As with all India’s medieval sex manuals, the Ananga Ranga incorporated new material alongside the old. It identified four types of vagina. The vagina ‘which is soft inside as the filaments of the lotus-flower’ was, understandably, the best. Then there was the one ‘whose surface is studded with tender flesh-knots and similar rises’ and the one ‘which abounds in rolls, wrinkles, and corrugations’. At the bottom of the list was the vagina ‘which is rough as the cow’s tongue’. Kalyanamalla was not only concerned with the aesthetics of anatomy. The four kinds of vagina were a further refinement of the traditional four classes of women, and the fruit of an entire system of thought that also identified four periods of life, three kinds of humours, eight previous states of existence, eight signs of indifference, fifteen causes of woman’s unhappiness and twelve periods of greatest desire for sex – including ‘throughout the spring season, during thunder, lightning and rain’.
Both spring and storms, tellingly, are archetypal poetic situations for the nayika or heroine of erotic literature, and she, rather than any real lover, was Kalyanamalla’s true obsession. The Ananga Ranga ended with a full rundown of the eight kinds of heroine accepted by Bharata’s Natyashastra – the ultimate source – and poetic convention. ‘The woman who goes to meet her lover’ Kalyanamalla described as ‘she who, agitated with passion, extremely bold, her ornaments on, stealing out in the night, would go to the house of her lover for love-sport – her, the wise men call the abhisarika’. ‘The betrayed heroine’ was ‘she whose husband – his body bearing love-imprints inflicted by the co-wife, his eyes red and bedimmed with sleep – approaches her in the morning, speaking coaxingly out of fear – her Bharata calls the khandita’. It was these women, the nayikas of the poets rather than Vatsyayana’s flesh-and-blood lovers, who would be the chief inspiration for the next major development in Indian erotics: the creation of sensual, jewel-like miniature paintings and illuminated manuscripts.
After the Ananga Ranga, sex manuals continued to be composed, but they were ever more debased and derivative. The Kamasutra itself reared its head in public from time to time, but with ever-decreasing vigour. A certain King Virabhadradeva composed a metrical version of the Kamasutra in 1577, while a commentary on the text, the Praudhapriya, was written in Varanasi as late as 1788. But despite these occasional stirrings, the shastra of kama underwent a slow, inexorable detumescence, and awareness of the Kamasutra collapsed alongside it. As Hindu court culture gradually crumbled under the pressure of the ever-expanding Muslim presence in India, Sanskrit scholarship diminished and erotic poetry finally became moribund. Brahmin scholars, meanwhile, regarded the erotic with mounting disapproval. Vatsyayana’s book of love steadily withdrew into the dusty darkness of religious libraries, to be hoarded among millions of decaying manuscripts.
Even as the Kamasutra itself was slowly forgotten, kama grew ever more visible – largely thanks to the new influence of Persian painting. It is impossible to trace the thread of any continuity with Hindu art, as almost no painting survives beyond a few fifth-century cave murals in Ajanta. (The alluring scenes of courtly pleasures depicted there may actually be the closest thing there is to an illustration of the Kamasutra but the relationship is strained – not just by a couple of centuries but by the fact that the cave-artists of Ajanta were Buddhist.) It is clear at least that erotic art in India long pre-dated the arrival of Islamic culture. The Kamasutra itself recommended painting as one of the sixty-four arts – along with ‘cutting leaves into shapes’ and ‘making diadems and headbands’. It even specified that the nagaraka should have a drawing board and pencils in his ideal home. The Natyashastra described how theatre walls were decorated with male and female figures, patterns of intertwining creepers and depictions of heroic deeds.
