Description

INTRODUCTION 

“Prostitution is often known as world’s the oldest profession, can be traced throughout recorded history” this is the view what many of the scholars have as they think prostitution is a natural byproduct of social formation. But there are differences as Encyclopedia Britannica says ‘has not, so far as is known, been a cultural universal. In sexually permissive societies it is often rare because it is unnecessary, whereas in other societies it has been largely suppressed. German physician Iwan Bloch tells us that it develops as a byproduct of the regulation of sexuality. According to him, prostitution appears among primitive people wherever free sexual contact is curtailed or limited. It is nothing else than a substitute for a new form of primitive promiscuity. While this is true, it does not explain under what conditions prostitution arises and becomes institutionalized in society. It also ignores the commercial aspect of prostitution by treating it as though it were simply a variant form of sexual arrangement among consenting partners. Bloch accepts the existence of a ‘natural’ state of promiscuity which is later supplanted by various forms of structured marriage. In the 19th century J.J, Bachofen and the American ethnologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, formed the foundation of Friedrich Engels’s analysis, which has influenced so much of modem feminist theory, “hetaerism derives quite freely from group marriage, from the ceremonial surrender by which women purchased the right of chastity. Surrender for money was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess of love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury. Among other peoples, hetaerism derives from the sexual freedom allowed to girls before marriage. With the rise of the inequality of property wage labour appears sporadically side by side with slave labour, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced surrender of the 171 slave. For hetaerism is as much a social institution as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom-to the advantage of the men. ” Further, Engels refers to prostitution as ‘the complement’ of monogamous marriage and 1 predicts its demise ‘with the transformation of the means of production into social property’. He pointed us toward a redefinition of the concept of ‘class’ for men and women. To understand the prostitution in early India we have to start with Engles thoughts where he have examine of the sexuality of women under a patriarchal society.