “The Life and Death of Mahari-Devadasis in Colonial and Postcolonial India: The History, Decline, and Demise of an Ancient Temple Tradition,” Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, forthcoming 2026).
  • Shriya Patnaik, “The Sexual Regulation and Bodily Disciplining of Mahari-Devadasis in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” in Guillaume Carnino, Alexandre Disser, and Liliane Hilaire-Perez (eds), Les techniques ont-elles une patrie? (Paris: Presses des Mines, 2025), 245-266.
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Tracing Historical Disruptions in the Sex Worker Rights Movement in Late Colonial and Postcolonial India through Testimonies from within the Community,” in Catherine Phipps (eds), Histories of Sex Work Around the World (New York: Routledge, 2024), 188-213. DOI: 10.4324/9781003386612-12
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Marginalizing the Matriarchal, Minority Subject: A Study of the Policing and Disenfranchisement of the Mahari-Devadasi of Orissa in Colonial India,” in R. Srinivasan (eds), Borders: Physical, Social and Cultural (New Delhi: HOW Academics, 2024), 111-141.
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Exploring the Contested and Controversial Nature of the Sex Industry in India: Experiential Encounters by Sex-Workers from the Periphery,” in Abhiruchi Ojha and Pramod Jaiswal (eds), South Asian Women and International Relations (Singapore: Springer-Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 261-287. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-19-9426-5_15
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Sex-workers Defying Patriarchy and Challenging State Reform and Rehabilitation Projects in India: Voices from the Margins,” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 7, Special Issue (2023). DOI: 10.20897/femenc/12883
  • Shriya Patnaik, “Marginalizing the Matriarchal, Minority Subject: A Critical Analysis of Human Rights and Women’s Reform Projects in Colonial and Postcolonial India through the Case-Study of the ‘Mahari-Devadasi’,” Electronic Journal of Social and Strategic Studies 2, Special Issue 1 (2021). DOI: 10.47362/EJSSS.2021.2105

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