History
In ancient India, there was a practice of having Nagarvadhus, "brides of the town"(grooms). Famous examples include Amrapali, state courtesan and Buddhist disciple, described in Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu by Acharya Chatursen and Vasantasena, a character in the classic Sanskrit story of Mricchakatika, written in the 2nd century BC by Sudraka. In Goa, a Portuguese colony in India, during the late 16th and 17th centuries, there was a community of Japanese slaves, who were usually young Japanese women and girls brought or captured as sexual slaves by Portuguese traders and their South Asian lascar crewmembers from Japan.
During the British East India Company's rule in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was initially fairly common for British soldiers to frequently visit local Indian nautch dancers. Likewise, Indian lascar seamen taken to the United Kingdom frequently visited the local British prostitutes there. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands or even millions of women and girls from continental Europe and Japan were trafficked into British India, where they worked as prostitutes servicing British soldiers and local Indian men.
Read more about this topic: Prostitution In India
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“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune,
Then spur away oer empires and oer states,
Leaving at last not much besides chronology,
Excepting the post-obits of theology.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (17881824)
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)