Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri

Frederique Apffel-Marglin's Wives of the God-King, The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri, published by Oxford University Press in 1985, is a scholarly study of the maharis, the ritual dancers dedicated in service to the Jagannath temple at Puri, examining the ritual service they performed and the temple tradition from which the classical dance form Odissi partly descends. Apffel-Marglin conducted fieldwork with maharis directly connected to the temple. Its strength is that direct access to a specific, well-documented temple tradition and its practitioners' own understanding of their ritual role. Its limit is that devadasi traditions varied considerably across different regions and temples of India, and the institution as a whole became the subject of considerable colonial-era moralizing and later reform legislation, so a claim generalizing from the Puri maharis to devadasi practice across India needs additional regional sources.