The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

  Thanks in no small degree to Tantrism, Indian sculptors went further than their Western counterparts. The apogee of erotic temple art was the giant, tenth-century temple complex of Khajuraho, in central India. Erotic sculptures form a mere tenth of the total, but it is a prominent and bewitching fraction. Twisting, broad-hipped and high-breasted nymphs display their generously contoured and bejewelled bodies on exquisitely worked exterior wall panels. These fleshy apsaras run riot across the surface of the stone, putting on make-up, washing their hair, playing games, dancing, and endlessly knotting and unknotting their girdles – an activity dwelled on with similar obsession in the Kamasutra and the erotic poetry of the golden age. Beside the heavenly nymphs are serried ranks of griffins, guardian deities and, most notoriously, extravagantly interlocked maithunas, or lovemaking couples.

  Today, Khajuraho is popularly known as the ‘Kamasutra temple’, but its coupling statues do not in truth ‘illustrate’ Vatsyayana’s positions. They are the child of a strange union of Tantrism and fertility motifs, with a heavy dose of magic. Fertility and conception are of course screamingly absent from the resolutely secular Kamasutra – as is Tantrism. It’s easy to imagine the hedonistic nagaraka shuddering at the very thought of fathering a child, and he certainly never seems to enter a temple – other than to enjoy a moonlit festival where he might pick up women. The famous love-making groups do not reflect the joyous precision of Vatsyayana’s embraces but, instead, concealed symbolical-magical diagrams, or yantras, which were placed in particular positions on the temple walls in order to magically propitiate evil spirits. At Khajuraho, a sculpture of a washerwoman clinging to the neck of a bearded ascetic may not simply show two people having sex, it may express the Tantric notion that the ‘washerwoman’, who represents the idea of the subtle energy of Kundalini, residing in the spine, has risen as far as the chakra, or subtle centre of life energy, at the level of the neck.

  The erotic temple sculptures at Khajuraho primarily symbolize the ‘right-hand’ Tantric practice of using sex as a metaphor for joyful union with the divine. They celebrate mystical release, not actual ejaculation. But there is a powerful connection with the Kamasutra, nevertheless. Behind Khajuraho’s Tantric significance lies the fact that, like other ‘erotic’ temples, it was built by a wealthy and powerful dynasty to advertise its status. Controlled virility was a sure sign of a great ruler, and erotic sculptures were a splendid way to demonstrate that quintessentially regal sexual excellence. The highest expression of control was alamkara, or ornamentation, an aesthetic ideal that stood for artistic sophistication, for the ability to improve upon the raw materials of nature. Vatsyayana and the temple sculptors alike delighted in imaginative variation on the theme of sensual pleasure, a delight driven by the urge to tame the erotic by transforming it into art. It is this shared aesthetic vision that throbs through the centuries, ultimately connecting text and temple.

  As India entered its ‘medieval’ epoch, in the early centuries of the second millennium, eroticism was again adopted by religion. This time, the links to the Kamasutra were less subtle. The burgeoning bhakti cult emphasized the emotional love of the worshipper for god, a love that often flirted with the outright erotic – and, sometimes whole-heartedly, rampantly embraced it. The roots of bhakti are at least as old as Tantrism, but the cult established itself in the eighth and ninth centuries around the thrillingly erotic story of the god Krishna and his rasa lila or ‘love dance’ with an entire gang of sexy milkmaids. The tale was most exquisitely told in a ninth-century poem, the rapturous Rasa-Pancadhyayi. As the milkmaids dance, it describes how one of them embraces Krishna. She becomes ‘elated with bodily ripplings of bliss’ and kisses his arm with tenderness. Another, ‘decorated with shimmering earrings that swayed to the dance’, lays her cheek against Krishna’s and accepts a betel nut from his mouth. Another gently brings Krishna’s hand to her breasts. Together, they whip themselves, and Krishna, into a sexual-ecstatic fever.

  Somehow, this dirty dancing had to be squared with the well-established theory that the milkmaids’ love for Krishna was pure and sexless. The only way to do it was to resurrect the old theory from the Natyashastra, namely that real emotions could be translated into their idealized, artistic form, as rasas. Under the guiding hand of religious devotion, it was said, the passions of kama could be similarly transformed and purified into a higher love, which was sweet and sexless. It was divine in essence, even if it was deeply human in its expression. This sleight of theological hand meant poets could get away with as much literary sex as they wanted. Jayadeva’s famous twelfth-century poem on Krishna’s love dance, the sublime Gitagovinda, dared to be even more palpably erotic than the Rasa-Pancadhyayi. Its hero was a god, and its ideal was divine love, but it was nothing less than a luxuriantly poetic expression of the very same eroticism sketched in by the Kamasutra – so much so that the standard commentary on the poem, by the Mewari King Kumbha, actually quotes from the Kamasutra in order to explain the many allusions in the text.

