The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

  The Kalogynomia would have been more useful to the sexual tyro than Every Woman’s Book or The Elements of Social Science. Bell may not have enumerated the postures, but he did describe the sexual act with unprecedented precision, giving a helpful sense of the kind of movements that the man might be expected to perform. ‘In this operation… it is not one and the same contact, but a repetition of contacts, which communicates pleasure. Hence in coition, the male and female alternately withdraw and approach in manners which are modified by the sensibility, the disposition, the taste, and the experience of each.’ Unfortunately, this was about all Bell wrote on the specific topic of how to actually perform the sex act. It was hardly a detailed breakdown of coital positions, still less an eight-part disquisition on how to give oral sex. As Arbuthnot noted, the Kalogynomia had its uses but offered little more than ‘elementary principles’ when compared to the Kamasutra. Writing to Ashbee, Arbuthnot compared the woeful state of European – and, worst of all, English – sex education with ‘the philosophy and knowledge of conjugal arts peculiar to the people who dwell under a hotter sun than we do’. Referring to ‘the writings of the old Indian sages’, he concluded that ‘Europeans and modern society generally would be greatly benefited by some such treatises’.

  The Kamasutra, then, was designed not just to fill a gap in the market but, by virtue of its exoticism, to show how anomalous and culturally determined that gap was. Burton scornfully compared ‘the ultra-delicacy, the squeamishness of an age which is by no means purer or more virtuous than its ruder predecessors’ with the superiority of what he considered to be Oriental attitudes. He admired the worthy pragmatism of ‘Moslems and Easterns in general’, who

  intelligently study the art and mystery of satisfying the physical woman… I have noticed among barbarians the system of ‘making men’, that is, of teaching lads first arrived at puberty the nice conduct of the instrumentum paratum plantandis avibus: a branch of the knowledge-tree which our modern education grossly neglects, thereby entailing untold miseries upon individuals, families and generations. The mock virtue, the most immodest modesty of England and of the United States in the nineteenth century, pronounces the subject foul and fulsome: ‘Society’ sickens at all details; and hence it is said abroad that the English have the finest women in Europe and least know how to use them.

  Burton’s jocularity – the Latin translates as ‘the instrument designed for the ploughing of birds’ – belies his outraged sincerity. As well as witnessing the behaviour of the contemporary East, Burton had absorbed the arguments of the Kamasutra. These described sexual expertise as nothing less than a social and moral obligation, especially for men. According to Vatsyayana, women should be at least acquainted with the science of kama, but it was particularly incumbent upon men to educate and improve themselves in this respect. Knowledge and employment of the ‘sixty-four arts’ guaranteed the nagaraka respect among the learned, made him a leader in society and earned him the love of his wife – as well as the wives of others, not to mention courtesans. As Burton put it, ‘where then is the shame of teaching what it is shameful not to have learnt?’

  In Vatsyayana’s view, it was only by proper study and self-improvement that humanity was elevated above the animals, and this applied to sexuality as much as to any other field of human activity. According to the Kamasutra, animals merely rut unrestrained in season, their ‘intercourse not being preceded by thought of any kind’. Humanity, by contrast, distinguishes itself by cultivation. Or, as Vatsyayana put it, ‘sexual intercourse being a thing dependent on man and woman requires the application of proper means’. The argument that art improved nature was a standard of the Western classical tradition, it was just that the West, at this time, did not apply it to the realm of sexuality.

  After the flurry of activity surrounding the printing of the Kamasutra, two watchful years passed without any further sign of the Kama Shastra Society – and without prosecution. Emboldened, in 1885 Arbuthnot and Burton issued another Indian erotic classic: the Ananga Ranga. This time it bore a more confident title-page declaring it to have been ‘Translated from the Sanscrit and annotated by A.F.F. and B.F.R.’ The Kama Shastra Society’s subscribers must have raised their eyebrows at the audacity. The translators were deliberately challenging and goading the censors. The book’s introduction touted the ‘extreme delicacy’ with which the sixteenth-century author, Kalyanamalla, had handled his theme, while also giving a fairly unequivocal idea of the actual contents. Readers were promised that ‘all you who read this book shall know how delicious an instrument is woman, when artfully played upon; how capable she is of producing the most exquisite harmony; of executing the most complicated variations and of giving the divinest pleasures’.

