Of legends and lakes built by courtesans

The story goes that the woman was a courtesan with the local chieftain who lived in a cave on a hill overlooking the lake. There is no record of her name, but a local writer called her Chandrasani; she is more commonly referred to as just sule, which is Kannada for prostitute.

 

The lake in Nagamangala is called Sule Kere after her (in Kannada, sule is prositute and kere is lake). Legend has it that she was the concubine of Timmanna Dandanayaka, a 15th-century feudatory of the Vijayanagara empire. In versions of the folk story, which is still told around Nagamangala, a town in Karnataka’s Mandya district, she either built the lake or sacrificed herself so that the bad luck plaguing the lake’s construction would stop.