In the Deccan girls dedicated to temples are called Devadasis or
'Hand-maidens of the gods.' They are thus described by Marco Polo:
"In this country," he says, "there are certain abbeys in which are
gods and goddesses, and here fathers and mothers often consecrate
their daughters to the service of the deity. When the priests desire
to feast their god they send for those damsels, who serve the god with
meats and other goods, and then sing and dance before him for about as
long as a great baron would be eating his dinner. Then they say that
the god has devoured the essence of the food, and fall to and eat it
themselves." [392] Mr. Francis writes of the Devadasis as follows:1
"It is one of the many inconsistences of the Hindu religion that
though their profession is repeatedly and vehemently condemned by the
Shastras it has always received the countenance of the church. The rise
of the caste and its euphemistic name seem both of them to date from
the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, during which much activity
prevailed in southern India in the matter of building temples and
elaborating the services held in them. The dancing-girls' duties
then as now were to fan the idol with chamaras or Thibetan ox-tails,
to hold the sacred light called Kumbarti and to sing and dance before
the god when he was carried in procession. Inscriptions show that in
A.D. 1004 the great temple of the Chola king Rajaraja at Tanjore had
attached to it 400 women of the temple who lived in free quarters
in the surrounding streets, and were given a grant of land from the
endowment. Other temples had similar arrangements. At the beginning
of last century there were a hundred dancing-girls attached to the
temple at Conjeeveram, and at Madura, Conjeeveram and Tanjore there
are still numbers of them who receive allowances from the endowments
of the big temples at those places. In former days the profession was
countenanced not only by the church but by the state. Abdur Razak,
a Turkish ambassador to the court of Vijayanagar in the fifteenth
century, describes women of this class as living in state-controlled
institutions, the revenue of which went towards the upkeep of the
police."
The dedication of girls to temples and religious prostitution was
by no means confined to India but is a common feature of ancient
civilisation. The subject has been mentioned by Dr. Westermarck in The
Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, and fully discussed by Sir
James Frazer in Attis, Adonis, Osiris. The best known and most peculiar
instance is that of the temple of Istar in Babylonia. "Herodotus says
that every woman born in that country was obliged once in her life to
go and sit down in the precinct of Aphrodite and there consort with a
stranger. A woman who had once taken her seat was not allowed to return
home till one of the strangers threw a silver coin into her lap and
took her with him beyond the holy ground. The silver coin could not
be refused because, since once thrown, it was sacred. The woman went
with the first man who threw her money, rejecting no one. When she
had gone with him and so satisfied the goddess, she returned home,
and from that time forth no gift, however great, would prevail with
her. In the Canaanitish cults there were women called kedeshoth, who
were consecrated to the deity with whose temple they were associated,
and who at the same time acted as prostitutes." [393] Other instances
are given from Africa, Egypt and ancient Greece. The principal
explanation of these practices was that the act of intercourse,
according to the principle of sympathetic magic, produced fertility,
usually of the crops, though in the Babylonian case, Dr. Westermarck
thinks, of the woman herself. Several instances have been recorded of
people who perform the sexual act as a preliminary or accompaniment
to sowing the crops, [394] and there seems little doubt that this
explanation is correct. A secondary idea of religious prostitution may
have been to afford to the god the same sexual pleasures as delighted
an earthly king. Thus the Skanda Purana relates that Kartikeya, the
Hindu god of war, was sent by his father to frustrate the sacrifice of
Daksha, and at the instigation of the latter was delayed on his way
by beautiful damsels, who entertained him with song and dance. Hence
it is the practice still for dancing-girls who serve in the pagodas
to be betrothed and married to him, after which they may prostitute
themselves but cannot marry a man. [395] Similarly the Murlis or
dancing-girls in Maratha temples are married to Khandoba, the Maratha
god of war. Sometimes the practice of prostitution might begin by the
priests of the temple as representatives of the god having intercourse
with the women. This is stated to have been the custom at the temple
of Jagannath in Orissa, where the officiating Brahmans had adulterous
connection with the women who danced and sang before the god. [396]