The Devadasis.
Sex and Religion have long been entwined. Raw instinct and moral intervention. There is some sympathy for the view that religion was invented in order to control and constrain sexual activity. Certainly the Church of England was founded in order to release Henry Vlll from the Vatican’s control of his sexuality and replace it with a control that suited him better.
The truly ancient religions had a surprising – to modern eyes – liberal attitude to sexual mores. The Hindu faith propagated the Devadasis practice whereby young girls were promised in marriage to God. Not wildly dissimilar to Nuns within the Christian faith. The Devadasis were highly respected, accomplished artists, who kept alive the ancient dances and songs and were welcome visitors to highly placed homes within the Indian caste system. It was one way in which the impoverished daughter from a rural home might find acceptance and a better way of life than her parents could provide.
The Devadasis was married to God, but the Hindu faith saw no reason why she should have to forgo the pleasures of sex and child rearing. As with the Church of England which accepts as sufficient that its clergy have devoted their life to God, and does not require them to maintain celibacy as well.
Since the Devadasis was already married to God, it followed that she could not marry another man.
“Traditionally the young devadasi underwent a ceremony of dedication to the deity of the local temple which resembled in its ritual structure the upper caste Tamil marriage ceremony. Following this ceremony, she was set apart from her non-dedicated sisters in that she was not permitted to marry and her celibate or unmarried status was legal in customary terms.
Significantly, however she was not prevented from leading a normal life involving economic activity, sex and child-bearing. The very rituals which marked and confirmed her incorporation into temple service also committed her to the rigorous emotional and physical training in the classical dance, her hereditary profession. In addition, they served to advertise in a perfectly open and public manner her availability for sexual liaisons with a proper patron and protector.
Very often in fact, the costs of temple dedication were met by a man who wished thus to anticipate a particular devadasi’s favours after she had attained puberty. It was crucially a woman’s ‘dedicated’ status which made it a symbol of social prestige and privilege to maintain her.
The devadasi’s sexual partner was always chosen by ‘arrangement’ with her mother and grandmother acting as prime movers in the veto system. Alliance with a Muslim, a Christian or a lower caste was forbidden while a Brahmin or member of the landed and commercial elite was preferred for the good breeding and/or wealth he would bring into the family. The non-domestic nature of the contract was an understood part of the agreement with the devadasi owing the man neither any housekeeping services nor her offspring. The children in turn could not hope to make any legal claim on the ancestral property of their father whom they met largely in their mother’s home when he came to visit.
Thus the devasdasi was by its very nature, a matriarchal society, and one that many western women might consider infinitely preferable to the arrangement in practice here. Perhaps that is the reason why the Victorian Christian missionaries were so aghast when they first encountered the devadasi in the Hindu temples. They denounced the devasdasi as prostitutes, so successfully that high caste heads of families who were keen to retain their prestige amongst the British in the climate of increasing colonialism, declined their ‘right’ to maintain a devasdasi, and gradually that ‘honour’ fell to lower and lower caste members, until the missionaries jibe of ‘prostitute’ became only too true.
Eventually the politicians, in a country ruled by Britain, outlawed the practice of Devasdasi and the girls fall from grace was complete. Nowadays it is only girls from the Madigan caste, the ‘untouchables’, who become devasdasi. Aids and HIV are extremely prevalent amongst the community, and the use of condoms is virtually unknown. It is a thankless life as an ‘untouchable’ – the alternatives are working as an agricultural worker or sewage collector.
The early missionaries got their wish. They imposed their rigid teaching from the bible on a community which had its own values and its own strengths. In doing so, they reduced the standing of these girls from highly respected artists and members of a powerful matriarchical society to women trapped into the very lowest levels of prostitution – from which the only form of escape is marginally less palatable than their current life.
The excellent Sarah Harris has produced a series of documentaries on the devadasi girls which will be shown on VBS.tv .
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1
September 25, 2010 at 10:14 -
It wasfailure to impose their morality on a population that resulted in poor prostitutes instead of rich educated ones. If they’d imposed it, there wouldn’t be any prostitute.
Duh.
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2
September 25, 2010 at 10:39 -
..and this same Church thinks it still ought to have a privileged place in modern society?
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3
September 25, 2010 at 10:43 -
Ahh, I thought it had been a while. That dirty Christianity eh, with its fuddy-duddy ways of trying to end child prostitution and idolatry.
Would India be a better place than it is today, were it not for the Raj, its money and its religion?
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4
September 25, 2010 at 11:37 -
It would be a different place. Can’t say better or worse because we can’t see into the alternate universe.
