The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

  Of course, before it could grace any English table, drawing room or otherwise, the Kamasutra needed to be translated. And by the time Indraji finally received delivery of a new manuscript containing the Jayamangala commentary from Benares – his manuscript still has the copyist’s date ‘Samvat 1933’, which translates as between roughly March 1876 and March 1877 – Burton had returned to Trieste. The work, however, would go on without him. Together with his own, original Kamasutra manuscript, and two others that had arrived from Calcutta and Jaipur, Indraji now had four texts to work with. ‘The first thing then to be done,’ Arbuthnot recalled, ‘was to find a man competent to prepare the Sanscrit text, and after that a competent translator.’ The man competent to prepare the text was clearly Indraji. A yellowing note in Arbuthnot’s smooth hand, pasted into a bound copy of Indraji’s revised Sanskrit text, explains how the work was done:

  The accompanying manuscript is corrected by me after comparing 4 different copies of the work. I had the assistance of the Commentary called ‘Jayamangla’ for correcting the portion from I to V Chapter but I found great difficulty in correcting the remaining portion; because with the exception of the copy thereof which was tolerably correct, all the other copies I had were far too incorrect, however I took that portion as correct in which the majority of the copies had agreed.

  An almost identical explanation appeared in Arbuthnot’s introduction to the 1883 edition.

  The identity of the ‘competent translator’ is more mysterious – and problematic. Arbuthnot declared only that, from the corrected Sanskrit manuscript, ‘the English translation was made’. No mention was made of how much of the work was done by Arbuthnot and how much by Indraji – leaving aside, for the moment, the whole question of the extent of Burton’s eventual contribution. In the nineteenth century, it was common practice for European scholars to employ pandits to elucidate difficult passages in a text and to help them prepare translations in draft form. In turning to Bhagvanlal Indraji, Arbuthnot the senior civil servant would normally have been conscious not so much of having a co-translator as a specialized but junior assistant. Indraji’s lack of fluent English – attested by numerous contemporaries – would, under normal circumstances, have further edged him into a subordinate role.

  But translating the Kamasutra into English was not at all a ‘normal’ process. Arbuthnot later recalled that in their original interview he had found that Indraji understood English ‘sufficiently’, but he did not, it seems, mean ‘sufficiently to translate from Sanskrit with me’. In 1898, the German Sanskritist Hermann Oldenberg reported that ‘the good Bühler’ – by then ensconced in his professorial chair at Vienna – had told him that the Kamasutra was actually translated in its entirety into Gujarati by Indraji, and that this version was then translated into English by a ‘native clerk’ who knew no Sanskrit, and that ‘a high official’ in the Indian Civil Service – that is, Arbuthnot – had then ‘revised it to make sure the linguistic expression was correct’. (If Indraji was translating into Gujarati, he was simply following his usual practice; every single one of Indraji’s many papers on archaeology was written in Gujarati and only afterwards translated into English by European friends and supporters.) If Oldenberg was right, translating the Kamasutra must have been a titillating affair for Arbuthnot, as Vatsyayana’s text slowly emerged from behind veil after veil of language: first Sanskrit, then Gujarati, then pandit’s English, and lastly Arbuthnot’s own, plain – naked, one might call it – prose.

  To produce an accurate translation in this laborious way is an extraordinary feat. Yet it seems this really was the way Arbuthnot and the pandits worked. Bühler’s story was backed up by the great Indian architectural historian, James Burgess, who later employed Indraji and reported that not only had Bühler told him Indraji was doing paid work on the Kamasutra, but that Indraji had been actively searching for ‘a student who knew English, to translate for him’. This ‘student’ – surely the same person as Oldenberg’s ‘native clerk’ – was, then, the first man ever to render the Kamasutra into English (albeit from Indraji’s Gujarati version, not the original Sanskrit). Frustratingly, of all the men who worked on this furtive project, he has most completely receded from view. Arbuthnot revealed his name to Henry Spencer Ashbee, sparingly admitting that ‘with the aid then of another Brahman by name SHIVARAM PARSHURAM BHIDE, then studying at the University of Bombay, and well acquainted both with Sanscrit and English… a complete translation… was prepared.’ Arbuthnot’s only other remark about Bhide was that he was ‘now employed in the service of His Highness the Guicowar at Baroda’. This is the only clue to his later career.

