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: