WORDS THAT HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING

The word gańiká⁽¹⁾ has lost its original meaning. Gańaka + t́á = gańiká. A gańiká was a woman who distinguished herself by her beauty, her gifts and accomplishments in the fine arts, music and drama, and by her personal behaviour. She was far above the ordinary woman; she was exceptional. In very ancient times the men would have bloody fights to marry such accomplished women. In order to maintain social peace, the leaders of the day would approach the king with a petition to give these beautiful, gifted women a status far above the common women – the state should recognize them as gańikás. It would consent to allow a gańiká to remain unmarried. Normally, it was not permitted for any woman to remain unmarried except those that chose to become sannyásiniis [renunciants].

The devadásiis [temple dancers] were also treated as gańikás; they too received the state’s consent to remain unmarried. The state would take full responsibility for their security and upkeep. As the báijiis [court dancers] under the Mughals were engaged in singing and dancing, they attained a certain amount of social prestige and were considered as a different class than prostitutes. But the prestige of the gańikás was a thousand times higher than that of the báijiis. While [fallen] women were not permitted to enter the inner shrines of temples, the gańikás enjoyed that right.

In my younger days, I noticed in some old temples in Burdwan District there were still some devadásiis. In most cases, they were girls from Brahman families. I have not heard of any devadásiis in any temples these days.

The institution of gańikás continued until the last part of the Buddhist period. It cannot be said that all of them led pure lives. Those who could not maintain sanctity in their personal lives were permitted by the king to be concubines.⁽²⁾ In the post-Buddhist Puranic Age a perverse trend arose. Whatever was positive in the Buddhist and Jain period was ignored and distorted in the following age. Thus many beautiful words with a positive meaning came to be used in a negative sense in the Puranic age. The word gańiká also lost its positive meaning and gained a negative implication.⁽³⁾ So you should not use this word gańiká in Bengali. Today some people are still using this word, but for that there are many alternative words available in Sanskrit.

Footnotes

(1) For example, Amrapalli, the famous disciple of Gautama Buddha who donated the deer park in Sarnath, was a gańiká. –Trans.

(2) “Concubine” is used in the sense that their relationships with their mates were never socially recognized marriages. –Trans.

(3) A shloka omitted here. –Trans.