Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu (South Asia Research)

Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu

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Describing one of the most important practices of hathayoga khecarimudra , the Khecarividya of This book accounts for the origin and evolution of the nature and roles of women within the Hindu belief system. It explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and texts of codes of conduct and how particular models of conduct for mortal women have been created.

Hindu religious culture correlates This book accounts for the origin and evolution of the nature and roles of women within the Hindu In recent years, changes in religious studies in general and the study of Hinduism in particular have drawn more scholarly attention to other forms of the Hindu faith that are concretely embodied in temples, icons, artworks, rituals, and pilgrimage practices.

This book analyses the phenomenon of pilgrimage as a religious practice and experience and In recent years, changes in religious studies in general and the study of Hinduism in particular Through the use of epigraphical evidence, Leslie C. Orr brings into focus the activities and identities of the temple women devadasis of medieval South India.

This book shows how temple women's initiative and economic autonomy involved them in medieval temple politics and allowed them to establish themselves in roles with particular social and Orr brings into focus the activities and This study, based on the author's fieldwork among rural Tamil villagers in South India, focuses on the ways in which people in this society interact with the supernatural beings who play such a large role in their personal and corporate lives.

This study, based on the author's fieldwork among rural Tamil villagers in South India, focuses on The annual festivals that are central to the south Indian religious tradition are among the largest religious gatherings found anywhere in the world. The religious landscape of the Chola period contained not only places where the great Hindu gods were honored but also shrines where Jains and Buddhists worshiped. Well before this period, Jainism and Buddhism had become widespread in Tamilnadu, and these religious traditions persisted through the period and beyond—in the case of Jainism, until the present day.

The number of Buddhist sites and inscriptions that have so far been discovered is small, but numerous Buddhist images reflect the existence of Buddhist worshipers in the Chola period. There is ample inscriptional evidence that Jainism was a continuing presence in some of the areas where it had long been established—in the northern and middle regions of Tamilnadu; in the far south; and in the southeastern part of the core Chola territory, bordering on the southern districts. Jain and Buddhist devotional poetry in Tamil was very similar to the works of the Saiva and Vaisnava poet-saints Nagaswamy , ; Vijayavenugopal ; Kandaswamy The ways in which worship was conducted and the ways in which the object of worship was conceptualized—as the "lord" of a particular place, present in iconic form, and as the recipient of gifts, offerings, and services—were virtually identical for Jains and Hindus, according to the inscriptions they have left us Orr forthcoming a.

The earliest of these inscriptions, recording endowments to support the worship of Hindu and Jain deities and Tirtharikaras in Tamilnadu, date to the sixth and seventh centuries. Perhaps the earliest inscription that provides details of the character of Hindu worship in medieval Tamilnadu is the Kuram copper-plate inscription SII 1. This grant established support for worship with water and fire; for the recitation of the Bharata; and for providing the temple deity with "worship, bathing, flowers, perfumes, incense, lamps, food offerings, conches, drums, etc.

These services are very similar to those referred to in the Jain inscriptions of this period, in the Tamil poems of the Alvars and the Nayanmars of the sixth to ninth century, and in earlier Tamil literature.

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The early material evidence of Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu worship in Tamilnadu, which we have just reviewed, would seem to challenge the notion that Brahmanical and folk religious traditions—or "heterodox" and Hindu ones—ought to be treated in such dualistic terms. In the later Chol period, we find more and more goddesses who are depicted as the consorts of the great Hindu gods and who are housed in shrines built within the compounds of Saiva and Vaisnava temples; images of these nacciyar consort goddesses , shrines built for them, and inscriptions referring to them are especially in evidence at the end of the period, in the thirteenth century K.

Srinivasan ,; Stein ,; Champakalakshmi I98ib, ; Orr forthcoming a. These developments were accompanied by a movement within South Indian Hindu theology of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which increasing emphasis was placed on the association of Siva and Visnu with powers or principles—s'akti and Sri—personified as the "wives" of these male deities Sivaraman ,, , n.

