In Hinduism, kama was – and still is – ranked as one of the three fundamental goals of human existence, which together formed the trivarga, or triple path. The three goals were dharma, artha and kama. The terms are famously hard to translate. Fortunately, the Kamasutra includes the pithiest definition found in any Hindu text. Dharma, it says, ‘consists in engaging, as the texts decree, in sacrifice and other such actions that are disengaged from material life’. It covers the concepts of ‘law’, ‘justice’, ‘religion’ and ‘duty’, as well as the seemingly conflicting ideas of ‘principle’ and ‘practice’ – one might call dharma ‘rules and religion’. As for artha, it ‘consists in acquiring knowledge, land, gold, cattle, grain, household goods and furniture, friends, and so forth, and increasing what has been acquired’ – ‘wealth and worldly affairs’, one might say. It is the trivarga, rather than kama alone, that Vatsyayana declares to be the subject of his text. He even opens his book by saluting the trio. They are in ‘mutual agreement’, he says. Together, they define and underpin all knowledge, all virtue and, ultimately, all human life.
In stressing the relevance of the ‘three goals’, Vatsyayana was staking a claim for the importance of his composition. It would address one of the three fundamental areas of human experience: sex. And if dharma covered not simply ‘ritual’ but the entire realm of the spiritual and moral, and artha dealt not just with money but with the entire world of public life and politics, kama could mean far more than just ‘sex’ in the narrow sense. It could fill the space beyond dharma and artha, concerning itself with all things physical and social. As such, a book on the subject could discuss not just lovemaking but the entire life of the gentleman nagaraka in all his private capacities: his betrothal and marriage, his relations with friends, courtesans and lovers – even his taste in bedroom decoration.
Vatsyayana had another reason to emphasize sex as a life-goal: he was covering his own back. Many of his fellow Brahmin scholars would have had little time for the distractions of kama – and still less for a text glorifying the philanderings of nagarakas under the banner of philosophy. If Babhravya, Dattaka and the rest of the Kamasutra’s predecessors were hoary, it was more a result of the dust of neglect than of silvered reverence. By contrast, study of dharma and artha, the other life-goals of the trivarga, was flourishing. Authoritative works on dharma and artha had already become standards by the time the Kamasutra was born.
The Manavadharmashastra, or ‘Manu’s shastra on the subject of dharma’, was not just authoritative but positively authoritarian. In the family of texts that makes up the shastras, it was the Kamasutra’s clergyman uncle: somewhat older and more severe, and deeply preoccupied with matters of religion and morality. The Laws of Manu, as the work later became known in the West, defined norms on subjects ranging from ‘guarding the kingdom’ and ‘the character and behaviour of outcasts’ to ‘acts that bring about the supreme good’. It also tried to regulate sexual behaviour. Notwithstanding the praise of Friedrich Nietzsche, who fumed that ‘all the things upon which Christianity vents its abysmal vulgarity, procreation, for example, woman, marriage, are here treated seriously, with reverence, with love and trust’, Manu’s attitude to sexuality and the physical can be terrifyingly monkish. It describes the body as ‘foul-smelling, tormented, impermanent… filled with urine and excrement, pervaded by old age and sorrow, infested by sickness, and polluted by passion’.
Manu bans sex ‘in non-human females, in a man, in a menstruating woman, in something other than a vagina’. Its ideal is that sex should be strictly procreative and monogamous: a man should only approach his wife on specific days within the first half of the menstrual cycle, and then only after a ritual bath and a prayer. Any kind of sex that threatens the social order is forbidden, to the extent that ‘if a man speaks to another man’s wife at a bathing place, in a wilderness or a forest, or at the confluence of rivers, he incurs the guilt of sexual misconduct’. Worse still are ‘acting with special courtesy to her, playing around with her, touching her ornaments or clothes, sitting on a couch with her’ – all of which modest flirtations are the very life-stuff of the nagaraka. The penalties for adultery are severe: a woman will be eaten by dogs in a public place, a man burned on a red-hot iron bed – though, generously, Manu accepts that this ruling on adultery need not apply to the wives of strolling actors. To underline the danger, Manu issues the apocalyptic warning that: ‘If men persist in seeking intimate contact with other men’s wives, the king should brand them with punishments that inspire terror and banish them. For that gives rise among people to the confusion of the castes, by means of which irreligion, that cuts away the roots, works for the destruction of everything.’
