Dancer, your image is in the pupil of my heart
You are always sought after by my eyes
Waking and sleeping I can see only you
I look I see you standing.
In his poems, Quli often addressed the unknown woman as a “dancer”. This is believed to be a reference to Bhagmati because she was a dancer – a devadasi or servant of God. She lived in Chinchlam, a predominantly Brahmin settlement where the Sufi saint Shah Chirag also had his abode. In Chinchlam, the cult of Mathangis followed the tradition of offering young girls as devadasis to temples, writes Rekha Pande in her paper Writing the History of Women in the Margins: The Courtesans in India.
In the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, which had been Golconda’s neighbour before it was wiped off the map in the battle of Talicota in 1565, the devadasis were of great importance as they served the gods. They were well versed in dance and music and were patronised by both the state and the public. The English merchant and administrator William Methwold, who visited Golconda during the reign of Muhammad Qutb Shah, recounted in his memoirs Relations of the Kingdome of Golchonda and other Neighbouring Nations, that during the festival of Ram Navami, “They [the devadasis] would dance before the chariots of the Gods that would be taken out in a procession around the towns and villages.”
Not to be mistaken for courtesans – the women who entertained high-ranking men of the kingdom – devadasis were well mannered, enchanting and well read. In the book Medieval Andhra: A Socio-Historical Perspective, author Alpana Pandey, quoting historian Sarojini Regani, notes that Chowdappa, a Brahmin karnam (records keeper) from Cuddapah, had written that dancing girls were employed in all functions of society. No religious or social function was complete without devadasis. This was corroborated by contemporary European travellers, one of whom was quoted in WH Moreland’s Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century as saying, “…they [the devadasis] have to come regularly twice a day to dance in the temples in return for which they receive some annual gratification.”
Though devadasis enjoyed special privileges and honour, Pandey explain in her book that most of these girls acted as prostitutes to the Brahmin priests of the temple. In the Kaikkolam caste, for example, a girl from each family was dedicated to the village deity and she had to offer herself to the temple servants. According to Pandey, all the Brahmin priests had Kaikkolam girls attached to them. Members of the royalty and the nobility also often adopted these women as slaves and courtesans.
As per, Edgar Thurston and K Rangachari in their book Castes and Tribes of Southern India, “such women who were beautiful did enjoy a high status and were sometimes even gifted to royal personalities or monarchs”. Many devadasis were wealthy enough to donate large sums of cash to charity, Thurston and Rangachari add, including in their book an amusing anecdote about a Sanskrit poet who, in the Travancore Census Report of 1901, described dasis of the Coromandel coast as “walking flesh trees bearing golden fruits”.
With the arrival of Muslim rulers, however, devadasis lost their special position because fewer temples were built and many were demolished. Even where temples remained intact, Muslim rulers did not patronise them, nor were they interested in patronising devadasis. Though the locals tried to continue the tradition, temples found it difficult to bear the expenditure of maintaining devadasis and many of the women were forced to take to prostitution in order to survive. With the arrival of European travellers, who made no distinction between devadasis and regular dancing girls, the position of devadasis in the kingdom of Golconda further deteriorated, even though they could read, write and sing as well as dance.
The Devadasi system was exploited to the maximum during the medieval ages under an aggressive feudal hierarchy. The caste of Bhogamwar in the tracts around the Coromandel coast specialised in music, song and dance. Historian KSR Murti, in his article References to Bhagnagar in the Contemporary Telugu Literature of Qutb Shahi Period, and the Enigma of Bhagmati and Bhagirathi, says that Bhagmati most likely belonged to this stigmatised caste. But the simple incident of birth into this caste didn’t necessarily make Bhagmati a prostitute. Even so, Mughal chroniclers, who were prejudiced against all Deccan kingdoms due to an imperialistic snobbery, maligned Bhagmati by calling her a fahisha or a patare, which in simple terms meant whore or prostitute.
There are different opinions about Bhagmati’s caste though it may be said that with some accuracy that she belonged to a lower caste. At least two historians believed that Bhagmati belonged to the Arundhatiya community, which categorised itself as shudras and offered girls to the local temples as devadasis. Rekha Pande quotes columnist and writer Sri Pasam Jagannadham Naidu who has asserted that Bhagmati was “an Arundhatiya damsel”.
Historian and Hindi-Urdu writer Anand Raj Varma, the author of the book Dastaan-e-Hyderabad, also insists in a conversation with me that Bhagmati belonged to the Arundhatiya community based on his memories of the time when performers from Bhagmati’s erstwhile village of Chinchlam visited his ancestral home, as they did the houses of all local jagirdars and other wealthy people, to sing bhajans during the festivals of Diwali and Dussehra. Since Chinchlam, where Muhammad Quli first encountered Bhagmati, was a place where the cult of Mathangi, as per the religious custom of shudras, dedicated girls to temples as devadasis, it is almost certain that Bhagmati was from this community.
Excerpted with permission from Bhagmati: Why Hyderabad’s Lost Queen Is the Soul of the City, Moupia Basu, Westland.
