The Kamasutra’s success halted the advancement of the science of kama – for a time at least – but love soon flowered in another, more perfumed arena: that of the arts. The shimmering cultural summer of the third- and fourth-century Gupta dynasty was the golden age of Classical Sanskrit literature, an epoch in which all the urban delights of the nagaraka were given their most refined expression. Poets were lauded and musicians celebrated, but greater than all other delights was the theatre. Crowds of aristocratic arts-lovers flocked to watch plays, especially those with erotic themes. Theatres were profoundly sensual places in themselves, the half-light of smoky lamps and the rows of columns supporting their barrel-vaulted roofs providing perfect opportunities for private conversation or flirtation, even in such a public space. The walls were painted with suggestive images of intertwining creepers and depictions of men and women pleasuring each other. Still more enticing was the perfume of the theatre, the alluring scents of sandalwood, incense, beeswax and betel rising from the audience and combining with the quintessentially theatrical smells of stage make-up and burning lamp-oil.
It was no wonder that Vatsyayana attested to lovers’ passion for the theatre. Plays of the Classical era, meanwhile, reflected an equally fierce desire for tales of lovers. Where Shakespeare’s theatre resounded with the trumpets of battle, the sighs of romantic lovers and the belly-laughs of low comedy, ancient Indian theatres were supposed to reverberate with one sound above all: the low hum of sensuality. Almost every surviving Classical Sanskrit court drama took kama as its central theme, and playwrights used sophisticated techniques of mime, dance and dialogue to capture the very essence of eroticism. Theatre had its own textbook to match Vatsyayana’s book of love: Bharata’s Natyashastra was the definitive work on all aspect of dance, theatre and aesthetics. It set out the exact dimensions for the construction of the ideal theatre and explored complex theories of beauty and artistic appreciation, including the grounding theory of all Sanskrit literature: that of rasas. The erotic mood sought by poets and dramatists was, the Natyashastra explained, one of nine rasas, each of which corresponded to a basic human emotion, but which was elevated above it by artistic expression or conscious appreciation. In Sanskrit, rasa can mean taste or flavour, and a rasa was like a distilled essence of the raw emotions of everyday experience. Each rasa could inspire the tone of a gesture, a look, or even an entire piece of theatre. In the Poetics, Aristotle had divided poetry into three genres: comedy, tragedy and epic. Sanskrit aestheticians went further: there were rasas for joy and laughter, disgust, wrath, serenity, heroism, fear, grief and wonder.
The greatest, the most fashionable and elegant rasa of them all was sringara, the rasa of the rapturously erotic. It was like the romantic love of the Western stage but underpinned by the force that truly drove that love. It was sringara that drew the audiences and inspired the greatest plays. And it was sringara – and the playwrights and audiences that together conjured it – that kept the Kamasutra alive. A rasa was created not only by the playwright; to exist at all it had to take shape in the mind of a connoisseur. The appreciation of the pleasures of love, according to Vatsyayana, was supposed to be ‘under the control of the mind and heart driven by the conscious self’. Similarly, sringara was to be refined from the actual experience of sexual love as ‘a dispassionate pleasure in the passions’. Nothing was supposed to be shown that would make the audience blush, but the articulation of sringara in the theatre was far from passionless. Theatre stages had to be raised up on plinths and, it is thought, protected by a wooden railing two feet high that could shield the actors from the excesses of theatre-goers. It isn’t known whether the miscreants were raised to such a pitch of erotic fervour that they attempted to cross the divide to enter the idealized world of the play, or whether they simply got so drunk that they attempted to grope the actresses – among whom were prostitutes celebrated for their beauty and their mastery of the sixty-four arts.
The Natyashastra was the Kamasutra’s sexy, clever actress sister – and the two siblings were very close. This wasn’t just a matter of age, although Bharata and Vatsyayana were probably roughly contemporary, give or take the usual century or two of uncertainty that blurs most ancient Indian dates. It wasn’t even a matter of their shared, shastric obsession with classification in general and the categorization of bodily postures in particular, though they were very similar in this regard – the Kamasutra’s coital positions need no introduction, while the Natyashastra describes no fewer than ten modes of standing, seven kinds of pirouettes, thirty-two types of gaits and 108 ‘transitory postures’. Their close relationship was born from a shared sense of the profound theatricality of the erotic.
