Devadasi Communities in Ceylon and the Straits Settlements: Tamil Circuits of Labour and Cultural Production in the Nine

This talk examines the movement of women from devadasi communities into worlds of colonial labour and cultural production outside of South India.It focuses primarily on two related sites, Ceylon and the Straits Settlements.This paper aims to shift the focus of debates on devadasi reform to the colonial Tamil diaspora, arguing that these sites provide alternate chronologies for charting interventions against “temple dancing” and “temple prostitution,” and women’s resistance to such intervention