Sadly, it is impossible to imagine what the artwork sketched by the nagaraka would have looked like, or to reconjure the paintings that adorned the theatres of the Gupta era. If the gulf between the serenity of ancient Rome’s statuary and its earthy and often libidinous paintings is anything to go by, even the sensuous sculptures of nymphs and lovemaking couples that adorn Hindu temples may bear little relation to the tradition in painting that preceded them. Still less can we conjure the ‘illustrations’ that accompanied the Kamasutra in pre-Muslim times. There probably never were any. In fact, no Indian illustrated manuscripts whatsoever survive from before the twelfth century, and illuminated texts in any number date back only to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Given the fragility of palm-leaf manuscripts, which were not supplanted by paper until the late fourteenth century, not to mention India’s hot, damp climate and thriving insect and rodent life, together with the scholarly habit of replacing rather than hoarding old manuscripts, it is just possible that all older illuminated texts have simply been lost – including those of a putative, illustrated Kamasutra. But it is unlikely.
Indian erotic art as it survives today is the beautiful child of the strange marriage between Sanskrit erotic literature and Persian miniature painting. Persian techniques were first introduced into India in the late fifteenth century, and painters were quick to seize on erotic themes, notably Krishna’s celebrated love-dance. When the Mughal Emperor Akbar came to power, in 1556, over a thousand local artists trained under famed Persian masters and set about illustrating Hindu books that had been newly translated into Persian. But the greatest achievements in erotic illustration took place not at the great Mughal court, but at the courts of their subject Hindu princes, the Rajputs of north-western India.
Rajput ateliers developed an entire erotic genre, from as early as the fifteenth century. The most popular subjects by far were the nayaka and nayika, the erotic hero and heroine, who were sometimes specifically identified as blue-black Krishna and his cow-girl lover, Radha. Drawing on their endless flirtations, philanderings and disappointments, Rajput court painters created albums of paintings known as ragamalas, or garlands of ragas – the raga being a kind of inspiring mood (or sometimes a melodic pattern) that was associated with a specific time of day, a season and, in erotic painting, a crux moment in a love affair. The focus was on the psychology of the lovers, and from any given ragamala series only a few paintings might be explicitly sexual in content. Nevertheless, the cultivated lover would have used the albums for ambient erotic inspiration. Like the plays of Kalidasa and the poetry of the Classical age, they were intended to stimulate a heightened mood of sensual awareness. They were in a sense, pornography, albeit of a very elevated kind.
Sexual intercourse was, of course, depicted in Indian painting, especially from the eighteenth century onwards. Anyone who has looked over one of the myriad twentieth-century coffee-table versions of the Kamasutra will have seen lurid and often improbable scenes, perhaps involving five or six women, a swing, a number of embroidered cushions and impressively yogic levels of flexibility. The roots of this highly explicit representation of sex extended back to the medieval kama shastra texts, and ultimately to the Kamasutra, but these paintings were no more illustrative of the book of love than had been the temple carvings at Khajuraho and Konarak. Erotic scenes often simply advertised the masculinity, prowess and status of the sitter. Eighteenth-century Indian princes might have themselves painted as consummate lovers, just as – in rather different poses and costumes – they would have themselves portrayed as great hunters or statesmen. Where European noblemen tended to portray their mastery of artha, or worldly success, the Indian aristocrat, as ever, was also concerned with kama.
The inspiration for erotic portraiture was not so much the Kamasutra, then, but the same masculine pride that led English aristocrats to pose with their dogs, horses or daughters in endless paintings by Reynolds or Gainsborough. And at the very same time that erotic portraiture was becoming the fashion in India, Joshua Reynolds was painting portraits of early British adventurers on the subcontinent. These venturesome soldiers, merchants and missionaries may not have taken off their own clothes, but they were more than happy to report back on the exotic and
erotic curiosities that had caught the roving colonial eye. If it wasn’t talk of sensual sculptures, it was descriptions of alluring ‘bayadères’ and ‘nautch girls’ – the devadasis or temple-dancer prostitutes who were the distant and diminished descendants of the Kamasutra’s exquisitely refined courtesans.
