Profile
Shriya Patnaik new

Shriya Patnaik

PhD Researcher in International History and Politics
SNF Doc.CH Fellow, Gender Centre Affiliate
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Spoken languages
English, Hindi, Oriya, Sanskrit, French
Theme
  • Gender, Class, Race and Intersectionality

PROFILE
 

Title: Temple Dancer, Prostitute, Celibate Nun? The Shifting Position of the Mahari-Devadasi from Late Colonial India to the Early 21st Century

PhD Supervisor: Nicole Bourbonnais, 2nd Reader: Aditya Bharadwaj, External Co-supervisor: Frédérique Apffel-Marglin (Professor Emerita, Smith College)

Completion date: 25 June 2025

Dr. Shriya Patnaik has a PhD in International History and Politics (Summa cum Laude) from the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) in Switzerland, where her research has been supported by the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, Swiss National Science Foundation Doctoral Grant, Swiss Network of International Studies, Swiss Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Community Scholarship. Her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and in book chapters for edited volumes with Routledge, Taylor and Francis, Springer, and Palgrave Macmillan, among others.

Shriya pursued her Bachelor’s in History from Cornell University (Magna cum Laude Honours) in 2014 as a Cornell Tata Scholar. She subsequently pursued a Double Masters’ in International History with a focus on Gender Studies from the Columbia University-London School of Economics Dual Degree MA-MSc program (with a Distinction) in 2017. During her undergraduate years, she was selected to be a part of an Exchange program at Oxford University’s Mansfield College on a full scholarship, where she undertook tutorials in History and Political Science. During her academic trajectory so far, Shriya has been closely involved in conducting archival, qualitative, and quantitative research for various data-driven projects, including for the Cornell University’s Language Acquisition Lab, Cornell’s Future of Minority Studies Project, the LSE Women’s Library, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Heidelberg University’s Odisha Research Project, and the Odisha High Court and Judicial Archives.

Shriya’s research focuses on the historical genealogy surrounding discourses related to prostitution, trafficking, sex worker rights, human rights paradigms, and feminist movements in late colonial and postcolonial India, as well as transnationally across the interconnected spaces of the British Empire. She does this through the case study of the now-extinct community of Mahari-Devadasis in Odisha (performative ritual specialists and temple dancers in the Jagannath Temple of Puri, whose kinship structures and practices of religiosity entailed being wed to Hindu deities over mortals). Devadasis have historically constituted female communities of hereditary temple-performers across various regions in India with matrifocal kinship practices, who were classified as “religious prostitutes” from the colonial period onwards, under the Contagious Diseases Acts and prostitution abolition regulations. Under the colonial disciplining of deviant sexualities together with racialized bio-politics across British India, the quotidian cultures of hereditary communities of female temple-performers, homogeneously categorized as ‘The Devadasi System’, were monolithically conceptualized, categorized, and criminalized as “culturally sanctioned prostitution” in official discourses. Shriya’s thesis highlights the historical continuities in the transition from colonial to postcolonial periods, stemming from exclusionary colonial abolitionist paradigms that have been inscribed into postcolonial legal and political structures in the independent Indian nation-state. It consequently illustrates how the abolition of the tradition, did little to improve the material factors or situational circumstances of such women, who came to be conceptualized predominantly through paradigms of sexual degeneracy, delinquency, crime, and moral turpitude in independent India. Taking into account such historical developments, her research narrows in on analysing the regional community of temple-dancers in the eastern state of Odisha in India, colloquially known as ‘Maharis’, and examines their distinct performative cultures, caste networks, ritualistic practices, and kinship structures through an ethno-historical analytical lens. The thesis is methodologically reliant on oral histories, archival records, along with UN/ILO humanitarian conventions on the rights of marginalized communities of women in the Global South. It spans 11 archives in total, across India, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany, and also incorporates fieldwork, thereby constituting a work in multi-sited historical ethnography. Consequently, upon the extinction of the Mahari-Devadasi community in Odisha in 2021, the thesis methodologically incorporates her interviews with the last living Maharis – Sashimani and Parasamani, alongside testimonies from regional interlocutors, through which it articulates iterations of collective memory, popular culture, bodily agency, and the complex teleological subjectivities of such subaltern subjects. In incorporating the experiential narratives of this community, it delineates their changing life circumstances across mutating socio-political contexts in India, thereby establishing the need for rights-based paradigms such as legal and healthcare frameworks for such historically underrepresented actors under international humanitarian conventions. Through a critical examination of the politics of disenfranchisement as well as articulations of agency for concomitant groups of stigmatized women living on the fringes of civil society in postcolonial South Asia, this research thereby situates such bottom-up, oral narratives from the margins within transnational historiographies of gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, subalternity, and human rights paradigms. In addition, Shriya has also interviewed and worked with sex workers in the Sonagachi district of West Bengal on the question of their rights, a topic on which she has widely published.