Sex, for the Kamasutra, was theatre; while theatre, for the Natyashastra, was all about sex. The Kamasutra sees sex as a public act played out to an audience. Even the word it uses for the male lover is the one that the Natyashastra employs for the hero of a play: he is the nayaka, or protagonist. In both works, his lover, or leading lady, is called the nayika. The Natyashastra classified her in detail according to her nature and temperament. The vasakasajja nayika, for example, would dress up in joyful preparation for having sex with her beloved, anxiously checking her jewels and make-up in the mirror, strewing her bed with flower petals and gazing longingly out of the window. The khandita nayika, by contrast, was furious with her unfaithful lover; panting with rage and sorrow, she would not hear his excuses or even let him come near her. Many of these archetypal romantic situations were also described in the Kamasutra. Tellingly, even the nagaraka’s three main companions, the ‘libertine’, ‘pander’ and ‘clown’, are stock characters in drama.
Vatsyayana, it seems, was interested not only in the science of kama. He had a manual of theatrical erotics in mind as much as a real guide to sexual relationships. At times, the Kamasutra itself plunges across the barrier dividing the real from the play-world. At the beginning of each of the seven books, the curtain comes up on the nagaraka in a different costume and at a different time of life: he appears as the seducer of virgins, the ideal husband, the pursuer of other men’s wives, the client of courtesans and, finally, in the last book, as the man in need of recourse to aphrodisiacs in order to maintain his flagging virility. Sex itself is one magnificent, mannered performance in the Kamasutra, part of a whole theatrical lifestyle that begins with the sixty-four arts and ends with the appropriate kinds of cries and moans in bed. The man seducing a young virgin – and the young virgin in turn seducing him – are playing out well-defined roles. Only the courtesan is as consummate a performer: she is hired to ‘play the part’ of a lover and required to act like a wife ‘in order to make him love her’. It is no accident that, as the Kamasutra observes, many prostitutes were also dancers or artists, while the Natyashastra actually describes prostitution as one of the arts of the dancer.
Lovemaking, in the Kamasutra, is elaborately gilded with layers of meaning. Love bites are not just bites, they are mutually understood modes of courtship. Scratches with the fingernails are not the signs of raw passion, they are recognized signals: the ‘hare’s leap’ mark of five ‘peacock’s foot’ scratches close together on the nipple is used to praise a woman for her sexual skill, while a man leaving on a journey also leaves behind ‘three or four lines on her thighs or on the upper part of her breasts, to make her remember him’. The Kamasutra’s vivid ‘scenes’ of passionate lovemaking are dramatic depictions as much as portraits of real lovers at play. Many embraces are postures as much as positions, and they owe as much to dance as real sexual behaviour. Take, for instance, ‘the twining vine’, in which, ‘as a vine twines around a great dammar tree, so she twines around him and bends his face down to her to kiss him’, or ‘climbing the tree’, in which she rests one of her feet on her lover’s foot and the other on his thigh, and acts as if she were climbing his body in order to claim a kiss. When the woman assumes an ‘on top’ position to make love, she is described as ‘playing the man’s part’. And when the lovers engage in
sex as ‘a form of quarrelling’, the woman ‘pretends to be unable to bear it’ when he ‘strikes her on her back with his fist when she is seated on his lap’; and all the while she uses, ‘according to her imagination, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck and partridge’. It must have been some performance. The woman’s imagination might well have been fired by the Natyashastra, which teaches the performer how to mimic the movements of birds and animals, if not how to produce such delicious coos and cries.
Real quarrels are marked by equally elaborate play-acting. If a woman’s lover speaks the name of a co-wife, ‘or accidentally calls the woman by the other woman’s name’, or actually betrays her, ‘then there is a great quarrel’ in which the woman is something of a prima donna. She plays her broken-hearted part
with weeping, anguish, tossing hair, slaps, falling from the bed or chair onto the ground, tearing off garlands and jewellery and sleeping on the floor… She answers his words by getting even angrier, grabbing his hair and pulling his face up, kicking him once, twice, three times, on his arms, head, chest or back. Then she goes to the door and sits down there and bursts into tears.
