Note 2 — KASBI

In the Deccan girls dedicated to temples are called Devadāsis or ‘Hand-maidens of the gods.’ They are thus described by Marco Polo: “In this country,” he says, “there are certain abbeys in which are gods and goddesses, and here fathers and mothers often consecrate their daughters to the service of the deity. When the priests desire to feast their god they send for those damsels, who serve the god with meats and other goods, and then sing and dance before him for about as long as a great baron would be eating his dinner. Then they say that the god has devoured the essence of the food, and fall to and eat it themselves.”2 Mr. Francis writes of the Devadāsis as follows:2 “It is one of the many inconsistences of the Hindu religion that though their profession is repeatedly and vehemently condemned by the Shāstras it has always received the countenance of the church. The rise of the caste and its euphemistic name seem both of them to date from the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, during which much activity prevailed in southern India in the matter of building temples and elaborating the services held in them. The dancing-girls’ duties then as now were to fan the idol with chamaras or Thibetan ox-tails, to hold the sacred light called Kumbarti and to sing and dance before the god when he was carried in procession. Inscriptions show that in A.D. 1004 the great temple of the Chola king Rajarāja at Tanjore had attached to it 400 women of the temple who lived in free quarters in the surrounding streets, and were given a grant of land from the endowment. Other temples had similar arrangements. At the beginning of last century there were a hundred dancing-girls attached to the temple at Conjeeveram, and at Madura, Conjeeveram and Tanjore there are still numbers of them who receive allowances from the endowments of the big temples at those places. In former days the profession was countenanced not only by the church but by the state. Abdur Razāk, a Turkish ambassador to the court of Vijayanagar in the fifteenth century, describes women of this class as living in state-controlled institutions, the revenue of which went towards the upkeep of the police.”