In 1868, Bühler was given official permission to investigate the holdings of India’s old libraries on behalf of the Education Service, as part of a monumentally overambitious government scheme to catalogue every Sanskrit manuscript in India and abroad. The actual legwork largely devolved on the various branches of the Royal Asiatic Society, which sent out scholars – British and Indian – on extended library tours of the various presidencies and provinces of India, ‘to examine the manuscripts reported upon, to seek new manuscripts, to purchase manuscripts procurable at reasonable rates, and to have copies made of such manuscripts as are unique or otherwise desirable, but which the possessors refuse to part with’. This was a new world: under the efficient patronage of the Raj, the casual, gentlemanly investigations of Wilson’s, Colebrooke’s and even Burton’s day were to be a thing of the past.
Letters were sent out all over the country, and local pandits and schoolmasters dispatched to persuade Brahmin librarians to relinquish their jealous hold on their sacred texts. One eminent British scholar, Peter Peterson, complained that his eyes were clouded by a ‘dense and far-spreading’ cloud that obscured the history of Sanskrit literature. To dispel that cloud, he urgently needed more manuscripts. He was clear-sighted enough to recognize, however, that the ‘native community’ was working, relatively speaking, in bright sunshine. Agents were chosen, therefore, for their ability to wheedle their way into the confidences of Brahmin librarians as much as for their scholarship. Georg Bühler could testify from personal experience to the difficulties of the work for Europeans. As he wrote to the Director of Public Instruction in his report for the winter of 1874–5:
In May I received letters from the Sir Sûbâ, and from my agent stating that the S’rîpûj had come back and had agreed to show me his books. I, accordingly, made on May 16 a second journey to Pathan, which a sand storm and several thunderstorms that surprised me in the open field, made anything but a pleasure trip. On my arrival the S’rîpûj seemed to have changed his mind. He at first tried to put me off by showing me one kothalî or bag full of dilapidated paper MSS. On being pressed further, he produced one after another six more such kothalîs, which contained altogether between 6–700 MSS. He then solemnly assured me that this was all he had – an asseveration which I refused to accept as true.
Bühler’s persistence was eventually rewarded and in the early 1870s the manuscripts came rolling in by the thousands.
Bühler and his colleagues targeted some 14,000 known texts in Sanskrit and other languages, but the Kamasutra was not to be found anywhere on their wish-lists. In fact, the entire field of kama shastra was strangely ignored. It was not as if scholars were unaware of the existence of ‘erotological’ material. Even early missionaries had complained about the wickedness of Indian scriptures, although they were probably referring to the tradition of popular epics, such as the Mahabharata, and the polygamous philanderings of Hindu gods. In the early nineteenth century, however, the missionary Jean-Antoine Dubois, author of Description of the Character, Manners and Customs of the People of India, and of their Institutions, Religious and Civil (1816), actually described texts from the kama shastra tradition proper. He described finding ‘abominable books’ treating of ‘the most filthy and disgusting forms of debauchery’, ‘the art of giving variety to sexual pleasures’ and ‘the decoction of beverages calculated to excite the passions’. It sounds remarkably as if the Abbé Dubois had picked up a copy of the Ananga Ranga or Ratirahasya, if not the Kamasutra itself.
Georg Bühler may not have targeted kama shastra texts, but some still found their way into the kothalî after kothalî of manuscripts that were bought and eventually catalogued for the government. In 1874, the German scholar Hermann Jacobi actually found and copied a manuscript of the Kamasutra while travelling around Rajputana (modern Rajasthan), on behalf of Bühler. But like H.T. Colebrooke and Horace Hayman Wilson before him, Herr Jacobi did not see fit to write about his discovery. (His reputation thus protected, Jacobi went on to become the respected Professor of Sanskrit at Bonn, and his magnificent private library – including the forgotten Kamasutra – was eventually sold to the British Museum.) Even if Jacobi mentioned his curious find to Bühler, the latter kept quiet about it too. Like most of his colleagues, Bühler was distinctly prudish in the face of the more explicit references to sex in the Hindu erotic tradition. When Bühler translated the Laws of Manu, in 1886, he squeamishly rendered the original’s prohibition of ‘sex in non-human females, in a man, in a menstruating woman, in something other than a vagina’, as a ban on ‘a bestial crime, or an unnatural crime with a female’.
