On getting up in the morning, the nagaraka ‘relieves himself, cleans his teeth, applies fragrant oils in small quantities, as well as incense, garlands, beeswax and red lac, looks at his face in a mirror, takes some mouthwash and betel, and attends to the things that need to be done’. He chews lemon-tree bark and betel to sweeten his breath, bathes daily, has his limbs rubbed with oil every second day, wears perfume and ‘continually cleans the sweat from his armpits’. Nothing so vulgar as body odour could be allowed to spoil this city boy’s perfumed perfection. Scent was an important marker of wealth and breeding. The Lalitavistara, a Buddhist text roughly contemporary with the Kamasutra, describes how the young prince Gautama, the future Buddha, was endlessly anointed with perfumed ointments, waters, oils and the beloved sandalwood paste, while his palace home was unceasingly adorned with fragrant flowers.
During the day, the nagaraka passes his time in cock-fights, games, teaching his birds to speak, chatting to his urbane and rather dissolute friends – his ‘libertine, pander and clown’. The ‘libertine’, a kind of itinerant connoisseur of the aesthetic arts, is characterized by the Kamasutra as an effete ne’er-do-well. Although he comes from a good family and is educated to a high standard, he ‘has no possessions other than his shooting-stick, his soap and his astringent’. Together, the friends attend horseback picnics involving games, theatricals and, in summer, swimming. One can imagine the smooth-mannered, meticulously scrubbed ‘libertine’ lounging against his shooting-stick while his nagaraka friends show off their lithe bodies in the water, teasingly inviting their lovers to join them.
After a siesta, the nagaraka and his hangers-on embark on a tour of the ‘salons’ – courtesans’ houses where fashionable people gathered to discuss art, poetry and women, and where they brought their racier lovers to drink, flirt and graze on fine foods. Later in the evening, the nagaraka attends a musical soirée, before retiring to his perfumed bedroom to wait for his women friends. Those girlfriends whose clothes have become wet as a result of coming to join him in bad weather, he courteously helps to change. The nagaraka and his lover then retire to the frescoed bedchamber, which has been festooned with flowers, and made fragrant with incense and other heady perfumes. As the lovers chat, joke and flirt with each other, the room is filled with the sounds of singing and the movement of dancers. Before making love, the nagaraka displays his wealth and generosity by rewarding the entertainers with yet more flowers, along with scented oils and betel nut. Only then are the musicians sent away – and lovemaking begins.
The nagaraka should now turn to the Kamasutra’s second book: ‘Sex’. It teaches him how to actually do it. Tellingly, it is the longest and most detailed of all seven books. For having sex, as the Kamasutra describes it, is a sophisticated affair. Famously, the Kamasutra describes sixty-four kama-kalas, or ways to make love. These ‘arts of love’, or ‘erotic techniques’, are not sixty-four sexual positions, as they are often said – with awe – to be, but simply a kind of grand total of the categories into which Vatsyayana divides the different moods and modes of lovemaking. Theorists, Vatsyayana says, divide sex into eight different topics, namely ‘embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, the positions, moaning, the woman playing the man’s part and oral sex’. As each of these modes of sex is supposed to have eight different particular manifestations, there are thus sixty-four ways in which a man or woman could be said to be having sex in its broadest sense. Mastery of these sixty-four erotic techniques is essential for an accomplished nagaraka. If a man lacks them, Vatsyayana says, ‘he is not very well respected in conversations in the assembly of learned men.’ The kama-kalas are not just tools for successful love making, then; they lie at the heart of what constitutes an educated man.
Of course, the fact that knowledge of the arts of love will impress women is in itself no small matter. ‘Virgins, other men’s wives and courtesans de luxe look with warm feelings and respect on the man who is skilled in the sixty-four arts,’ says Vatsyayana, drily – and success with women is another defining characteristic of the gentleman. The nagaraka’s basic education behind him, he may now turn to the Kamasutra’s next four books, which define all the different types of women that he may want to pursue. ‘Virgins’ describes how a man gets married, and how he woos his bride in bed, while ‘Other Men’s Wives’ focuses on how those wives may be seduced. Where seduction is not, apparently, necessary, the Kamasutra takes a different tack. The books on ‘Wives’ and ‘Courtesans’ sketch the relationship of these women to the nagaraka, instructing the wife or the prostitute in her obligations, and informing the nagaraka about what behaviour he should expect.