However there are possibilities. India might not have existed, it might have stayed as a number of different states. It might still be a third world, or it might have been controlled by a despot and become a super power like China.
Chrisitianity and it’s method of imposing it’s moralities on others via missionaries does have a lot to answer for. People say that missionaries brought in education, health, better living standards, etc. But it also destroyed centuries of local knowledge, brought in diseases, destroyed communities. Was the change in balance worth it in the long term? Who knows?
Does a person living in a mud hut able to gather all their own food with plenty of time left over to do other things (such as art, socialise, etc) have a better standard of living than one living in a brick built home with a fridge & microwave and able to go to the supermarket for their food and with plenty of time left over to do other things (such as watch Jeremy Kyle on tv). Which one would you think is happier and more satisifed with their life?
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September 25, 2010 at 13:28 -
Indeed, without the Raj the Indians wouldn’t have been able to organise the Commonwealth Games properly. Wasn’t India the “Jewel in the Crown” precisely because it was a net contributor to the Exchequer? India benefitted from enlightened administrators who concentrated on developing trade by keeping missionaries at arms length – trying to convert Indians en masse would have made the massacres around Partition look like tea-parties.
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6
September 25, 2010 at 13:31 -
Christianity does not impose itself on anyone; the whole point, and a very significant difference between Christianity and other religions, is that it MUST be a willing, internal choice, otherwise the whole thing is superficial and worthless. Very significant numbers of Indians, in fact most, refused the message of the gospel.
India is still today, mostly, a third world country, if we judge from the living conditions and the state of nutrition of millions of its inhabitants. Only the major cities (a parting gift from the British) are anything like ‘normal’. The upcoming Commonwealth Games are testament to the backwardness of the country.
Your comparison between the vacuous, artificial and craven world which is the West and the lives of the people living in utter poverty is not valid as Jeremy Kyle and Tesco are not a product of Christianity.
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7
September 25, 2010 at 16:30 -
Christianity doesn’t impose itself on anyone. Just the same as Islam is actually a peaceful religion. The key point about both is how people interpret it and use religion to further their aims. Christianity had the crusades, which Muslims are still smarting over. Islam now has terrorism which the Christians will be smarting over for years to come. Islam was way ahead of Christianity around the tenth century and going through it’s Golden Age with lots of science whilst the Christians then were going through the Dark Ages. The situation has swapped. No one seems to learn from history anymore so it will more than likely swap again. Fundamentalist Christians in America seem to want that to happen with their rejection of science because it doesn’t allow for The Creation.
My comparison between living in a brick home and mud hut was to state that the one if the mud hut was not living in utter poverty. It wasn’t about Christianity either, other than to point out that a religion can’t bring about a change in living standards. The person living in the mud hut probably has a better quality of life than a westerner on the dole in a council house watching tv all day. Your definition of poverty is based purely on economic grounds (like the UN one of someone earning less than $1/day). I don’t think it is. A person is need not be in poverty if they don’t have fridge, tv, microwave, hifi, pc. What about an American living in the back of nowhere in Alaska with no income, none of the amenities of the American life, but happily living off the land. Are they living in poverty because they aren’t interested in the world via CNN?
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September 26, 2010 at 01:12 -
Islam is not a religion of peace; why would you think that? If you need to misconstrue the so called ‘crusades’ to pervert Christianity into an attempt to take over the world by force, whilst speaking favourably of Islam, you deserve everything you get, and believe me, it’s coming.
Never mind what happened 500 years ago. What is happening now?
…’religion cannot bring about a change in living standards’… That is a joke, right?
I do not disagree with your ideas on relative poverty, they just are totally irrelevant to the validity of Christianity.
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9
September 27, 2010 at 22:19 -
The Koran and Bible both have sections which are quite violent. However proponents of both religions who are not zealots and fundamentalists and extremists do follow the peaceful aims of their religions.
Of course religion can’t change living standards. Its not a joke, its a fact. What can change standards is free trade and an open market. That’s how people make a living – to change it.
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10
September 25, 2010 at 17:04 -
Many untouchables in India have no hope. Thats poverty. Missionaries tried to end that hopelessness and did have huge success but of course we’ve revised the history that does not suit the revolutionaries and made a new one where White Christians were rubbish and everyone else was better.
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11
September 26, 2010 at 05:56 -
Well, I’m with the Victorian Christian missionaries on this. It was no more than high class prostitution with a thin veneer of respectability. If the high caste man who supported her really respected her he would have married her and conferred on her the social acceptance such status then would given her.
I also think the term ‘matriarchal’ is misused here. It may have been women centred but it was still largely dependent on men’s largesse.
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