The field remained open to bolder scholars and enthusiasts. At some point in 1874 or possibly early 1875, Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot contacted Bühler in Bombay to ask for his assistance. The pandits who had helped him with the Ananga Ranga had proved entirely unable to locate a copy of the legendary Ur-text, Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra. Frustratingly, a manuscript was proving to be quite as rare as they had assured him it was. Did Bühler, perhaps, have any idea where or how such a manuscript might be found? Bühler regretted that he couldn’t assist Arbuthnot directly. Perhaps he didn’t know of Jacobi’s discovery, or didn’t want to admit that he had heard of it. But he did know another way to help. Arbuthnot recounted the story to Henry Spencer Ashbee. ‘After some inquiry’, he recalled,
Dr. Bühler, now Sanscrit professor in Vienna, but then employed in the Educational Department in Bombay, recommended to me the Pundit BHUGWANTLAL INDRAJI. This Pundit had already been frequently employed by Mr. James Fergusson, and Mr. James Burgess, in copying and translating for them writings found on copper plates, on stone boundaries, and in temples in many parts of India.
Arbuthnot arranged to interview Indraji. He did not know it, but this encounter would set the Kamasutra on its slow journey towards the West.
Bhagvanlal Indraji was uniquely qualified to help Arbuthnot in his search. Born in Junagadh, north of Bombay, in 1839, he had been brought up in the traditional Brahmin way. He learned Sanskrit from his father, who belonged to a hereditary Gujarati sub-caste producing mostly doctors, astrologers or readers and interpreters of Hindu sacred literature. He acquired a detailed knowledge of Ayurvedic medicine, developing a candour about matters physical that would later serve him well. While his elder brother followed tradition, becoming the head of a Sanskrit school under the authority of the Nawab of Junagadh, Indraji didn’t care for what he later called ‘the abstruse lore of the shastras’. He was attracted, instead, by ‘the historical traditions of his native province’. One British resident of Junagadh, a certain Colonel Lang, fondly called him ‘the little antiquarian’. As an adult eking out a living in business in Bombay, he found time to work as the pupil and assistant of the antiquarian and archaeologist, Bhau Daji – the very same Daji who repeatedly frustrated Bühler in his quest for manuscripts.
Between 1861 and Daji’s death in 1874, Indraji made numerous exhausting journeys across India on his patron’s behalf, unflagging in his search for ancient coins, inscriptions and manuscripts. An obituarist recalled his ‘indomitable energy’ and the qualities that underpinned it.
He pursued knowledge under difficulties purely for its own sake, without regard to ulterior advantages. And he pursued it steadily, ardently, and with remarkable success. For the sake of knowledge, he spent days and nights in lonely jungles, in caves, and monasteries, at times in the neighbourhood of the denizens of forests, regardless of heat or cold, hunger or thirst, comfort or discomfort.
In May 1874, following Bhau Daji’s death, Indraji was forced to consider his position. European sponsorship was perhaps the only viable way to continue his work, but while he had learned a little English on his travels, his acquaintance among European enthusiasts was small. Georg Bühler recalled that Indraji suddenly paid him a visit in the spring of 1875, ‘while I was temporarily staying in Bombay for some official business’. Bühler took a liking to him, despite his guest’s initial diffidence, later recalling that ‘af
ter his natural shyness and distrust of Europeans, which, I think, had been implanted artificially, were overcome, he became a most amiable companion’.
