Women in Ancient India (Vedic to Vatsyayana)

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Women play an important role in Indian society. Ancient Indian women had a high social status and were in excellent health. In terms of equality, education, marriage and family life, caste and gender, religion and culture, women in contemporary Indian society preserve or diminish their ancient and medieval status. Vedic women enjoyed financial independence. Some women were working as teachers. The place of production was the home. Clothes were made at home by spinning and weaving. Women also help their husbands in agricultural work. In the religious sphere, women enjoyed full rights and often participated in rituals along with their husbands. Both husband and wife participated in religious rituals and sacrifices. Even religious discussions saw active participation of women. The status of women improved somewhat throughout the Buddhist period, but not much. Women have an important place in ancient Indian literature. Many educated women lived in ancient India. In this paper discuss the ancient, medieval and modern sociology of the status of women in India.

The Indian Constitution has always provided women equal rights as men, unlike the West, where women had to struggle for more than a century to obtain some of their fundamental rights, such as the ability to vote. In terms of equality, education, marriage and family life, caste and gender, religion and culture, women in contemporary Indian society preserve or diminish their ancient and medieval status.

Working as a domestic help, a small trader, an artisan, or a field worker on a family farm comes under the informal sector. Most of these positions are low skilled, low paid, and do not provide benefits to the employee. But perhaps more importantly, cultural customs vary from place to place. North India tends to be more patriarchal and feudal than South India, despite the fact that this is a generalization. In North India, women are subject to severe restrictions on their conduct, which limits their access to employment.

We are fortunately living at a period when a serious attempt is, for the first time, being made all over the world to control, regulate and if possible, to eradicate all the commercialised vices that are eating into the vitals of humanity. An intensive and systematic propaganda against traffic in women and children has formed one of the permanent activities of the "League of Nations" in pursuance of a paragraph of the Covenant, the Article 23-C which states that the members 'will entrust to the League the general supervision of the execution of agreements with regard to traffic in women and children'....... The Tenth Assembly in 1929 decided that an enquiry should be extended to the Far East, and with the princely donation of $ 125,000 contributed by the American Bureau of Social Hygiene, a small committee was appointed for the purpose. The Commission of Enquiry visited the East including India and Burma in 1931 and in due course submitted to the League its valuable report which has since been issued to the public.

The social reformers of India, too, have not remained indifferent to the gravity of this growing evil; and during the course of the last few years at least four Provinces have made better provisions for combating this menace by the passing of Suppression of Immoral Traffic Bills. Most of the Provinces and Native States of India are facing, though in a far lesser degree than America and the Western countries, the double evil of prostitution per se and the traffic for prostitution. Humanity must be thankful to those men and women who have been making an honest and sincere attempt to ameliorate the condition of the unfortunate victims to human lust and monstrous avarice, and to blot out this standing blotch w civilisation.

The Bengal Social Hygiene Association was started a few years back with the above objects in view, and has ever since its inception been attempting in its humble way to help this mighty cause.

The authors have done me much honour by asking me to write an Introduction for this volume of their "History of Prostitution in India" which is to be published seríatim. The interested reader may well anticipate to see it completed in altogether three volumes, the first of which only is now ready for publication.

In a sense, a request of this kind has not come to me as a surprise. About a decade back I had the misfortune of incurring the displeasure of rejecting a thesis dealing with the subject of Prostitution in Ancient India, for no other reasons than that the information supplied was inadequate and the treatment was unsatisfactory. Now I have a great pleasure in commending the present work on the History of Indian Prostitution to the class of modern readers who are or may be interested in the study of so delicate and important a subject as the institution of prostitution, which has persistently defied, through many centuries of men's past, all campaigns of the social puritans against it.

I am aware that I have gained some amount of public notoriety for an interest evinced by me both in the study and cautious handling of the peculiar socio-economic and moral problem arising from rapid increase in the number of prostitutes open or covered, as well as traffic in women and children in Calcutta and other Municipal areas throughout Bengal and other Provinces of India. The acuteness of the problem has come to be felt also on account of a powerful advocacy of the cause of fallen women by certain writers of modern novels, Indian and European. This advocacy or appeal through the novels has not been viewed without fear or suspicion by the custodians of society and of public morality.

Upon the whole, the impression in this country is that such an advocacy has just served or is serving to encourage sexual immorality and corruption in all its nudity and shamelessness instead of restraining it or evolving a healthy moral sense from within. Those who are for leaving the institution undisturbed fondly quote the opinion of so sane a jurist as the late Sir Guroodas Banerjee who is known to have considered it as a moral safety-value to the social organism as a whole.