The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

  Raymond Burnier, a fine photographer and the lover of Alain Daniélou, was one of the first to exhibit images of temple carvings in the West, but picture books of Indian erotic art became available only in the late 1950s. The first to add images to the Kamasutra itself was S.C. Upadhyaya, whose 1961 edition used photographs of temple sculptures. These, however, had proved disappointing. Firm-breasted apsara nymphs and copulating couples were all very wonderful, but their sheer stoniness made it hard for many modern readers to imagine themselves in those positions. And after a thousand years of weathering, the statues were also tamely monochrome. The Love Teachings of Kamasutra, a London production of 1980, remediated all these faults by lavishly illustrating the text with erotic images drawn from miniature paintings. Still more resplendent was a Kamasutra co-created in New Delhi by the writer, Mulk Raj Anand, and an avid and knowledgeable collector of erotic artworks, Lance Dane. Anand had first had the idea of producing an illustrated Kamasutra as a graduate philosophy student at Cambridge. He discussed it with none other than Havelock Ellis, who agreed that the text needed artworks in order to fully communicate Vatsyayana’s meaning. But only when Anand teamed up with Lance Dane and his superb art collection was the project made possible. This latest east–west cooperation was supposedly ‘aimed at academicians’, but it was no less influential than Arbuthnot’s and Indraji’s work had been. The art-tome format and use of illustrations from right across the Indian artistic tradition won awards and set the standard for hundreds of editions to come. Henceforth, the Kamasutra of the modern imagination would be inextricably linked with medieval erotic art.

  Even if the temple-nymphs and the lovers of Persian miniatures hadn’t actually illustrated the Kamasutra in their day, they did now. Western readers were soon buying the Kamasutra for the gorgeous erotic miniatures that accompanied the text as much as for the book of love itself. The paintings revealed a side of sex that the West had never before seen, or certainly not in such stunning, vivid detail. Indian sex was luxurious, aristocratic and artful, it was splendidly self-aware without being self-conscious. It was gorgeous and possibly even admirable. A new audience, one that would have been less inclined to wade through a book dedicated to the manners and customs of the olden East, became aware of India’s erotic civilization.

  Unfortunately, understanding of the actual Kamasutra suffered. Many readers came away with the impression that the images and text had always been one and the same, to the extent that the Kamasutra was even understood to be a set of images rather than a book. In 2001, a disgruntled customer of Amazon.com even complained in his review that ‘this book is not a Kama Sutra. There are no illustrations.’ The almost ubiquitous use of the 1883 translation was another problem. Readers who had once thrilled at the incredible immediacy of the nagaraka’s world were now more likely to find it quaint and antiquated, if not outright confusing. What, they wondered, could it mean to ‘shampoo’ the joints of someone’s thighs? And what exactly might ‘congress’ involve? As edition followed edition, increasingly savage cuts were made to the actual text. If the Kamasutra wasn’t a list of sex positions, it could easily be edited to look like one. Erotic images suffered equally drastic cropping. Any context – courtyards, palaces, gardens, rivers, forests – was all too often excised, leaving simple images of interlocked lovers in full, pornographic close-up. The most extraordinary scenes of acrobatic lovemaking or mass contortion were favoured above all others. The result was to illustrate not the Kamasutra, but the West’s own preconceptions of how exotic sex should look.

  The coffee-table Kamasutra was all about positions – and the more fantastical the better. The real Kamasutra, unfortunately, falls far short of the myth. There are ‘just’ eighteen sexual positions proper, plus three ‘unusual sexual acts’ that could be described as positions, ten ‘sexual strokes’ for men, and three postures for the woman who ‘plays the man’s part’. Most are descriptions of fairly straightforward sex acts designed purely to compensate for disparities between the sizes of the lovers’ genitals. The ‘squeeze’, for instance, involves the cavernous ‘elephant’ woman squeezing her thighs together, while the ‘yawning’ posture requires the narrow ‘doe’ woman to spread her thighs wide apart while keeping her legs suspended. Few positions are much more ambitious. The notorious ‘impaling on a stake’, which requires the woman to have one of her legs athletically raised above her head while the other is stretched out, is a rare exception. And Vatsyayana himself advises when a posture, such a this one, ‘can only be done with practice’. As generations of readers have been disappointed to discover, the Kamasutra’s positions are notable for their simple efficacy rather than for their spectacular effect. Far more splendid variations can easily be found in modern sex manuals, many of which are more obviously addressed to twenty-first-century audiences: perhaps incorporating advice on contraception and sexual health – or, indeed, mention of the clitoris.