Bühler, then, had no qualms about recommending Indraji to Arbuthnot. His background had given him access to the right kinds of library, his training allowed him to recognize and understand ancient manuscripts, while his experience of Europeans gave him insight into the likely importance of a work such as the Kamasutra. When the two men met, Arbuthnot found himself face to face with a simply dressed man with soft, cow-like eyes, refined features and a markedly humble, almost diffident manner. There was something determined about his chin, however, and Indraji’s unaffected demeanour did not quite conceal his passion for history or his enthusiasm for the great work of unveiling India’s heritage. Conversation was awkward at first, shifting between Indraji’s halting English and Arbuthnot’s Gujarati, but eventually, across the linguistic divide, a thrilling truth emerged. By extraordinary chance, Indraji himself owned a copy of the Kamasutra. Some five years previously, he told an astonished Arbuthnot, he had discovered it in a library in Benares and, recognizing its rarity, had ordered it to be specially copied. He could even show the book to Arbuthnot, if he so wished.
The offer of a manuscript no doubt clinched the deal. Unfortunately, as Indraji told a crestfallen Arbuthnot, the text in his possession was incomplete. Most critically, it lacked the crucial Jayamangala commentary that would help explain the many obscurities of the original. Arbuthnot did not hesitate. He engaged Indraji’s services at once and set him to work on compiling a complete text of the Kamasutra in Sanskrit by tracking down any other manuscripts that could be found. Indraji accordingly wrote to the many contacts he had made in libraries across India during his long journeys. It was like an all-points bulletin for Brahmin librarians. Kamasutra manuscripts were wanted; good British money would be paid for information leading to capture. Arbuthnot, in turn, wrote to Burton to let him know that the great project was at last under way, and Burton relayed the exciting news to Richard Monckton Milnes, up at Fryston Hall.
Burton’s revelatory letter is dated ‘Trieste (purgatory)’, 2 March 1875. ‘Caro Milnes,’ he began. ‘As the yank said before the big fight with the Bear “God Almighty it’s not often I bother you”, but now I have really something worth telling you. Boy Bunny has been behaving like a trump and giving up his mind (as I, his Pa, have ever advised) to the study pure and simple of Hindú erotic literature.’ Triumphantly, Burton asked his friend to go to his secret, erotological library, find the copy of the Ananga Ranga shelved there – the one translated by ‘two ruffians’ – and open it at page 46. There he would find an allusion to a certain ‘Vátsyáyana Muni’, a character who, Burton was delighted to report, was mysterious no longer. Thanks to Bunny’s researches, it was now at last known that this Vatsyayana was nothing less than
the father of ars amoris in Sanskrit, lived about AD.100 and wrote a book in 7 chapters that treats ‘de omni re scribili et femina’. He also quotes from no less than 7 other authors whose works have wholly perished. One of his chapters treats of courtesans, another of managing one’s own wife and a 3rd of managing other mens wives. It is the standard book.
A book containing ‘everything that is writable about women’ was a book Milnes would surely, dearly wish to have in his library. There was the problem of finding a complete copy, however, and then the small matter of getting it translated. Fortunately, Burton had a man in the field, ‘Bunny’ Arbuthnot, who ‘has ordered the book from Benares, where the “Holy Sage” lived and will begin to translate at once’. (No mention was made, of course, of the Indian pandits who would do most of the work.) Burton played down his own ambitions for the book, teasing his old friend with the prospect that ‘If it is thoroughly moral I hope to add some notes. And why, when old age creeps on, should one not devote oneself to popularising the precepts of the wise?’ Milnes was well accustomed to reading between the lines. Burton, he knew, would wait and see quite how obscene the book turned out to be before making up his mind whether it was worth adorning with the scholarly veil of his learned footnotes.
If Vatsyayana’s book of love turned out to be everything Burton hoped it was, this was the last opportunity to make his mark. On his Mecca pilgrimage, over twenty years earlier, he had overheard Arab traders talking about the African sources of the Nile. He later described his intense elation, the numinous clarity of a moment in which he felt he had found ‘the mot de l’enigme, the way to make the egg stand upright, the rending of the veil of Isis’ – though, as it turned out, it was left to another man, John Hanning Speke, to rend the veil and claim the glory. When Arbuthnot told Burton that the Kamasutra was found, that ‘the standard book’ on sexual wisdom was (once more?) within his grasp, even if not yet in a complete form, he must have felt a similar sensation. If he couldn’t be the first man to physically rend the veil of Isis by standing triumphant at the sources of the Nile, perhaps he could at least be the first man to penetrate the ‘Isis’ of Indian erotic wisdom.