Suggestions that these religious developments of the later Chola period are linked to an effort to assimilate local goddesses into an orthodox Hindu pantheon or to "ground" the great Hindu gods in the Tamil country through myths of marriage with local goddesses differentiate too sharply between Brahmanical and local traditions—and ignore the fact that by the late Chola period, "Sanskritic" deities, both male and female, had been rooted in the Tamil religious landscape for many centuries.

In medieval Tamil inscriptions, gifts to temples were described as gifts to the deity or Buddha or Tlrthankara enshrined in the temple, who was regarded as receiving them in the same way a human being would. Yet there are remarkably few precedents in the pre-Chola era—at least within the Hindu context—for this donative behavior. The Dharmasastras declare that dana, making gifts, is the chief form of religious practice in the Kali age in which we live Manusmrti 1.

It seems that the earliest examples, in South India and elsewhere, of gifts being given to an institution or to a divine or superhuman figure are found in the Buddhist and Jain contexts. It is interesting as well that so many of those engaged in the patronage of Buddhism and Jainism were women. Gifts were presumably made, at least in part, with the intention of generating religious merit or possibly to fulfill a vow or expiate a sin.

The transfer of merit is, however, atypical of Chola period inscriptions; only rarely do we find that a gift has been made "for the sake of" another person. And in contrast to later Tamil inscriptions and to inscriptions from outside of Tamilnadu that more frequently refer to such transfers of merit, we do not even find in the Chola period inscriptions a word e.

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Apart from merit, one could acquire social recognition and political and economic advantages through donations to temples. The inscriptions' attention to the results of religious donation opens a window onto the situations and intentions of donors. Although there are those who disparage the usefulness of inscriptional evidence as "distorted and highly fragmentary" because "the inner reality, the linkages, the motivations" are not revealed Shulman , 8, 24; also Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam , , others are more optimistic: "We may be able to study even the mentality of the people associated with inscriptions" Karashima The argument is about the value of evidence derived from inscriptions in comparison to what one may learn from literary sources.

On the one hand, there are several great advantages in using inscriptions rather than the texts that more usually serve as the basis for our reconstruction of the social and religious history of India. Perhaps the most striking virtue of inscriptional sources, in contrast to religious and legal texts, is that they allow us to determine with great precision the date and place of their production.

Despite the fact that some of the records are fragmentary, it is possible to chronologically situate 90 percent of the Chola period inscriptions Heitzman , In terms of locating these inscriptions geographically, very often the place where the inscription is found is the temple or village to which the record refers.

Furthermore, the inscriptions tend to be very precise in specifying the location of the temple that is receiving the donation, of any lands that may be the substance of the gift or whose revenues are to be transferred to the temple, and of the hometowns of donors and other people named in the inscription. There are other important ways in which inscriptions differ from texts that prove advantageous.

Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu (South Asia Research)

These records are not normative and prescriptive. They are formulaic in style and may serve as exemplary models, but they record particular and individual events rather than an idealized and abstract pattern; that is, they present precedents rather than paradigms Waghorne , Although forged inscriptions are not unheard of and the terms of the endowments, even if they are literally written in stone, can be and eventually are superceded by subsequent arrangements and the "interpretation" of temple practice, these records are far less prone than many texts to alteration, interpolation, mythic elaboration, or being read through the lens of later commentary and tradition.

In fact, 98 percent of Chola period inscriptions are concerned with temple affairs Heitzman , Furthermore, because their purpose was usually to record some change or addition to temple acquisitions, services, or organization, inscriptions refer only in passing to routine procedures and standing arrangements; these records do not show the system "at rest" Granda , Also, certain types of changes are more likely than others to be recorded: donors and temple officials would be particularly motivated to record endowments in inscriptions when the gift was of a durable nature—land that would yield agricultural produce, a sum of money that would produce interest, or a herd of livestock that would produce ghee for ritual lamps Talbot igSSb, The value of inscriptional evidence may also be compromised and its accuracy skewed as a consequence of the way in which it has been gathered and presented during the last century.

The fact that inscriptions are most likely to have been copied from the walls of large, famous, and still living temples means that sites that were important in the Chola period, but later fell into disuse, are underrepresented in the inscriptional corpus. Despite these limitations, inscriptions are precious to the historian inasmuch as they document economic, religious, political, and social realities, occurring in a particular place and time.

