The Mahari, the Gotipua and the Break Between Them

The temple of Jagannath at Puri maintained a body of women called maharis, dedicated to the deity and performing dance as part of the daily temple service, in front of the image and out of public sight. Their service was ritual employment rather than performance for an audience, and it was governed by the temple. Alongside them, from around the sixteenth century, ran the gotipua tradition: boys trained to dance in female dress, performing outside the sanctuary and in public, in an environment shaped by the Vaishnava devotional movements of Odisha.

The mahari institution declined through the colonial period and was ended, in common with comparable temple dedication systems elsewhere in India, by reform campaigns and by legislation directed at them. The history is not a simple one and the atlas does not present it as either a rescue or a destruction: the campaigns responded to real exploitation, and they also removed a hereditary professional standing from the women concerned and left many of them destitute. Both are documented and both belong in the record. What survived in practice was the gotipua line, in which many of the twentieth century teachers of Odissi had trained as boys.