  Jayadeva’s masterstroke was to elevate one of the milkmaids, Radha, as Krishna’s principal lover, thus putting a very human love affair at the heart of the relatively ethereal dance. As the archetypal erotic heroine, Radha is the descendant of the idealized lover of the Kamasutra. As she waits in a lonely forest hut for her lover to arrive, in the Sixth Song, her eyelids tremble just as the Natyashastra says they should, and when Krishna finally arrives, her eyes ‘close languidly’ and her body is ‘moist with sweat’, in the proper manner. Radha then confesses that she ‘cooed with the soft sound of the cuckoo; he mastered the procedures of the science of love; my tresses were strewn with loose flowers; the mass of my firm breast was scratched by his nails’. The ‘science of love’ is, of course, nothing less than Vatsyayana’s book. ‘O friend!’ Radha sighs. ‘Make him make love to me.’ And Krishna does – masterfully. Radha recalls how ‘The jewelled anklets rang out on my feet; he made love to me in various ways; my unfastened girdle jingled; he gave me kisses and pulled my hair. O friend!’ she sighs, again. ‘Make him make love to me.’

  Whether it was the dreamy effect of the love dance, the stirring inspiration of erotic temple sculpture, or the subtle, almost alchemical inflence of Tantrism, as India entered the second millennium kama once again became the fashion at India’s princely courts. Despite eroticism’s literary – and religious – success, study of the original science of kama had lapsed. Now, for the first time in centuries, new manuals of eroticism were commissioned by aristocratic patrons. A Nepalese Buddhist monk called Padmasri was one of the earliest writers to take up the erotic baton, in around the tenth or eleventh century. Just as Vatsyayana had turned to ancient predecessors, Padmasri turned to the by now ancient Kamasutra – along with a handful of other works, most of which have since been lost. The fact that he considered the Kamasutra to be the authoritative text, despite the profound social changes that had taken place in the eight hundred or so years since the nagaraka’s heyday, is a sign of Vatsyayana’s success.

  Padmasri’s approach to the master text set the standard for the many erotic manuals that followed his pioneering work. His Nagarasarvasva, or Complete Book of the Nagaraka, barely acknowledged the wider social and philosophical context of the original – perhaps because it was so blatantly out of date – and focused instead on the explicitly sexual content, which it expanded to encompass recent theological and scientific developments. The Nagarasarvasva recommends a quite astonishing number of different ways of kissing, for example, and gives endless recipes for cosmetics. Even more up to date was Padmasri’s new emphasis on psychology. The ‘stallion’ man was no longer, as Vatsyayana had it, simply a man with a large penis; according to Padmasri, he was also cunning, smart, bold and sexually voluptuous. The ‘doe’ woman, meanwhile, was not just a woman with a small vagina; she was jealous, passionate, soft-spoken and skilled in lovemaking.

  Padmasri also added a heavy dose of magic, probably under the influence of Tantrism, which had found p
articularly fertile soil in the lush mountains of Nepal. Magic, of course, was already present in the Kamasutra’s aphrodisiac recipes. Luck in love, for instance, required ‘beauty, good qualities, the right age, and generosity’, but, in the absence of these advantages, holding a gold-plated peacock’s or hyena’s eye in the right hand would do the trick, as would coating the penis with a powder of milkwort, milk-hedge, red arsenic, sulphur and honey – or even spreading the same mixture, with the judicious addition of dried monkey shit, on the desired woman. But where Vatsyayana’s magic was of the country-lore kind, relying on sympathetic magic and traditional medicines, Padmasri’s relied on highly developed Tantric-yogic theories.

  The Ratirahasya, or Love Secrets, of Kokkoka took Padmasri’s tendencies to another level. It was written ‘to satisfy the curiosity of the Most Excellent Vainyadatta concerning the art of love’, probably in the late twelfth century. Just like Padmasri, Kokkoka looked back to the Kamasutra as the fountain of erotic wisdom while making several innovations and borrowing selectively from alternative scientific traditions. After his invocation to the god Kama – ‘Friend of the World, Storehouse of Joys, the Fair, the Divine, the God presiding over Joy in Existence’ – Kokkoka granted that while ‘the repute and credit of Vatsyayana are worldwide’, it had to be admitted that ‘other authorities have made plain matters which he left obscure’.