Vatsyayana, of course, includes a whole chapter on ‘Other Men’s Wives’. He advises his male audience that among the ‘women who can be had without any effort’ are ‘a woman who stands at the door; a woman who looks out from her rooftop porch onto the main street… a woman who hates her husband; a woman who is hated; a woman who lacks restraint; a woman who has not children’ – and the list goes on and on, ending with ‘the wife of a man who is jealous, putrid, too pure, impotent, a procrastinator, unmanly, a hunchback, a dwarf, deformed, a jeweller, a villager, bad-smelling, sick or old’. One somehow feels for the jewellers.
The point of adultery is, according to Vatsyayana, pleasure alone. And sex for the sake of sex is, conveniently, exactly what the nagaraka is looking for. As is his wife: Vatsyayana approves the notion that a woman who does not ‘experience the pleasures of love’ may leave her husband for another man. But Vatsyayana is careful not to extol the virtues of adultery too highly. The verses that end the chapter on ‘Other Men’s Wives’ pronounce, surprisingly, that a man ‘should never seduce other men’s wives’ as this goes against both dharma and artha, and they claim that the sole object of describing how a man can be a successful seducer – as the preceding book has done in prolific detail – is supposedly to put husbands on their guard.
It’s easy to choke on the cool hypocrisy of this self-justification, but it is the result of Vatsyayana’s defensiveness about describing forbidden sexual practices, a pose of legitimacy he adopts while the encyclopedic ideal drives him to describe all possible forms of sexual experience. Vatsyayana’s approach seems to be that if you know all the rules, you can choose whether or not they apply to you, and where your best advantage lies. These Machiavellian mores were undoubtedly influenced by Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the standard treatise on the life-goal of artha, or ‘wealth and worldly affairs’. As a manual of statecraft addressed to an ideal prince, the Arthashastra is the devious politician brother to Manu’s clergyman uncle. It deals with subjects as diverse as the proper conduct of courtiers, the ‘capture of the enemy by means of secret contrivances or by means of the army’ and ‘detection of what is embezzled by government servants out of state revenue’.
Vatsyayana copied the Arthashastra’s supremely organized structure, and even mimicked its stance, employing the same ruthlessly pragmatic approach to seduction that the Arthashastra uses for, say, capturing a fortress or dealing with a strong enemy. So close are the forms that the Kamasutra might almost be a mischievous parody. The Arthashastra itself brushes up against the realm of kama. It stipulates the prince’s ‘duty towards the harem’, for instance, and the tasks of the ‘Superintendent of Prostitutes’ – which include seeing that prostitutes are properly trained in the art of lovemaking. Its morals are more equivocal than Manu’s, but the Arthashastra is hardly permissive. Its first book, ‘Concerning Discipline’, has a good deal to say on the personal and intimate conduct of the ideal prince. A chapter on the ‘restraint of the organs of sense’ describes how a worthy ruler has ‘his organs of sense under his control’ and should (or should be able to) ‘keep away from hurting the women and property of others; avoid not only lustfulness, even in dream, but also falsehood, haughtiness, and evil proclivities’.
A prince was not expected to be an ascetic, however, and the
Arthashastra briefly sways towards the warmth of the Kamasutra’s embracing world-view:
Not violating righteousness and economy, he shall enjoy his desires. He shall never be devoid of happiness. He may enjoy in an equal degree the three pursuits of life, charity, wealth, and desire [dharma, artha and kama], which are inter-dependent upon each other. Any one of these three, when enjoyed to an excess, hurts not only the other two, but also itself.
