A* was a teenager when her mother told her one day that she would soon be married—to the village deity, in the southern Telangana district of Mahbubnagar.

A lean, shy woman in a pink cotton saree and a golden taali around her neck, oiled hair in a braid with vermillion in the parting of the hairline, A was taken to the shrine of Yellamma (whose devotees refer to as “mother of the world” or jagdamba) in her village.

A’s family watched as her face and hands were covered with turmeric powder and a yellow taali, an ornament resembling the necklace tied by a Hindu groom around the neck of his bride, was placed around her neck by an old woman, a widow from the family of the traditional chief of the village.

The ceremony marked her transformation to a jogini, a human spouse to a Hindu deity.

Now in her thirties, she remembered feeling detached from her own emotions. “I was very young, I felt lost, unable to understand what was happening to me,” A told Article 14. “I had a lump in my throat. I was scared and confused. It all felt like a nightmare.”

Her life changed overnight.

Men began to visit their house and offered her parents sarees, money or groceries in exchange for taking A away for the night, sometimes even for a few months. Being a jogini meant earning and supporting her family. Their only girl child, A’s parents had decided to ‘dedicate’ her as a jogini in order to avoid paying a dowry for her wedding.

Every time she stepped out of her parents’ house, wearing her taali, bangles and vermillion on her forehead, children laughed, she recounted, and men abused her.

Practised in various parts of India, the jogini or devadasi system takes young girls, often before they attain puberty, to be married off to a deity. The girls then act as temple caretakers, and are considered ineligible to ever marry a human.

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