The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

  In 1883, however, everything had changed. The printing of the English Kamasutra acted as a starting gun to Europe’s pornographic publishers, causing them to fall over each other to see who could pirate the book fastest. The noise they made was loud enough to wake up even Sanskrit scholars – some as far away as India itself. The truth is that it was Arbuthnot and Burton – along with Indraji and Bhide, of course – who stimulated India to rediscover the Ur-text of its own, almost-vanished erotic tradition. In 1891, Pandit Durgaprasad, of Jaipur, published an edition of the Sanskrit text in Bombay. It was the first time that Vatsyayana’s original sutras had ever been printed. Despite the title-page’s warning – printed in English – that the book was ‘For Private Circulation only’, it managed to excite ripples in learned circles. In July, the eminent Sanskritist Peter Peterson actually dared to read aloud a review of the new edition to the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The reactions of the audience were, unfortunately, not recorded.

  Peterson had been a personal friend of both Bhagvanlal Indraji and Georg Bühler, and had, he claimed, himself secured a fragment of the Jayamangala for the Bombay government collection back in 1883. He was interested not in the Kamasutra’s explicit material but in the extraordinary way in which it had evidently influenced Sanskrit drama. Peterson avowed that the book was ‘a work which is destined, I believe, to throw a great deal of light on much that is still dark in the ancient history of this country’. He would be proved right. The Kamasutra was a kind of key to the treasure-house of Sanskrit erotic literature. Indian eroticism was clearly no decadent medieval sideshow, and Indian pandits and Western Indologists alike would have to change the way they thought about India – as, ultimately, would the rest of the world.

  Pandit Durgaprasad did not know it, but he had also won a race with Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot – thereby, in a small way, reclaiming the Kamasutra for India. Even as his Sanskrit edition was about to reach the presses, Arbuthnot was struggling to get his own (or rather, Bhagvanlal Indraji’s) Sanskrit text published in Britain. Arbuthnot’s slow, quiet – and ultimately ineffectual – approach reveals quite how crucial a role Burton had played in making sure the English translation saw the light of day. Back in March 1884, Arbuthnot had written to the head of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, E.W.B. Nicholson, to say that he had given Max Müller, Oxford’s stylish and extrovert Professor of Comparative Philology, a copy of his Kamasutra, and had asked him ‘to be good enough to give it to you with my compliments’. Arbuthnot’s next sentence was written in red ink, and underlined for good measure: ‘The Sanscrit mSS he will hand over to you for the Bodleian when has done with them.’ Nicholson must have wondered what on earth Müller was doing with the manuscripts. The answer did not arrive until seven years later, in July 1891, when Müller wrote to Nicholson from his rooms in one of the brand-new villas of Norham Gardens, in the academic enclave of north Oxford. He had lent the Kamasutra manuscripts to the Sanskritist Maurice Winternitz, he explained, who had been thinking about publishing the Sanskrit text. ‘But as the text has now been published in India,’ Müller continued, ‘he has given up the idea.’

  Arbuthnot had missed his chance. His manuscripts – Indraji’s revised text of the Kamasutra and the original Benares copy – were quietly deposited in the Bodleian, where they have since gathered dust, unrecognized. Even if rich British pornophiles and Bombay pandits were ready for the Kamasutra, Oxford Sanskritists were not. Arbuthnot threw himself instead into more mainstream projects, reviving his idea of an Oriental Translation Fund and contributing generously to the Royal Asiatic Society from his own pocket for the purpose. Thirteen volumes were published by the time of his death in 1901; not one of them was an erotic work.

  The disappearance of Arbuthnot’s manuscripts, fortunately, did not mean that the Kamasutra vanished from sight. It was given a new impetus by the distinguished German Sanskritist Richard Schmidt, who published his own translation in 1897. As had been the case in 1883, Schmidt was keen for his book not to fall into the hands of the profane. Instead of limiting the print run, as Arbuthnot and Burton had done, Schmidt took the extraordinary decision to translate all the Kamasutra’s sexually explicit material into Latin rather than German, thus creating a bilingual text. The result was that only linguists – or of course gentlemen with the benefit of a Classical education – would be able to understand the book’s dirty bits. Partly thanks to its lack of obscenity – vulgar obscenity, at any rate – Schmidt’s translation became accepted as the academic gold standard. It would never become anything like as well known as the 1883 Kamasutra, but the distance that it had marked out for itself from the world of smutty books allowed it to be read in influential circles.

