This is the Kamasutra.
It’s widely known as the Indian book of acrobatic sex positions.
“When both the legs of the woman are contracted, and placed on her stomach, it is called the
“crab’s position.”
And since its original composition around 2,000 years ago...
it’s been translated, pirated, and illustrated.
It’s inspired chocolates, branded condoms, films, and yes -- even furniture -- designed
for Kamasutra moves.
But the part about sex positions is only a fraction of the book.
It doesn’t even have any pictures.
And the rest?
“A girl who is called by the name...of a tree, or of a river, is considered worthless,
as also a girl whose name ends in “R” or “L”.
Turns out the Kamasutra is very misunderstood.
It is telling that of all the Sanskrit texts that this country has produced,
and we have produced God knows how many thousands, the Kamasutra is the one text that has been
heard of across the world.
The Kamasutra — which roughly translates to “treatise on desire” — was originally
compiled in ancient Indian language, Sanskrit, by philosopher Vatsyayana sometime around
the third century.
It found popularity in the West centuries later.
British explorer Richard Francis Burton, an “Orientalist” famous for his travels East
in the 1800s and for translating The Arabian Nights into English, commissioned the first
English edition of Kamasutra.
Burton’s goal was to introduce it to a sexually repressed Victorian society at the time, and
in order to avoid Britain's obscenity laws, he created a club to privately publish erotica
from the East that would be otherwise illegal to print -- including the Kamasutra.
It wasn’t until nearly a hundred years later, during the era of the “sexual revolution”,
that the US legally allowed the publication of the book.
And once it hit the internet in the 1990s, often, only the “sexy” chapters were copied
and circulated — which helped create the image of the Kamasutra most people know today.
People were actually looking to this text, for a kind of perhaps an oriental
version, an exotic version of sex that India could provide, without understanding the larger
cultural context to this text.
So -- if the book isn’t a sex manual, what is it?
It's more of a manual for living a life of leisure and luxury in India during this time
period.
The parts about sexual activity make up one section - out of seven.
Outside of the chapters like…“kissing”, “biting”, and “different ways of lying
down”...
The book details how a man should set up his home:
“Not far from the couch, and on the ground, there should be a round seat, a toy cart,
and a board for playing with dice; outside the outer room there should be cages of birds”
It also covers the “64 arts” every “public woman of high quality” should master, including:
“Tattooing”, “Playing on musical glasses filled with water”, “cooking”, the “Art
of teaching parrots and starlings to speak”, and “Knowledge of the art of war”
And explains how a man can “acquire a wife”, how best to commit adultery, and also some
magic recipes: If a man throws this mixture on a woman, she will not love anybody else afterwards.
At times - the book shifts to speak directly
to women.
There’s a section on how one wife can maintain control in a household with multiple wives.
And another section on how to be a profitable courtesan - or sex worker.
It also gives a woman ideas about ways to manage men.
And in that sense it's about power as much as it is about pleasure.
How to get what you want, how to make a man do what you want.
Historian Wendy Doniger argues that for its time -- the book makes some pretty progressive
statements about the role of women and their access to pleasure.
It explicitly mentions that one of the reasons for the Kamasutra is because
the purpose of sex is not to have children but to have fun.
That's a revolutionary thing to say.
But at the same time, the book is loaded with contradictions.
It’s less about the practice of sexuality, and more about the control of sexuality.
For example, it features a list of classes of women who are “not to be enjoyed”...
And rape is listed as an acceptable - last resort - form of acquiring a wife.
"Give the girl some intoxicating substance”...and “enjoy her before she
recovers.”
2,000 years later, it’s not surprising
that the text doesn’t hold up.
It’s a book of its time.
A historical account of what elite life and pleasure may have looked like in ancient India.
I don't think early Indian texts can be fit into these categories of
feminist or patriarchal as easily as we perhaps make them sound today.
The task which is undertakes is a very fundamental one for all of human society, which is how
do you reconcile basic instincts and the desire for pleasure with a social order and social
obligations too?
Over the years, the Kamasutra has made its way from Indian philosophers to Victorian
explorers to today’s magazine columnists.
And it’s taken on a life of its own.
The sexy bits have endured, while the more complex parts - about gender and power and
class - have been lost in translation.