  Kokkoka pointed out that where the Kamasutra listed three types of men and women, divided according to the size of their genitals, other authorities named four: the lotus-woman, conch-woman, ‘varied’ or ‘marvellous’ woman, and the unlovely elephant cow-woman. Like Padmasri, Kokkoka associated each with particular qualities. The elephant-woman, for instance, did not move daintily. Her feet were stout, her toes curling, her neck short and plump and her hair – horrors – red-brown. Her character was no more appealing: ‘she is apt to be spiteful,’ Kokkoka observed, ‘is rather corpulent, and her whole body, and more especially her yoni, has the odour of elephant “tears”.’ Compare the lotus-woman, who is ‘delicate like a lotus bud, her genital odour is of the lotus in flower, and her whole body divinely fragrant. She has eyes like a scared gazelle’s, a little red in the corners, and choice breasts that put to shame a pair of beautiful quince-fruits; she has a little nose like a til-flower.’ There is a deliciously pornographic flavour to this passage, a sensual savour that is absent from Vatsyayana’s clinical dissection of the topic. But Kokkoka was not indulging in salacious description. His task, as he saw it, was to cross-reference the Kamasutra with other ancient sources on kama, and to tie it to developments in related Sanskrit sciences. In describing the elephant cow- and lotus-woman, Kokkoka was drawing on the Sanskrit science of physiognomy, which was used, along with astrology, to predict a woman’s suitability as a bride and as a sexual partner. Each of the four types of women, Kokkoka argued, wants to have sex on different days of the lunar cycle, while ‘to obtain the best results’ each should be enjoyed at different times of the night. Kokkoka even offered a detailed calendar of lovemaking. On the fourth day, for example, ‘Lovers reckon to hold a woman tighter still, pull the two breasts hard together, bite the lower lip, mark the left thigh with the nails, make the “click” several times in the armpits and polish the body of Lady Lotus-eyes with the water that comes from the spring of her own love-juice.’ The secret of the ‘click’ in the armpits is, sadly, lost.

  Kokkoka saw himself as writing a new, improved book of love. It was not so much that the techniques of lovemaking had changed or needed to be updated (though Kokkoka was aware of the clitoris while Vatsyayana, apparently, was not). The great task for medieval writers like Kokkoka was not to develop the shastras, still less to test them empirically, but to bind them together in one vast and more truly, wholly encyclopedic system. Shastras began to encompass everything from Vedic grammar and the trivarga to – and this is a mere selection – medicine, weapons-training, music, perfumery, alchemy, penmanship, artithmetic, elephant-training and the noble art of the cutpurse. To this list could be added all or any of the ‘sixty-four arts’ or silpa-kalas of the Kamasutra, from needlework and gardening to magic, cock-fighting and, of course, lovemaking. Crucially, texts on even these areas of apparently practical knowledge tended not to describe contemporary reality but an ideal based on venerable – and sometimes ancient – sources. In the world of the shastra, truth was seen not as progressive but regressive. The problem, as Vatsyayana himself had pointed out, was that the further in time one moved from the original 100,000 chapters in the mind of Brahma, the more fragmented and unsatisfactory knowledge became.

  Kokkoka’s Ratirahasya and Padmasri’s Nagarasarvasva were the first major texts to return to the topic of erotic love in a thousand years. They epitomized what would become the Kamasutra’s sad legacy: the transformation of the masterwork of erotic culture into a mere rubric for sexual virtuosity. The gulf between the subtlety and sophistication of Vatsyayana and the decadent scholasticism of his successors is nowhere more glaring than in the work of Yasodhara, who wrote a detailed commentary on the Kamasutra in the thirteenth century. According to his own account, Yasodhara wrote his Jayamangala ‘because he was terrified of suffering a lover’s separation from sophisticated women’. His other motivation may have been less personal, and less pressing, but it was even more important. A thousand years after the Kamasutra’s composition, the medieval scholars attempting to pick up the threads of the kama shastra tradition were struggling to make sense of Vatsyayana’s words.