These dancer-prostitutes were one of the few visible survivals of the almost moribund practices of the shastra of kama. Erotic art was another. In the 1830s, George Eden, one of the first governor-generals of India, visited the court of the Maharaja of Sirmur at his capital of Nahan, in the hills of the Punjab – which had been one of the heartlands of erotic painting. After the ladies left the room, the Maharaja proudly showed off his gallery of lubricious pictures. Many, it seems, had been painted by courtiers themselves; if so, then teaching of the sixty-four arts – which traditionally included painting – was clearly still preserved 1,500 years after the heyday of the nagaraka, in aristocratic circles at least. Meanwhile, in the east of India, in Orissa, popular ‘posture books’ showing a gamut of sexual positions were created by the hundred. Some were picked up by fascinated British travellers and collectors, but they gave little hint of their origins, as the postures rarely acknowledged any kama shastra text, and the artistry was usually poor.
Such arts were the last, half-rotten fruits of the tradition that had spawned them. Vatsyayana’s book of love, by contrast, was by now all but buried in the past, and discovering it would require painstaking digging. Among the first to put foot to spade was Sir William Jones, a diligent Sanskrit scholar and the first Westerner to roam widely in the great literary treasure-house of Sanskrit literature. He stumbled across a key relic of India’s erotic civilization almost by accident. It was Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, and it was so good that Jones could not help but translate it. He was reluctant, however, to expose to the world the existence of the most explicitly erotic material. He observed drily that ‘it is remarkable to what a degree [India’s] works of imagination are pervaded by the idea of sexuality’, and to combat this vicious tendency he expurgated the magnificent conclusion from his 1792 translation. The glorious lovemaking that concludes Radha and Krishna’s tormented affair was thereby lost, for a time at least.
As India’s breathtaking literary heritage was slowly uncovered, however, it was inevitable that the erotic tradition would eventually be exposed along with it, despite the efforts of the Joneses. But it would take two unusual Victorian gentlemen, combining the rare talents of being both Indologists and iconoclasts, to lay bare the knowledge of that tradition and bring it home triumphantly to the West. Astonishingly, these two enthusiastic British amateurs would ultimately be responsible for India’s own rediscovery of its greatest erotic classic.
WHEN THE GIRL accepts the embrace, the man should put a tambula or screw of betel nut and betel leaves in her mouth, and if she will not take it, he should induce her to do so by conciliatory words, entreaties, oaths, and kneeling at her feet… When she is asked by the man whether she wishes for him, and whether she likes him, she should remain silent for a long time, and when at last importuned to reply, should give him a favourable answer by a nod of her head. If the man is previously acquainted with the girl he should converse with her by means of a female friend, who may be favourable to him, and in the confidence of both, and carry on the conversation on both sides. On such an occasion the girl should smile with her head bent down, and if the female friend say more on her part than she was desired to do, she should chide her and dispute with her. The female friend should say in jest even what she is not desired to say by the girl, and add, ‘she says so’, on which the girl should say indistinctly and prettily, ‘O no! I did not say so’, and she should then smile and throw an occasional glance towards the man.
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
Part III: About the Acquisition of a Wife
Chapter II: Of Creating Confidence in the Girl
translated by ‘A.F.F and B.F.R’ (1883)
CHAPTER THREE
The Hindoo Art of Love
In October 1842, a young Indian Army ensign, Richard Francis Burton, arrived in Bombay. He was a pugnacious man of twenty-one with a record of failing to fit in. At Oxford, he had appalled his tutors, quite deliberately, by speaking Latin with a full-blooded Mediterranean accent and had even had the temerity to seek private tuition in Arabic – he was flatly turned down. Burton had shocked fellow students by sporting a luxuriant moustache on arrival at his college and by challenging a rival to fight a duel – a notion so quaint as to be embarrassing. After less than two years, his irrepressible gambling and roistering, and his ostentatious independence of mind, became too much for the college authorities and he was expelled. In the hope that the army might instil some discipline and provide an outlet for his bellicosity, Burton’s father bought him a commission in the Bombay Native Infantry for the princely sum of £500. The ongoing campaigns in Afghanistan, it was felt, would provide a speedy road to fame and fortune, or at least to promotion.
