W.G. Archer, the Keeper of the Indian Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1960s and the first authoritative writer on the Kamasutra, mused that he was tempted to regard Burton ‘as a character whose unseemly adventures had already given him a vicious aura, to see him as a mystery man, a kind of T.E. Lawrence but with something of the sinister smear of a Roger Casement’. Archer’s evidence for Burton’s homosexuality was speculative:
Burton’s preference for Arab society, his obsessional studies of pederasty, the very thoroughness of his Karachi report, his friendship with Swinburne, his long absences from society, even his mania for fencing and weapons (itself at times a symptom of the crypto-homosexual), suggest that behind his investigation of sex in all its forms lay a need to placate, defend or justify a latent homosexuality.
This statement is loaded with all the psychological whimsy the early 1960s could muster. Burton’s ‘mania for fencing’, of course, hardly proves that he was was gay any more than does James Casada’s observation that Burton had a ‘tendency towards emotional involvement with men’.
Burton may well have had homosexual inclinations, or indeed relationships, but if scandal was behind his career problems, it was as likely to be as a result of his sexual relations with Indian women. He was quite open about his relationship with his bubu. In the 1840s, this was not yet socially unacceptable, as it would become under the Raj, but married officers’ wives were already known to strongly disapprove of such relationships. More damaging to his reputation was the story circulating among the subalterns that Burton had buried his love-child beside his bungalow, although the corpse was in fact that of his deeply mourned fighting cock. More damaging to Burton’s self-esteem was an unfortunate consequence of the fact that his bubu was teaching him not only about ‘the syntaxes of native Life’, but giving him a crash course in the grammar of sex itself. Burton later wrote that he had failed to satisfy his bubu as he lacked the ‘retaining art’, whose essence, he stated, was ‘to avoid over-tension of the muscles and to preoccupy the brain’. Defensively, Burton argued that the vegetarian diet of India and lack of stimulants made the women cold, so that they ‘cannot be satisfied… with less than twenty minutes’. Unlike his monolingual fellow officers, Burton was able to actually understand what his bubu said and he may have been almost unique in realizing the inadequacy of his ‘Western’ technique. Given the bullish curiosity of the man, it is hardly surprising therefore that sexual performance was a subject to which Burton would return.
Burton’s sexual experiences in India were not limited to his bubus. He claimed that British officers’ wives in Sindh, for all their moralizing, were virtually free of sexual restraint. The officers, meanwhile, had sex with Indian women as often as they wanted – with both married women and prostitutes. In ‘Past Loves’, an unpublished poem written in India in around 1847–8, Burton claimed, ‘I cannot tell the Christian names / Of all my past and present flames.’ The reason he gives has less to do with literary reticence – never a virtue of Burton’s – and more to do with the sheer number of his lovers:
One came from far Bokháráa walls
Another from Gandoppa’s falls
A fourth from Muskat
Bagdad gave me a dozen at least
And Aden many a pretty beast
Strong as full-grown muskrat
The Nubians and the Abyssinians
Sent me at least a score of minions
Cashmere was not far behind
But of them all the fair Núr Ján
The Venus of Belochistan
Was most to my mind
There was talk, much written up by his niece, Georgiana Stisted, of a romance with a Persian princess, and Burton himself leaked other veiled tales of erotic escapades, including a shaggy dog story about the attempted kidnap of a Goan nun – a classic Burton tale of the breaking of taboos. Burton’s encounter with Núr Ján, a nautch girl, or dancer-cum-prostitute, is better documented. It also appears to have been a genuine affair of the heart, judging by the few details he let slip.
Whatever the truth behind his romantic liaisons, Burton’s erotic discoveries in India weren’t limited to the personal. His four Indian travel books are packed with details of the country’s sexual culture. He discussed Sayyid Hasan Ali’s bride-book Lawful Enjoyment of Women and reported that Indian doctors considered the Western lack of knowledge of aphrodisiacs ‘the most remarkable phenomenon’. In particular, he gave detailed, ethnological descriptions of rites of passage, including those surrounding circumcision, puberty and marriage. In his first great book, Goa and the Blue Mountains, he dwelled on the devadasis, or temple-dancer prostitutes, and described how:
The Numboory family is governed by several regulations peculiar to it: only the eldest of any number of brothers takes a woman of his own cast to wife.… This life of celibacy became so irksome to the Brahmans that they induced the Nair cast to permit unrestrained intercourse between their females and themselves, it being well understood that the priesthood was conferring an especial honour upon their disciples.