This is a feistier heroine than the nayika of the Natyashastra, who ‘should harass him with rebukes made up of words spoken in jealous indignation. But no very cruel words should be uttered and no very angry words should be used either.’ Nevertheless, the two heroines are definitely cousins.
If poets and dramatists looked to the Natyashastra for the theory, they turned to the Kamasutra for the practice, for a model of expression. In the first of the many appropriations that would define the afterlife of Vatsyayana’s book of love, the Kamasutra’s very language was mined by poets and dramatists, its terminology adopted for erotic authenticity. Sudraka’s wonderful, fourth-century play, Mrcchakatika, or The Little Clay Cart, exists in the very same vibrantly erotic realm described by Vatsyayana. The play has as its hero an elegant and noble nagaraka called Carudatta who, by virtue of falling in love with a courtesan, seems almost to walk off the pages of the Kamasutra. Carudatta’s very house – as described by his friend Maitreya, the ‘clown’ – could be the the ideal bachelor pad described in the Kamasutra, with its terraces, soft bed and couch, its gaming board, orchard garden and caged, melodious songbirds. Writing in around the fourth or fifth century, the greatest of all Sanskrit poet-dramatists, Kalidasa, clearly knew his Kamasutra backwards. His poem Raghuvamsa dwells on the erotic abandonment of the decadent King Agnivarna, who devolves all his power to his ministers in order to pursue a life of ceaseless sensual pleasure, much like the nagaraka’s. In his lap he cradles young women or a vina lute; he sits on the terrace of his palace under a canopy, enjoying the moonlight with his harem of graceful virgins; and he leaves bite and fingernail marks on the lips and thighs of women ‘practised in the arts’ – to the cruel extent that it hurts them to play the flute or vina for his entertainment.
Of course, the poets and Vatsyayana could just have been drawing on the same stock images and scenarios, from a common pool of erotic motifs and sexual behavioural norms. But the Kamasutra was more than just another literary source: it was the authoritative original. The proof of this is found in Kalidasa’s greatest play, the Recognition of Shakuntala. In one crux moment in the play, the hero king, Dusyanta, meets the lovely Shakuntala for the first time as she waters fragrant mango trees in a hermit’s grove. The scene follows the Kamasutra like a rulebook. When a young girl is attracted to a man, Vatsyayana says,
she does not look at him face to face. When he looks at her, she acts embarrassed. She reveals the splendid parts of her body, under some pretext… When questioned about something, she replies by smiling, lowering her head, and mumbling indistinctly, with unclear meaning, very softly. She delights in staying near him for a long time. When she is some distance from him, she speaks to her attendants in an altered tone of voice, hoping that he will look at her. And she does not leave that place.
Shakuntala obeys Vatsyayana to the letter. She asks her attendants to loosen her blouse, which is ‘chafing the youthful swelling of her breasts’; she stands speechless when Dusyanta addresses her, looking down at her feet; she scolds her friends and pretends to quit them and the king – although she ends up staying behind. And when the lovers begin to converse, Shakuntala’s friends act as go-betweens – exactly as the Kamasutra recommends. Meanwhile, a stage direction notes that Shakuntala ‘displays all the embarrassment of erotic attraction’, without troubling to specify how this embarrassment might look. It did not need to. The Kamasutra had said it all.
The Kamasutra’s literary legacy persisted for centuries, Vatsyayana’s book of love becoming a manual for the literary representation of love as much as a guide to lovemaking itself. By the seventh century, Magha’s poem Sisupalavadha was not only borrowing the Kamasutra’s technical terms for embraces, kisses and fingernail-marks but, when it came to describing the orgasmic gasps of women, choosing simply to refer its readers to the Kamasutra for detail. ‘Lovely ladies hissed, purred, wailed, said sweet things and words to the effect of “please stop!”, and their laughter and jewellery tinkled,’ Magha wrote. He continued, ‘All these sounds were the stuff of the Kamasutra.’ It’s tempting to think that the Kamasutra was becoming a cliché, and Magha was mocking the ladies for their oh-so-conventional style of lovemaking. More likely, he was using the Kamasutra as shorthand for sheer erotic perfection.
