Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India

Davesh Soneji is a scholar of South Asian religion and performance, and this University of Chicago Press book is his scholarly study of devadasis, temple dancers of South India, and how their history is remembered and contested in modern India. Its strength is that Soneji combines archival research with fieldwork among devadasi communities themselves, giving weight to how the women and their descendants remember their own history against outside narratives about them. Its limit is that it is focused on South Indian devadasi tradition specifically, so a claim about temple dance or ritual specialists in other regions of India needs a source matched to that different tradition.