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Research Expertise

Doctoral Work

Shriya’s research focuses on the historical genealogy of discourses on prostitution, trafficking, sex worker rights, human rights paradigms, and feminist movements in late colonial and postcolonial India, as well as transnationally across the interconnected spaces of the British Empire. She does this through the case study of the now-extinct community of Mahari-Devadasis in Odisha (performative ritual specialists and temple dancers at the Jagannath Temple of Puri, whose kinship structures and practices of religiosity entailed being wed to Hindu deities over mortals). Devadasis have historically constituted female communities of hereditary temple dancers across various regions in India with matrifocal kinship practices, who were termed as “religious prostitutes” from the colonial period onwards, under the Contagious Diseases Acts, as well as postcolonial prostitution and Devadasi abolitionist regulations. Under the colonial disciplining of deviant sexualities together with racialized bio-politics across British India, the quotidian cultures of hereditary communities of temple dancers, homogeneously classified as ‘The Devadasi System’, were monolithically conceptualized, categorized, and criminalized as “culturally sanctioned prostitution” in official discourses. Shriya’s dissertation highlights the historical continuities in the transition from colonial to postcolonial periods, stemming from exclusionary colonial abolitionist paradigms that have been inscribed into postcolonial legal and political structures in the independent Indian nation-state. It consequently illustrates how the abolition of the Devadasi custom did little to ameliorate the material factors or situational circumstances of such women, who came to be conceptualized predominantly through paradigms of sexual degeneracy, delinquency, crime, and moral turpitude in postcolonial India. Taking into account such historical developments, her research narrows in on analyzing the regional community of temple dancers in the eastern state of Odisha in India, colloquially known as ‘Maharis’, and examines their distinct performative cultures, caste networks, ritualistic practices, and kinship structures through an ethno-historical conceptual lens. Her dissertation is methodologically reliant on oral histories, archival records, and UN/ILO human rights protocols/conventions on the rights of marginalized communities of women in the Global South. It spans 11 archives in total across India, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany, as well as digital repositories, and incorporates fieldwork, thereby constituting a work in multi-sited historical ethnography. Consequently, upon the extinction of the Mahari-Devadasi community in Odisha in 2021, the dissertation methodologically incorporates her interviews with the last living Maharis – Sashimani and Parasamani, alongside testimonies from regional interlocutors, through which it articulates iterations of collective memory, popular culture, bodily agency, and the complex teleological subjectivities of such subaltern actors. In incorporating the experiential narratives of this community, it delineates their changing life circumstances across mutating socio-political contexts in India, thereby establishing the need for rights-based paradigms such as legal and healthcare frameworks for such historically underrepresented women under international human rights conventions. Through a critical examination of the politics of disenfranchisement as well as articulations of agency for concomitant groups of stigmatized women living on the fringes of civil society in postcolonial South Asia, her research thereby situates such bottom-up, oral narratives from the margins within transnational historiographies of gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, subalternity, and human rights paradigms. Furthermore, Shriya has also interviewed and worked closely with sex workers in the Sonagachi district of West Bengal on the question of sex worker rights, a topic on which she has widely published over the years.


Research Interests

Gender, Sexuality, Colonialism, Postcoloniality, Decolonialism, Postcolonial Studies, South Asia Studies and Indian History, British Imperial History, Oral History, Historical Anthropology, Archival Research, Fieldwork, Women’s Rights, Human Rights Frameworks and Humanitarian Approaches of International Development Organisations, Civil Society Movements, Histories of Marginalisation, Subaltern Studies, Political Science, International Relations


Research Experiences & Memberships in Scientific Societies