Your Life As a Devadasi in a Hindu Temple (Medieval India)

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[00:00:00]You were born in 1098 in a village on the eastern banks of the Cavari River in the heart of Tamil Nadu in the shadow of a temple so large it can be seen from 3 days walk away. The Brihywar temple at Tanjar built by the Jolola king Raja Raja 1 rises over 60 m above the flat plane. Its granite tower carved with hundreds of figures of gods, celestial dancers and divine attendants. You grow up knowing that tower the way you know the smell of your mother's cooking. It is the first thing visible in the morning light and the last thing you see before the limp is extinguished at night. Your mother is a dva dasi. This means you will be one too. Devadosi means servant of god. Dva means god.

[00:00:49]Dossi means female servant. The word is precise. A devodsi is a woman formally dedicated to a temple deity through a religious ceremony who then lives in the temple service for the rest of her life.

[00:01:03]She performs ritual dances during worship ceremonies, sings devotional hymns, participates in festival processions and maintains a continuous sacred presence within the temple complex. In the framework of medieval south Indian Hinduism, her presence is not incidental. It is required. A temple without Davids is considered ritually incomplete.

[00:01:27]Your mother performs at the main worship ceremony every morning before sunrise.

[00:01:32]You watch from the doorway of the small stone room attached to the temple's outer wall where your family has lived for three generations.

[00:01:40]She moves in the half dark to the sound of a single drum in the chanting of priests. The oil lamp throws her shadow across the carved walls. She has been doing this since she was 9 years old.

[00:01:53]Your family is not poor in the way that means starving. You eat, you have shelter, you have a specific kind of status that exists within the geography of the temple and its surrounding community. Outside that geography, the picture is different. Your family belongs to a cast designated for temple service. You cannot marry into a landowning family. You cannot pursue a different path. The dedication of daughters to the temple is not a choice made fresh each generation. It is the channel your family has moved through for longer than anyone can remember. You are dedicated to the deity when you are 8 years old. The ceremony is called the paducatu, the tying of the sacred mark.

[00:02:39]It is conducted inside the temple's inner sanctum before the main shrine. A priest ties a gold ornament called a batu to your forehead. The same ornament a bride receives in a marriage ceremony because this is a marriage ceremony. You are being married to the god. From this point forward, you are his wife. You cannot marry a mortal man. You cannot be widowed. A daddasi whose patron dies simply takes another. She belongs to the deity not to any man which in practice means she belongs to the institution of the temple which means she belongs to the men who run it. Your mother stands beside you during the ceremony and holds your hand. The air is thick with incense, sandalwood and campfor and the sound of conch shells blown by priests in the outer hall. You are dressed in a new silk pavadai, a skirt and blouse in deep red with a gold border. the fabric stiff with starch. You are not frightened. You have been prepared for this moment for your entire life. You understand that you are being given something important. You do not yet understand what is being taken.

[00:03:52]Training begins the next morning. Your guru is a woman named Kamakshi, a Davidsi in her 40s who has served the temple for 30 years and whose knowledge of the sacred repertoire is considered the finest in the district. She is not gentle. She does not need to be. You have nowhere else to be and no other future to prepare for. The first thing she teaches you is the basic units of movement that will become your full dance vocabulary.

[00:04:21]Anavou is a combination of foot position, hand gesture, and body posture held together and repeated until the body stops thinking about it. There are over a 100.

[00:04:33]You spend two years learning them before you are permitted to combine them into sequences. Your ankles ache from the footwork. The rhythmic stamping required in performance produces a specific soreness that settles into your calves and never fully leaves. You are studying baratanayyam, the classical temple dance form of south India. known in this period as sad. It is a codified system of movement, expression and rhythm developed over centuries for one specific purpose to enact stories from Hindu scripture in the presence of the deity. The dance is not entertainment.

[00:05:10]It is devotion made visible. Every hand gesture called a mudra carries a precise meaning. The lotus opening signals the god's presence. A particular turn of the wrist indicates a river. You learn 40 basic mudras and the sequences that weave them in narrative.

[00:05:29]Alongside dance, you study carnatic music, the classical music tradition of South India. You learn to sing the daily lurggical hymns called tearam composed by poet saints centuries before your birth. You learn the ragas, the melodic frameworks governing which notes are used, in what sequence, for each ceremony, each time of day, each season.

[00:05:53]You study enough Sanskrit to understand the texts you perform and enough Tamil to compose simple verse. An educated Davidi is expected to converse with scholars and noblemen. You are not being trained only to dance. You are being trained to be someone a learned man finds worth talking to.

[00:06:13]By 13, you perform in the temple for the first time. Not your formal debut, but the daily worship ceremonies.

[00:06:21]Six times a day, from before sunrise to after midnight, the deity is woken, bathed, dressed, fed, and put to sleep through ritual. Your role is to be present, to dance during the processional moments, and to sing the prescribed hymns. You do this every day without exception. The god does not take rest days and neither do you. Your Aaron getrum, your formal debut performance happens at 15. The temple courtyard is lit with hundreds of oil lamps. An audience of priests, patrons, and local nobles fills the space. You perform for 3 hours without stopping. Every movement from 7 years of practice is on display.

[00:07:04]Kamakshi watches from the side without expression. When it is over, she tells you only that your footwork in the fifth sequence was imprecise.

[00:07:14]You understand this as the closest she will come to a compliment.

[00:07:18]Shortly after your debut, the arrangement called amii is made. Arami means the right, specifically the right to first access. It is a formal negotiation of who will become your first patron. Your mother and kamakshi handle it. You are present but not consulted. The man who pays will spend the night with you and the payment goes to your family and the temple. The amount paid signals your value publicly.

[00:07:47]Your patron is a landowner from a village 2 days east, a man in his 50s with a wife and four children. He pays well. He is not unkind. These are the only two things that matter in this context.

[00:08:01]After this you have patrons. Not clients in the way a transaction implies but men who enter a sustained informal arrangement. They provide financial support, gifts and occasional protection. You provide companionship, performance and access. A Davidsi of standing typically has one primary patron at a time. Though the relationship carries no legal weight.

[00:08:26]You cannot inherit from him. He has no enforcable obligation to you. The arrangement persists for as long as both parties find it useful.

[00:08:36]What you have that ordinary women do not is this. You can own property. You can appear in court. You cannot be widowed because you are already married to the god and the god does not die. The social restrictions confining a Hindu wife of this period. The requirement to defer entirely to a husband. The prohibition on public life. the expectation of domestic seclusion do not apply to you.

[00:09:02]You move through the world with a specific kind of freedom that has a specific price attached to it. By 30, you are teaching. The younger girls in the temple watch your rehearsals the way you once watched kamakshi. You correct their mudras. You demonstrate the footwork sequences. You carry the knowledge forward in the only way it can move. body to body, repetition to repetition, the same pre-drawn practice sessions in the stone hall, while priests chant in the inner sanctum and oil lamps gutter in the draft from the courtyard.

[00:09:35]By 45, you no longer perform at the major ceremonies. Younger women hold those positions now. Your body carries the knowledge, but no longer has the stamina for 3-hour processional performances.

[00:09:48]You teach. You advise on the lurggical calendar. You sit near the entrance of the temple on festival nights and watch the girls you trained move through sequences you once performed in this same courtyard under the same carved tower before the same God who has been receiving this offering of movement and music for 500 years before you arrived and will continue receiving it long after your name is no longer spoken aloud.