Nine Lives Read online

  “Before long, a rich man came and saw me at my duties, cleaning the house. He refused all the other girls and demanded to have me. I was scared as he was very hefty, very fat. Much fatter even than you. So, instead, the gharwalli, who was very clever, sent some younger boys to me. They were lean and good-looking, and a nice match for me. Eventually, I agreed to sleep with one of them. They were very sensitive with me, not like the men here. We didn’t use a condom—I didn’t know about them in those days.

  “Finally I agreed to take the big man. He offered Rs 5,000 for me, and the gharwalli gave me half—Rs 2,500! It would have taken me twenty years to earn that picking onions in my village, and I wasn’t even a virgin; I was already used goods. So I stayed, and even though I got some diseases that first year, I remained in that house for four years.

  “By that time, I had had my first two children—a daughter and a son—and it was partly for them that I went back to my village. I lived with my mother, and for the past eighteen years I have done dhanda in our house in the village. After some time, I got a lover—a big man locally. He has a family—a wife, two sons and two daughters—and used to give me money. With him, I had a second daughter. He wanted more children by me, and I didn’t. That was how we eventually parted, even though we had been happy together.

  “Because I am still good-looking, I have been lucky and I’ve made good money. I can still earn Rs 200 to 300 from a single client. It’s true that I sometimes feel this is not dignified work. There is a lot of insecurity. But I have looked after and married off my sister, I feed my mother and my son, and I now have eight acres of land with the money I have earned. On it, we keep four buffaloes and four bullocks. Thanks to the generosity of the goddess, I will escape this work when I have saved some more, and live by selling the milk and curd from the animals.”

  It was only when I specifically asked about her daughters that Rani told me what had happened to them.

  “One was a singer. She eloped when she was fourteen. She came back a year later, but no one would marry her. So she became a devadasi.”

  “And the other?”

  “The other had a skin disease and had white patches on her thighs. We went to many doctors but they could not cure it. Like her sister, she found it hard to get married, so I had to dedicate her too.”

  “But how could you do that when you were so angry with your own mother for dedicating you? You just said yourself this is undignified work.”

  “My daughters scolded me,” admitted Rani Bai, “just as I scolded my mother.”

  “Didn’t you feel guilty?”

  “I didn’t like it,” said Rani. “But there was no alternative.”

  “So where are they now?” I asked. “Here? Or in Bombay?”

  There was a long pause when I asked this. Then Rani said, simply, “I have lost them.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Both have passed away. Maybe it was because of some sins in a past life that the goddess cursed me in this way. One lost weight and died of a stomach disease. The other had fevers.”

  Rani didn’t say so explicitly at the time, but I later learned that both her daughters had died of AIDS. One had died less than a year earlier, aged only fifteen. The other had died six months later, aged seventeen.

  The devadasis stand in the direct line of one of the oldest professions in India. The word comes from Sanskrit: “deva” means god and “dasi” means “a female servant.” At the heart of the institution lies the idea of a woman entering for life the service of the god or goddess. The nature of that service and the name given to it have wide regional variations and have changed through time; only recently have most devadasis come to be working exclusively in the sex trade.

  Some experts trace the institution to the ninth century. Others maintain it is far older and claim that what is arguably the most ancient extant piece of Indian art, the famous small bronze of a naked dancing girl from Mohenjo-daro, dating to around 2500 BC, is believed by some archaeologists to depict an ancient devadasi. By the time of Ashoka in 300 BC, a piece of graffiti in a cave in the Vindhya hills of central India recalls the love of Devadinna, a painter, who had fallen for “Sutanuka, the slave girl of the god.” There are large numbers of images of temple dancing girls from the first centuries AD onwards, and detailed inscriptions and literary references from the sixth century. The poetry of the ninth-century Shaivite saint Manikkavacakar, for example, describes adolescent temple girls “with auspicious eyes,” “rows of bracelets,” “heaving bosoms adorned with pearls and shoulders shining with ashes” as they decorate the temple in preparation for a festival.

  Several of these early inscriptions are from the area immediately around Saundatti: one from AD 1113 can be found at Alanahalli, only a few miles from Yellamma’s temple, which is one of the very earliest to use the word devadasi. Another, at Virupaksha near Bijapur, records a devadasi gifting her temple a horse, an elephant and a chariot. The largest collection of inscriptions, however, come from the Chola temples around Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, where the great Chola kings of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries boast of gifting thousands of devadasis, or tevaratiyars, to the temples they founded. These royal temples were conceived as palaces of the gods, and just as the Chola king was attended on by 10,000 dancing girls—they worked in rotation, according to the Chinese traveller Chau Ju-kua, so that 3,000 attended him at any given time—so the gods also had their due share of devoted attendants. The vast entourages added to the status of rulers, whether heavenly or terrestrial, and were believed to surround both with a luminous and auspicious female presence.

