Shriya Patnaik

Shriya Patnaik

Dissertation

Dr. Shriya Patnaik has a PhD in International History and Politics (Summa cum Laude with no corrections) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Switzerland, where her research has been supported by the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, Swiss National Science Foundation Doc.Ch and Gender Equality Grants, Swiss Network of International Studies, Swiss Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities, Pierre du Bois Foundation, and the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Community Scholarship. Shriya is currently a Research Associate at the Pierre du Bois Foundation in Switzerland, and is also a part of the United Nations’ Centenary of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations research project in Geneva. In her present capacity, she also serves as an Adjunct Lecturer at Utkal University in India, where she delivers in-person and online lectures for the Department of History. Additionally, she works as a research affiliate with the Graduate Institute’s Gender Centre and the Global Migration Centre. Her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and in book chapters for edited volumes with Routledge, Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Palgrave Macmillan, among others. 

Shriya achieved 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’ (MA and MSc) 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 for an Exchange program at the University of Oxford’s Mansfield College on a full scholarship, where she undertook tutorials in History, Anthropology, and Political Science. During her academic trajectory so far, Shriya has been closely involved in conducting archival, ethnographic, palaeographic, and 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 of discourses on 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 at 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 dancers across various regions in India with matrifocal kinship practices, who were termed as “religious prostitutes” from the colonial period onwards, under the Contagious Diseases Acts, as well as postcolonial prostitution and Devadasi abolitionist regulations. Under the colonial disciplining of deviant sexualities together with racialized bio-politics across British India, the quotidian cultures of hereditary communities of temple dancers, homogeneously classified as ‘The Devadasi System’, were monolithically conceptualized, categorized, and criminalized as “culturally sanctioned prostitution” in official discourses. Shriya’s dissertation 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 Devadasi custom did little to ameliorate 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 postcolonial India. Taking into account such historical developments, her research narrows in on analyzing 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 conceptual lens. Her dissertation is methodologically reliant on oral histories, archival records, and UN/ILO human rights protocols/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, as well as digital repositories, and 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 dissertation 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 actors. 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 women under international human rights 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 closely with sex workers in the Sonagachi district of West Bengal on the question of sex worker rights, a topic on which she has widely published over the years.

In addition to her scholarly interests, Shriya has worked in the public policy and NGO sectors on gender and human rights projects across India, Europe, 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. In terms of her linguistic abilities, she is fully proficient in English, Hindi, and Odia, has a medium level of proficiency in Sanskrit, and has a beginner’s level of proficiency in French. 

Publications