The Devadasi System and Its Legal History

Yellamma's shrine at Saundatti has historically been among the most prominent sites in India at which girls, typically from lower caste and economically vulnerable families, were ritually dedicated to the goddess as devadasis, a dedication that in earlier centuries carried temple service obligations but which, particularly from the colonial period onward, became closely tied in this specific regional context to a life of sex work with no institutional protection, since the dedication itself carried no legal marriage status and no property rights for the woman involved.

Indian state legislatures moved to end the practice by law: Karnataka passed the Devadasis (Prohibition of Dedication) Act in 1982 and Andhra Pradesh passed comparable legislation in 1988, both making the dedication itself a criminal offence. Scholarship on the practice, including ethnographic work documenting devadasi women's own accounts of memory and continued marginalization after the legal ban, records that dedication continues in reduced and less public form in some areas despite the law, a persistence this entry states as a documented fact rather than as a claim about the present scale of the practice, which is difficult to measure precisely by its own clandestine nature.