  Not all the “temple women” referred to in such inscriptions were necessarily dancing girls, courtesans or concubines, as has sometimes been assumed: some of them seem to have been more like nuns, busy with their devotions and temple cleaning duties. Others appear to have been domestic and personal servants of the temple Brahmins. A few had honoured and important roles in the temple rituals, keeping the images of the deities free of flies, fanning the idols, honouring them with sandalwood paste and jasmine garlands, “carrying pots of water in the divine presence,” delivering prayers and food for the deity, singing and playing music in the sanctuary and replenishing the temple lamps.

  By the sixteenth century, however, when Portuguese traders from Goa began to visit the great Hindu capital of Vijayanagara in southern India, there are fuller and more explicitly sensual descriptions of temple women:

  who feed the idol every day, for they say that he eats; and when he eats women dance before him who belong to that pagoda, and they give him food and all that is necessary, and all girls born to these women belong to the temple.

  These women are of loose character, and they live in the best streets that there are in the city; it is the same in all cities, their streets have the best rows of houses. They are very much esteemed, and are classed amongst those honoured ones who are the mistresses of the captains; any respectable man may go to their houses without any blame attracting thereto.

  If the partially sexualised nature of the temple women is described by the early Portuguese sources, the same is evident in the great profusion of images of the voluptuous temple dancing girls that cover the pillars of so many temples in the south—Tiruvannamalai alone has several hundred. These highly suggestive images seem to hint that the modern confusion and embarrassment at the idea of troupes of young girls being kept to entertain the gods, and the priests who attended upon them, was clearly not shared by the kings and merchants who built and patronised the great temples of medieval southern India.

  There is, moreover, a whole body of explicitly sexual poetry from sixteenth-century southern India in which the love of a devotee for the deity is envisaged as being akin to the love of a temple dancing girl for her client. Some of the most famous of these were discovered carved in an early form of Telugu on copper plates and kept in a locked room in the temple of Tirupathi. Although the copper plates were first brought to the attention of
scholars in the early 1920s, it wasn’t until the end of the twentieth century that they were translated into English, by the poet A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993). In most, the god, usually a form of Krishna, has the upper hand: he is a good-looking and desirable but thoroughly unreliable lover who plays games that drive his devotees to despair. In some cases, the courtesans clearly don’t fully realise who their client is:

  You are handsome, aren’t you,

  Adivaraha,

  And quite skilled at it, too.

  Stop these foolish games.

  You think there are no other men in these parts?

  Asking for me on credit,

  Adivaraha?

  I told you even then

  I won’t stand for your lies.

  Handsome, aren’t you?

  Prince of playboys, you may be,

  But is it fair

  To ask me to forget the money?

  I earned it, after all,

  By spending time with you.

  Stop this trickery at once.

  Put up the gold you owe me

  And then you can talk,

  Adivaraha.

  Handsome, aren’t you?

  Young man:

  Why are you trying to talk big,

  As if you were Muvva Gopala [Krishna]?

  You can make love like no one else,

  But just don’t make promises

  You can’t keep.

  Pay up,

  It’s wrong to break your word.

  Handsome, aren’t you?

  In other, later poems, however, it is sometimes the devadasi who has the upper hand:

  I am not like the others.

  You may enter my house,

  but only if you have the money.

  If you don’t have as much as I ask,

  A little less would do.

  But I will not accept very little,

  Lord Konkanesvara.

  To step across the threshold

  Of my main door,

  It’ll cost you a hundred in gold.

  For two hundred you can see my bedroom,

  My bed of silk,

  And climb into it.

  Only if you have the money.

  To sit by my side

  And to put your hand

  Boldly into my sari:

  That will cost ten thousand.

  And seventy thousand

  Will get you a touch

  Of my full round breasts.

  Only if you have the money.

  Three crores to bring

  Your mouth close to mine,

  Touch my lips and kiss.

  To hug me tight,

  To touch my place of love,

  And get to total union,

  Listen well,

  You must bathe me

  In a shower of gold.

  But only if you have the money.

  These poems of union and separation have sometimes been read as metaphors for the longing of the soul for the divine, and of the devotee for god. Yet they are also clearly an expression of unembarrassed joy at sexuality, part of a complex cultural tradition in pre-colonial India where the devotional, metaphysical and the sexual are not regarded as being in any way opposed; on the contrary, they were seen to be closely linked. Because of their fertility, the temple girls were auspicious.

  The devadasis still retain this auspiciousness in Karnataka today, and for exactly the same reason: they are seen as symbols of fertility. There is, however, an almost unimaginable gulf separating the devadasis of ancient poems and inscriptions and the lives lived by women like Rani Bai today. In the Middle Ages, the devadasis were drawn from the grandest families in the realm, among them princesses of the Chola royal family—as well as from slaves captured in war. Many were literate and some were highly accomplished poets; indeed at the time they seem to have been almost the only literate women in the region. Their confidence and self-possession is evident in much of the poetry, while their wealth is displayed in the inscriptions recording their generous gifts to their temples.