  In the same year, the Kama Shastra Society produced the first volumes of a monumental translation of the Arabian Nights, or The Thousand Nights and a Night. Unlike the Kamasutra or the Ananga Ranga, it was not a new and entirely original translation, but it was the first to present the original stories unexpurgated, complete with what its publishers called all ‘the naïve indecencies’. The book was another private printing, to be sold to subscribers only, but it was not considered so outrageous that the translator’s name had to be concealed behind the mask of a fictitious society. His identity was plainly announced. It was none other than Her Majesty’s Consul in Trieste, the cunningly disguised penetrator of Mecca, the bold discoverer of the Great Lakes region of Africa, the brilliant swordsman, controversial diplomat and polyglot Orientalist: Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. As the sexologist Alex Comfort later put it, the djinn was right out of the bottle. If Burton was behind the Nights, the public would know that he was behind the Kama Shastra Society – at least, those members of the public who had ever heard of it would know. Dazzled by Burton’s celebrity, perhaps, no one troubled to enquire into the identity of his original co-translator, ‘A.F.F.’

  Touting his Arabian Nights to Bernard Quaritch, who had been one of the first booksellers to stock FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Burton had wondered, ‘What will Mrs Grundy say?’ He promptly answered his own question: ‘I predict read every word of it and call the translator very ugly names.’ He was right: The Arabian Nights was a massive commercial success, albeit a controversial one. So successful were the ten volumes of the Nights that a further six Supplemental Nights were issued the following year. They too sold out. At last, Burton’s career was crowned with financial reward. He commented bitterly that ‘I struggled for 47 years. I distinguished myself in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a “thank you” nor a single farthing. I translated a doubtful book in my old age and immediately made 16,000 guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money.’

  Despite his earnest protestations that his books were aimed at serious scholars, despite his lofty aims to shame hypocrisy and expose ignorance, Burton had discovered in the most tangible way possible that, as sex became an ever greater preoccupation in Western society, books about sex would sell in ever greater numbers. As the 1880s drew to a close, Burton set about translating erotica with a furious energy. If the Midian and West Africa could not be made to produce gold, perhaps dirty books would do it. It was as if he could sense the approaching end – and sense the direction in which social mores were moving.

  Burton believed that Anglo-American society was temporarily aberrant, and that natural good sense would eventually be restored. In 1888, he wrote that the public was ‘slowly but surely emancipating itself from the prudish and prurient reticences and the immodest and immoral modesties of the early nineteenth century’. His own work would be judged, in good time, with ‘full and ample justice’. In May 1889, he wrote to the publisher Leonard Smithers to say that ‘It appears to me that the national purity is going too far and that a reaction will presently set in.’ Smithers was a self-consciously bohemian figure who dressed as an undertaker and legendarily had himself photographed buggering his wife in a basement print works
on the west side of Shepherd’s Bush (an act bizarrely reminiscent of the eighteenth-century maharajas having themselves painted having sex with their wives and courtesans). In the coming decade he would become the celebrated ‘Publisher to the Decadents’ – notably Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley.

  In early 1890, Burton began work on a revised translation of The Perfumed Garden of the Sheik Nefzaoui, a sex manual sometimes referred to as ‘the Arab Kama Sutra’. The Kama Shastra Society had already issued a subscription-only English edition back in 1886, but it was little more than a rip-off of a French translation printed in Paris by the highbrow Parisian pornographer Isidore Liseux – with the added bonus of plentiful creative additions from Burton’s own hand. Burton, as ever, was quite happy to add material; what he could not bear, as a translator, was to excise it. The French version of The Perfumed Garden had lacked a crucial section on homosexuality found in the Arabic original, but Burton finally tracked down a complete manuscript after a long search. In his declining months he strove to rectify his former work, labouring every day from half past five in the morning until dusk. He gave his manuscript the new title of The Scented Garden and asked Arbuthnot by letter to take care of the manuscript in the event of his death.