  The problem was Vatsyayana’s use of the sutra form. If an ideal sutra is ‘brief, unambiguous, essential, universal’, as the Sanskrit motto put it, Vatsyayana’s actual sutras had proved rather too brief, too essential and not altogether unambiguous. By the thirteenth century it was felt that the bare bones of the book of love needed some fleshing out. Yasodhara’s was the first commentary on the Kamasutra – at least, if there were other, earlier, works, they have been lost. Despite Yasodhara’s relative proximity to Vatsyayana’s time, he misunderstood or misrepresented the original again and again. Most significant was the difference he perceived between kama in general – that is, pleasure – and kama in particular – that is, sex. For Yasodhara, sex itself had become the ultimate focus. Pleasure might be experienced through touch in, say, the hand or foot, but the highest pleasure was ‘the reciprocal discovery by man and woman of the natural differences of the lower part of their bodies, which are the vulva and the penis’. Not only was this pleasure higher than non-sexual pleasure, for Yasodhara, but actually different in kind. Genital sexual pleasure produced a result, specifically the ‘emission of semen’ and the accompanying ‘bliss’ of orgasm. Other pleasures were mere sensations.

  Yasodhara’s narrow emphasis on sex sometimes led his interpretations bizarrely astray. Where the Kamasutra listed woodworking among the sixty-four arts of the cultivated person, Yasodhara felt the need to gloss the art as specifically very useful for the creation of dildos. When it came to the enumeration of the kinds of sex, Yasodhara really lost sight of the bigger picture. Vatsyayana mused that ‘since there are nine texts according to each of the criteria of size, endurance and temperament, when they are combined it is not possible to enumerate all the forms of sex’. It is not as if multiplication was unknown to third-century India. The point was rhetorical. Kama, for Vatsyayana, was greater than the shastra: sex was beyond the study of sex. For Yasodhara, the reverse was true. He pointed out with staggering pedantry that with nine forms in each of the three categories for men and women alike, ‘if they mate in all possible combinations, the total comes to 729.’ The scholarly weed of classification was now choking the flower of eroticism.

  Even as Yasodhara wrote his commentary, Muslim warlords were seizing control of northern India. For a time, the Sanskrit sciences, kama included, were insulated from foreign influences by their own innate conservatism, and there was little sign at first that the Islamic courts were much interested in the beliefs or practices of their defeated subjects. Gradual
ly, however, Muslim princes began to extend the same patronage to scholars as would have been offered by their predecessors, the Hindu rajas. Islamic and Sanskrit culture could hardly be described as cross-fertilizing, but they were beginning to flirt. Among the Hindu sciences embraced with the greatest enthusiasm was erotics.

  One of the sweetest and earliest fruits of this flirtation was the Ananga Ranga, whose euphonious title means ‘Stage [or theatre] of the Bodiless One’, referring to the ancient myth of how the god Kama was scorched to a cinder by Shiva’s third eye. The book was written at around the beginning of the sixteenth century, making it one of the last great Sanskrit works of erotology – and one of the earliest to be composed for a Muslim ruler. Its author, Kalyanamalla, begins by invoking the Hindu god Kama, ‘thee the sportive; thee, the wanton one, who dwellest in the hearts of all created beings’. He continues, almost in the same breath, by eulogizing his Muslim patron, Lada Khan, the son of King Ahmad, ‘the ornament of the Lodi House’. The Lodi family was a Muslim dynasty, reaching its proud zenith as the last ruling house of the Delhi sultanate before it was conquered by Babur, the first Mughal emperor, in 1526. Lada Khan was clearly interested enough in Sanskrit culture to commission this work, yet there is no sense that the fascination was mutual; the Muslim call to prayer does not so much as echo inside the calm, sequestered world of the Ananga Ranga.

  Sanskrit literature’s tendency to look backwards – rather than forwards, or even outwards – was clearly as strong as ever. Kalyanamalla claims to have consulted ‘many wise and holy men’ before composing his manual, and the wisest and holiest was evidently Vatsyayana. He is quoted twice by name (a chance that would save the Kamasutra from probable extinction in the nineteenth century, as the next chapter reveals) and is referred to respectfully as a rishi, or divinely inspired sage – once for recommending a powdered concoction that will render a man or woman ‘submissive and obedient to the fascinator’, and once for his teaching that adultery may be allowed only in certain life-threatening circumstances. These are, according to Kalyanamalla, ‘when he passes restless nights without the refreshment of sleep… when his looks become haggard and his body emaciated… when he feels himself growing shameless and departing from all sense of decency and decorum…when the state of mental intoxication verges upon madness…when fainting fits come on’ and, ultimately, ‘when he finds himself at the door of death’.