  If contemporary inventiveness has made the Kamasutra’s sexual positions look tame, and modern anatomy has rendered its sexual anatomy redundant – not to mention the fact that Western sexual politics have called into question its attitudes to women – what future, then, remains for the book of love? Two recent novels suggest that it exists as a fantasy of unattainable sexual perfection, as if the story and the idea of the book has superseded the Kamasutra itself. The Revised Kama Sutra (1998), by Richard Crasta writing as ‘Avatar Prabhu’, explores the sticky mess of ideas and counter-ideas about sex fighting for control of the id of the hero, a Goan Catholic who dreams of America, where he imagines ‘millions of ravenous women are waiting for him’. Where Crasta satirizes naive, Indian ideas about Western sexuality, Lee Siegel’s brilliant, Sterne-esque tragicomedy, Love in a Dead Language (1999), sends up Western fantasies about India. He charts the downfall of an American professor of Indian studies who lusts after one of his students, the beautiful, facile and Californian Lalita Gupta. ‘I’ve dedicated my life to studying Sanskrit, to learning about India,’ Professor Roth complains, ‘yet I’ve never made love to an Indian woman.’ Roth sets about inveigling his ‘Lalita’ to go on a solo study tour of India and he begins producing his own translation of the Kamasutra as a gift of love. He is eventually murdered with a Sanskrit dictionary: hoist with his own petard, one might say.

  In India, by contrast, the Kamasutra has not yet entirely succumbed to this kind of postmodern treatment. Liberals are still using the book to argue against India’s prevailing anti-sensual culture – a culture that defines itself as traditionally Indian, in opposition to modern, Western permissiveness; a culture that forced Lee Siegel to make cuts and changes for the Indian edition of his novel, including deleting the sex scene set in a temple and giving the second part, entitled ‘fucking’, the more demure heading of ‘sexual union’. In the face of this kind of prudery, Indian liberals want the Kamasutra to have the same corrective impact at home that it had during a century of adventures abroad.

  Back in 1963, the left-wing novelist Mulk Raj Anand bitterly compared the West’s enthusiastic reception of the Kamasutra with the relatively stony ground on which the book had fallen at home, bemoaning the fact that ‘while the younger intelligentsia of the West turns in admiration to our monuments, the false shame of our new bourgeois parades itself in the most abject apologies about the decadence of our medieval art, and prohibits even husbands and wives to hold hands on the seashore’. Anand’s analysis was rather confirmed the following year, when Devadatta Shastri published his Hindi ‘Jaya’ commentary on the Kamasutra. It somehow managed to gloss the purpose of the text as essentially asexual. The book ‘describes a moral eroticism leading to spiritual realization’, Shastri concluded, ‘and not the sating of the passions or the encouragement of pleasure seekers’.

  Almost fifty years later, little has changed. At least, liberals make the same complaints. In 1993, Dr Indira Kapoor, then director of the South Asian Regional Office of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, claimed that ‘Although the evidence
of the Kamasutra and erotic temple carvings shows an open attitude to human sexuality in South Asia in the distant past, today ignorance and embarrassment cause much unhappiness.’ In 2004, HarperCollins India published Love and Lust, an anthology of sublimely erotic ancient and medieval literature. Sounding strangely like Arbuthnot and Burton addressing the West in 1883, the editors warned that ‘In India today, the philosophical acceptance of desire and the erotic sentiment has been asphyxiated by a hypocritical morality that has for much too long equated sex with sin and desire with guilt.’ Pavan K. Varma and Sandhya Mulchandani hoped their anthology would provide ‘evidence of an alternative vision, so that readers can get a glimpse of the sense of maturity and honesty that animated our ancestors’.

  It’s curious that a country with thousands of years of erotic civilization could be seen to lack ‘maturity’ concerning matters sexual. But an India where love marriage – as praised by Vatsyayana – is rare in most sections of society; where young couples in Calcutta feel obliged to march against police harassment for the crimes of meeting, talking and just occasionally kissing in public; where the vaginal ‘touch-hole’ of a sculpture at Ellora was cemented over; where a Hindu-nationalist Health Minister can insist that the ‘Indian traditions’ of abstinence and fidelity are more effective barriers against HIV than condoms; and where the 1860 Penal Code defines all extramarital sex as criminal – this is an India that has moved far away from the easy sensuality of Vatsyayana and his nagarakas.