  The ripples of the stone cast in 1883 were now spreading outwards. Schmidt’s Kamasutra was picked up by the Berlin dermatologist and ‘father of sexology’, Iwan Bloch, who discussed Vatsyayana’s work in an essay he wrote on ‘Indian Medicine’ in 1902. Bloch, in turn, was read by Havelock Ellis, Britain’s pioneer sexologist. It’s likely that Ellis knew about the 1883 Kamasutra early on, perhaps through his membership of the Fellowship of the New Life, a pacifist-leaning, liberal-radical club dedicated to self-improvement. Many members of the Fellowship were fascinated by Indian mysticism, notably Annie Besant, the celebrated Theosophist (and erstwhile publisher of The Fruits of Philosophy), and Edward Carpenter, a homosexual activist and close colleague of Ellis’s who had travelled in India and was a devoted student of the Bhagavadgita. Ellis had also worked with Burton’s old flagellant friend A.C. Swinburne on the Mermaid series of unexpurgated Elizabethan dramas, and had collaborated closely with John Addington Symonds on their landmark 1896 study of homosexuality, Sexual Inversion. Symonds, in turn, had corresponded at length with Richard Burton, then England’s chief authority on the topic of homosexuality, thanks to the essay in his Arabian Nights. (Sexual Inversion accused Burton of being ‘wholly unacquainted with the recent psychological investigations into sexual inversion’, thus distancing what Ellis liked to consider his new, modern, psychological approach from Burton’s catch-all, literary-ethnological approach.)

  It’s impossible to be sure how exactly Ellis first heard about the Kamasutra, but certainly, by the time he published Sex in Relation to Society, in 1910, he knew enough about it to write: ‘there has long existed an English translation of this work.’ Ellis was fascinated by the Kamasutra’s discussion of erotic pain and seductive techniques, and described both at length in his book. He also affirmed that ‘The old Hindu erotic writers attributed great importance alike to the man’s attentiveness to the woman’s erotic needs… He must do all that he can to procure her pleasure, says Vatsyayana.’ Ellis pronounced the author of the Kamasutra to be ‘one of the greatest of authorities’ and approved the ‘spirit of gravity’ found in Indian erotic treatises in general. ‘Nowhere else,’ he wrote, ‘have the anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been studied with such minute and adoring reverence.’

  Through Havelock Ellis, Vatsyayana’s book of love would finally be recognized by Western science. It took longer for it to be absorbed into the burgeoning realm of Western sex manuals. The Kamasutra, for instance, was probably unknown to Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, another intimate of the Fellowship of the New Life and author of The Human Element in Sex, Being a Medical Enquiry into the Relation of Sexual Physiology to Christian Morality. Writing in 1884, Blackwell attacked ‘the prevalent fallacy that sexual passion is the almost exclusive attribute of men’ and praised ‘the beneficent control which the human mind can exercise over the passion’. Both sentiments are central to the Kamasutra, but hardly unique to it. Even Marie Stopes’s 1918 bestseller, Married Love, showed small sign of any acquaintance with the Indian arts. At most it is possible to catch a dim echo of the Kamasutra in Stopes’s answer to the question: ‘Is not instinct enough?’ No, she declares, ‘instinct is not enough. In every other human activity it has been realized that training, the handing on of tradition are essential.’ Or
as Vatsyayana put it, ‘because a man and a woman depend upon one another in sex, it requires a method’.

  When Stopes wrote Married Love, the Kamasutra had evidently not penetrated the consciousness of Western sex writers. It was still hovering around the shadier edges of society, at best. One problem was that the earliest campaigners and sex writers tended to come from nonconformist, liberal or medical backgrounds. All too often, their works were laudably sensible and, in their efforts to steer clear of any suggestion of lubriciousness, any sense of pleasure in eroticism was lost. Such authors were likely to take a dim view of a salacious work of Oriental eroticism. Until the 1960s, few sex writers, if any, straddled the worlds of politics and pornography as comfortably as Arbuthnot and Burton.

