T he commodification of women by influential men has a long, tragic history in India. From practically the beginning of urban settlements in the 5th century BCE, literary sources mention the presence of enslaved women in the country. And well into the 19th century, until British colonial laws were enforced across South Asia, a vast body of evidence indicates that elites participated in the trafficking of women.
Contemporary attitudes often have deep historical roots—deeper than we might think. One of the earliest mentions of enslaved women comes from the Antagada-Dasao , an early Jain text dating to around the 5th century BCE, when kingdoms were emerging across the Gangetic Plains. It depicts a prince as being attended to by Persian and Greek women, as well as many local women.
India had no direct links with Greece at the time: the presence of Greek women in such an early text may indicate they were slaves trafficked through Persia, at the time the world’s mightiest empire. Adding heft to this theory are roughly contemporary claims by the Greek historian Herodotus. As historian Kathryn A Hain points out in her paper, The Prestige Makers: Greek Slave Women in Ancient India , Herodotus claims that ravaging Persian raids captured Greek women for slavery and sale.
In subsequent centuries, early Indian rulers prided themselves on having large numbers of women attendants, an attitude that was fairly commonplace in the premodern world. Having foreign women in court demonstrated .