  There is, however, another India – as there always has been. Just as Vatsyayana’s book of love existed alongside the Laws of Manu and the ascetic ideal, so the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Penal Code exist alongside a reported two thirds of young adults who would have casual, pre-marital sex before an arranged marriage; alongside plastic-wrapped, yellow-jacketed copies of Kok Shastra and Old Kam Sutra sold furtively at streetside bookstalls, and, since 1991, alongside the KamaSutra condom. If any prophylactic sheath could be said to encapsulate the conflicting attitudes to sex in modern India, it is the ‘KS’ condom. It was designed to replace the despised government-subsidized product, a sturdy, yellow, unlubricated length of misery that took its name, tellingly, from the Sanskrit word for ‘restraint’ or ‘control’. The Nirodh, however, did little to stem India’s awesome birth rate or its terrifying rate of HIV infection and, thanks to the governnment’s health campaigns promoting its use, condoms had become associated with seedy, risky and illicit sex. The new KamaSutra condom was designed to project a very different image: to ride on the aristocratic coat-tails of the Kamasutra in order to sell itself to a pleasure-seeking, wealthy and urban demographic – to the nagarakas of modern India.

  In the 1990s, it seems, Kamasutra meant ‘sexy’. Alyque Padamsee of Lintas, the advertising agency responsible for the marketing campaign, described Kamasutra as ‘universally recognized as a code for eroticism’. Smart Bombay college girls, he said, would even describe an attractive man as ‘quite KS’. As a brand name, Kamasutra ‘telegraphed sex without actually mentioning the forbidden word’, he said. ‘It was daring, yet culturally it was wholly acceptable.’ Except that it was not. Adverts broadcasting the notion: ‘It’s your revolution. It’s your condom. It’s KamaSutra,’ accompanied by eye-wateringly sexy photographs of the actress Pooja Bedi, were deemed ‘vulgar and indecent in the context of an Indian morality’ by the Press Council of India. Conservatives were determined to rewrite the Kamasutra out of Indian history. Somewhere between authoritarian hostility to sexual expression and the percolation of ‘Western’ sexual mores among the upper-middle classes, India’s erotic heritage seemed once again in danger of being lost. Eighteen hundred years after Vatsyayana, someone would have to begin another rescue mission.

  The highest-profile candidate to date has been film-maker Mira Nair. Her lavishly sensual feature of 1996, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, looked back misty-eyed to the last days of a Hindu kingdom ruled by the erotic ideal. The Kamasutra is a potent presence, especially among women: a group of wives gives a princess bride sex tips from the Kamasutra as she prepares for her wedding; the sensual heroine, meanwhile, studies Vatsyayana’s sutras at a female-run school of love. Thanks to male sexual jealousy, however (and the black-clad Muslim hordes that, rather disturbingly, overrun the kingdom at the finale), all this learning is about to be tragically lost. ‘I feel that sexuality in our country is so repressed and so twisted,’ Nair commented in an interview. Looking around her with disbelief, she asked: ‘Could this be the country that created the Kamasutra?’ Given that the cast and crew were harassed and even threatened with arrest during filming, and that India’s Board of Censors asked for a fifteen-minute cut before finally banning the film altogether as pornographic, her question was answered for her.

  Mira Nair claimed she wanted to conjure a distinctively Indian approach to sexuality in her film. ‘In India we now have so little of our history,’ she complained. ‘The only views of female sexuality we see – Elle, Cosmopolitan, television – are totally Western, and they have nothing to do with our reality.’ She was not the first to say as much. In his 1985 book, Kamasutra: Its Relevance Today, the doctor and writer Girija Khanna pitched the Kamasutra as representing a middle road between asceticism and eroticism that was quintessentially Indian. Did it not call for a respect for kama within the framework of the trivarga, or triple path, after all? ‘We cannot accept as our pattern,’ Khanna protested, ‘an absolutely decadent sensualism which results in a lopsided notion of human nature – i.e. Western permissiveness.’