  Today, however, the devadasis are drawn exclusively from the lowest castes—usually from the Dalit Madar caste—and are almost entirely illiterate. Around a quarter come from families where there are already devadasis among their immediate relations, and in some of these families there is a tradition that one girl in every generation should be dedicated to the goddess.

  While many medieval temple women had honoured positions within the temple hierarchy, the overwhelming majority of modern devadasis are straightforward sex workers; the devadasis I talked to estimated that only about one out of twenty of those dedicated as children manage to escape into other careers, not least because almost all of them begin work soon after puberty, and so leave school long before they can get the qualifications that might open up other opportunities. They usually work from home rather than brothels or on the streets, and tend to start younger, and to take more clients, than commercial sex workers. Maybe partly because of this larger number, the infection rate of devadasis is also slightly higher than that of other sex workers.

  The main outlines of the working lives of the daughters of Yellamma are in reality little different from those of other workers in the sex trade. This does not, however, stop the devadasis from drawing elaborate distinctions between their sacred vocation and the work of their commercial sisters, which they take great pleasure in looking down upon.

  Ironically, it was partly well-meaning social reform which contributed to this marked drop in status. In the nineteenth century, Hindu reformers, reacting to the taunts of Victorian missionaries, began to attack the institution of temple dancers and sacred prostitution. Successive waves of colonial and post-colonial legislation slowly broke the ancient links that existed between the devadasis and the temples, driving them out of the temple precincts and eroding their social, economic and spiritual position. Most recently, the 1982 Karnataka Devadasi (Prohibition of Dedication) Act drove the practice completely underground, outlawing the dedication of young girls and threatening any priest who assisted in such ceremonies with years of harsh imprisonment. All around the lake, and on the road up to the temple, the government has now put up huge warning signs:

  DO NOT DEDICATE YOUR DAUGHTER.

  THERE ARE OTHER WAYS OF SHOWING YOUR DEVOTION.

  and

  DEDICATING YOUR DAUGHTER

  IS UNCIVILISED BEHAVIOUR.

  For all their efforts, however, the reformers have not succeeded in ending the institution, only demeaning and criminalising it. There are currently estimated to be around a quarter of a million devadasis in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka, about half of them living around Belgaum. Every year, several thousand are added to their number—estimates range widely from 1,000 to 10,000 dedications annually—and they still make up around a quarter of the total sex workers in Karnataka. For the very poor, and the very pious, the devadasi system is still seen as providing a way out of poverty while gaining access to the blessings of the gods, the two things the poor most desperately crave.

  This is why several thousand girls, usually aged between about six and nine years old, continue to be dedicated to the goddess annually. Today, the dedication ceremony tends to happen at night, in small village temples, and sometimes without the presence of Brahmins. When Brahmins do consent to attend, they charge as much as Rs 5,000 to the parents of the girl, because of the risk they now have to take in doing so. A feast is thrown, prayers said, then the young devadasi is presented with her muttu, which represents her badge of office as a sacred prostitute. Her duties and privileges are explained to her. If the girls are dedicated when they are very young, as is usually the case, they then return to a normal childhood. Only when they hit puberty are they wrenched from the lives they have led, and offered out for their first night to be deflowered by the highest bidder in the village, usually for sums ranging from Rs 50,000 to 100,000.

  Later that day, I visited the Yellamma temple with Rani Bai and Kaveri. It was a fine ninth-century bu
ilding, packed with pilgrims from across the state, and we had to queue for some time to get darshan of the goddess. Ahead of us were a party of excitable eunuchs from Bijapur. The girls had recovered their spirits and now chatted away with the eunuchs as they waited. They were clearly happy to be in the home of their protectress.

  “I feel very devotional whenever I am here,” said Rani.

  “You feel her presence so strongly in her temple,” said Kaveri.

  “She is very near,” said Rani.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “It’s like electricity,” she replied. “You can’t see it, but you know it’s there, and you can see its effects.”

  When we arrived before the idol, the priests blessed us with a camphor lamp and Kaveri explained that the image of the goddess had emerged from the hillside. “No one made it,” she whispered.

  Having bowed before the deity and made an offering, I asked one of the Brahmins whether they still performed devadasi dedications. The priest looked cagey.

  “What do we know of these women?” he said, looking around to his fellow pundits for support.

  “We used to bless their necklaces,” said one of the older priests. “Then give them back to them. But now that is illegal.”

  “That was our only role.”

  “What they do is their own business,” said the first. “This is nothing to do with us.”

  That evening, after we had dropped off Kaveri in Belgaum, I drove Rani Bai back to the house where she lived and worked, in a nearby town. This was located in Mudhol, in a back alley of the town where many devadasis have settled. More than a hundred worked here in a small warren of streets off the main highway heading to Bangalore.