In addition to her scholarly interests, Shriya has also worked in the public policy and NGO sectors on gender and human rights projects across India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. These experiences have played a key role in shaping her research focus on women’s rights and minority rights initiatives at a transnational scale. Shriya is currently a Research Associate at the Pierre du Bois Foundation in Switzerland and is part of the United Nations’ Centenary of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations research project. She is also a Guest Lecturer at Utkal University, where she delivers in-person and online lectures for their Department of History. Additionally, she serves as a research affiliate with the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Gender Centre and the Global Migration Centre. In terms of her linguistic abilities, she is fully proficient in English, Hindi, and Oriya, has a medium level of proficiency in Sanskrit, and has a beginner’s level of proficiency in French.

 

Academic Work experience

 

Research Experience

  • International Organisations Stipend Research Fellow at Swiss Network for International Studies (2021)
  • PhD Research Affiliate at IHEID Gender Centre (2020-2024)
  • PhD Research Affiliate at IHEID Global Migration Centre (2021-2024)
  • Archival Research Assistant at Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (2015-2016)
  • Research Assistant at Cornell University Future of Minority Studies Project (2010-2014)
  • Research Assistant at Cornell University Language Acquisition Lab (2011-2014)
     

Research Interests

 

  • International and Global History
  • Indian History and South Asia Studies
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Humanitarian Approaches of International Development Organisations
  • Civil Society Movements
  • Histories of Marginalisation
  • Subaltern Studies
  • British Colonial History
  • Decolonization
  • Women’s Rights

 

Relevant Publications and Works

 

ACADEMIC EXPERIENCES
 

OTHER WORK EXPERIENCES
 

Fellowships, Grants and Awards
 

  • Swiss Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Award (2023)
  • SNSF Doc.Ch Grant, Swiss National Science Foundation (2022-2024)
  • Swiss National Science Foundation Gender Equality Grant (2022-2024)
  • Swiss National Science Foundation Project Completion Grant (2024)
  • Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship – Federal Commission for Scholarships (2020-2022)
  • Swiss Network of International Studies International Organizations Research Stipend – PhD Fellow (2021)
  • North American Oral History Association Conference Grant (2021)
  • Pierre Du Bois Foundation Research Grant (2021)
  • Geneva Graduate Institute Community Scholarship (2019-2020)
  • London School of Economics Postgraduate Merit Scholarship (2016-2017)
  • Davis Projects for Peace Award (2016)
  • Service Fellowship – Odisha State Government (2016)
  • Columbia University Alliance Fellowship (2015)
  • Women’s International Leadership Award – International House, New York (2015)
  • Cornell University Anne Macintyre Litchfield History Award (2014)
  • Cornell University Cornelis W. Dekiewet History Award (2013)
  • Cornell University Dean’s List (2011-2014)

  • Cornell University Tata Scholar (Tata Trust India, 2010-2014) 

     

Affiliations
 

Links

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