Shifting Modes of Collective Memory and Popular Culture in the Re-construction and Re-imagination of Mahari-Devadasis: A Critical Analysis of Gender, Subalternity and Human Rights Projects in Postcolonial India (1947 - 2015)

The MPT focuses on the rights of gendered minorities in postcolonial India through the matriarchal community of Mahari-Devadasis. It delineates how the abolition of this tradition under colonial and postcolonial laws, instead of ameliorating women's life circumstances constituted their growing socio-economic marginalization and exclusion from civil society, whilst juxtaposing inclusive feminist paradigms. It argues for a bottom-up, experiential analytical lens for studying such subaltern actors.