  In May, Arbuthnot came to Trieste to visit his old friend. Together they sat out on the verandah, listening to the nightingales, recalling their Indian days and no doubt arguing about their latest translation projects. A photograph shows the two men sitting together with Isabel in the garden. A jovial and mischievous Bunny, his bowler perched cheekily on his head, looks across at his white-haired, white-bearded and obviously failing friend. Burton described Arbuthnot’s stay as ‘like a whiff of London in the Pontine marshes of Trieste’. If so, it was the last breath of that cosmopolitan air. As the summer waned, Burton’s health declined. By October, according to his early biographer, Thomas Wright, ‘His eyes, though still fierce and penetrating, were sunk into hollow cavities. His body was emaciated, his hands were thin to transparency, his voice was sometimes inarticulate.’ Together with Isabel, he took to releasing caged birds in the garden. On 29 October, Isabel returned from Sunday Mass to find her husband working on the last page of the twentieth chapter of The Scented Garden. By midnight, he was complaining of severe gout pain. His condition quickly deteriorated. Shortly before dawn, frantically gasping for air, he cried out, ‘I am dying, I am dead,’ and collapsed.

  A few weeks later, a grieving Isabel wrote to Arbuthnot and his wife Elinor to thank them for their sympathy. ‘I am so thoroughly stunned that I feel nothing outside, but my heart is crucified,’ she said. ‘I have saved his gold watch-chain as a memorial for you.’ Arbuthnot might have preferred her to save Burton’s work, especially the manuscript of The Scented Garden. But this was not possible. In the wake of her husband’s death, Isabel had burned the text, claiming she had ‘reason to know that I did what he wanted me to do, what he wished himself’. The legend of an ‘insane orgy’ of manuscript burning that accompanied the destruction of The Scented Garden is ill-founded, although certainly Isabel cleared out the house in Trieste with a recent widow’s manic thoroughness, and she ordered many more papers to be destroyed after her own death – including, it seems, everything that related to the Kamasutra or the Kama Shastra Society.

  Isabel is often supposed to have been so shocked by discovering what her husband was really up to in his study that she cleansed her house by fire. In fact, she later wrote that while ‘Richard wished that his men friends shd think I did not know what he was engaged upon’, she knew perfectly well what he was about. She read his draft manuscripts. Coyly, she protested, ‘I cannot afford to be particular what words I see, nor do they do me any harm.’ Even in the first weeks after her husband’s death, Isabel was impressively methodical, not maniacal. She took care to make a copy of the first and last lines of every page of The Scented Garden. She was clearly well aware of the speed and ruthlessness with which the pornographic book industry worked, and felt she needed to be able to defend her husband’s reputation against unscrupulous publishers trying to claim their own, pirated versions as the work of ‘Burton’.

  Isabel could not, however, stand guard over books that had already been published – although, ironically, if she had chosen to preserve the papers relating to the Kama Shastra Society, Burton’s supposed authorship of the 1883 translation of the Kamasutra would long since have been exposed as dubious. In her Life of Burton, Isabel explained that she was afraid not of the nature of her husband’s work but of its possible reception. She feared that his publications ‘would by degrees descend amongst the populace out of Holywell Street, the very opposite result to what the upright, manly translator would have desired, and the whole contents might be so misunderstood by the uneducated that the good, noble stories [and the] life of Richard Burton… might be handed down to posterity in a false light’. The funeral pyre of Burton’s The Scented Garden may have run scandalously counter to his lifelong campaign against hypocrisy and bowdlerization but, judging by what happened to the Kamasutra after his death, Isabel was remarkably prescient. The next century in the life of the book would largely belong not to the upright and manly worlds of thrusting explorers and penetrating anthropologists, but to the murky realm of pornographic publishing. The Kamasutra’s future would belong to Holywell Street and its descendants – to the nagarakas of the modern world. As ever, scholars would have to fight to reclaim the book as their own.

