DONORS, DEVOTEES, AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH Series Editor Richard Lariviere A Publication Series of The University of Texas Center for Asian Studies and Oxford University Press THE EARLY UPANISADS Scholar's Edition Texts, Translations, and Notes by Patrick Olivelle INDIAN EPIGRAPHY A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages Richard Salomon A DICTIONARY OF OLD MARATHI Anne Feldhaus DONORS, DEVOTEES, AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu Leslie C. Orr DONORS, DEVOTEES, AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu Leslie C. Orr New York Oxford Oxford University Press 2000 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2000 by Leslie C. Orr Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orr, Leslie C., 1948- Donors, devotees, and daughters of God : temple women in medieval Tarnilnadu / Leslie C. Orr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-509962-1 i. Devadasls—India—Tamil Nadu. 2. Tamil Nadu (India)—Religious life and customs. I. Title. BL1237.58.048077 2000 30543'2945'095482—dc2i 98-7533 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Preface As a preface to her book, Women on the Margins, Natalie Zemon Davis engages in an imagined conversation with her subjects, three seventeenth- century European women. Davis, displaying considerable courage, confronts the fact that the women she is writing about would not have appreciated or even recognized her description and analysis of their lives. I am in a simi- lar, and perhaps even more dire, predicament with the women who are the subject of this book—the temple women of medieval South India. Being so far removed from them in time and space and hampered by the fact that they have left no personal accounts of their experiences, I can hardly conceive of what my conversation with them might be like. Yet I do feel that I have come to have at least a nodding acquaintance with these women. This ac- quaintance has been for me an immensely rewarding relationship—if at times a demanding and discomfiting one—which has gradually transformed my way of thinking about the women of India and has challenged my ideas about the location and significance of "women on the margins." My knowledge of the temple women of medieval Tamilnadu rests on the fact that their activities have been recorded in inscriptions. Thus it is pos- sible to glimpse the actuality of their lives—the details of their relationships with the temple and the down-to-earth realities of where they lived and what they owned and even, if they shared in the food prepared in the temple, what they ate. The information yielded by inscriptional sources is extremely valu- able for our understanding of India's social and religious history; it is par- ticularly precious for what it can tell us about women's lives. These sources afford us the opportunity to examine the arrangements and activities with which real human women were involved, opening up a perspective that is quite different from that provided by the mythic and idealized imaging of "the feminine" in Indian literature and religious texts. The inscriptions also allow us to leap-frog backward over postcolonial, colonial, and late pre- colonial delineations and interpretations of the events and structures of the past and find the traces of a particular historical moment represented in its own terms. This book is an exploration of one part of the historical space to which the inscriptions admit us; as so much more remains to be discovered, I hope that my study may encourage other researchers to make further use of inscriptions in the study of Indian history. I also hope that this book will contribute to the ongoing reexamination and reevaluation of "women's place" in religion and society by showing the complexity, multiplicity, and dynamic character of women's identities and activities. Although it is difficult for me to imagine talking with the temple women who are the subject of this book, I have engaged in much talk about them, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge a few of the many people who have shared in these conversations. To K. Koppedrayer goes the credit for starting the whole thing over fifteen years ago, with her casual suggestion that it might be interesting for me to find out more about the history of the devadasls. To S. S. Janaki I am grateful for persuading me that it was much better to try to do so by using Tamil inscriptions rather than Sanskrit texts. To M. L. Varadpande I owe thanks for opening many doors, including the one that led me for the first time into an office of the Archaeological Survey of India. To Katherine Young I am deeply indebted for her guidance as my thesis supervisor throughout the long years of my work on this topic, but even more for her extraordinary support as an exemplar, colleague, and friend. She has read many earlier versions of this book—and a great deal more, as well— and her criticism and encouragement have been and continue to be indis- pensable. To James Heitzman, George Spencer, and Cynthia Talbot go heart- felt thanks for their great generosity—for sharing materials and ideas that have made my labors much easier and more enjoyable and for providing inspiration and detailed suggestions that made possible the transformation of a gigantic dissertation into a book. My colleagues and students in the Department of Religion at Concordia University have, with patience and interest, borne witness to this process and have particularly contributed to the development of my thinking about women and religion; conversations with and comments on my work by Rosemary Drage Hale, Norma Joseph, Sheila McDonough, and Michael Oppenheim have been especially useful. The length of my bibliography and the number of my notes give an indication of the extent to which this work relies on the foundation of scholarship laid down by others. It is with grate- ful appreciation that I also acknowledge the help of those who have ex- tended themselves personally to me and have shared with me ideas and information that have been important in the gradual corning into being of this book: John Cort, Richard Davis, Ginni Ishimatsu, Padma Kaimal, Noboru Karashima, Saskia Kersenboom, Mohan Khokar, Anne Monius, Usha Narayanan, Vasudha Narayanan, Indira Peterson, Pamela Price, Vi PREFACE Nandini Ramani, Paula Richman, T. Sankaran, S. P. Tewari, Tom Trautmann, K. K. A. Venkatachari, P. Venkatesan, Lakshmi Viswanathan, Joanne Wag- horne, Philip Wagoner, and Paul Younger. Many thanks are due also to Steven Collins, for his parrainage of this book, and to the editors Richard Lariviere and Patrick Olivelle at the University of Texas and Cynthia Read at Oxford for their remarkable and sympathetic forbearance. My work would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Office of the Chief Epigraphist of the Archaeological Survey of India, in Mysore, where I have been graciously granted permission to read the tran- scripts of unpublished inscriptions. I am greatly indebted to Dr. K. V. Ramesh, who was the Director at the time I first undertook my research, and to his successors, Dr. Madhav N. Katti and Dr. M. D. Sampath, for the access they have allowed me to the precious resources in their keeping. In my work I have also relied heavily on the help and knowledge of librarians; I wish especially to acknowledge the assistance of the librarians of the Of- fice of the Chief Epigraphist in Mysore, the Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi, the Institut francais d'Indologie in Pondicherry, the Adyar Library in Madras, the library of the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill Univer- sity, and the Concordia University Library. I am grateful for the financial support I have enjoyed during the long period of research and writing lead- ing up to the appearance of this book, in the form of fellowships and re- search grants received from McGill University, Concordia University, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, the Ponds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et 1'Aide a la Recherche du Quebec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks are due to Linda Cardella Cournoyer for her excellent work on the index. I would also like to thank the graduate students who have acted as my research assistants—Steven Engler, Michelle Folk, Paul Hammett, Daphne Lazar, Grant Martin, Philip Moscovitch and Tanisha Ramachaudran—for all their help. My friends and family have long had to endure my preoccupation with this project; I deeply appreciate their patience and encouragement. I espe- cially thank my husband, Jon Kalina, and my daughter, Nathalie, for ac- commodating me and sustaining me throughout my work. Their confidence in me, their interest and support, have not only gladdened me but have been essential to the very existence of this book. PREFACE vii This page intentionally left blank Contents Methods of Transliteration, Abbreviation, and Citation xi ONE Introduction 3 DevadasTs and Dancing-girls 3 In a Different Landscape 18 TWO Discerning and Delineating the Figure of the Temple Woman 37 Definitions and Locations 37 Devotees and Daughters of God 48 THREE Temple Women as Temple Patrons 65 Property and Piety: Women and the Temple 65 Patterns of Patronage of Temple Women 75 FOUR Temple Women as Temple Servants 89 The Design of Temple Life in Medieval Tamilnadu 89 Reputation, Recognition, and Responsibility 98