PERCEPTIONS ON TEMPLE PROSTITUTION IN EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIA

Temple prostitution has been a common phenomenon across varied ancient civilizations across the globe. It flourished
under state patronage. Medieval India has been no exception to this. The origins of this process can be traced back to
the early period through varied textual sources including prescriptive texts. A contemporary understanding of the
devadāsīs or the temple women in service to god is intertwined with that of prostitution, and a perpetual exploitation
of women under the facade of religious traditions and practices. Most of it can be impressions formed by the
perceptions about temple women found in late nineteenth and the twentieth century, from the ethnographic records
and the press and court proceedings (Orr, 2000) and the subsequent abolition or extinction of various forms of
devadāsī systems.
Drawing from works of Leslie Orr, Sukumari Bhattacharji, and others this paper uses varied examples including the
women of the Jagannatha temple of Puri, the joginīs prevalent in Andhra Pradesh and the devaradiyals in the Tamil
society. The work tries to ascertain whether the role of the practice of appointing women into the temple as ritual
service providers, contributed to a form of prostitution. It tries to examine other factors which led to prostitution within
the women appointed or offered to the temple.