  Baroda (now Vadodara, in Gujarat) was a semi-autonomous kingdom within the British-run state of Bombay – close enough to the city that Burton had travelled there as a young soldier to watch sports put on by His Highness such as ‘a fight between two elephants with cut tusks, or a caged tiger and a buffalo’. In the 1870s, the Guicowar – or Gaikwar, or Gaekwad – was a less blood-thirsty figure. Maharaja Sayaji Rao III had come to the throne as a twelve-year-old child, in 1875 – after his predecessor had been deposed for attempting to poison the British resident – and within four years he had founded a college for the study of traditional Hindu astrology and Sanskrit language and literature. This was a fledgling, but significant, Indian-nationalist response to British Indology. It seems likely that Shivaram Parshuram Bhide worked at this college, putting his student experience of working on the Kamasutra to good use, no doubt. Perhaps he too was seized with Indraji’s passion for collecting; at any rate, by the end of Sayaji Rao’s reign, Baroda had over 13,000 Sanskrit manuscripts.

  Unlike Bhide, Bhagvanlal Indraji went on to become a celebrated figure – if not for his work on the Kamasutra. Bühler put him in touch with a number of European archaeologists who needed a ‘man in the field’ and over a decade of indefatigable travels he became a leading authority on Indian palaeography and early history, settling the troublesome controversy over ancient number symbols, discovering the famous stupa at Supara with J. MacNabb Campbell, and bequeathing to the British Museum a valuable collection of coins and archaeological fragments – including the beautiful ‘Lion Capital’ from Mathura. ‘His amiable frank character, his keen intelligence, and his extensive learning, made him very dear to me,’ Bühler wrote, and his feelings were shared by many European scholars. Indraji’s obituarist, Oliver Codrington, recalled in 1888 that he ‘had no wish for money nor luxuries… and his one luxury was the enjoyment of any appreciation of his work by scholars in Europe, which was slow in coming to him, but did come at last’. Indraji was indeed elected an honorary member of the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in April 1877 and, after being invited to submit a paper to the Oriental Congress held in Leyden, in 1883, was made a Doctor of Letters. However, neither institution would have had an inkling of what was, perhaps, his greatest achievement: transforming a hoary and almost vanished work of Sanskrit literature into the world’s best-known work of erotology.

  Restoring the pandits to their proper place of honour as translators does not mean that Arbuthnot should be knocked right off his podium. Unless a draft translation somehow magically appears from some lost box of papers, it’s impossible to know exactly how the work was done. In his brilliant, Kamasutra-obsessed novel, Love in a Dead Language, Lee Siegel mocks the idea that any such draft will one day turn up. A character finds a (fictional) manuscript in the (real) Burton collection at the Huntington Library which contains what he calls the pandit’s ‘first stab’. The passage that eventually became ‘The lovers may also sit on the terrace of the palace or house, and enjoy the moonlight, and carry on an agreeable conversation. At this time, too, while the woman lies in his lap, with her face towards the moon, the citizen should show her the different planets, the morning star, the polar star, and the seven Rishis, or Great Bear’ is rendered, instead, as ‘Veranda going for moon orb watching, Sahib and Mensahib are talking, talking, most talkatively. Sab is saying this sta
r and that star are this and that.’ Of course, the early drafts can have looked nothing like this, and the extraordinary accuracy of the final translation proves that Arbuthnot did far more than simply rephrase Shivaram Parshuram Bhide’s English. He worked closely with both pandits. One can only imagine the trilingual cacophony of the translation sessions at his house in Bombay.

