Yellamma

Presiding goddess of the shrine on
Yellama hill, in the town of Saundatti in
780
Yatri
the Belgaum district of the state of
Karnataka. Yellama’s temple is infamous for being a traditional center for
the dedication of devadasis (“[female]
servant of the Lord”), a class of women
kept in temples as singers and dancers
in the service of the temple’s presiding
deity and to whom they were usually
considered to be “married.” In Yellama’s
temple, however, both boys and girls can
be dedicated. Although for the past two
centuries the devadasi tradition has carried associations with common prostitution, in earlier times it was far more
common for a devadasi to live with a
single man for her entire life, although
she could not marry him because she
was considered dedicated to the deity.
At times this dedication is done
because of a demand by the goddess
herself, revealed through possession; in
other cases the parents do this, hoping
to gain some concrete benefit, particularly healing from disease. Yellamma is
associated with fire and also with causing (and potentially curing) skin diseases, which can be seen as symbolic
“burning.”
According to the traditional model,
devadasis held a definite social position
and had special legal rights—they were
entitled to family inheritance and to
perform religious rites, which other
women were not. These special rights
have disappeared with the outlawing of
the devadasi system, done, in part, by
the British, and definitively in postIndependence India. Although such
dedications still take place, in many
cases they are little more than a cover for
procurement, with the girls being
shipped to brothels in Bombay, Pune,
and other central Indian cities. In most
cases the girls come from extremely
poor families, and the dedication to
Yellamma is a way to avoid paying for a
wedding, a major expense in contemporary Indian society. The dedications take
place on the full moon in the lunar
month of Magh (January–February),
and are reportedly widespread, but
because of secrecy, the laws prohibiting this are rarely enforced. For further
consideration of the devadasi system, in
this case at the Jagannath temple in
Puri, see Frederique Apffel Marglin,
Wives of the God-King, 1985.