Temple prostitution has been a common phenomenon across varied ancient civilizations across the globe. It flourished under state patronage. Medieval India has been no exception to this. The origins of this process can be traced back to the early period through varied textual sources including prescriptive texts. A contemporary understanding of the devadāsīs or the temple women in service to god is intertwined with that of prostitution, and a perpetual exploitation of women under the facade of religious traditions and practices. Most of it can be impressions formed by the perceptions about temple women found in late nineteenth and the twentieth century, from the ethnographic records and the press and court proceedings (Orr, 2000) and the subsequent abolition or extinction of various forms of devadāsī systems. Drawing from works of Leslie Orr, Sukumari Bhattacharji, and others this paper uses varied examples including the women of the Jagannatha temple of Puri, the joginīs prevalent in Andhra Pradesh and the devaradiyals in the Tamil society. The work tries to ascertain whether the role of the practice of appointing women into the temple as ritual service providers, contributed to a form of prostitution. It tries to examine other factors which led to prostitution within the women appointed or offered to the temple.