Burton resolved to make a return journey to India before the end of 1875. Surprisingly, given her popular reputation as a Catholic prude, he owed the idea to his wife, Isabel. As a young, unmarried diarist, Isabel had implored the fates to ‘let me go with the husband of my choice to battle, nurse him in his tent, follow him under the fire of ten thousand muskets… Why with spirits, brains, and energies, are women to exist upon worsted work and household accounts? It makes me sick and I will not do it.’ It was not only Richard Burton who was reluctant to live comfortably in Trieste. Isabel had heard, and read, endless stories of her husband’s early days in India and she proposed returning there as a way to rediscover and savour his youth. Whether or not she had also heard stories of a certain Vatsyayana and his book of love is unknown.
Burton had ambivalent feelings about returning to the ‘fatal land’. In his absence, the heady days of East India Company rule had given way to the tight-lipped conventions of the British Raj; and in the wake of the Mutiny of 1857, Burton-style fraternization with the natives was more frowned upon than ever. For Burton, the very journey was less a matter of rediscovering his youth than of being confronted with his age – he had become stiff and weak in the aftermath of his illness and may have struggled with impotence. In his Life of Sir Richard Burton, Thomas Wright described how as the ship passed through the Middle East the old warhorse repeatedly asked after former comrades and acquaintances:
On reaching Yambu, Burton enquired whether Sa’ad the robber chief, who had attacked the caravan in the journey to Mecca days, still lived; and was told that the dog long since made his last foray, and was now safe in Jehannum… At Aden Burton enquired after his old Harar companions. Shahrazad was still in Aden, the coquettish Dunyazad in Somaliland, the Kalandar had been murdered by the Isa tribe, and The End of Time had ‘died a natural death’ – that is to say, somebody had stuck a spear into him (story in Nights). Bombay was reached on February 2nd.
On arrival in Bombay, Burton found his oldest and closest friend very much alive. The Burtons stayed with Arbuthnot at his summer bungalow, beside the sea at Bandra, twelve miles from Bombay proper. It was a fine house, the fruit of thirty years’ hard work in the government service. Isabel was utterly charmed, both by the residence and by her husband’s bachelor friend, who took them out on long drives in his daring four-in-hand carriage. Together, the trio toured the sights of Burton’s youth and were entertained at parties by local boys dressed as tigers, who performed ‘native dances’ that Isabel found ‘exceedingly graceful’. Arbuthnot also introduced the Burtons to his local friends, including the eccentric Hungarian scholar Edward Rehatsek. Recently retired from a professorship at Wilson College, Rehatsek had sequestered himself, hermit-like, in a tiny house built of local reeds. Dressed in threadbare clothing and unencumbered by servants, he worked furiously on endless translations and submissions to the journal of the Bombay Royal Asiatic Society. Together the party debated Arbuthnot’s scheme to revive
the Royal Asiatic Translation Fund, a project designed to rescue texts in Sanskrit and other languages from linguistic obscurity.
The conversation also turned to the erotic. Arbuthnot explained that he was still waiting for a copy of the Kamasutra that included the complete Jayamangala – a commentary which, his pandit Indraji assured him, was absolutely necessary in order for the translation proper to begin. Rehatsek revealed that he too had been doing research into erotology, albeit in his own field of Persian and Arabic texts, and had an intimate knowledge of hitherto unpublished Persian erotological classics. At this point Burton must have set out his big, bold idea. With the help of friends and contacts at home such as Milnes and the men of the Cannibal Club – plus the services of less prudish printers than those who had aborted the Ananga Ranga scheme – these extraordinary works of Eastern erotics could be made available to an eager readership in the West. Burton explained that together they could concoct a spurious ‘club’ that would masquerade as a publishing house. They would call this club… the Kama Shastra Society. And the censors be damned! Isabel recalled that the three men had ‘many a laugh’ over the idea, describing the society as a ‘bogie name’ invented ‘for the purpose of puzzling people when they wished to bring out any book that was not for the drawing room table’.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 12