Until Monday (May 26), Nari Kamakshi, an accomplished researcher had been denied both a passport and official recognition of her identity for over two years by the authorities, despite submitting all required legal documents, including a certificate from the Child Welfare Department confirming her mother’s status as a Devadasi, solely on the absence of her father’s name in the application.
The researcher and practitioner committed to education, youth empowerment, and social justice, in an article published on The News Minute, titled “Waiting for Passport: How a broken system denies identity and justice to a Devadasi’s daughter,” asks,” How many times must I prove I exist? How many forms must I fill out to explain why I don’t have a father’s name? Why does the system punish those of us born outside patriarchy’s rules, even as it pretends to offer us a future?”
Since 2023, she has been repeatedly denied a passport, a process she describes as “humiliating,” during which, she says, “I found myself spiraling into a question that tormented me daily: Who am I if the state refuses to acknowledge that I belong?”
In April 2023, Nari Kamakshi applied for a passport in Delhi, believing that all her documents were in order. She carried everything she understood the system required, including Aadhaar, voter ID, education certificates, and a government-issued certificate verifying her mother’s status as a Devadasi.
At the time, she had been working in Delhi for over a year, supporting youth programmes and leading research in public education. What should have been a routine application process quickly turned into what she describes as “a nightmare.”
The Devadasi system, deeply rooted in caste-based oppression, has devastated thousands of women in Karnataka. Under this practice, young girls like her mother were dedicated to temples as children act which deprived them of agency and autonomy.
These women were forced into a life of servitude, denied the opportunity to marry, and compelled to serve deities through religious rituals, trapping them in a cycle of social and economic marginalisation.
Kamakshi, who worked as a Research Assistant on the Karnataka Devadasi (Prohibition of Dedication) Act 1982/2018 Rehabilitation Bill, also presented her mother’s certificate from the Department of Women and Child Development, providing clear legal proof of her mother’s status as a Devadasi.
Even though she referenced the Maharashtra High Court’s decision that allows a mother’s name alone to be used in official documents, it made no difference. The officer rejected her application outright and, she recalls, remarked dismissively, “You can try, but it’ll likely be rejected at police verification.”
Hours of waiting, pleading, and explaining resulted only in humiliation.
The weight of caste and patriarchy reduced her to an administrative inconvenience.
Although the officer eventually forwarded her application, he warned her, “At your own risk.” His warning proved accurate, as the application was ultimately rejected during police verification.
She recalls one particularly painful moment when being mocked and ridiculed for not having a father’s name, which, she says, “shattered something deep inside me.”
For the next two years, she was in constant motion, both physically and emotionally.
“To the system, I wasn’t a person, I was a problem,” she said.
She returned repeatedly to the Delhi Passport Seva Kendra, hoping that someone would look beyond the blank space in the father’s name column and recognise her as a human being with proof, purpose, and dreams. She filed appeals, sent emails, and made numerous visits, only to be met with silence.
After nearly a year, she withdrew her application in resignation.
In March 2025, she reapplied for a passport in Bengaluru under the Tatkal category, urgently needing it to meet the approaching deadline for her scholarship documents, but was denied entry at the token counter itself.
“I felt a deep, burning shame—not for who I am, but for daring to expect fairness from a system designed to erase people like me. I clutched my mother’s certificate—her truth, my truth—as I watched my dreams dissolve into paperwork tossed between indifferent hands. Powerless and invisible, I cried,” she wrote.
Officials insisted that she switch from the Tatkal to the regular passport application process, citing vague and arbitrary rules lacking any legal basis. She waited for hours, pleaded her case, and explained her situation, but the Assistant Passport Officer refused to consider her application.
She changed her appointment from Tatkal to the regular process and shifted her Passport Seva Kendra from Bengaluru to Bellary, becoming more aware of the system’s workings.
On May 1, 2025, she completed her document verification and submitted a written letter explaining her mother’s Devadasi status while formally requesting a passport.
Her identity wasn’t seen, it was “sorted, stamped, and sidelined.”
She was treated as just another bureaucratic anomaly: not a person, not a citizen, and “not worthy.” Officials repeatedly told her, “Switch to the regular process!” “This certificate is not enough!” and “Come back later!”
Emphasising that her experience is not an isolated one, she asserts, “I am not alone. This isn’t just a personal struggle-it’s a reflection of the larger systemic failures that continue to oppress marginalised communities.”
“This is a system that continues to erase people like me, Dalit women and their children, whose existence is inconvenient to the established social order,” she added.
She says she wasn’t rejected for lack of qualifications or merit, but because her mother, once a Devadasi, raised her alone.
Despite her years of education, acceptance into a PhD program, and the extensive official documentation she provided, “none of it mattered.” She was treated as if her very existence was “an error,” an “anomaly unworthy of recognition.”
Yet, this is no longer just her fight. Thousands of children born to Devadasis face the same barriers, and most lose. They are denied “passports, education, and dignity.”
She says her lived experience fuels her activism, “Education gave me the language to dream and resist,” as a first-generation Dalit learner.
However, she acknowledges that education alone has not been enough, as discrimination persists through “red tape, silent rooms, and locked gates.”
She urged that the government must act, emphasising that “children from single-parent homes, especially Devadasi families, should not be forced to justify their identity again and again.”
She called for policies that explicitly state that a father’s name is not mandatory and stressed that officials must be trained to understand and respect these realities.
She insisted that “even in Tatkal cases, children of Devadasis deserve fair access, not ridicule.”
After all these struggles, she finally received her passport on Monday.
Despite legal prohibitions against the exploitative Devadasi system, a 2015 report by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) estimates that over 70,000 Devadasis still live in India.
Research conducted by Jana Shakti and the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) reveals that more than 60% of Devadasi children drop out of school, primarily due to stigma, poverty, and systemic bureaucratic neglect.
Courtesy : Maktoob Media
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