Women had played a central role in the rise of Chola power but as their power faded, so too too did the status of their women. Chola royal women practically disappeared from the historical record from the early twelfth century, as the dynasty shifted from a sprawling empire to a regional power. It was only the daughters of rival families—Hoysala and Kadava princesses—who had any sort of public life now. Gone were the days of Sembiyan Mahadevi, perhaps the single most important woman in South India’s religious history; of Loka-Mahadevi, the formidable temple-builder, mother and grandmother of emperors.
Gone also were the days of Service Retinue women great and small, of palace favourites commissioning great bronzes. In fact, by the 1230s, the Chola Service Retinues had almost disappeared as an institution. The Beautiful Lord Pandya, who repeatedly captured Chola palace women, never mentioned the Service Retinues in his inscriptions.
Many of these ladies, when entering the Chola palace, had lost their ties with their fraternal lines—a dangerous situation for medieval women. Some were captured from other courts, or received as tribute, and had no homes to return to. If the Chola king could not feed them, let alone pay them, where could they go?
As with so many questions in medieval Tamil Nadu, the answer is ‘temples’. We’ve seen how temples, in the twelfth century, offered honorary offices and divine access to male patrons. In the turbulence of the thirteenth century, many temples took the logical next step of granting female patrons a place in temple affairs.
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And so some women purchased houses in temple plots, made donations and received from temples the title of ‘God’s Slave’, Devaradiyar. Over the centuries, Devaradiyar would become a title attached to hereditary dancers in Tamil temples—and eventually give rise to the term ‘Devadasi’.
However, temple status wasn’t open to all women in the thirteenth century. Over the previous century, paralleling the Chola court’s sidelining of its women, many medieval Tamil ladies lost their prominent positions as politicians and patrons. This left them with the ornamental, exploitative jobs that women had always been saddled with. Cooking, cleaning, sweeping floors and applying cow-dung paste; in wealthier households they also fanned their husbands and carried lamps.
Anirudh Kanisetti’s Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire portrays not just the world of kings and queens but also the stories of the “little people”, whose lives were buffeted by big events.
Women were considered incapable of autonomy, to the point that their husbands were made responsible for their crimes. In one weird and tragic case, a man agreed to donate a lamp to his local temple because his wife had thrown a stick at their daughter. The stick had missed and hit a neighbour’s daughter on the head, and the child died after twenty days of agony. None of the women or girls are even named in the temple inscription recording this—only the lamp-donating husband.
Privileged women were (slightly) better off. Many of them (especially Brahmin women) entered marriage with at least some wealth of their own, even if administered by their husbands and sons. And they, like their male relations, sought respectability through patronage, which entrepreneurial temple authorities were pleased to grant them—in ‘traditional’ women’s roles. And so in the thirteenth century, as poorer and lower-caste women were being gifted to temples as slaves, wealthier Tamil women began to participate in temple rituals, an extraordinary and unprecedented development for South Indian Hinduism. They, too, called themselves ‘God’s Slaves’.
In temples, wealthy women performed the same roles they had been relegated to in palaces and mansions: waving fans for the gods, carrying lamps. These were roles of great honour, and were only occasional.
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In comparison, poorer women, especially enslaved women, got the less prestigious, never-ending jobs. Sweeping floors, cleaning feeding halls. They were temple employees, not patrons, and they were always paid less than men for similar work.
For example, in Chidambaram in the thirteenth century, ladies in the kitchen received between one- fourth to two-thirds of what male cooks got, all while being considered less ‘pure’. No temple could function without mountains of husked rice; yet the rice husked by temple women, as historian Leslie Orr puts it, ‘had a long way to go before being transformed into food fit for the gods’. Which is to say, it needed to first be cooked by men. While wealthier ladies made limited headway in the patriarchal system of medieval India, lower-caste and poorer women were trampled by it.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a researcher, writer, and historian. Excerpted with permission of Juggernaut Books from Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire.
