Given to the Goddess brings a powerful new approach to the study of Indian devadasis. Rejecting both liberal models of secularization and reform and cultural feminist attempts to recuperate female power in the goddess, Lucinda Ramberg takes seriously the religious and ethical worlds that these women inhabit and create. Her study focuses not on the typically highly trained and higher status devadasis who historically had connections to the performing arts, but on the largely Dalit women dedicated to the regional south Indian goddess Yellama, known as jogatis, who had no such training but play significant roles in local ritual functions.

Like other devadasis, jogatis have been targeted as objects of reform for more than a century. Ramberg describes how, since the 1980s, the actions of the Indian state and reform groups have taken a particularly virulent form, seeking to suppress the practice of dedication and all associated forms of religiosity, which are seen as perpetuating a system of prostitution under the veil of religion. These actions have largely been supported (even demanded) by masculine-inflected Dalit publics, who view dedication as a practice intended to secure upper-caste sexual access to Dalit women and to deny dignity and respectability to Dalit men and women. One of the strengths of Ramberg's work is her careful navigation of the issues of caste and gender that this practice raises: she at once acknowledges the force of arguments put forward by anti-caste activists and yet holds out a space for a more complex story of valuable forms of life. As she notes, “Political equality is not the horizon [jogatis] are looking toward” (p. 57).

The contemporary moment that Ramberg traces is nonetheless powerfully shaped by the compulsions of secular liberal reformism, what Ramberg characterizes as “a contest over the body; its possible meanings; and its capacity to make meaning…” In Ramberg's telling, this is a contest over the “disposition of sexuality,” the differential uses to which it is put, within the world of the devi and within that of the modern postcolonial state. With similar analytical acuity, she explores forms of kin-making (especially marriage) and religiosity as “technologies of the human”: “tool[s] for producing certain kinds of humans endowed with particular obligations and claims on others, social obligations and forms of value” (p. 211). Marriage to Yellama creates one set of commitments and forms of value; marriage to a man according to the norms of the modern state, another.

Ramberg's rich ethnography unfolds through a three-part structure: “Gods,” “Gifts,” and “Trouble.” Each section takes on a particular body of theory or set of conceptual issues, layering these analytical approaches with the forms of knowledge provided by the jogatis themselves: the first section takes up the story of Yellama within a history of modern Hinduism and Dalit politics; the second explores the nature of Yellama worship and the “gift” of a child through anthropological theories of marriage, sacrifice, and the gift; and the final section considers how Yellama's presence (often described by devotees as “difficulty” or “trouble”) and jogatis' marriage to the goddess trouble theories of kinship and open alternate terrains of gender and sexuality. Ramberg's work emerges out of queer theory and a biopolitical analysis, while it also delves deeply into classical anthropological theory and religious studies, offering critique with a light touch. In this intriguing work of filiation, Foucault, Talal Asad, and Judith Butler seem to sit comfortably with McKim Marriot and Gloria Raheja.

Ramberg rightly insists that marriage to the devi is a real marriage, that Yellama worship is real religion, that jogatis become both wives of the goddess and sons in their natal families, and that “sexuality saturates all religions” (p. 35). Nonetheless, some questions remain about the sexuality of this religion. Ramberg discusses theories in anthropology and religious studies regarding Tantra and Shakta rites, introducing them as a “layering of interpretive possibilities” (p. 127) related to Yellama worship. Yet how she views these theories of esoteric sexual practice, and their relation to Yellama and to the sexuality of her wives the jogatis, ultimately remains unclear and unspecified. What are the desires and pleasures and forms of bodily intensity in that “Yellama women” world? While the book discusses the kinship and material functions to which their sexuality is put, it remains unclear if we are to understand sex as an integral part of the ecstatic rites of worshipping the devi, or as something else. In a book marked by exemplary ethnographic candor, some commentary or analysis seems warranted of the possible silences or resistance on the part of jogatis regarding the pleasures and desires, forms of “intoxication,” or “transactional exchange” they “are given over to” (p. 222).

Still, in navigating complex issues with great acuity and in evocative and compelling prose, Given to the Goddess will be valuable to scholars and students of anthropology, religion, gender, sexuality, and the modern state in the field of South Asia and beyond.