  The prominent Indian psychoanalyst and writer, Sudhir Kakar, has taken a nuanced version of the same stance. Inspired by the Kamasutra itself, which opened for him ‘a window on our heritage, an ancient Hindu heritage very different from the one conveyed in most philosophical, historical and religious discourse’, Kakar has led a thoughtful professional campaign against sexual repression. For him, the book of love held out the hope that the ‘ideal of a balance between Eros and spirituality may indeed once again become our own’ – in contrast to what he called ‘the icy frost that threatens it from, what I hope, are the fringe elements of Hindu culture’.

  The book of love itself is chief among Kakar’s resources. In 1998, he published The Ascetic of Desire, a naturalistic novel set in Vatsyayana’s own time. It dramatized the adventures of a Vedic student who is drawn to the ‘subversive intent’ and ‘self-assertive’ voice of the Kamasutra and decides to learn from the master himself. The student sometimes seems to stand in for Kakar, sometimes for Vatsyayana – and sometimes for the sexual soul of India, exposed as if on an analyst’s couch. ‘I did not have a natural gift for what I was trying to become,’ the student confesses. ‘My inner irreverence could not breach a painfully correct exterior; the spontaneity I often felt, even intimations of a passionate nature inclined towards excess, did not undermine the stilted movements of my body and my terse, much too deliberate speech.’

  Kakar believed that the Kamasutra did not have a message for India alone. In Europe and the US, the book’s task was ‘the rescue of the erotic from the clutches of raw sexuality’. ‘Eros, that divine creation of human beings,’ he added, ‘is always in danger from both the moral and the instinctual.’ To help fight those twin enemies, he worked with the revered American Indologist Wendy Doniger on a landmark edition of the Kamasutra, published in 2002 by Oxford University Press. It was yet another east–west partnership, as now seems almost obligatory. Kakar provided psychological insights and translations of the Hindi commentaries. Wendy Doniger handled the Sanskrit.

  Doniger was thus the first professional, Western Sanskritist ever to translate the Kamasutra into English. This, then, was the first time many English speakers would hear Vatsyayana’s sutras without the distorting layers contributed by Indraji, Bhide, Arbuthnot and Burton – or their later, amateur rivals. Such, at least, was Doniger’s own argument. She acknowledged that Burton had ‘managed to get a rough approximation of the text published in English in 1883, nasty bits a
nd all’. ‘His’ translation ‘remains precious’, she wrote, ‘like Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, as a monument of English literature, though not much closer to Vatsyayana than FitzGerald was to Omar Khayyam’. The claim – a gross misrepresentation of Indraji’s and Arbuthnot’s careful translation, if not of Burton’s own, solo Arabic efforts – echoed its way through the press.

  Reviewing Doniger’s translation in the London Guardian, the writer Maureen Freely referred to the text’s ‘moralistic mistranslations’. The doyenne of South Asian queer studies, Ruth Vanita, fantasized that ‘Burton’s’ translation was not only ‘inadequate’ but also ‘skewed by his tendency to exoticise Asian sexuality as more “primitive” than European sexuality’. Sex journalist Michael Castleman, in the online magazine Salon, went further: Burton was ‘the editor from hell’, he wrote. ‘He altered the text considerably to shoehorn it into Victorian views about sexuality, notably the then-popular notions that only men experience sexual desire and pleasure, and that women are nothing more than the passive recipients of men’s lust.’

  The charges laid against Burton seemed to stem from the assumption that the Victorian translation over which he presided must have somehow been ‘Victorian’. Of course, Castleman’s ‘then-popular notions’ were actually fairly unusual in the Victorian era, and Burton was perhaps the least likely person in England to shoehorn any text anywhere in their service. The 1883 translation, in fact, is regarded by the philologist Chlodwig Werba as coming second only to Richard Schmidt’s academic, German–Latin text. Certainly, it is astonishingly accurate given the circumstances of its creation. But Arbuthnot, Indraji and their collaborators did make one arguably misleading decision. They chose to use the word ‘should’ to translate the Kamasutra’s original optative mood. This optative was a grammatical form long lost in European languages which, in Sanskrit law books, could indeed mean ‘shall’ or ‘should’. But in plays and poetry it was often used with a more open sense, to indicate what might happen – as in ‘the train should arrive in half an hour’. Wendy Doniger, therefore, chose to use the present tense throughout her translation, on the grounds that this better conveyed ‘the flavour of a novel or a play’. Even if the Kamasutra is closer to a book of rules, she said, ‘when a woman gives you a recipe on how to make potato soup, she doesn’t say “you should take the potatotes”, she says “you take the potatoes, and then you peel them.”’