Inscriptions describe actual events— but it is important to acknowledge that they are not simply objective reports of these events. Inscriptions record donations in particular ways, using specific kinds of terms and certain styles of composition and language Inden , It was Burton Stein who first highlighted the importance of what he called the "ritual" aspect of Chola period inscriptions, the intention of inscriptional records "to present a particular understanding of relations among persons and institutions" Stein , Stein and others who have studied the shape and style of Chola period inscriptions Stein , ; Spencer ; Shulman , have focused particularly on the way in which they express something about the Chola king's relations with his domain and his subjects; these scholars have provided analyses of meykkirttis Skt.

But there are many other ritual elements in inscriptions apart from meykkirttis that give us clues about the motives, perceptions, and values held by a donor and those people around him or her who were in some way involved in the donative activity see Alayev , The order in which the elements of an inscription are arranged and the amount of space allotted to each element provide information about the significance of the transaction recorded.

Chola period inscriptions usually emphasize the importance of the deity, who is typically mentioned at the very beginning of the record, following the meykkirtti if it is present and the date, and is described as the lord of a particular locality, which is itself identified at length. The donor's connection with the temple or with other local social structures may be further underlined by the mention of corporate groups who sanction the transaction or of individuals acting as witnesses or signatories; such individuals—often local notables or temple functionaries—are mentioned with increasing frequency in the course of the Chola period.

Inscriptions are thus capable of articulating a whole range of religious, social, and political relations—including many that have nothing to do with the king.

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Almost all Chola period inscriptions mention the name of a king or chief at the beginning of the record as a means of dating the record, but only about a third of the inscriptions have meykkirttis cf. Stein , Even when a meykkirtti is present as the preface to an inscription, this does not indicate that there was any association between the king and the transaction recorded Granda , Kings are very rarely the central actors in the arrangements described by the inscriptions—although queens, especially in the early Chola period, are frequently represented as taking active roles as donors.

The features emphasized in these analyses—the role of the king as the premier temple patron, the king's utilization of the temple in legitimating his sovereignty and integrating his polity, and the parallels between court and temple ritual—seem to belong much more to the late precolonial era than to the Chola period. For the most part, rulers in the Chola period remained aloof from involvement in local affairs. In reaction to the earlier view of the "Chola Empire" as a vast bureaucratic state, Burton Stein has conceptualized the Chola polity as a "segmentary state," in which the ruler's sovereignty was more "ritual" than it was politically or administratively effectual at the local level.

Others regard South Indian society in this period as "feudal" Jha ; R. Sharrna ; Narayanan and Veluthat Although I will avoid the debate about whether any of these models adequately describes the political system of medieval Tamilnadu see Kulke ; Heitzman ; Karashima ; Chattopadhyaya , I must emphasize that a particular model of the medieval feudal economy—in which the control of resources by temples, Brahmans, vassals, and officials is seen as bringing about economic stagnation and the impoverishment of local people54—is clearly inapplicable to the Chola period.

Although many economic and political arrangements were strongly local in character, the people involved in them were not isolated. Local communities were nodes in broad networks, as were local temples. The village in the Chola period was not insular and self-sufficient but was involved in a wide range of economic and cultural links to other parts of Tamilnadu Hall ,; Kulke ,; Chattopadhyaya ,; cf. Mahalingam , ; Jha , There was not a sharp distinction between urban and rural economies or societies; even large towns contained fields and gardens, interspersed among residential, market, and temple areas Heitzman Ib and forthcoming.

A good deal of wealth was channeled into the temples in this period, but a very large proportion of this wealth was redistributed and recirculated, encouraging trade, craft production, and the growth of agriculture. The inscriptions thus offer us a view "from below"—but it is not a view from the bottom. The people who are most frequently represented as actors in the transactions and relationships recorded in the inscriptions are those with access to enough wealth to make gifts to the temple and to commission the engraving of the inscription and those connected in one way or another with the life of the temple.