  Whether or not Richard Burton should share the laurels as translator is more controversial still. Just as Burton’s fellow Indian Army officers sensed a shadow of moral corruption following him about, similar suspicions have long been harboured by Burton scholars concerning his abilities as a translator. According to some, his later translation of the Arabian Nights lifted whole passages from that of his rival, John Payne. This rumour has tainted Burton’s role in the publication of the Kamasutra as well – but with much better reason. Most of his biographers gloss over the problem, apparently unwilling to suffer the posthumous loss of one of their hero’s most remarkable achievements. But there is little evidence that Burton was much of a Sanskrit scholar, for all his much-vaunted fluency in anything from two dozen to forty languages and dialects – depending how you count them. The Indian Army required its translators to be expert in living vernaculars, not dead scholarly languages (although in mid-nineteenth-century India, Sanskrit’s status was something like that of Latin in Enlightenment Europe). Burton did at least dabble in Sanskrit, taking lessons in 1843, soon after passing his examination in Hindustani. On this basis, he would have been able to ‘read’ a Sanskrit text with the close assistance of a munshi or teacher – and very often, this was exactly the practice of British Orientalists. But Burton, we now know, had left India before Indraji started work.

  Instead, Burton’s contribution was that of a celebrity editor. Arbuthnot must have somehow arranged for the completed translation to be delivered to his friend at Trieste. Perhaps he used Fred Hankey’s old tricks of smuggling documents in the diplomatic bag, or conveniently hidden in the overcoats of well-respected friends; perhaps he waited until he himself returned to England. Certainly, Burton set about giving the Kamasutra a final polish and adding a few of his famous footnotes. Quite how vigorous that polish was remains unclear. In 1963, the Kamasutra’s latter-day editor, W.G. Archer, guessed that ‘Left to himself, Arbuthnot could not have given it rhythmical vigour and assured style.’ Burton, in other words, sexed it up. It is true that Arbuthnot’s later, solo literary efforts are bluntly and sometimes awkwardly written, but the style of the translated Kamasutra is not especially assured or vigorous. It is, for the most part, obtrusively plain. In his translators’ ‘Concluding Remarks’, Arbuthnot referred admiringly to Vatsyayana’s unadorned style. ‘As a collection of facts, told in plain and simple language,’ he explained, ‘it must be remembered that in those early days there was apparently no idea of embellishing the work, either with a literary style, a flow of language, or a quantity of superfluous padding.’

  Burton’s own, solo translations revel in the florid, the rococo and above all the superfluous. The Arabist Robert Irwin criticized his Arabian Nights for being replete with ‘Victorian vulgarisms’ and alleged it had a vocabulary that lurched ‘between the erudite and plain earthy’. The English Kamasutra, by contrast, cleverly finds a third path, allowing it to avoid the two extremes: the words lingam and yoni are used throughout to refer to the penis and vagina. Surprisingly, while both are indeed Sanskrit words, Vatsyayana’s original scarcely uses the terms at all – the lingam, for instance, rears its head just three times. The choice was probably less a matter of draping a verbal fig-leaf over words that readers might find obscene; as the next chapter will show, Burton in particular was resolutely opposed to pusillanimous expurgation. It was, instead, a clever solution to the lack of an acceptably neutral register for talking about sex in English. It was neither erudite nor earthy, neither gross nor gynaecological.

  It was, however, misleadingly religious. Lingam and yoni can mean ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ in Sanskrit, but in the Hindu tradition the words had increasingly come to refer to symbols of divinity. By the late-nineteenth century, a Hindu lingam was no more a penis than a cross was a Roman instrument of execution; rather it was a stone column representing the ascetic power of the god Shiva. Arbuthnot knew this very well. One of his last forays into print was a curious little book entitled Sex Mythology, Including an Account of the Masculine Cross. It attempted to trace the use of phallic symbols in religious myths, and Arbuthnot observed that ‘there is in Hindostan an emblem of great sanctity, which is known as the Linga-Yoni’. He even attempted to coin the word ‘yonjic’ to match ‘phallic’.

  When the Kamasutra was revived in the 1960s, the egregious lingams and yonis were in no small way responsible for the surprising new reputation the Kamasutra acquired as a spiritual text, rather than one that was merely pornographic. We cannot know who was reponsible for the words, but if Burton felt an original text wasn’t flavoursome enough, he was more than capable of adding a pinch of exotic spice. A ‘black slave’ in the Arabian Nights, for instance, becomes ‘a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight’. Burton occasionally inserted his own stories into the Nights, and he confessed that in his ‘translation’ of the Vikram and the Vampire stories, he had ‘ventured to remedy the conciseness of their language, and to clothe the skeleton with flesh and blood’.