Amaru’s eighth-century Amarusataka – an intimate sequence of one hundred love lyrics, each capturing the mood of a particular moment in an archetypal, passionate love affair – was so incredibly vivid that legend had it that the poems were written by an ascetic named Shankara who had entered the body of a dead man in order to indulge in exuberant erotic experiments. The story is a curious echo of Vatsyayana’s own claim to celibacy. Shankara has also taken the opportunity, it was said, to study the Kamasutra in depth, and many of the poems’ scenes, and the language used to conjure them, were drawn directly from the book of love. Vatsyayana’s ‘kiss that kindles passion’, for instance, which a woman places on the mouth of her sleeping lover, and his ‘awakening kiss’, which may be provoked by a lover pretending to be asleep, become in the Amarusataka a real scene from a love affair. At the end of a too-long and too-social evening, a woman is finally left alone with the man she desires. But he is already asleep – or so she believes.
Overpowered by love my mouth I placed
Right on his.
Then it struck me. The rogue’s skin had arisen,
he had just feigned closing his eyes.
Despite the unabashed eroticism of Classical-era literature, India’s religious culture was still as troubled by sex as it ever had been. By the time Amaru was writing, however, a movement was becoming established that tried to reconcile Hinduism’s erotic and ascetic urges. According to the philosophers of the ‘Tantric’ cults, desire could be used to overcome desire. Hermetic texts known as Tantras explored the formulation of mantras, or mystical utterances, and invoked esoteric theories of cosmology, magic and even anatomy, so that the practitioner could tap into the power of the divine. An important Tantric idea, derived from Patanjali’s Yogasutras of around the first century, held that the Supreme Power of the universe is manifest in occult ‘veins’ in the human body, taking the form of the sleeping Kundalini serpent. The Tantrin, or adept, was supposed to awaken the Kundalini from its dormant state through ritual, magical – and possibly sexual – practices, uniting the male and female seats of power in the body in the experience of ekarasa, the universalized sensation of unitary consciousness. One could describe ekarasa as a mystical orgasm, but it could hardly be further from the nagaraka’s joyful pursuit of ejaculatory pleasure. The nagaraka sought pleasure as an end in itself, while the Tantrin sought to harness it for religious use. The Kamasutra stressed the importance of kama as a valid life-goal, if kept under proper control, while the Tantric philosophers embraced kama as something forbidden and chaotically, d
arkly powerful.
Among the darkest and most powerful Tantric rites of all was the esoteric kula prakriya. It was reserved for high-level Tantric initiates only and sought to purify the devotee’s consciousness through ritual acts of transgression, including the expression, exchange, offering and consumption of sexual fluids. Sacramental sex may even have been performed between devotees in mimicry of the divine union of the god Shiva and his own female emanation, Shakti. But even within the already esoteric and transgressive cult of Tantrism, such practices were the province of an extremist, ‘left-hand’ or ‘sinister’ minority. Their object was liberation from the world, not joyous participation in its pleasures, and those who followed the left-hand path were supposed to carry out their rituals without desire.
In theory, then, ascetic-minded Tantrism could hardly be more distant from the worldly, passionate realm of the Kamasutra. From around the tenth century, however, kama and Tantra came together – and the results were made stunningly manifest on temple walls all over India. Statues of intertwined couples had existed since Vatsyayana’s time, but sculptors, newly gripped by Tantric theories, now began to carve feverishly erotic scenes by the thousand to adorn the exterior walls of temples. This wasn’t as shocking as it might seem. Indian temples had always had an intrinsically sexual element. They were centred around a garbagriha, or womb chamber, while the chief object of religious devotion, in the Shaivite tradition at least, was the stone lingam, a massive, sculptural representation of the ever-erect phallus of the god Shiva, often set in a sculpted base representing the female yoni. It is easy to overstate the eroticism of such objects. Gothic cathedrals can also be read as representations of the body, after all, but this does not mean that medieval Christians worshipped the erotic.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 5