"courtesan" as translation

[Thrasher, Allen]

Lars Martin's question raises another I have been meaning to raise in this forum.  Does the word "courtesan," which seems to be standard nowadays for referring to pre-modern Indian female sex workers, correspond to any Sanskrit lexeme? I seem to recall going through Ludwik Sternbach's  Vesya: Synonyms and Aphorisms (Bombay, 1945), to which, as I see from JAOS 71 (1951), "Legal Position of Prostitutes According to Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra, p. 25n, he published a "First supplement," in Bharatiya Vidya 11, 256, and planned a "Second supplement."  (Was all this accumulated in his Gaṇikā-vr̥tta-saṅgrahaḥ, or, Texts on courtezans in classical Sanskrit (Hoshiarpur, 1953)?).
Anyway, several years ago I went through his 1945 publication and could not find that there was anything corresponding to a distinction between "courtesan" (high-class, cultivated, expensive) and "prostitute" or "whore," with the exception of compounds like rAjagaNikA, "royal prostitute," presumably having the characteristics just cited for "courtesans," since she would be for the entertainment of the king's guests.  But this is a difference primarily in place of business, not quality.  For those outside the court, the same terms seem to be used for everyone from the village or alley whore to the top of the line variety.
I think there is in at least in some modern  Indo-Aryan languages such a distinction, between raNDI or veZyA and the like and tawAIf.  But I don't see it in Sanskrit.  Do others see it or not?
I am also wondering whether I am making "courtesan" a more marked term that some other English-speakers do.  In the online Digital Dictionaries of South Asia I find for several IA languages that a string of synonyms is given for raNDI et al.: "whore," "courtesan," "prostitute," "strumpet," etc. (Somehow I have not found a search strategy that turns up tawAIF for comparison.) Of course, many of those dictionaries are of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, when usage may have been different. But I also notice that the online OED calls "courtesan" "a somewhat euphemistic appellation," citing examples going back centuries.   Is this contemporary translation habit a matter of euphemism?

Surely not all Indian prostitutes, not even all assembled to take part in public processions or the like, were drop-dead beautiful, cultivated in all the arts, and expensive.  Also, unpleasant things are said about the ladies at both the bottom and the top of the trade.

Allen

Allen W. Thrasher, Ph.D.
Senior Reference Librarian and Team Coordinator
South Asia Team
Asian Division
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, DC 20540-4810
USA
tel. 202-707-3732
fax 202-707-1724
The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress.








-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20110822/d111ecbb/attachment.htm>