  IF A MAN is attached to her and has done favours for her in the past, even if he now yields but little fruit, she keeps him around by lying. But if he has nothing left at all and no resources to do anything about it, she gets rid of him by some contrivance, without any consideration, and gets support from another man. She does for him what he does not want, and she does repeatedly what he has criticized. She curls her lip and stamps on the ground with her foot. She talks about things he does not know about. She shows no amazement, but only contempt, for the things he does know about. She punctures his pride. She has affairs with men who are superior to him. She ignores him. She criticizes men who have the same faults. And she stalls when they are alone together. She is upset by the things he does for her when they are making love. She does not offer him her mouth.

  Kamasutra

  Book Six: Courtesans

  Chapter Three: Ways to Get Rid of Him

  translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002)

  CHAPTER SIX

  Overwhelming Obscenity

  Without Richard Burton’s presiding genius, the Kamasutra would be no better known today than Tung-Hsüan’s seventh-century Art of Love, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria or any one of a host of other sex manuals or erotic treatises from distant countries or times. It was Burton’s list of erotomaniac contacts that ensured the initial success of the Kama Shastra Society’s printings. It was Burton’s status as a great explorer and Orientalist that lent the Kamasutra authenticity as a piece of anthropological archaeology, offering a fig-leaf cover of at least semi-respectability. Ultimately, it was Burton’s reputation as a Romantic, counter-culture hero, waving goodbye to – or giving the finger to – Victorian values with one hand, and beckoning in the world of modernity with the other, that ushered the Kamasutra towards its fame and ubiquity in the twentieth century.

  More immediately, it was Burton’s decision to publish ‘his’ translation of the Kamasutra as a limited edition for subscribers only that, perversely, ensured its worldwide fame. The fact that the 1883 Kamasutra was a secretive private printing meant that its publishers could not establish copyright; and in any case they would hardly dare bring a prosecution for any infringment of their rights. This lack of legal protection did not escape the attention of the buccaneer pornographers of London and Paris – in some cases, the very same people who had supplied Fred Hankey and Richard Monckton Milnes with their ‘private’ libraries. As Isabel Burton had feared, the British public was less interested in the ‘manners and customs of the olden East’, as the 1883 Kama
sutra’s dedication had phrased it, than in sex.

  Exotic, aristocratic sex was particularly fascinating. The vellum-bound second printing was hardly off the presses before the first pirated editions were being sold on Holywell Street. This was the first pulse of the feverish underground life of the Kamasutra, a life that would continue for as long as England’s obscenity laws lasted. The earliest editions were classy affairs, physically at least, reflecting the perceived tone of the Kamasutra. The notorious pornographer Edward Avery carefully copied the Kama Shastra Society’s pristine white-vellum bindings for his copycat editions, while in 1885 the Parisian publisher of erotica, Isidore Liseux, produced a French ‘édition privée’ in a limited run of 220 copies, each of which cost the princely sum of 75 francs. Such high production qualities advertised the fact that this was no mere sex guide; it was a precious and elegant work. This was lovemaking for lords and princes.

  Isidore Liseux’s original advertisement assured readers that no book was ‘more capable of exciting curiosity’, that they would ‘enter into a civilization full of mysteries, a kind of virgin forest in which they would march from surprise to surprise’. Readers of the Kamasutra felt themselves to be explorers of exotic realms. The advertisement also suggested a surprisingly close acquaintance with the story of how this ‘virgin forest’ was originally discovered. ‘This extraordinary work only exists, even in India, in manuscript,’ it boasted. ‘Hardly more than a few copies are known, and these are carefully hidden from the eyes of the profane in the libraries of Benares, Calcutta and Jaipur.’ This was quite true. As Arbuthnot and Burton had discovered in the 1870s, far from being the well-thumbed Bible of a living erotic tradition in India, the Kamasutra was in fact extremely difficult to find. Manuscripts were rare, and printed copies of the original Sanskrit simply did not exist. The erotic tradition in India had fallen into a long sleep.