Kamasutra

Kamasutra, the oldest extant Indian prose treatise (sutra) on the subject of pleasure (kama)—sexual pleasure, desire, love, and the pleasures of good living generally conceived. Popularly known for its depiction of positions for sexual intercourse, the text is more broadly about the life of pleasure, focusing on an adult man of leisure, the women in his life, and their social and physical encounters. The work is part of a tradition of eroticism in Hinduism—including sexual analogies in the Upanishads, Tantric practices, the god Krishna’s amorous adventures in the Bhagavata Purana, and the sexually explicit carvings at the Khajuraho temple complex—to which the text greatly contributed. In recent times the Kamasutra has spread around the globe, and its explorations of pleasure have seeped into the popular imagination.

Science of sex: genre and authorship

The Kamasutra is classified as a shastra, a genre of texts that aspire to explain everything in a scientific way about their subjects, which include a wide range of topics such as theater, medicine, astronomy, architecture, and the management of horses and elephants. The erotic science, known as kama-shastra (“the science of kama”), is one of the three principal human sciences in ancient India. The other two main areas of human science on which many shastra texts have been written are religious and social law (dharma-shastra, of which the most famous work is the Laws of Manu [Manavadharmashastra]) and the science of political and economic power (artha-shastra) found in Kautilya’s influential Arthashastra.

The Kamasutra was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, probably sometime in the second half of the 3rd century ce, and likely in northern India, perhaps in Pataliputra near the present city of Patna, Bihar state. Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, who tells the reader that his text is a distillation of works, now lost to history, of authors who preceded him. These other authors supply what Indian logic called the “other side” (literally, the “former wing,” purvapaksha), the arguments that opponents might raise. Vatsyayana cites them often, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement, thus making the Kamasutra a text that can be described as an academic debate combined with an encyclopedia of pleasure and a self-help book. Yet Vatsyayana occasionally abandons this scientific approach, as in his declaration: “When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order” (Kamasutra, Book II, chapter 2, verse 31; translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar).

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Beyond positions: the full body of the text

The Kamasutra may be best known in popular culture for its section detailing sexual positions, but the Kamasutra as a whole is a book about the art of living for pleasure—finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, and living with or as a courtesan. The text is divided into seven books and subdivided into 64 sections. Numbers and lists are significant in the text and match its encyclopedic sensibility: for example, Vatsyayana enumerates 12 embraces, 17 kisses, 16 bites and scratches, 17 positions, 6 unusual acts, 16 slaps and screams, 8 acts of oral sex, and so forth. While the text’s primary focus and much of its intended audience is male, there are places, too, where Vatsyayana seems to address women and writes about them in ways that make room for women’s agency and speak to their sexual pleasure.

The Kamasutra begins Book I by situating kama as one of the three aims of life along with dharma (religion or law) and artha (wealth or power), and it advises how to balance these objectives. Vatsyayana then turns to the text’s hero, the man-about-town (Sanskrit: nagaraka), and advises him how to set up his house and arrange his lifestyle, use male helpers and messengers, and cultivate the arts. His is a life of luxury, and he spends his day bathing, talking with his pet birds, and arranging for dinner parties; he never visits his mother or concerns himself with business matters.

The various sexual positions are found in Book II, which begins by expounding a sexual typology according to size, endurance, and temperament. It then gives detailed instructions on embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, slapping, moaning, oral sex, ways in which a woman may act like a man, and navigating lovers’ quarrels. Many of these various practices are given descriptive names in the text, such as the “twining-vine” or “climbing the tree” embraces, the “brushing” or “battle of tongues” kisses, the “goose-flesh,” or “half-moon” scratches, or the “garland of jewels” or “scattered clouds” bites. Only after this textual foreplay does the text get to the possible ways of positioning the body during sexual acts. Many of these positions are specific to typologies based on the sizes of the man or woman, and some are specific to geographic regions in India.

Book III takes the socialite playboy through the stages of courtship of a young bride, which include winning a woman’s trust, interpreting her reactions, discerning her interest, and various means to pursue marriage, for both men and women to achieve their hearts’ desire. There is a final section that includes devious means of obtaining a marriage, which offers several types of subterfuge and, if necessary in extremis, marriage by force. The book ends with a set of verses praising love-marriage as superior to marriage by force. The text’s advice on how men should go about making their intentions known can be quite playful and perhaps relatable to a modern audience familiar with romantic comedies: “When they are playing in the water, he dives underwater at some distance from her, comes up close to her, touches her, and dives underwater again right there” (Kamasutra, III, 4, verse 6).

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The intended audience then shifts from the man to the wife, informing her in Book IV of how to run the household (manage the servants, plan the garden), behave in her husband’s absence, behave toward wives that are junior or senior to her, and maintain power in the household when her husband no longer loves or desires her. It also describes the life of the women in a harem and gives the husband advice on how to manage many women. By way of example, the description of the junior wife begins:

The junior wife, however, regards her co-wife like a mother. She does not even give anything to her relatives without the other woman’s knowledge. She reports her own experiences to her. With her permission, she sleeps with the husband. She never reports to any other woman what the other woman says. She has more regard for the other woman’s children than for her own. But privately, she serves the husband more (Kamasutra, IV, 2, verses 16–22).

