T H E E N D C O M M U N E

The Devadasi ― Women of the Temple

A Devadasi (meaning in Sanskrit a servant of a god or goddess) is a girl or a young woman dedicated to worship and service at a given temple for the rest of her life. This religious custom is ancient and traditionally rooted in the southern half of the Indian subcontinent. In addition to maintaining the temple, the Devadasi were also performers and practitioners of traditional Indian and Hindu artistic expression, thereby enjoying a respectable reputation and high social status as dance and music were (and still is) essential to Hindu templar worship.

During British colonial rule, the white-supremacist policies of the colonizers mistakenly deemed (although actual mischief was not uncommon at all) the Devadasi as, by definition, “sacred prostitutes”, while stripping the kings and temple owners of their power, leaving the tradition slowly declining throughout the 20th century, finally being outlawed in 1988 by the Indian government on the grounds that a vast minority of Devadasis were coerced into ‘temple dedication’ as a cover-up for forced marriage and child prostitution.