Vatsyayana says much the same thing, although what the Arthashastra deems to be excessive is surprisingly tame. If a woman is engaged ‘in amorous sports’ she is fined three panas. The fine goes up to twelve panas ‘if she goes out to see another man or for sports’. It is doubled for the same offences committed at night or ‘if a man and a woman make signs to each other with a view to sensual enjoyment, or carry on secret conversation for the same purpose’. Such rules could be designed to target the lifestyle described in the Kamasutra as these kinds of flirtations are meat and drink to the nagaraka and his lovers.
Vatsyayana was up against powerful enemies – or, at least, rivals. Despite kama’s theoretical importance as one of the three life-goals, to actually enjoy a lifestyle based entirely on the pursuit of pleasure was deeply problematic. Both the Laws of Manu and Arthashastra are stiff with warnings of what constitutes sexual misbehaviour. They groan with precisely stipulated penalties for transgression. The Kamasutra, in violent contrast, offers moderating or cautionary notes at most, and these are often preceded with the phrase ‘Vatsyayana says’ – a stylistic tic borrowed from the Arthashastra – thus emphasizing that rules may be a matter of opinion.
Vatsyayana gets his retaliation in first by anticipating attacks on the moral worth of kama. Pursed-lip ‘pragmatists’, he reports, would argue that ‘people should not indulge in pleasures, for they are an obstacle to both religion and power, which are more important… They make a man associate with worthless people and undertake bad projects; they make him impure, a man with no future, as well as careless, lightweight, untrustworthy and unacceptable.’ They make him, in short, a nagaraka. But kama, for Vatsyayana, is just as important as dharma and artha. It is simply a matter of appropriate timing. Childhood, he says, is for knowledge, youth for pleasure, and old age for religion and release – horses for courses, one might say. He adds, with gleeful pragmatism, ‘Or, because the lifespan is uncertain, a man pursues these aims as the opportunity arises’ – stabbing as the occasion serves, perhaps.
Vatsyayana confesses that some authorities believe that people should not even indulge in writing about pleasures, let alone enjoying them. ‘Scholars say,’ he warns, that while it is appropriate to have shastras about dharma and artha, ‘since even animals manage sex by themselves, and since it goes on all the time, it should not have to be handled with the help of a text’. Vatsyayana’s answer is typically practical. ‘Because a man and woman depend upon one another in sex,’ he says, ‘it requires a method.’ The method is, of course, his book. With an earnest manner – and perhaps a glint in his eye – Vatsyayana then modestly suggests that the pleasures of the flesh ‘are a means of sustaining the body, and they are rewards for religion and power’. One must simply ‘be aware of the flaws in pleasures, flaws that are like diseases. For people do not stop preparing the cooking pots because they think, “There are beggars”, nor do they stop planting barley because they think, “There are deer.”’ Nor, we may infer, should people stop making love – or writing about it – because they think, ‘There are scholars.’
This ‘liberal’ voice would later resonate with Western readers as a precious survival from the ancient world. Such palpably permissive mores are rare indeed in ‘religious’ texts from the distant past. The voice is most audible and distinct in the shlokas or verses that round off most of the Kamasutra’s chapters, acting as a kind of running commentary on the sutras. If the sutras are like grains of rice – nutritious, pithy, essential and capable of being stored for long periods – the shlokas are spoonfuls of sweetness. To borrow from the Kamasutra’s own recipe for virility, they are the honey and butter that transform a plain rice dish into a sumptuous pudding – one that, with the addition of ‘the juice from a sparrow’s egg’, allows a man to ‘make love with endless women’.
