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the courts as well as during festivals, religious and secular alike. The dancers were mostly girls and they were known as devadasis, 'servants of god'. All temples, in south India in particular, had devadāsīs as part of its regular staff. For devadāsīs dancing was a natural and fundamental condition of existence. A story from Rajatarangini illustrates this poetically:
Once a king took out by himself an untrained horse into a wasteland in order to break it in. There, far away from men, he saw one maid of lovely form singing and another dancing. He observed that they came to the same spot several days later so he came up and questioned them. They told him: "We are dancing girls belonging to a temple....By the directions of our mothers, who got their living here, we dance at this spot....This custom handed down by tradition has become fixed in our family. Its reason we cannot know nor anyone else."
Later the king has the spot excavated and an old temple is discovered.
It is significant to note that dance was considered important enough to become the dharma, a social duty, of certain castes. Thus regarded a craft and art to be studied and mastered, it generated its own rules and regulations, and a system. The complex, and the convoluted institution of devadasis lasted hundreds of years right into the twentieth century, carrying with it riches of dance but a social stigma for dancers and the profession of dancing."
Dancers and musicians, 12th century, Kesava temple, Somnathpur.