Unfortunately, by the time Burton’s ship had docked at Bombay, after a four-month voyage, the fighting was over. It was the first blow in what would become a lifetime’s pattern of frustration and disappointment, and the first to push him towards other outlets for his aggression and ambition. Burton was sent, instead, to the regimental headquarters in Baroda, where he began, almost obsessively, to learn Indian languages. With the help of his munshi, an old Parsee teacher called Dosabhai Sohrabji, and a series of bubus, or local servants-cum-mistresses, he passed the army’s examination in Hindustani (or Hindi) within a year. Burton later told the story of a certain unnamed Bombay army officer who had shocked his Indian subordinates by ‘having learned Hindostani from women’ and consequently speaking of himself in the feminine, a linguistic error that ‘hugely scandalized the sepoys’. Burton’s bubus, however, were more than worth the occasional linguistic slip. He later wrote that a local mistress was ‘all but indispensable to the student’, as she taught him ‘not only Hindostani grammar, but the syntaxes of native Life’. It was a prescient comment. Burton would later become the driving force in uncovering India’s original grammar of social and sexual life: the Kamasutra.
Lacking opportunities to distinguish himself militarily – various mischances and mistimings would ensure that he never fought in a single campaign – Burton devoted himself to the study of Indian languages and, less officially, to the study of Indian sex. He quickly added Gujarati, Marathi, Sindhi and Persian to his Hindustani, and began to revise and improve the basic Arabic he had taught himself at Oxford. In 1844, his unusual linguistic talents were put to use for the Survey Office in the province of Sindh, in modern-day Pakistan. Burton was probably engaged in low-key intelligence work. At least, from this date he began to mix with local people in disguise. In the character of a half-Iranian, half-Arab merchant called ‘Mirza Abdullah the Bushiri’, Burton began trading from rented shops in Karachi, furnishing them, in his own words, ‘with clammy dates, viscid molasses, tobacco, ginger, rancid oil and strong-smelling sweetmeats’. His private interest may have been largely anthropological, but Mirza Abdullah’s eavesdropping on the gossip of the bazaar found its way into reports that were passed to Captain William McMurdo, the head of the Intelligence Section under Charles Napier, the conqueror of Sindh.
After a year or two with the Sindh Survey Office, Burton received a special commission to investigate the male brothels of Karachi. ‘Being then the only British officer who could speak Sindhi,’ he later wrote, ‘Mirza Abdullah the Bushiri passed many an evening in the townlet, visited all the porneia and obtained the fullest details which were duly despatched to Government House.’ These fullest details, according to Burton, included descriptions of how boy prostitutes were worth twice as much as eunuchs, on the grounds that ‘the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movements of the animal’. This kind of exacting, intimate and shocking detail was an early taste of what would become vintage Burton. Inevitably, it profo
undly offended his superiors. After Napier left Sindh, the infamous report found its way to Bombay, where someone whom Burton would later only name as ‘one of Sir Charles Napier’s successors’ proposed Burton’s dismissal from the service in an ‘excess of outraged modesty’. The prudish officer can only have been General Auchmuty or his subordinate, Colonel Corsellis. According to a rare surviving notebook of Burton’s, he had already fallen out with Corsellis over an epitaph jokingly improvised one night in the Officers’ Mess: ‘Here lies the body of Colonel Corsellis,’ Burton extemporized. ‘The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.’ The offended colonel reported Burton for insubordination.
Whether or not Corsellis privately blackballed Burton for his unseemly interest in boys’ scrotal bridles is something of a mystery. Burton’s career undoubtedly began to founder. It is possible, however, there was more to it than the notorious Karachi report. Burton’s foremost bibliographer, James Casada, spent years trying to trace the report and found nothing. Instead, he uncovered only a consistently positive service record, ‘regularly interlaced with commendations and containing no hint of scandals’. Casada concluded that Burton ‘retrospectively romanticized and likely fictionalized his parting of ways with the Indian Army’. Equally plausible is the conclusion that such a dangerously obscene report would have been quickly destroyed. There is, however, another possibility: that the man they called ‘Ruffian Dick’ concocted the whole ‘Karachi report’ as an elaborate cover for his own, private investigations of India’s homosexual brothels. Any potentially damaging rumours about such activities could thus be explained away as a malicious echo of these unacknowledged services to the Crown.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 7