Burton was, in fact, a pioneer anthropologist, and his two travel books on the Sindh region are still regarded as classics of the genre. More uniquely, he was the first writer to pull back the bedsheets to uncover Indian sexual behaviour and beliefs. He examined the ancient roots of India’s erotic tradition and digressed in unprecedented detail on shivalingams, the phallic stones worshipped across India as a symbol and manifestation of the god Shiva. As to their meaning, Burton was as yet circumspect: ‘You look towards me for some explanation of these upright stones, daubed with red,’ he wrote, adding: ‘I must place the seal of silence upon my lips, much as I regret to do so.’ He would not remain silent for long.
In January 1847, following a dose of cholera, Burton convinced the surgeon general in Bombay to grant him two years’ leave. Leaving behind the plains, he made his way south to balmy Goa and the cool, forested highlands of the Nilgiri Hills, a journey through backwoods India that filled his travel notebooks, eventually providing the voluminous raw material for Goa and the Blue Mountains. During periods of rest, Burton set about an English translation of the colourful folk fables of Pilpay. It was probably his first encounter with a Sanskrit text, though it was made through many veils; lacking serious knowledge of Sanskrit, he was forced to work from a Hindi version of a Persian rendering of the original. Pilpay was also Burton’s first attempt at the literary translation of a ‘dubious’ Oriental text – an occupation that would lead to his lifetime’s crowning work. The moralizing element of the tales had led Pilpay to describe the very scurrilous behaviour of which he supposedly disapproved, thus providing Burton with an early chance to skirmish across the boundaries of acceptability.
Burton’s furlough allowed him to tour the private libraries of scholars and local princelings, where he could indulge his passion for book-collecting. This was something of a fashionable hobby for more intellectually minded British residents in India, as it was exactly in this period that Western scholars were beginning to discover the full, vast extent of Sanskrit literature. As early as the sixteenth century, European travellers had reported, with great surprise, the existence of Hindu sacred books, but it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that it dawned on the British that tens of thousands of works remained entirely unknown, metaphorically hidden by the obscurity of their language or literally hoarded by the Brahmins, who were often reluctant to let foreigners see their sacred texts. The study of Sanskrit was as yet a young discipline; Sir Charles Wilkins’ and Sir William Jones’ landmark translations of what they called the Bhagvat-Geeta and the Institutes of Menu were only just over half a century old, while the kama shastra tradition remained almost entirely unknown. (Jones had in fact translated Kalidasa’s play, The Recognition of Shakuntala, but neither he nor the many Romantic poets and dramatists – notably Goethe – who acclaimed the work would have been equipped to recognize the references to the Kamasutra.)
Here was an opp
ortunity for Burton to make his mark. The library that most captivated the young ensign was in Bombay, at the East India Company’s headquarters, and towards the end of his furlough Burton malingered in the city, making repeated visits, and even commissioning new copies of old texts to be made especially for him. The chief glory of the Court of Directors’ library was its unique collection of almost 3,000 Sanskrit manuscripts, which had been donated by H.T. Colebrooke, the great Professor of Hindu Law and Sanskrit at Fort William College in Calcutta. Colebrooke had been the first man to proclaim the Himalayas as the greatest and highest mountain range in the world; he was a pioneer after Burton’s own heart. Many of his manuscripts had yet to be examined in any detail, and one in particular remained utterly obscure. It was a modest, 150-page volume, a foot long by just four and a half inches wide. Bound together with a later commentary, following the Indian custom, was the Kamasutra. Whether Colebrooke was ever confronted with – or affronted by – Vatsyayana’s book of love is unknown, as he never described it or indeed referred to it in any way. No more, for the time at least, did Burton. If, one morning in Bombay, Burton picked up Colebrooke’s Kamasutra, he did not record his thoughts – although it is hard to be sure as, in 1861, all Burton’s notebooks went up with the smoke of a warehouse fire. We know only that among the precious papers reduced to ashes was a collection of Persian and Arabic manuscripts that included works of ‘aphrodisiac literature’. Colebrooke would not have regretted missing the chance to be known as the discoverer of India’s greatest erotic text. Burton, however, would surely have kicked himself black and blue.
Thanks to either ignorance or reticence, the Kamasutra remained unknown in the West, for a time at least. It was only after another visitor to the library copied it out by hand that word of the book’s existence leaked into print. It was, fortunately for Burton’s later career, the slowest of all possible leaks, coming in the form of an entry in an 1864 catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts held by the Bodleian Library, a laborious work with the unwieldy title of Catalogi Codicum Manuscriptorum Biblothecae Bodleianae. It was created by the German Indologist Theodor Aufrecht, an indefatigable researcher and creator of catalogues – and an unlikely candidate for the title of erotic pioneer. In compiling his catalogue, Aufrecht appended the Colebrooke Kamasutra to a second ‘unknown’ copy, which had been discreetly bequeathed to the Bodleian in 1842 by Horace Hayman Wilson, another lion of Sanskrit scholarship. Wilson had most likely discovered the text while studying manuscripts in Benares, in the 1820s, but he was even less likely than Aufrecht or Colebrooke to publicize such a work, being no enthusiast for ‘puerile and tiresome’ literature, as he once described India’s erotic tradition.
Aufrecht’s catalogue may not have shaken the world, but it did include the first ever published description of the Kamasutra, calling it: ‘The book of Vatsyayana, by whom the art of loving is translated not lightly nor ambiguously but as becomes a learned Indian man – even in the matter of disgusting and filthy things.’ Aufrecht couldn’t decide, it seems, between denouncing the text for its subject matter and praising its author for managing to handle his material with a modicum of delicacy. He quoted the first three paragraphs of the text, hazarded a guess (incorrectly) as to Vatsyayana’s identity, and wrote – in Latin – that he hoped that by his action ‘the names of the holy men of yesteryear who toiled in the same study will be rescued from oblivion’. It would take far more than this to rescue the Kamasutra from the profound obscurity into which it had sunk. It would, ultimately, take Richard Francis Burton.
Before Burton could deepen his explorations into Indian culture, he was forced to leave India under a cloud. At the close of 1848, soon after his return from Goa and the Nilgiri Hills, he was passed over for the job of translator to General Auchmuty, the commander of the Indian Army in the Mooltan and Punjab campaigns of the Second Sikh War. He was devastated: earlier that year he had added success in the army examination in Punjabi to his qualifications in another half-dozen local languages; his rival, meanwhile, was a lieutenant who knew only Hindustani. Burton boarded ship for home on 13 May 1849. ‘Sick, sorry, and almost in tears of rage,’ as he later put it, ‘I bade adieu to my friends and comrades in India.’ Burton also said goodbye to his Indian studies, turning, instead, to the Middle East and Africa. It was not as a fearless army officer in Afghanistan that he would make his name in Victorian society, nor as a learned traveller in Sindh and the Nilgiri Hills, but as the bold penetrator of the world’s darkest and most dangerous places.
Burton’s first great expedition was, typically, horrendously transgressive. In 1853 he set out alone for the forbidden city of Mecca, a version of his old disguise of ‘Mirza Abdullah’ providing the necessary passport of Muslim identity. At enormous personal risk, he even scribbled notes while actually inside the most sacred space in Islam, the tent surrounding the Qa’aba. The resulting book, the extraordinary Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimate to Al-Madinah and Mecca, was a massive success. It enabled him, four years later, to embark on another journey towards the sacred and the forbidden. While in Arabia, Burton had spoken to traders who reported the existence of snow-capped mountains and giant seas in the heart of Africa. Burton knew his Ptolemy, and the legend that the Nile flowed out of a series of great lakes, and he decided to mount an expedition. In the company of the younger and less experienced John Hanning Speke, Burton set out for the African interior from Zanzibar in June 1857. Twenty-one months later, the two men returned, broken by illness and fever. But the source of the Nile had been found, and Burton had filled yet more notebooks with descriptions of ‘native’ sexual behaviour.
Amazingly, considering their incredible success and the élan with which they were achieved, Burton’s pilgrimage to Mecca and his ‘great safari’ produced as much poison as they did celebrity. This poison, ultimately, would play a crucial role in creating the feelings of disappointment, frustration and alienation that eventually provoked his publication of the Kamasutra. Mecca, first, had damaging repercussions for Burton’s later career as a British Consul. As a result of his blasphemy in visiting the holy city, countries with Islamic rulers would never be entirely comfortable with Burton. His relatively sophisticated understanding of Arab culture and politics, not to mention his mastery of the Arab language, presented another problem. Men like Mohammed Rashid Pasha, the Turkish Wali governing Syria when Burton was Consul in Damascus, from 1869 to 1871, would always greatly prefer to work with a bluff, blind, John Bull type, who could be trusted to understand little of what he saw and to report less, rather than with the man they called the ‘White Nigger’. The Foreign Office were sceptical about Burton’s usefulness for much the same reasons. Henry Elliot, British Ambassador at Constantinople, denounced Burton in the strongest terms as a man ‘whose character was so well known in the East as to make it a certainty that trouble would come of it… The fact of the matter is that Eastern Travellers are for the most part exactly the people least fitted to fill the responsible positions of Consuls in Turkey.’ Careful observers like the Arabist, anti-imperialist and poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt might have realized that most of the celebrated traveller’s ‘recitals’ were performed pour épater les bourgeois but the conservatives at the Foreign Office would never be persuaded that ‘Ruffian Dick’ was a safe pair of hands. Not only did his looks suggest a touch of the tarbrush, his language and behaviour added a distinct whiff of sulphur.
London society, meanwhile, positively throbbed with tales of Burton’s outrageous conduct. Most notoriously, Burton loved to thrill his audiences with the story of how a boy in his party of pilgrims to Meccca had seen him urinating from a standing position, European-fashion, rather than squatting in the Arab manner. Realizing that he had accidentally unmasked himself, Burton bragged that he had followed the boy out of the tent and stabbed him to death, to preserve his disguise and thus his life. Bram Stoker reported that Burton told him the story ‘was quite true’. In Damascus, Lord Redesdale’s enquiry on the same subject was met with the insouciant
answer, ‘Well, they do say the man died.’ A young curate in Trieste who dared to probe was famously stung with Burton’s retort: ‘Sir, I am proud to say that I have committed every sin in the Decalogue.’ The fact that so many celebrated diarists saw fit to task Burton with the question is probably more revealing than the rather dry manner in which Burton answered it. In London clubs and English country houses alike, Burton was viewed as some kind of half-tame bear: the main point of having him around was to make him growl. Burton probably told his ‘murder’ story less to genuinely provoke and more to advertise his understanding and absorption of all the ways of the Arabs: from his mastery of the muezzin’s call to prayer – which Burton was pleased to perform for delightedly horrified friends – right down to the correct way to piss in the desert.
Burton’s Nile expedition provoked even greater notoriety. The source of the great river had at last been found; the trouble was that Burton and Speke profoundly and vehemently disagreed about where exactly it was. The quarrel followed them home: Burton felt that Speke betrayed him by publicizing his claims at the Royal Geographical Society before Burton arrived back in England, and by organizing a new expedition with himself in command. Speke was fêted, Burton sidelined and criticized. Speke’s geographical and topographical labours were lauded, Burton’s historical and ethnographic work barely discussed. Worse, Burton believed that his former companion, now his ‘angry rival’, was spreading poisonous rumours about him, making arch references to his habit of noting local sexual customs, and perhaps alleging outright that Burton’s sexual continence – or preferences – were suspect. Burton’s poet friend Swinburne claimed that there had been a ‘beloved and blue object of his Central African affections’, whose ‘caudal charms and simious seductions were too strong for the narrow laws of Levitical or Mosaic prudery which would confine the jewel of a man to the lotus of a merely human female by the most odious and unnatural of priestly restrictions’. Burton’s secret marriage in January 1861 to Isabel Arundell, the idealistic daughter of an aristocratic, English Catholic family – against the wishes of her parents – may have helped to quell such rumours.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 8