Few ancient books have described the social and sexual lives of women in such intimate, exacting detail, and for this alone the Kamasutra is a rare and precious work. From the nagaraka’s point of view, however, the Kamasutra’s descriptions of women are rather like excerpts from a handy field guide to birds in their various plumages. There are even descriptions of regional variations (in sexual tastes), detailed instructions on how different kinds of women may be spotted and won, and warnings about which types of game must be left alone. Wives can be young and virginal, for example, or senior, or junior, or married to a king and living in a harem, or simply ‘unlucky in love and oppressed by rivalry with her co-wives’. If virgins and wives aren’t enough, the nagaraka may seek out the alluring punarbhu, an independent and sexually expert widow seeking remarriage or a mistress-like arrangement with an important official. He may also encounter two particularly exotic types of birds: the lady-boy, who offers oral sex for a living, and the more masculine masseur, who may throw in a hand-job or, if so desired, go so far as to ‘suck the mango’.
There was no shame in turning to paid sex. Courtesans are lovingly graded according to their desirability, beauty and sophistication, from ‘the servant woman who carries water’ and ‘the promiscuous woman’, to ‘the dancer, the artist, the openly ruined woman, the woman who lives on her beauty and the courtesan de luxe’. This last and highest kind of prostitute is the ganika, a woman of significant independence and high status – the ganikas of the fifth-century Licchavi kingdom of Nepal even had their own political representative body and were considered one of the glories of the city. The ganika acquires her elevated status, Vatsyayana says, by distinguishing herself in the ‘sixty-four arts’. Confusingly, these are not the sixty-four kama-kalas that mark out the properly trained nagaraka, but the sixty-four silpa-kalas, a finishing-school-type programme of feminine accomplishments ranging from cooking and testing gold and silver, to making glasses sing by rubbing their wet rims, and teaching parrots and mynah birds to talk. Massage and hairdressing, meanwhile, more obviously lend themselves to the young student of kama, as do the arts of putting on make-up – including make-up for the teeth – and dressing a bed properly. Mastery of all these skills will apparently allow a prostitute to work in the highest circles, while a nobleman’s daughter, if she learns them, will successfully keep her husband under her thumb, ‘even if he has a thousand women in his harem’.
The Kamasutra’s seductively intimate, naturalistic detail can be dangerous. The nagaraka’s erotic cocoon all too easily becomes the reader’s, and the world outside his shining realm of limitless pleasures can all too easily fade from view. In truth, the Kamasutra is no more isolated from its context than the real nagaraka can have been insulated from the everyday demands of religion, work and family. Vatsyayana was not just composing a manual for the men-about-town of his day, nor was he simply describing their world. His Kamasutra was no ‘player’s handbook’, no proto-Joy of Sex. It was something far more ambitious and profound. It was also far more wedded to Brahmin traditions of the distant past than its colourful descriptions of the nagaraka’s dissipated life suggest.
In its very first chapter, the Kamasutra declares itself to be the last scion of an ancient lineage that stretches right back to a ‘Kamasutra’ composed by Nandi, the servant of the god Shiva. This divine Ur-Kamasutra was supposedly 1
,000 chapters long and was itself an offshoot of the original book of Brahma’s creation. Sacred or not, this text was clearly unwieldy, so a sage by the name of Svetaketu Auddalaki cut it down to a more memorable 500 chapters. Perhaps this was still unmanageable, for another erotic expert called Babhravya, from the western Pancala country, further edited the book down to a mere 150 chapters. Concocting a legendary genealogy for a text was commonplace, as claiming that a text was descended from a god’s original composition was as good as to say that it was correct. The Kamasutra’s genealogy, however, was not fabricated for the sake of authenticity – or at least not entirely.
The grandfathers of the Kamasutra appear in other texts as well, albeit as sexual lawmakers rather than experts in technique. Svetaketu appears in the already ancient mythological epic, the Mahabharata, as a legendary seer from the distant past. He is first mentioned when Pandu, the king of the Kurus, explains to his wife Kunti that women used to be free and sexually autonomous. Promiscuity, Pandu says, was ‘not regarded as sinful, for that was the sanctioned usage of the times. That very usage is followed to this day by birds and beasts without any jealousy.’ Addressing her as ‘Kunti of the softly tapering thighs… lotus-eyed Kunti’, Pandu tells her how there was once a hermit called Svetaketu, the son of the great seer Uddalaka, who saw his mother being led away by the hand by a Brahmin, as if by force. Svetaketu became angry and laid down a new rule that ‘a woman’s faithlessness to her husband shall be a sin equal to aborticide, an evil that shall bring on misery’. (Pandu gets his come-uppance when he shoots a deer with an arrow while it is trying to mate. The deer turns out to a disguised sage taking advantage of the relatively relaxed rules on animal sexuality, who curses Pandu, saying that if he attempts to have sex with either of his two wives he will surely die. Heroically, Pandu tries to have sex with his second wife, Madri – and dies.)
