The Female on the Fringe: A Study of the ‘Devdasi’ System in Amita Trasi’s The Color of Our Sky

Abstract

Marginalization is a social phenomenon by which a person or a group of people become relegated or ostracized in our society. Marginalization generally talks about the inequality on the basis of economy, politics, class, caste, religion, race and of course gender. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, defines women as the “Other”—the marginalized in the patriarchal power-structure. The word devdasi is a Sanskrit word which means a female-servant of deva or god. Between the ages of eight to thirteen, devdasis are offered or ‘married’ to a goddess according to their rituals and hence, they are unable to marry any ‘mortal being’, which eventually converts them to nothing but sex-workers. Amita Trasi in her debut novel, The Color of Our Sky, portrays a heart-rending story of two teenage friends—Tara (a rich upper class girl) and Mukta (a daughter of a devdasi who comes to stay at Tara’s house to avoid her fate). But Mukta, destined to be a temple-prostitute, is kidnapped one night from Tara’s house. In course of the story, we gradually come to know that the two girls are no other than step-sisters. The aim of this paper is to present the plight of the devdasis and to present them as the extremely marginalized beings among the “Other”.