THE RECENTLY APPROVED Karnataka Devadasi (Prevention, Prohibition, Relief and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2025, escalated the fight against Devadasi dedications. Its stated intention is to provide recognition, justice, rehabilitation and institutional support for the generationally exploited Devadasis and their children.
The Bill must be commended for its progressive aspect. However, its broad prohibitions and definitional sweep create potential legal precarity for the Jogappas, a prominent gender-diverse community in Karnataka. The Jogappa community, largely concentrated in Northern Karnataka, occupies a unique cultural and spiritual position. They are individuals assigned male at birth who undergo gender transition through complex rituals culminating in dedication to a localised deity, Yellamma. Their dedication to Yellamma is a personal choice often approved by family. Jogappas’ gender transition characteristically proscribes ritual castration or sexual reaffirmation surgeries.
Instead, they assert themselves as the chosen daughters of Yellamma, emphasising a spiritual gender embodiment rather than physical alteration. Hence, their identity embodies a complex negotiation of spirituality and gender variance. This upends the neat binaries of male-female, conformity-deviance that welfarist legislative-juridical reforms tend to recognise.
Jogappas and the socio-cultural complexity of dedication
The language of the Bill, in its current form, criminalises dedication and related cultural practices. Though these practices are undoubtedly exploitative to Devadasis, some (like dedication to Yellamma and tying the mutthu) are intrinsic to Jogappa identity and their embodied gender expression.
The Bill must be commended for its progressive aspect. However, its broad prohibitions and definitional sweep create potential legal precarity for the Jogappas, a prominent gender-diverse community in Karnataka.
Socio-anthropologists and inclusive platforms have consistently argued that severing the Jogappa community from their ritual practices essentially takes away their assertion of identity and way of life. While gender non-conforming practices are widely stigmatised, the Jogappa ritual practices also ensure community belonging and social continuity. Their community, organised around dedication to Yellamma, offers a framework of self-formulation embedded in collective solidarity and belonging. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the significance of the Jogappa community system that has historically provided a space for recognising gender-diverse expressions.
Consequently, the broad prohibitions of the Bill, collapsing all acts of dedication as a singular exploitative practice unless specifically marked, risk criminalising the Jogappa tradition. The punishments prescribed ‘not be less than two years but may extend to a period of five years and shall be liable to fine of not less than rupees one lakh’ (clause 44) transform a mode of cultural survival and gender-expression into a criminal offence for the Jogappa community.
It is discerning here how legislative measures that are emancipatory on one axis can become repressive on another, undermining constitutional commitments to gender diversity in India. The result is not protection, but erasure. In this sense, the Bill inadvertently echoes a long history of colonial and postcolonial regulation of local traditions and ritual practices, insisting on a singular narrative of victimhood and exploitation. It does not distinguish between the complexities of plural experiences of those who have historically negotiated dedication differently - some as sites of exploitation (Devadasi system), others as spaces of spiritual and gendered affirmation (Jogappa tradition). Thus, if the language of the Bill is not amended to be specific, Jogappas will potentially find themselves subsumed within a criminalised framework that erases the socio-cultural legitimacy of their identity.
Constitutional guarantees and their undoing
At the heart of this ambiguity lies the Bill’s resolve on framing the dedication practices exclusively through the cis-normative category of ‘women.’ The Bill, while drafted from extensive research and participant data, focuses on a singular meaning of women without taking cognisance of gender-diverse bodies who also claim the category. In this imagination of women and subsequently in the legal language, those who are not born women but embody womanhood, vis-à-vis the Jogappas, remain undistinguished.
The inconsistency becomes sharper when measured against constitutional guarantees under Articles 14, 15 and 21, preserving equality, prohibiting discrimination and the right to dignity and autonomy. Judicial interpretations, including the NALSA v. UoI (2014) decision and the Karnataka High Court’s (2024) progressive rulings on transgender documentation, have affirmed that gender identity is not reducible to biology and that the state must respect self-identification. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, however flawed, recognises a statutory category of gender diversity.
Thus, the Bill while making sincere efforts, reproduced the very exclusions that constitutional jurisprudence has sought to undo by affirming transgender rights. By criminalising rituals that are central to Jogappa identity and not distinguishing them from the Devadasi, it effectively undermines these constitutional and statutory advancements. It creates a disagreement between the promise of legal recognition for transgender persons and the lived reality of criminalisation for identities that cannot be neatly categorised within legislative-juridical frameworks.
Thus, the Bill while making sincere efforts, reproduced the very exclusions that constitutional jurisprudence has sought to undo by affirming transgender rights.
The socio-cultural intersectionality further complicates this picture. Jogappas, especially those belonging to Dalit and religious minority communities, already vulnerable to economic exclusion and social oppression, will now face the additional threat of state prosecution under the guise of abolition. The Bill therefore, embodies a welfare paradox. On the one hand, it seeks to dismantle a system of gender-based subjugation. On the other hand, it inadvertently criminalises the cultural existence of a gender-diverse group, reinforcing a cis-normative framework of recognition. This contradiction points to the dangers of universalising juridical and legislative frameworks that straitjacket layered values associated with rituals and traditions, especially for intersectionally marginalised communities.
It is recommended that the Bill distinguish the nuances between exploitative dedication and cultural expressions of gender diversity. Moreover, a precise outlining of who constitutes a Devadasi ‘woman’ and which specific dedication practices are to be abolished is required so as not to cause precarity for the Jogappas. Culturally specific gender-diverse communities like Jogappas are to be comprehended in relation to their ritual practices and socio-cultural reality rather than reflexive criminalisation that follows from neoliberal codes of juridical-legislative morality. Without such recognition, the promise of constitutional justice remains partial and denied to those whose very identities are made precarious by the state’s attempt at reform.