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Domingo Paes, a Portuguese traveller who visited Vijayanagara in the early 16 century wrote, ‘The size of the city was as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight. The people are countless in number, so much that I do not wish to write it down for fear it should be thought fabulous.’ Vijayanagara inhabitants numbered 500,000 and the city, slightly larger than the island of Manhattan, stretched over 24 square miles. The wealth came primarily from trade with Persia, China, Africa, Southeast Asia and from the 15th century onwards, Europe.
According to indigenous accounts, Krishna Deva Raya, Vijayanagar’s greatest king, who ruled from 1509 to 1529, spent a portion of his highly ritualized day listening to recitations of verses from ancient texts, including the Arthshastra, a political treatise dating to the second century CE. Laying down prescriptions for state organise prostitution, the text advises kings to organise prostitutes under the auspices of a chief superintendent whose duties should include hiring and classifying prostitutes according to ranked hierarchy, paying their salaries and fixing their fees.
The kings of Vijayanagara seem to have heeded the Arthashastra’s advice, for no foreign traveller fails to remark upon the city’s prostitutes. One third of the king’s income was said to come from brothels. According to Abdul Razzaq, ‘Opposite the mint is the office of the Prefect of the city, to which it is said 12,000 policemen are attached. Their pay, which comes to 12000 fanams (small gold coins) per day, is derived from the proceeds of brothels. The splendor of those houses, the beauty of the heart ravishers, their blandishments and ogles are beyond all description. It is best to be brief on the matter.’
Dancing girls adorned not only the processions and chariots of the gods and notables, but also the courtyards and verandahs of temples and palaces. According to foreigners’ descriptions, dance was a continuous feature of the festival – for nine days straight, one set of dancers followed upon another.
Prostitution organised under the auspices of the King, as it is described in the Arthashastra, was also a feature of ancient Indian society, and is described in detail in Buddhist and Jain literature dating back to 500 DC. In this literature, courtesans, jewels of the king’s court, are portrayed as evil temptresses who make sport of seducing rich men, sucking them dry off all their money only to repudiate, insult and publicly humiliate them when they have nothing left. As we shall see later, they have been some truth to this. While courtesans were regarded as wicked and their establishments referred to as ‘houses of ill fame,’ they were deemed a necessary evil. They had rights and responsibilities and were protected by the king’s court of law. Men had to be careful in the treatment of them, lest they be dragged to court; beating a prostitute was akin to damaging the king’s property.
As auspicious women, they had a role of honour at religious festivals and perceptions, dancing on the floats, waving the horsetails whisks. Like devadasis, if they were unable to provide an heir, they lost their property. The remarkable similarity of the role of the courtesans in the court of the king to the role of devadasi is in the palace of the gods leaves no doubt that the pre existing structures of prostitution provided a template for the devadasi system when it emerged. Devadasis in the god’s temple and courtesans in the king’s court were simply the earthly versions of the Apsaras of the Vedas, the prostitutes who sang and danced in the court of Indra, and whose duty it was to tempt and seduce.
Excerpted from pages 98-102 of ‘Servants of the Goddess: the modern day Devadasi’ by Catherine Rubin Kermorgant.