The inscriptions provide a good deal of information about local lords and Brahmans, village administrators, and temple servants but very little about those people with few economic and political resources. It is interesting, therefore, that these records can tell us as much as they do about women. Were we to rely solely on normative and mythological texts for an understanding of women's roles and activities in India's past, as so often has been done, we would never even suspect the existence of this evidence of women's involvement in economic and religious life.

The fact that the inscriptions are descriptive, recording specific and concrete events, makes them extremely valuable for the study of women's history.

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These records allow us to catch a glimpse of the actuality of women's participation in society, which is frequently obscured in literary and religious texts. In contrast to what Brahmanical legal texts may lead us to expect, we do not find that caste is the organizing principle of society or that boundaries between different social groups are sharply demarcated. Even for those belonging to the group with the most clearly defined caste identity—the Brahmans—the term brahmana is scarcely used, their identity as Brahmans is not well marked, and it is only as a result of a certain amount of sleuthing that one can establish that they actually are Brahmans.

For the most part, they were not directly involved in the administration of the temple or with temple ritual. Individual Brahmans are frequently mentioned in Chola period inscriptions as landowners and temple patrons. Groups of Brahmans, organized into the corporate bodies referred to in the inscriptions as sabhais Skt.

Sabhais are not the only type of local administrative body mentioned in the inscriptions. In the course of the Chola period, the relations among these groups, the sabhais, and bodies of temple authorities, and their relative importance and power underwent various changes Champakalakshmi ; Hall It has been assumed by some authors that in the Chola period and even earlier, the non-Brahman administrators of villages and natus were vellalas, members of a group that is today the dominant agricultural caste in Tamilnadu Subbarayalu , 36; Stein ; Gough ,; Karashima , 58; Veluthat ,; Younger ,,, Indeed, vellalas are mentioned in Chola period inscriptions and, apart from Brahmans, are the only group of people resembling a caste for which we have evidence in this period.

We do not, however, have evidence that they were primarily identified as agriculturalists, or had the dominant economic position or the high ritual status that they have today.

Nor is it clear that their identity as a caste was at all well defined; the social boundary between vellala and nonvellala, as between Brahman and non-Brahman, may have been considerably more porous than it is today. These people, whom Heitzman terms "lords," are those described by the inscriptions as "possessors" utaiyar of villages or regions. These men typically had property rights and administrative or honorific positions in several localities and were active as donors to temples.

Another group whom we encounter in Chola period inscriptions, and who also figure prominently as donors, are merchants viyapari. Merchants took part in local administrative affairs as members of the corporate groups known as nakarattar.

For example, people referred to as paraiyar the name of a low caste in contemporary South India, from which the English word "pariah" is derived are described in some Chola period inscriptions as living in separate areas within villages, and they are mentioned in contexts that clearly indicate that they were considered to have a degraded status. But there are also several inscriptions recording gifts made by paraiyar to temples, suggesting that they cannot in all cases have been without economic resources or have been regarded as "outcastes. Temple administrators are often referred to as corporate groups rather than as individuals, particularly in the early Chola period.

The inscriptions use a variety of terms for these groups, including tanattar from Skt. Among those serving in the temple, the inscriptions refer to an array of groups and individuals, including priests arccippar, nampimar, acariyar, sivabrahmanas , who were assisted by manis Skt.

The great majority of the people associated in these various ways with the temple were men. Some, however, were women—which gives me a reason for writing this book. But there is another category of people referred to in the inscriptions that appears to be almost exclusively male, particularly in the Hindu context. These are the ascetics tapasyar, sannyasis, atikalmar, vairagyar, sivayogis and those associated with mathas "mutts," Ta. Although not mentioned very frequently in Chola period inscriptions, these figures are of interest because of their importance in the later religious landscape of Tamilnadu.

One must, however, guard against an anachronistic understanding of medieval religious institutions. Mathas were not, as they later came to be, the exclusive preserve of ascetics and members of sectarian elites. These institutions, which came increasingly to be associated with Hindu temples in the course of the Chola period, closely resembled the Jain pallis of early medieval Tamilnadu Orr They appear to have served primarily as feeding houses for pilgrims, ascetics, and Brahmans, in addition to being places of worship.

By the end of the Chola period, some of them may have begun to take on the character of schools and monasteries.

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