by Gail Omvedt
Recently, a young teacher in an Urdu school in Bijapur was forcibly abducted by a government official. She was told that she must become a devdasi. She was threatened with the vengeance of the goddess Yellamma, and also with being sold to a brothel in Bombay.
On June 29, she managed to escape but her complaint has so far been ignored by the court and the Kamataka government. Thousands of young girls from low caste poor families in Belgaum, Bihapur and parts of Kolhapur districts, are unable to escape the fate with which this teacher was threatened. It is estimated that 200 girls are yearly dedicated to Yellamma, and are then sold in the Bombay prostitution market. According to a rough estimate, they constitute about 40 percent of prostitutes in Bombay.
In August 1983,1 undertook a brief research project sponsored by the Shahu Central Institute of Bushiness Education and Research, in the course of which I visited Bangalore, Belgaum, Nipani, and interviewed activists involved in the campaign against the devdasi system. The following is a brief report of my findings.
Origins of the system
The devdasi system is an old one, and apparently pre-Aryan. There is no mention of it in Vedic Sanskrit literature, but Tamil Sangam literature, which dates back to 200-300 BC, describes a class of dancing women called parattaiyar. They were courtesans who performed some ritual function, lived in a separate part of the city, and eventually came to be associated with temples. Later, in the post-Vedic and post-Buddhist age, the system seems to have spread through India, though it remained strongest in the south. Young girls were usually dedicated to the goddess, or occasionally to gods, very often after the appearance of matted hair called jath which is taken to be a sign of the call of the goddess. The dedicated girl was forbidden to marry. When such girls came of age, they would perform dances in the temple, perform various services to the gods and goddesses, and take part in various rituals and religious ceremonies. They were considered to be married to the god or goddess, and were sexually available to any man who came to the temple. Devdasis were invariably from the lowest, usually the untouchable castes, and were considered lower than other classes of courtesans, or other classes of dancers and singers in the temple.
During the feudal period, devdasis became bound to the service of feudal lords, from rajas and maharajas down to the village overlords. Even today, they continue to be enslaved to such masters. Rich merchants, landlords, big farmers pay the Rs600 to 800 required for the dedication ceremony of a girl and thus buy the right to have the first sexual relation with her. They continue to have special privileges after that, even though she remains available to other men as well. However, the more prevalent system today is that the pimps from the Bombay prostitution industry pay for the dedication ceremony, and often pay something to the girl's parents, in order to directly recruit the girl for a commercial brothel in Bombay.
Special status
The devdasi's life was unique, not only because of her sexual function or because she was supposed to be sacred to and often possessed by the goddess. Her whole way of life was far removed from the life of ordinary women, was in fact almost a reversal of their life. She was free to wander anywhere, in or out of the village, free to work at any profession or occupation, and earn an income. According to traditional law, she was treated as a male, having inheritance rights similar to those of a son, and also having the right to perform religious rituals, such as the shradh for her father, which no woman is normally permitted to perform. Her children took her surname, and not that of any man, regardless of how longstanding a relationship she had with their father. She was thus absolutely free from the bondage of pativrata and the stricture of Manu tnat a woman must always be dependent on father, husband or son.
For this reason, many see remnants not only of matrilineal but also of matriarchal traditions in the devdasi's situation, and feel that the life of a devdasi was not particularly worse than and in some respects was better than that of the ordinary, patriarchally oppressed woman. In what way is being sexually open to all men worse than being bound to the lifelong service of a single man, with the prospect of being a dishonored widow or of dying on his funeral pyre after his death? Thus Maria Mies, in her study, Indian Women and Patriarchy, speaks of the greater freedom and high social and religious prestige of the devdasis. She quotes a Bombay prostitute as saying "I would not like to be bossed over by the man called husband. So this life is all right for me. After all, I have not missed anything a married woman enjoys except perhaps the husband's beating." Mies argues that the struggle against the devdasi system arises out of a falsely progressive "puritan morality" and has only resulted in depriving the devdasis of their traditional prestige, thus turning them into "ordinary prostitutes who live a miserable life in the brothels and slums of the city."