The Kamasutra then turns from married life to extramarital pleasure. Book V is about adultery. It explains why some women resist the seduction of the would-be-adulterer and how to tell which women are more likely to commit adultery (Vatsyayana compassionately details the various reasons why women might be unhappy in their marriages therefore and open to adultery). It advises the adulterer to use a female messenger and then advises the husband on ways to guard his own wives.

Continuing the focus on pleasure outside of married life, Book VI offers advice to courtesans. The text advises courtesans how to distinguish between an eligible and an ineligible lover, how to give a lover what he wants, how to get money from him, how to tell when his passion is cooling, how to get rid of him, and how to get back together with an ex-lover. The text also counsels courtesans how to balance the various desiderata of affection and profit, gains and losses, consequences and doubts. In a passage that neatly illustrates the academic debates between Vatsyayana and the unnamed “scholars,” as well as the give and take between courtesans and clients, the text reads:

Scholars say: “Between a lover who is in love and another who is generous, the obvious choice is the generous one.” Vatsyayana says: But it is possible to cultivate generosity in a man who is in love. For even a greedy man, if he is in love, spends generously, but a generous man cannot be made to fall in love through mere persistence (Kamasutra, VI, 5, verses 9–11).

Love potions are the subject of Book VII, an amalgam of advice about various mixtures to put another person in one’s sexual thrall, to assure virility, to rekindle exhausted passion, or to increase the size of the male organ. There is also the further possibility, outlined at the end of Book VII, of engaging in “unusual techniques”—using various potions to achieve pleasurable ends. For example: “A woman falls into the power of a man when she hears the sound of him playing a flute that has been coated with a decoction of mint, wild ginger, East Indian rose bay, Indian plum tree, cedar wood, and prickly pear” (Kamasutra, VII, 2, verse 43). Despite these “unusual practices,” Vatsyayana, in his concluding statements of the text, restates an earlier caveat from Book II: “The unusual techniques employed to increase passion...are strongly restricted...for the statement that ‘There is a text for this’ does not justify a practice” (Kamasutra, VII, 2, verses 54–55). In keeping with his policy of qualifying his encyclopedic study of pleasure with attendant moments of moralizing, Vatsyayana notably repeats this last phrase, insisting on a gulf between theory and practice.

The enduring pleasure of the text

The Kamasutra was not the last of its genre, for many textbooks of eroticism followed it. Kokkaka’s Ratirahasya (also called the Kokashastra; pre-13th century) and Kalyanamalla’s Anangaranga (15th century) cite the Kamasutra as a foundational authority. The Nagarasarvasva of Padmashri and the Panchasayaka of Jyotirishvara (11th to 13th century) base themselves explicitly on the Kamasutra. The Kamasutra also made a deep impact on Indian literature, as its vocabulary and taxonomies were diffused into later Sanskrit poetry (kavya).

The Kamasutra’s circulation in learned society continued even as Islamic rulers of India supplanted Hindu rulers. From the 15th to 18th century various Muslim emperors in India embarked on a broad project to translate and maintain Sanskrit learning. They had the Kamasutra and other texts on the subject of kama translated into Persian and commissioned lavishly illustrated Persian and Sanskrit Kamasutra manuscripts.

Under the British raj, the Kamasutra fell victim to a strange mix of Victorian prudery and preoccupation with sexuality and the circulation of exoticized pornography. For some British colonialists, especially Christian missionaries, the eroticism in Indian culture was a step too far; they preferred the philosophical and ascetic threads of Hinduism and condemned the ritualistic and sensual parts. But in 1833 a sensationalist British explorer and writer, Richard Francis Burton, published a translation of the Kamasutra (albeit riddled with inaccuracies, and not his own work but that of two Indian translators). That translation became one of the most pirated books in history and spurred considerable cultural interest in the text in British and American society.

In the 20th and 21st centuries the Kamasutra was reduced in the popular imagination to a compendium of sexual positions, the erotic equivalent of a collection of yoga poses. Satires and imaginative elaborations on the sexual positions circulated with wild abandon in popular magazines, websites, smartphone apps, and other media. This Western focus on the erotic over the more broadly pleasurable reinforced an Orientalist idea of an exoticized East.

In present-day India the Kamasutra has become largely an object of disrepute, considered a dirty book. Members of the conservative Hindutva movement have reframed Hinduism in puritanical terms and have, along with some other political and religious groups, objected not only to works of art (including paintings, books, and films) that deal with aspects of sexuality, but to any public demonstration of desire. In this modern India the Kamasutra lives on as a book read primarily by an intellectual elite, but it has also become widely known as the name of a brand of condoms.