When the Kamasutra was composed, the sutra form was already archaic. Shlokas, by contrast, had a more contemporary flavour and it seems likely that they are the voice of Vatsyayana himself – or at least of the writers or editors whose work is attributed to him. Many readers in the West have found this voice warmly, comfortingly liberal. It tends to commentate on the sutras in order to clarify or modify the rules. The final shlokas, for instance, warn that the ‘unusual techniques employed to increase passion’ are in fact ‘strongly restricted’, and they are described only because a full survey required it. This is not a moralizing restriction, however, so much as a liberating one. As the shlokas continue, the extraordinary relativism underlying the statement becomes clear. ‘People should realize,’ they observe, ‘that the contents of the texts apply in general, but each actual practice is for one particular region.’ Rules, in the Kamasutra, may not be what they seem.
Ultimately, the Kamasutra challenges the very idea of rules concerning love. The shlokas that conclude the chapter on ‘slapping and the accompanying moaning’, from the book on ‘Sex’, end with a celebrated simile that perfectly expresses the idea that passion prevails over regulation and sex surpasses the dry facts of any textbook – even a textbook on sex. Slapping and moaning, Vatsyayana says, are ‘no matter for numerical lists / or textbook tables of contents’ – which is exactly what characterizes the sutras.
For people joined in sexual ecstasy,
passion is what makes things happen…
For just as a horse in full gallop,
blinded by the energy of his own speed,
pays no attention to any post
or hole or ditch on the path,
so two lovers blinded by passion
in the friction of sexual battle,
are caught up in their fierce energy
and pay no attention to danger.
The simile of the horse perfectly captures the power and (sweaty) energy of lovemaking. It represents neither man nor woman but passion itself: vigorous, autonomous and almost, but not quite, out of control, hurting itself recklessly in delight at the energy of its own speed. Sexual excellence may be the product of self-mastery, the cultivated knowledge of the sixty-four arts and sciences, but passion, Vatsyayana says, ‘does not look before it leaps’.
But it is in the verses that close the chapter on ‘embraces’ in which Vatsyayana most emphatically casts off the dusty gown of the scholar. He stands naked before his audience, declaring that:
The territory of the texts extends
only so far as men have dull appetites;
but when the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion,
there is no textbook [shastra] at all, and no order.
Would Vatsyayana’s successors throw away the Kamasutra and strap themselves to the wheel?
AS FOR THE end of sex, when their passion has ebbed, the man and woman go out separately to the bathing place, embarrassed, not looking at one another, as if they were not even acquainted with one another. When they return, they sit down in their usual places without embarrassment, and chew some betel, and he himself rubs sandalwood paste or some other scented oil on her body. He embraces her with his left arm and, holding a cup in his hand, persuades her to drink. Or both of them may drink some water or eat some bite-sized snacks or something else, according to their temperament and inclination: fruit juice, grilled foods, sour rice-broth, soups with small pieces of roasted meats, mangoes, dried meat, citrus fruits with sugar, according to the tastes of the region. As he tastes each one he tells her, ‘This one is sweet’ or ‘delicate’ or ‘soft’, and offers it to her. Sometimes they sit on the rooftop porch to enjoy the moonlight, and tell stories that suit their mood. As she lies in his lap, looking at the moon, he po
ints out the rows of constellations to her; they look at the Pleiades, the Pole Star, and the garland of Seven Sages that form the Great Bear. That is the end of sex.
Kamasutra
Book Two: Sex
Chapter Ten: The Start and Finish of Sex
translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002)
CHAPTER Two
Pleasure in the Passions
For a time it seemed as if Vatsyayana had succeeded too well, as if his students and nagaraka followers really were throwing away their textbooks and freely indulging their erotic appetites. No rival Kamasutras emerged to challenge Vatsyayana as the authoritative voice of sex. He even seemed to have killed off the works from which he borrowed – certainly, none of his predecessors’ books is known today. Once the Kamasutra had been composed, who would try to memorize the 150 chapters of Babhravya, after all? And with the Kamasutra to hand, who would commission a new, specialized study of courtesans and their arts? Vatsyayana’s book of love was so perfect, so closely observed and finely argued that it couldn’t be bettered.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 4