Svetaketu again figures as a patriarch of sexual regulation in the philosophical Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which probably dates back to the sixth or seventh centuries BC. Asking his father for an explanation of the meaning and mystery of sex, he is told that sex is a kind of sacrificial offering of man to the gods by means of woman. It even involves the traditional ritual ingredients of kusha grass and the mysterious Soma (an ingredient which has been variously identified as the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom and the stimulant desert plant ephedra). A woman’s vulva ‘is the sacrificial ground’, Svetaketu hears, ‘her pubic hair is the sacred grass; her labia majora are the Soma-press; and her labia minora are the fire blazing at the centre.’ Svetaketu is also given magical formulae for ensuring the birth of different kinds of sons. To get ‘a learned and famous son, a captivating orator assisting at councils, who will master all the Vedas and live out his full lifespan’, the man should open the woman’s thighs, saying, ‘Spread apart, earth and sky.’ He then ‘slips his penis into her, presses his mouth against hers and strokes her three times in the direction of her hair’ – all the while invoking the assistance of various gods.
Whatever the results in terms of progeny, Svetaketu’s recipe would hardly seem to guarantee satisfying lovemaking. It is all a long way from Vatsyayana’s resolutely practical Kamasutra. Babhravya, however, the other grandfather of the erotic tradition, feels less distant. A certain ‘Pancala Babhravya’ is supposed to have been the author of part of the Rig Veda – which would place him only 1,000 years or so before Vatsyayana. As well as condensing the teaching on kama into a mere 150 chapters, Babhravya divided it into the seven topics or ‘limbs’, which survived as the seven books of the Kamasutra.
In doing so, he nearly killed off kama. According to Vatsyayana, later scholars fatally dismembered Babhravya’s work by choosing to specialize in the different topics. A certain Suvarnanabha was apparently an authority on ‘Sex’; Ghotakamukha specialized in ‘Virgins’; Gonikaputra in ‘Other Men’s Wives’; while Kucumara focused on aphrodisiacs – this became the Kamasutra’s rather perfunctory seventh and final book. Dattaka – who was cursed to live for a time as a woman, thus giving him a privileged, Tiresias-like insight into male and female pleasure – was apparently commissioned by the courtesans of Pataliputra to compose a new text based on Babhravya’s sixth ‘limb’, the one dedicated to prostitution. Like the ancient works of Babhravya and Svetaketu, the seven works of the seven original sexual specialists are now lost. Only a few mere fragments or quotations survive – but enough to be sure that they existed in the distant past.
Even in Vatsyayana’s time, the works of the seven sex specialists were apparently in danger of extinction. In his opening chapter, Vatsyayana announced that the teaching on kama had become dangerously fragmented and he was mounting an urgent rescue mission. He set out to pick up the threads of an ancient and perhaps moribund tradition in order to bind them together. He wanted the Kamasutra to be quoted and referred to by future generations. In the third century, however, books were a rare novelty. (And it’s almost certain that none – including the Kamasutra – was illustrated.) Manuscripts existed in the form of dried palm leaves inscribed with a stylus whose pinhead-fine scratch marks were afterwards inked in, and there was even paper to be found, made from the skin of birch trees. But most texts were probably learned by rote rather than written down.
There was only one way to ensure that the Kamasutra was remembered and that was to make it literally memorable. Vatsyayana accordingly composed in the tightly woven sutra form. A celebrated Sanskrit sutra, in the classic two-line form, defines the nature of a good sutra: ‘Brief, unambiguous, essential, universal, / shining and faultless is the sutra known to the sutra-sages.’ In an era when most texts were probably transmitted orally, one that was both short and memorable – not to mention shining and faultless – had obvious advantages. There were drawbacks, however. Vatsyayana was so concerned that his Kamasutra should survive that he made it concise to the point of being cryptic. A sutra like ‘no hand prevention’ might mean ‘he does not hold back his hand’, and ‘a mare, cruelly gripping’ might mean ‘she grasps him, like a mare, so tightly that he cannot move’. This compressed style would cause serious problems for future translators.