  Politics was one problem; sheer availability was another. In the 1890s, London’s harried erotic publishers had decamped from Holywell Street and resettled in the relatively liberal climate of Paris. Even Havelock Ellis had been able to lay hands on only a pirated French translation of the Kamasutra, which had been printed in Paris in 1891 and illegally shipped back across the Channel. Erotic books, whether Oriental or more homely, were banned under obscenity and postal censorship laws that were policed with vigour. In the first part of the twentieth century, the risks for British publishers and booksellers were just too great. It was only in the 1920s, when a few American publishers began to take an interest in this Indo-pornographic curiosity, that the Kamasutra was pushed towards a less clandestine market. For the first time, the book of love would reach an audience wider than a few eccentric experts and dissipated aristocrats.

  At first, the climate of the US was scarcely any more favourable to erotica than Europe’s. In 1923, the pornographic publisher ‘Broadway’ Samuel Roth was sentenced to ninety days in jail, under the repressive Comstock Act, for sending a $35 limited edition of Burton’s The Perfumed Garden through the US mail. If the prosecution was meant as a warning, however, it failed. The American ‘Society of the Friends of India’ dared to reprint the 1883 Kamasutra in 1925, while the Risus Press of New York published a few short extracts in the same year, although both editions were limited to under 1,000 copies. This kind of publishing programme would no doubt give a few lucky buyers tremendous excitement, but it would hardly bring the wisdom of the Kamasutra to the masses.

  Far more significant was the compilation, the following year, of a tiny, flimsy booklet entitled A Hindu Book of Love (The Kama Sutra). It squeezed excerpts of the 1883 text into the sixty-four-page format of the famous – and sometimes infamous – Little Blue Book series. This was a quasi-philanthropic operation set up by the socialist publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, ‘the Henry Ford of literature’. The idea was to mass-produce classic works of literature at bargain prices; workers, the theory went, would order the staple-bound books by mail and thus acquire the rudiments at least of a full Humanist education – including sex education; also on the Little Blue list were Prostitution in the Modern World and Strange Marriage Customs. Just as in 1883, a printing of the Kamasutra in Girard, Kansas, in 1926, was about more than recovering an ancient classic. The editing was done by Leo Markun, a hack writer with radical, anti-censorship leanings who was also responsible for the alarming Mrs Grundy: A History of Four Centuries of Morals Intended to Illuminate Present Problems in Great Britain and the United States. Richard Burton would have been proud. A Hindu Book of Love duly took its place alongside other Little Blue Books presenting radical, alternative lifestyles such as that of the homosexual, the agnostic and the man who knew How To Be Happy Though Married. Perhaps the Hindu Book of Love was intended to achieve the same effect, at least among the 70,000 Americans who bought a copy.

  In the wake of the March 1930 judgement of the splendidly named Justice Augustus Hand, which reversed the conviction of Mary Ware Dennett for mailing her pamphlet The Sex Side of Life, the atmosphere in the US brightened a little. Justice Hand found that ‘an accurate exposition of the relevant facts of the sex side of life in decent language and in a manifestly serious and disinterested spirit cannot ordinarily be regarded as obscene’. In the same year, amendments to the Tariff Act allowed ‘classics or books of recognized literary or scientific merit’ to be imported from Europe – although some senators fought the amendment with everything they could throw at it. Senator Reed Smoot, of Utah, actually sermonized from behind a pile of ‘obscene’ books, a private printing of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Kamasutra among them. Clearly, even if Vatsyayana’s book of love was not reaching mass audiences, it was acquiring a reputation as one of the world’s more dangerously sexual works – and also as a classic.