But can any special section of women be free of patriarchy in a patriarchal society? Though devdasis traditionally were not slaves of a single husband, yet any man could claim sexual rights over them, and they were often enslaved to particular feudal lords. Though devdasis had the social and religious rights that males had, the advantage of these rights was most often taken by men. Parents and brothers lived off the devdasi's earnings from prostitution or other professions. Often, a particularly beautiful little girl was, and still is, deliberately dedicated to the goddess, so that her parents could benefit from her earnings. Girls are also sometimes dedicated when people have no male heir, in order that land and property may be inherited by her, and may stay in the family.
Thus, while devdasi's life was apparently the opposite of the life of the married woman, it remained bound within the same patriarchal and exploitative framework. In addition, the system was a caste-based one. One function of the system was to allow so called high caste men free and religiously sanctioned sexual access to the best looking dalit caste women.
Caste exploitation
It is overwhelmingly dalit girls who become devdasis. Occasionally, even today, brahman girls (who) get the jath or mat in their hair, are dedicated to the goddess and continue all their life to perform the puja of Yellamma, without marrying. But they never become devdasis or prostitutes. A survey of Pune prostitutes by Vilas Wagh showed that more than 60 percent of them were dalits, and of the devdasi prostitutes 90 percent were dalits. His survey did not find a single prostitute from the brahman, maratha, jain or lingayat castes. Of course girls from so called high castes and from the middle or even upper middle class do practise prostitution, but instead of becoming brothel bound prostitutes, they act as independent call girls, often with their own apartments. As one dalit student told Wagh: "These women may get four rupees while those women get 400. Even here, caste and class can be found."
Today, the devdasi system is no longer a feudal one. The traditional form remains, but Yellamma, like any number of Indian social traditions, has been pressed into the service of a voracious capitalism. The towns and villages of Bijapur, Belgaum and other districts around Yellamma's temple at Soundatti, are today the hunting ground of pimps from the brothels of Bombay. Instead of providing their services to the temples or to feudal lords, girls from impoverished dalit families sell their bodies on the open market.
The devdasi system enslaves women and oppresses dalits in the name of religion. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was from within the dalit movement that it was first attacked. Around 1910, S.J. Kamble of Pune published an analysis and attack on the system in his magazine Somvanshiya Mitra. In 1912, in Hyderabad, Andhra's dalit leader Bhagyareddy Varma, formed his first organization, the Manya Sangam, which took up abolition of the custom as one of its planks. Such internal reform efforts managed to stop many dedications of girls, and later an Adi Hindu Murii Nivaran Mandal was formed especially to oppose the system. As of now, little information is available about the impact and extent of these efforts among dalits in various parts of India.
Current phase of protest
In 1975, a devdasi rehabilitation conference was held at Gudhingiaz, district Kolhapur, under the sponsorhsip of Mahatma Phule Samta Pratisthan of Pune. About 500 women attended it, and almost as many came to a second conference held at Nipani in 1980. The presence of many militant women tobacco workers helped to provide an atmosphere of struggle. As a result of studies, press conferences and lobbying by some organizations and individuals, the Karnataka government passed the Devdasi Abolition Act, which provides for stricter penalisation. However, the bill fails to provide for any government supervision of the temples and priests, or any special punishment for the priests, brothel agents or capitalists who extract profit from the system.
Very recently, a new effort has begun with small teams taking up jath removal or haircutting campaigns in the towns of Kolhapur, Gargoti and Nipani. So far, about 50 women in several towns and villages have been officially released form their state as devdasis, and several have been married. Many of the activists plan to continue these campaigns by linking propaganda against the devdasi system with propaganda for the need for united struggle by dalits and other toilers against all the injustices that beset their lives.
It remains true, however, that the current phase of anti-devdasi campaigning, from 1975 to the present, contrasts with the early period, not only in that its leadership is primarily caste Hindu and middle class, but also in that its style has mostly involved lobbying, rallies, seminars and conferences without much ongoing follow up. It does not seem to have been very effective. An occasional individual like the Bijapur school teacher may fight back, but Yellamma still has hundreds of thousands of devotees. The desire to throw off traditional forms of religion (that) endorsed patriarchal and casteist enslavement has not yet taken hold of the masses of low caste workers, agricultural laborers and poor peasants in the border areas between Karnataka and Maharashtra. Until it does, the system will undoubtedly continue. At present, all we can say is that the efforts of the last eight years represent the beginnings of a fight against the devdasi system.
From: Manushi. (19) [4(1)], November-December. 1983, pp. 16-19