By the time he reached concluding verses of the Kamasutra, Vatsyayana was clearly exhausted. The work of ‘combining earlier texts / and following their methods’, he complained, was only done with ‘great effort’. It wasn’t even entirely successful. Three of the seven books do not sit easily with the other four. The notorious book on ‘Sex’ stands out by being focused on matters physical rather than social or ethical, while ‘Wives’ and ‘Courtesans’ are, exceptionally, written from the woman’s point of view. Maybe Vatsyayana’s story about Dattaka being commissioned to write the book by the courtesans of Pataliputra was true. The final book, on aphrodisiacs, meanwhile, is blatantly tacked on at the end. Vatsyayana seems to have had little time for it, even casting doubt on the quality of its recipes by warning his readers not to use techniques that look ‘doubtful’.
It’s impossible to know whether Vatsyayana really was who he said he was: a white-haired scholar, long past sexual temptations, who sat down one day to stitch together the seven limbs of the teaching on kama. Like Homer, he may have been a convenient name for unknown compositors, a figure dreamed up to confer a greater degree of unity on a text that was cobbled together from disparate sources. But whether Vatsyayana was real or notional, ‘his’ task remained the same: it was to restore the body of teaching on kama to the dignity of its original wholeness. The idea was not so much to advance or redefine thinking on the subject of kama, but to capture the best thinking from existing schools of thought.
The Kamasutra was intended to be a contribution to the great scientific project of the era: the composition of authoritative studies of all aspects of human behaviour and understanding. As Vatsyayana describes it, the teaching of Babhravya, Svetaketu and the other venerable authorities formed a shastra, or a learned teaching on a particular topic. And at around the time he composed the Kamasutra, new shastras were consta
ntly being created. Patanjali had composed his Mahabhasya, a definitive commentary on the ancient science of grammar, not long before. Bharata contributed his Natyashastra, which examined every conceivable aspect of the teaching and performance of dance and theatre. Collectively, these shastras could be seen as a vast encyclopedia striving to present the best wisdom available on all subjects – which, in the Brahminical world-view, meant divine wisdom. Creating such an encyclopedia was less a matter of discovering truth than of recovering it, as if Brahmin scholars were attempting to reconstitute the 100,000 chapters of Brahma’s original creation.
It was Vatsyayana’s task to ensure that the chapter on kama was up to scratch. It was to be the last word on the subject. But what that subject actually was – what kama really meant – was deeply controversial. ‘Sex’ doesn’t begin to cover it. The Kamasutra begins by defining kama ‘in general’, which, it says, consists ‘in engaging the ear, skin, eye, tongue and nose each in its own appropriate sensation, all under the control of the mind and heart driven by the conscious self’. In Vatsyayana’s view, it seems, kama is nothing less than the conscious experience of pleasure, a state elevated above mere sensuality by awareness and control. As an idea, it isn’t so far removed from Wordsworth’s aesthetic theories – albeit applied to actual sweating, heaving bodies, rather than clouds and daffodils. (As the next chapter reveals, Vatsyayana’s idea owes much to the theories of poetics and literary appreciation developed at around the time he was writing.)
In its ‘primary form’, however, kama is more immediate, more physical. It is ‘a direct experience of an object of the senses, which bears fruit and is permeated by the sensual pleasure of erotic arousal that results from the particular sensation of touch’. On this phrase, ‘bears fruit’, hangs an entire debate of crucial importance for how the Kamasutra should be understoood. According to the translators Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar, ‘bears fruit’ probably refers to the conception of a child. If so, it would fit neatly with the orthodox Brahminical view that sex is ‘for’ procreation. The Viennese Sanskritist, Chlodwig Werba, has a more radical suggestion, however. Kama, as defined by the Kamasutra, he translates as being something that comes about ‘in consequence of a special contact’ which results in the person who experiences it ‘being permeated by a well-being of awareness’ and successfully reaching her or his goal. Kama, then, is an experience that appears to relate on some level to orgasm, not conception, and this kind of orgasm appears to have been seen as a microcosm of the enlightened liberation of the soul. The difference in translation is the result of no mere academic spat; it echoes the single most debated point in the entire realm of sexuality: is sex ‘for’ procreation or pleasure? If Chlodwig Werba is right, the Kamasutra is unequivocally on the side of pleasure.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 3