  Smoot’s theatricals didn’t do him any good and, in April 1931, Federal Judge Woolsey lifted the ban on Marie Stopes’s classic, Married Love. Tolerance, if not acceptance, was growing. But still, the Kamasutra failed to find a mainstream publisher. In 1932, Edward Windsor and the aptly named Panurge Press, of New York – a dubious enterprise run by friends of Samuel Roth specializing in mail-order pornography – published an Indo-erotological compilation grandly entitled Cultural and Anthropological Studies in the Hindu Art of Love. It incorporated most of the 1883 Kamasutra, albeit turned into ‘explanatory extracts and summations’, along with excerpts from the Ananga Ranga and other kama shastra works. It looked like an impressive product, aiming to expose the third of what it called the ‘three great fundamentals of Hindu civilization: the caste system, child marriage, and the Ars Amoris Indica’. These secrets would be revealed exclusively to the ‘private collectors of erotica’ who had $5 to spare for one of the 1,500 numbered copies. The book, however, was much less worthy than it seemed. Most of it was ripped off, unacknowledged, from Richard Schmidt’s magnum opus on Indian erotic literature, Beiträge zur Indische Erotik, or Contributions on Indian Erotics, which had been published in Berlin twenty years previously.

  No more respectable was the edition disgorged by the so-called Medical Press of New York, in 1936. This was yet another semi-pornographic affair, issued this time by Sam Roth’s chief collaborator, Jack Brussel – the forty-page introductory essay on ‘The Doctor as Marriage Advisor’ was simply lifted from an Austrian publisher’s edition of Richard Schmidt’s translation. But the Medical Press was not totally without imagination. In the same year, it issued the first Kamasutra to offer what would afterwards become the obligatory accompaniment to Vatsyayana’s text: illustrations. These were not actual reproductions of erotic miniatures, but the artist, Mahlon Blaine, a bohemian figure who had acquired a steel plate in his head during World War I, was clearly extremely familiar with Indian erotic art. (His work was also heavily influenced by Aubrey Beardsley; tantalizingly, if Richard Burton had lived a little longer, Beardsley himself might well have ended up illustrating the Kamasutra, as the two men shared a publisher and a friend, Leonard Smithers.)

  There was little sign of the Kamasutra, on either side of the Atlantic, in the late 1930s and 1940s, although a horse named Kama Soutra did finish as an also-ran at the Hyde Park Handicap of September 1937. After the hiatus of World War II, the flow of pornographic material from Paris to London was resumed. Les éditions de la Fontaine d’Or, or ‘Golden Fountain Press’, kept up the city’s eroto-bibliophilic traditions by issuing a veritable stream of editions of what it called the ‘Love Precepts of the Brahmans’ from 1952 onwards. But the best-selling version of the Kamasutra belonged to the notorious Olympia Press, again based in Paris. Issued in 1958, with the dirty-green paper cover of the Traveller’s Companion series, their edition masqueraded under the authoritative-sounding title of Classical Hindu Erotology and bore the spurious imprimatur of one ‘Swami Ram Krishnanada’, a travesty of the name of Swami Krishnananda, the Rishikesh-based leader of the yogic Divine Life Society. Pornography, as ever, was slipping in under the wrapper of Indology.

  The Olympia edition sold in the tens of thousands, but it was still forced to live in the semi-darkness of brown-paper packaging and the backs of closets – a fact that only contributed to its
reputation as potent pornography. Then, in 1961, the Kamasutra was finally thrust into the sunlight. The force behind the shove was the publication, on both sides of the Atlantic, of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the US, Federal Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan ruled in July 1959 that Grove Press’s unexpurgated book-club edition of the novel was not obscene, stating that ‘the sincerity and purpose of an author as expressed in the manner in which a book is written and in which his theme and ideas are developed has a great deal to do with whether it is of literary and intellectual merit’. In the UK, on the basis of the reformed Obscene Publications Act of 1959, and Grove Press’s success in the US, Penguin Books dared to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover in August 1960. The case came to trial in October and the jury returned a landmark verdict of not guilty.

  In publishing terms, Pandora’s box was suddenly wide open. Chatterley sold 2 million copies within a year. But publishers in the United States were still faced with powerful conservative forces. Boston’s censorious Deputy Collector of Customs singled out the Kamasutra for criticism. He was particularly horrified by its love slaps, scratches and bites, testifying in 1962 that ‘the human mind is scarcely able to withstand the impact of the overwhelming obscenity and sexually-based desire for torture’ in the book. The stakes were indeed high: facing the Kamasutra on the table was nothing less than sanity. Notwithstanding such rearguard actions, by 1962 a number of American publishers had staked their own claims in the Great Sex Rush.