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Beeban Kidron - Director of 'Sex, Death and the Gods'
The journey I made in making 'Sex Death and the Gods'
Monday 24th January 2011 by Beeban
Shortly after I first heard about the Devadasi, I found myself in Oxo tower looking at an exhibition of photographs detailing the work of EveryChild. I had been in contact with many of the English based NGOs and Charities that worked with women and Children in India, but EveryChild appeared to be the only one that actually had a programme that was specifically designed to work in the Devadasi communities along the northern Karnataka border.
Only a small part of the exhibition dealt with the Devadasi but it was the first step in humanising the issue. Everything that I had read hereto had been either about a glorious tradition of a court elite that were dancers and lovers of wealthy men or loud articles about ‘mothers selling daughters’, at the exhibition it was more measured. Not characters but real people stared out of the frame. Although to be honest I was none the wiser about how being ‘married or dedicated’ to god could possibly be advantageous if it meant that at puberty you would be sold for sex.
The journey I made in making 'Sex Death and the Gods' took longer and was more convoluted that I could imagine. There is no doubt that by all standards, dedicating a child at a young age to a system that automatically confers a destiny of sex work is unacceptable. But on the ground, within not one community, but the many communities that are home to the Devadasi, the reality reveals itself to be very complex.
EveryChild has an office in Bangalore, here trained lawyers, activists, social workers look at both the policy and practice that victimises disadvantaged children in India. But, more importantly perhaps, they also have a network of partners in rural places that deal with the minutiae of everyday lives and individual children who they try, to keep in school, to keep in their family home and to keep safe. It was among these partners that I was able to find the Devadasi activists, women who had decided to leave their lives of enforced sex work and instead fight for rights of housing, pensions and education for their children.
I found each community very different, and as I went again and again to the Devadasi Belt I found that the women themselves had vastly different views on their Devadasi status. What I found in common were just two things; a determination to stop dedications of young girls under 18 and a commitment to educating their children that rose above all other considerations.
Each community was administered and organised by a complex series of peer groups and educators. What struck me, as an outsider, was that it was those who had gained ‘awareness’ and ‘leadership roles’ that were charged with helping their own. Occasionally it felt like a supply teacher in school, just one work sheet ahead of the class, but most often there was an understanding of circumstance, culture, worldview…it was not ‘there by the grace of god go I’ it was ‘there by the grace of god I have left’.
This is not a small observation about organisational structure or ‘expertise’. It is the peer groups who organise the micro-banking, the health checks, apply for government grants, run after schools clubs, who step in when they hear of a dedication and intervene if a Devadsi’s child is discriminated against at school. In a community that measures its successes and failures by tiny margins each small intervention brings a family back from the brink of potential crisis – from bride price to flour – from ill health to a hole in roof - any one thing can always be the last straw. And it is the youngest and most vulnerable, young girls, who tend to pay the price.
What is important about the peer groups is that they live the same precarious lives, often the small sums they are paid for their activism is keeping them afloat and where they too do choose to do sex work, they are gathered in communities where the peer groups pay for doctors, condoms and advocates to make sure that they are safe and well.
The British intervened once before, and the effects of pushing the Devadasi underground were nothing but harmful. This new model is not for the impatient or the hasty. The Devadasi will take another generation to educate its young, to find alternative employment, to raise the age of consent, even to have consent as a concept in its community. But what the peer groups, have achieved, people who for the most part can neither read nor write, is awe-inspiring and the tolerance in the community for dedicating young girls is in freefall.
It is this work that EveryChild supports.
Beeban Kidron's Sex Death and the Gods will be shown as part of BBC4's Storyville on January 24th and 10pm. It will be available in full on BBC iPlayer until 31st January. Please visit www.everychild.org.uk/devadasi for more information.
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