These final words could as well have been written about Burton as about Vatsyayana – one certainly suspects that they were written by Burton, perhaps for that very reason. Arbuthnot, Bhide and Indraji may be owed the true credit for translating the Kamasutra, but without Burton’s drive and determination, it would likely have festered among Arbuthnot’s private papers, or at most have been printed in some obscure and learned journal of Asiatic studies. And without the shadow of Burton’s notoriety, the Kamasutra would never have acquired its current global celebrity. In the next phase of the book’s life, its rebirth in the West, Burton would come to the fore.
BUT WHEN THE man makes advances by himself he must achieve intimacy from the very start. He sees her on a natural or contrived occasion. A natural occasion might occur near his own house, and a contrived one near the house of a friend, relative, minister of state, or doctor, at a wedding, sacrifice, festival, disaster, picnic, or other such occasion. When she sees him, he gazes at her constantly, sending signals, smoothing down his hair, snapping his nails, jingling his jewellery, chewing on his lower lip, and making various other pretences. When she is looking he talks with his friends about her under the pretext of discussing other matters; he displays his generosity and fondness for enjoyments. Seated on the lap of a friend, he shifts the position of his arms and legs, yawns, raises one eyebrow, speaks slowly, and listens to the woman’s words.
Kamasutra
Book Five: Other Men’s Wives
Chapter Two: Ways of Becoming Intimate
translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002)
CHAPTER FIVE
A Doubtful Book in Old Age
Seven years passed between the translation of the Kamasutra into English and its final appearance in print. Burton squandered them, scrabbling around for money. He prospected for gold in the Midian and on the Gold Coast of West Africa, finding none, then launched a patent liver remedy under the label of ‘Captain Burton’s Tonic Bitters’, which failed to find an eager market. His literary schemes were marginally more fruitful. He completed an oddly mannered translation of the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Camoëns, and published The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdi, A Lay of the Higher Law, a whimsical poetic confection intended to echo Edward FitzGerald’s phenomenally popular Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The Kasîdah was among Burton’s better poetic efforts, but it was not a commercial success, selling only one hundred copies before being remaindered. Burton tried to maintain the fiction that he was merely the poem’s translator – as an author and as a traveller, he was still most comfortable in disguise. Few were fooled. One memorable quatrain captured Burton’s proud autonomy and his growing obsession with posterity:
Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause,
He noblest lives and noblest dies who
makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other life is living death, a world
where none but phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice,
a tinkling of the camel-bell.
Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, meanwhile, retired from his post as Bombay Collector and returned to England. He married the widow of a distant cousin, Elinor Stirling, in 1879, and settled into a comfortable villa in Shamley Green, a well-to-do village in Surrey. His cosy home-counties life was a world away from Bombay, Edward Rehatsek and the four-in-hand carriage, but it was not entirely conventional. Elinor Arbuthnot later became a supporter of the Fabian Society, while her husband – who was now President of the local Liberal Association – earned himself a certain local notoriety by choosing to be the first to leave church at the end of the Sunday service, thus enraging the infuriated squire, who railed against the flagrant breach of the ‘long-admitted if unwritten rule of good manners in this parish’.
Privately, Arbuthnot was infringing ‘good manners’ in a far more purposeful fashion. In 1881, under the punning pseudonym ‘Anaryan’ he cobbled together a collection of popular stories from Sanskrit literature under the bland title of Early Ideas. The book contained a tantalizingly brief description of the Kamasutra. It was a first, cautious flirtation with the idea of having his translation printed, but Arbuthnot as yet lacked confidence. He bowdlerized his own translations, advising readers of Early Ideas that the Kamasutra contained ‘a good deal of matter connected with the domestic and private details of married life to which it is unnecessary to allude, and which are more fitted for Sanskrit manuscript than for English print’. Quoting a passage from the Ananga Ranga, he described how the Lotus-woman’s ‘mouth resembles the opening lotus-bud, and her perfume is as a lily which has newly burst’. This was a travesty of his earlier work. In his own 1873 translation, it had not been the Lotus-woman’s ‘mouth’ that resembled the opening lotus bud, but her ‘Yoni’; and it was not her ‘perfume’ that smelled lily-like, but her ‘Love-seed’.
Arbuthnot was troubled less by obscene words than by the thought that they might reach the wrong ears. He warned his readers that while ‘many books contain some good things’, unfortunately they are too often ‘mixed up with such a mass of padding that the gems of the work are lost in their surroundings. In compiling the present work much has been omitted that would be, doubtless, interesting perhaps to the few, but not to the many for whose edification the book has been prepared, and published as cheaply as possible.’ By removing the ‘padding’, as Arbuthnot coyly referred to the sexually explicit matter, the text’s philosophical gems would remain untarnished. Equally, the masses would be unable to get their grubby hands on the padding instead of the pearls – which, for Arbuthnot, was a prime concern. Arbuthnot seemed to believe that whether a text was pornographic or not depended chiefly on the audience. He implied that another, unexpurgated edition could be created explicitly for specialists and collectors, and sold at such a price as would protect it from misuse. Such a project would be less a case of casting pearls before swine and more a matter of delivering muck to the manor-house.
Early Ideas hinted at Arbuthnot’s ambitions for the Kamasutra. Describing the book as a ‘subtle analysis’ of ‘the social domestic economy of the Hindoos’, which entered into ‘great details about marriages, about the wives of other people, and about courtesans’, Arbuthnot regretted that he could devote only a few cursory lines to what was actually in it. ‘The matter is all there,’ he insisted, ‘but a Balzac is required to place it in an interesting way before the public.’ The ‘Balzac’, the necessary controversial, masterful literary giant, was Richard Burton.
To mastermind the publication of the Kamasutra, a book that most of Burton’s contemporaries would have described unhesitatingly as obscene, filthy and vicious, might seem a surprising move for a Victorian grandee in the later years of an eminent, if already controversial, career. To most minds – including that of his wife, Isabel, who complained that he should ‘write from his own clear understanding and not from defiance and contempt of rules’ – Richard Burton should have been basking in the warm afterglow of his years spent making a name for himself in Africa and the East. Only the friends who understood Burton’s passionate hatred of anti-sensualism could have fully understood the motives that provoked his shocking, erotic swansong.
Burton’s first task was to persuade his friend not to indulge in any more rabbit-like substitutions of ‘mouths’ for ‘yonis’, and the like. Burton was not averse to the occasional insertion, but he was vehemently opposed to any form of bowdlerization. Chief among his many enemies was the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the self-appointed moral guardian of the publishing world. It was a powerful organization, having secured convictions – as well as large fines and prison sentences – from all but four of the first 159 prosecutions it sponsored. Burton called it a ‘hideous humbug’ and obsessively referred to its members and supporters by the scornful collective term ‘Mrs Grundy’ – a name coined in the eighteenth century to personify priggish conventionality. Writing to his fellow Orientalist, John Payne,
in 1882, Burton roared that he knew Mrs Grundy to be ‘an arrant whore’ and would tell her so. By the following year he was raging that he ