The book’s elaborate frontispiece showed an altar-like bookcase with a single volume being burned by a miniature devil at its centre; the flames reached up towards a pediment decorated with a satyr’s head, from whose horns hung an elaborate strap-on dildo; below, a single bookshelf was filled with volumes including the New Epicurean, the Sublime of Flagellation, Frederick Hankey’s Instruction Libertine – and the Kama Shastra. Inside the Index, Ashbee gave a detailed description of the text, so detailed, in fact, that he must have corresponded at some length with at least one of the translators – probably Arbuthnot, although the two men would not actually meet for another eight years. Ashbee was certainly well aware of the authors’ identities. As he noted, in his usual earnest manner: ‘The talented translators are F.F. Arbuthnot, and R.F. Burton, the celebrated African Traveller; the initials of their names being reversed.’ Ashbee also observed, on Arbuthnot’s authority, that ‘there are many references to the poets and philosophers of older days’, and he speculated that ‘it is hardly probable that so awful and artificial a system sprang full-grown from a single brain.’
This observation was an early flicker of awareness of what might lie out there in the darkness of the Indian night. Arbuthnot had held up a candle and seen the light falling on ranks of kama shastra manuscripts. As one of the last manifestations of the long kama shastra tradition, the Ananga Ranga, of course, could not have been further from springing full-grown from a single brain. But it did stem ultimately from a single textual source: the Kamasutra. In a later volume of his eroto-bibliography, Catena Librorum Absconditorum (String of Books Worthy of Being Silenced or, punningly, The Chain of Books of the Hidden Ones), Ashbee reported what Arbuthnot had told him about the 1873 Kama Shastra: ‘at pages 46 & 59, references were made to the holy sage VATSYAYANA, and to his opinions. The pundits informed me that the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana was now the standard work on love in Sanscrit literature, and that no Sanscrit library was supposed to be complete without a copy of it. They added that the work was now very rare.’
Arbuthnot later wrote a fuller description himself of exactly ‘how it came about that Vatsyayana was first brought to light’. Arbuthnot’s curiosity had been piqued, it seems, following discussions with the pandits, or Brahman Sanskrit scholars, who were helping him translate the Ananga Ranga. He recalled how, while translating,
reference was frequently found to be made to one Vatsya. The sage Vatsya was of this opinion, or of that opinion. The sage Vatsya said this, and so on. Naturally, questions were asked who the sage was, and the pundits replied that Vatsya was the author of the standard work of love in Sanscrit literature, and no Sanscrit library was complete without his work, and that it was most difficult now to obtain in its entire state.
In fact, Vatsyayana is referred to only twice in the Ananga Ranga. The book’s sixth chapter, on ‘the art by which man or woman is rendered submissive and obedient to the fascinator, who for that purpose uses certain drugs and charms’, gives a list of prescriptions. The first is taken from ‘the holy sage Vatsyayana Muni’, who
hath declared that whosoever will take the powder of sensitive plant, the root of green lotus-flowers, the Bassia latifolia, and barley-flower; and, after mixing it up with some of his own Kama-salila [translated elsewhere as ‘love seed’ and the ‘water of life’], will apply it as a sectarian mark to his forehead, such an one will subdue the world of women, and she who looks upon his brow cannot fail to feel for him the most eager desire.
The seventh chapter, on ‘Different Signs in Men and Women’, ends by discussing the ethics of adultery or, to quote the text itself, the circumstances in which, ‘despite all this ignominy, disgrace and contumely, it is absolutely necessary to have connection with the wife of another’.
The book of Vatsyayana, the Rishi, teaches us as follows: Suppose that a woman, having reached the lusty vigour of her age, happens to become so inflamed with love for a man, and so heated by passion that she [is] likely to end in death attended with frenzy, if her beloved refuse her sexual commerce. Under these circumstances, the man, after allowing himself to be importuned for a time, should reflect that his refusal will cost her life; he should, therefore, enjoy her on one occasion, but not always.
If Arbuthnot and Burton were to explore further and deeper into the unknown realm of ancient Indian sexuality, their quest was now to find a complete manuscript of this ‘book of Vatsyayana’.
A VIRTUOUS WOMAN, WHO has affection for her husband, should act in conformity with his wishes as if he were a divine being, and with his consent should take upon herself the whole care of his family. She should keep the whole house well cleaned, and arrange flowers of various kinds in different parts of it, and make the floor smooth and polished so as to give the whole a neat and becoming appearance. She should surround the house with a garden, and place ready in it all the materials required for the morning, noon and evening sacrifices. Moreover she should herself revere the sanctuary of the Household Gods, for, says Gonardiya, ‘nothing so much attracts the heart of a householder to his wife as a careful observance of the things mentioned above’.
…When the wife wants to approach her husband in private her dress should consist of many ornaments, various kinds of flowers, and a cloth decorated with different colours, and some sweet-smelling ointments or unguents. But her everyday dress should be composed of a thin, close-textured cloth, a few ornaments and flowers, and a little scent, not too much.
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
Part IV: About a Wife
Chapter I: On the Manner of Living of a Virtuous Woman
translated by ‘A.F.F and B.F.R’ (1883)
CHAPTER FOUR
Rending the Veil
The failure of the Ananga Ranga printing meant that Richard Burton’s career and public reputation were safe. But like a comfortably married man haunted by memories of a stolen embrace, he could not forget his aborted flirtation with clandestine publishing. In the years that followed, his frustration and sense of impotence only grew, feeding on a larger sense of slight and personal injury. In October 1872, shortly before the printing of the Kama Shastra, Burton had accepted the post of British Consul in Trieste. To his contemporaries in the Foreign Office, it would have seemed a fine placement. It was free from the feverish African air of Fernando Pó, an island off the Bight of Benin, where Burton had festered between 1861 and 1863; and it was free from the sickness of Santos, in Brazil, where Richard and Isabel had together dodged mosquitoes and cholera from 1865 to 1868. It was free, too, from the diplomatic intrigues of Damascus, so inimicable to Burton’s irreverent character, which had resulted in his dismissal as Consul, in 1871, after just two years’ controversy-dogged service. A messenger had brought Burton the humiliating news; two days later he ‘left Damascus for ever; started at three o’clock in the dark, with a big lantern; all my men crying… Ever again? Felt soft. Dismissal ignominious, at the age of fifty, without a month’s notice, or wages, or character.’
To Burton, Trieste could never compensate for the loss of Damascus – still less for the loss of India. Cosmopolitan as it was, it was not the East. Bram Stoker – who was to write the (deeply erotic) novel Dracula a quarter of a century later – commented that the Consul’s job in Trieste was ‘looked on as a resting-place for a man of letters’. As such, it was far beneath the high-profile appointment that Burton believed was owed to him as an acknowledged expert on the East. It was, in fact, a profound disappointment, as his wife Isabel acknowledged: ‘Commercial work in a small, civilized European seaport, under-ranked and underpaid,’ she snorted, ‘cannot be considered compensation for the loss of wild Oriental diplomatic life.’ Self-pityingly Burton compared himself to the poet Ovid, exiled by the Emperor Augustus to Tomis, on the Black Sea. ‘I, too,’ Burton wrote, ‘am a neglected book gnawed by the moth’, ‘a stream dammed up with mud’, ‘a Phalaris, clapped, for nothing in particular, into the belly of a brazen bull’. Ironically – and Burton would have been well aware of the irony �
�� Ovid’s exile probably stemmed from the offence caused by his erotic poem, the Ars Amatoria, or Art of Love. For Burton, by contrast, exile in Trieste was to allow him to make up for a lifetime of disappointment. Isabel had complained ‘how his writings have kept him back from place or power’, but now the translation of erotic literature would be his life’s crowning achievement. One of Burton’s first and greatest projects was the preparation of an English edition of the Kamasutra.
In their first summer in Trieste, in 1873, the journalist Alfred Bate Richards paid a visit to the the Burtons. Richards was an old friend and sparring partner – Burton apparently mastered him with the sword, but was no match for Richards’ punch in the boxing ring – and had been one of only eight people to attend the couple’s clandestine wedding in 1861. Richards began his account of the Burtons’ fourth-floor, seafront apartment by describing the prominent evidence of Isabel’s profound Catholicism in her private rooms:
Thus far the belongings are all of the cross, but no sooner are we landed in the little drawing-rooms than signs of the crescent appear. These rooms, opening one into another, are bright with Oriental hangings, with trays and dishes of gold and burnished silver, fantastic goblets, chibouques with great amber mouth-pieces, and Eastern treasure made of odorous woods.
Damascus may have been lost to Richard Burton but he was clearly doing his best to turn his rooms into at least a simulacrum of Constantinople.
To Alfred Bate Richards’ eye, Burton himself, with his ‘hands and feet of Oriental smallness’, seemed to have undergone some sort of exotic transformation. ‘The Eastern and distinctly Arab look of the man,’ he wrote, ‘is made more pronounced by prominent cheek-bones (across one of which is the scar of a javelin cut), by closely-cropped black hair, just tinged with grey, and a pair of piercing, black, gipsy-looking eyes.’ By the time Charles Ashbee, the son of the erotic bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee, met Burton – in the late 1880s, after his landmark translation of the Arabian Nights – the Oriental metamorphosis was complete.
He was the Djinn who brought the hatchet and the cord, he was Agib losing his eye, the Barber extracting the bone from the hunch-back’s throat, the Fire worshipper that bound Prince Assad, the Bird catcher who snared King Beder, he was Aladdin’s Drug merchant, the African magician, king of the Djinns – there was no end to the possible transformations of that appalling beard of his.
For young Ashbee, Burton’s magical ability to auto-transmogrify was as much the point as his Oriental appearance. Other writers who met Burton in the 1870s were more impressed by the erotic power that seemed to emanate from him. Bram Stoker, who met Burton on the Dublin to Belfast train in August 1878, found him ‘dark and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance.’ Later, he suggestively told his friend, the actor-manager Sir Henry Irving: ‘He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!’ The writer Frank Harris, now best known for his candid sexual confessional, My Life and Loves, met a sixty-year-old Burton at a party in London. In his Contemporary Portraits he claimed Burton had ‘an untamed air about him… the naked, dark eyes – imperious, aggressive eyes, by no means friendly; the heavy jaws and prominent hard chin gave him a desperate air’. Burton’s fascination for dirty talk – erotic and sadistic – and matters Oriental also caught Harris’s ear. Burton, he said,
had a curious liking for ‘sabre-cuts of Saxon speech’ – all such words as come hot from life’s mint… He would tell stories of Indian philosophy or of perverse negro habits of lust and cannibalism, or would listen to descriptions of Chinese cruelty and Russian self-mutilation till the stars paled out. Catholic in his admiration and liking for all greatness, it was the abnormalities and not the divinities of men that fascinated him.
The eccentric poet, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, agreed that ‘in his talk he affected an extreme brutality’. Blunt observed that Burton’s eyes were ‘like a wild beast’s’ but, perceptively, he spotted something constrained, claiming that Burton reminded him of ‘a black leopard, caged but unforgiving’.
For Burton the fighting animal, Trieste was his cage; for Burton the resplendently costumed Orientalist, it was his straitjacket. Burton yearned for the East with a lover’s passion. Throughout their time in Trieste, Burton and his wife intrigued with an almost manic persistence to be moved to a worthier and more easterly posting, from that of special commissioner in charge of suppressing the continued slave trade in the Red Sea, to the post of British Consul in Morocco. Burton wrote to his old friend and patron, Richard Monckton Milnes, complaining that he knew ‘every stick and stone within a radius of 100 miles… And now I’m sick of it. I want to be up and doing.’ In February 1873 he asked Milnes, ‘Why does not the F.O. make me resident at Cabul and find out what Russia is doing there? I can ride, outwalk my mare here, speak Pushtu (Afghan), Persian, Hindustani and so forth.’ He wrote a similar letter to Queen Victoria’s secret envoy, Lieutenant-General William Wylde, adding, ‘Do put in a word for me and send me rejoicing Eastward Ho!’
In the spring of 1874, it seemed for a while as if there would be little time for any kind of future, Oriental or otherwise. During an Alpine ascent of the Schneeburg, Burton decided to spend the night out in the snow, instead of inside a mountain hut, with his companions. He wore only light clothing. It was a typical gesture – a mixture of bravado and a real determination to maintain his body in its iron condition. Burton evidently wanted to prove to himself that he was still up to it. He was not: within days, he fell seriously ill. An inflammation in the groin centred on what was described as a ‘tumour’, and bouts of severe fever over a period of a month brought him close to death. On hearing the news, Swinburne protested how great the loss would have been to his country, made all the greater because ‘he has been neglected and thrown away with all his marvellous and unequalled powers’. Swinburne saw to the bitter heart of the matter: his friend’s life as yet lacked its crowning accomplishment. Burton himself recognized as much. His diary entry for 6 December 1883 recorded his profound dissatisfaction. ‘To-day, eleven years ago, I came here,’ he wrote; ‘what a shame!!!’
While Burton floundered and raged in Trieste, his friend Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot was busy in India with his quest: to locate a manuscript of this ‘book of Vatsyayana’. The theory outlined in Ashbee’s Catena Librorum Absconditorum, that ‘no Sanscrit library was complete’ without a copy, was all very well but Arbuthnot found the reality very different. On closer enquiry, he was told that the work was ‘very rare’ and ‘most difficult now to obtain in its entire state’. The problem, it seemed, was the parlous state of Indian libraries. Under the British Raj – established in 1858, almost ten years after Burton left India – it was not just traditional royal government that was breaking down; the old structures of scholarship were suffering too. Religious learning was relatively safe in autonomous monasteries and religious institutions, but areas of scholarship traditionally under court patronage, notably the erotic sciences, had long been under threat. The royal libraries were mouldering, their collections sold off or even disposed of outright.
The problem was compounded by the fact that, in the early 1870s, the British study of Sanskrit was only starting to recover from decades of official neglect. The golden age of Wilkins, Jones, Wilson and Colebrooke had been followed by an era marked by clashes between the ‘Orientalists’, who favoured the promotion of ‘native’ learning under the patriarchal guiding hand of the British, and the ‘Anglicists’, who wanted India to adopt English as the language not only of government, but of education too. In 1835, the great essayist and colonial legislator Thomas Babington Macaulay had outlawed education in languages other than English, declaring that ‘all the historical information that has been collected to form all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’. Setting Macaulay’s prejudice aside, he could not have known of the existence of even a tiny fraction of the Sanskrit
texts that were to be discovered some forty years later.
The West was on the cusp of a veritable Oriental renaissance in the 1870s, and many British Indologists felt that it was Britain’s imperial duty to be in the vanguard, Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot among them. England, he urged, ‘ought to lead the way in keeping the world informed on all subjects connected with Oriental literature’. Arbuthnot was notorious for his use of a four-in-hand, a fast and somewhat dangerous type of carriage whose four horses were managed by one skilful driver alone, and he reached for a familiar metaphor, arguing that, ‘Surely the time has not arrived for her to take a back seat on that coach, and to let other nations do a work which she ought to do herself.’ If England did not take the lead, Arbuthnot knew that other countries would. Germany, with its ever-growing ranks of linguists and philologists, was a particular threat.
Fortunately for the imperial cause, one of the key German scholars of Sanskrit, Johann Georg Bühler, was working on the side of the British. As he was a professor of Eastern Languages and Ancient History at Bombay’s Elphinstone College, and was also an enthusiastic member of the Royal Asiatic Society, the nationality of ‘George Buehler’ – as his British contemporaries called him – was not necessarily a problem. He had begun collecting Sanskrit manuscripts for his own private collection, but repeatedly found himself outbid – often by a Bombay antiquarian, Bhau Daji. Funding was one problem, Bühler’s non-Indian status another. As Bühler put it, ‘the orthodox sentiments of the majority of the Brahmans, who considered the traffic with “the face of Sarasvati” to be impious and hated the very thought of giving their sacred lore to the Mlechchhas [foreigners], made operations very difficult’. By relying on ‘unknown Brahmans who secretly came to my house in Puna, being in great pecuniary distress’, however, Bühler managed to build up a collection of some 400-odd manuscripts, some old, others copied. He began to realize that the sorry state of ‘native learning’ meant that time was running out. He observed: ‘unsaleable MSS in Gujarat usually find their way into the hands of the Borah paper-manufacturers and are destroyed.’ Similar dangers threatened the preservation of manuscripts in other regions.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 11