  He certainly burst exuberantly into the Ananga Ranga. To the original’s description of the lavish lovemaking chamber, he added what must have been the fruit of his experience of nineteenth-century Indian brothels:

  Scattered about this apartment place musical instruments, especially the pipe and the lute; with refreshments, as cocoanut, betel-leaf and milk, which is so useful for retaining and restoring vigour; bottles of rose water and various essences, fans and chauris for cooling the air, and books containing amorous songs, and gladdening the glance with illustrations of love-postures. Splendid divalgiri, or wall lights, should gleam around the wall, reflected by a hundred mirrors.

  The anachronistic addition of books ‘with illustrations of love-postures’ gives away the game, as does the wishful, Victorian recommendation that follows, namely that ‘both man and woman should contend against any reserve, or false shame, giving themselves up in complete nakedness to unrestrained voluptuousness’. Burton also gave some narrative flow to the Ananga Ranga’s rather po-faced enumeration of sexual positions. At one point he makes ‘the poet’ interrupt his own text in order to address his audience – a king whose attention, one may infer, is flagging. ‘O, Rajah,’ he has the poet say,

  ‘there are many other forms of congress, such as Harinasana, Sukrasana, Gardhabasana, and so forth; but they are not known to the people, and being useless as well as very difficult of performance, nay, sometimes so full of faults as to be excluded or prohibited, I have, therefore, not related them to you. But if you desire to hear anything more about postures, be pleased to ask, and your servant will attempt to satisfy your curiosity.’ ‘Right well!’ exclaimed the king. ‘I much wish to hear you describe the Purushayitabandha.’ ‘Hear, O Rajah,’ resumed the poet, ‘whilst I relate all that requires to be known concerning that form of congress.’ Purushayitabandha is the reverse of what men usually practise. In this case the man lies upon his back, draws his wife upon him and enjoys her.

  This is all vintage Burton; readers of one of the exceedingly rare original texts of the Ananga Ranga will search for this passage in vain.

  Arbuthnot’s ‘Concluding Remarks’ seem to give his swaggering collaborator a discreet rap over the knuckles: ‘The author tells the world what he knows in very concise language,’ he wrote, ‘without any attempt to produce an interesting story.’ Arbuthnot wanted no added ‘local colour’ in his Kamasutra. It would be entirely faithful to the original. Burton found himself confined to the bottom of the page, where he could squeeze in a few of his characteristically juicy footnotes. When Vatsyayana mentions the ‘Lokayatikas’ or materialist philosopher
s, Burton muses that ‘These were certainly materialists who seemed to think that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.’ When Vatsyayana observes that ‘a courtesan, well dressed and wearing her ornaments, should sit or stand at the door of her house’, Burton remarks that ‘In England the lower classes of courtesans walk the streets; in India and other places in the East, they sit at the windows, or at the doors of their houses.’ The presence of Burton the traveller – and Burton the anthropologist, treating the Kamasutra as if it described contemporary Indian society – is all too palpable.

  Burton himself thought of the actual translation principally as his friend’s work. In January 1883, he wrote to John Payne. ‘Has Arbuthnot sent you his Vatsyayana?’ he asked. In the autumn of 1888, Burton was corresponding regularly with the bookseller and publisher of erotica, Leonard Smithers, who had subscribed to the Nights. In one of his letters to Smithers, now held in the Burton Collection at the Huntington Library, Burton attacked the ‘bawdy publisher’ Edward Avery, the leading (red) light of London’s erotic book trade. ‘Avery is a most pernicious rogue,’ Burton wrote; ‘he pirated my friend Arbuthnot’s book and our joint work.’ The book in question was, of course, the Kamasutra. Even if Burton had only an editor’s role, it is hard not to ascribe the marvellous valedictory paragraph of the ‘Concluding Remarks’ to him.

  And though there may be disputes and discussions about the immortality of the body or the soul, nobody can deny the immortality of genius, which ever remains as a bright and guiding star to the struggling humanities of succeeding ages. This work, then, which has stood the test of centuries, has placed Vatsyayana among the immortals, and on This, and on Him no better elegy or eulogy can be written than the following lines: So long as lips shall kiss, and eyes shall see, / So long lives This, and This gives life to Thee.