Abolition, Revival and a Reformed Art

Colonial and early independence era reform campaigns led to formal legal abolition of the devadasi system, most comprehensively through legislation such as the Karnataka Devadasis (Prohibition of Dedication) Act of 1982, which criminalised the practice of dedicating girls and women to temple service in the form the historical system had taken, ending the institutional structure that had sustained bharatanatyam's temple context for centuries.

In parallel with and partly ahead of this legal abolition, a deliberate cultural revival movement from the early twentieth century, associated particularly with figures such as Rukmini Devi Arundale, reconstructed and repositioned bharatanatyam as a respectable, formally taught concert and stage art suitable for performance by dancers from any background, largely severed from the devadasi temple system's religious institutional structure even as the dance retained, and continues to retain, substantial explicitly devotional and religious content and repertoire within its performances. Bharatanatyam today exists as a major, internationally taught and performed Indian classical dance form, its historical devadasi origins and the honest complexity of that history increasingly discussed openly within contemporary scholarship and performance communities rather than left unaddressed, even as the dance itself continues to be understood by most practitioners and audiences as carrying genuine devotional and religious meaning.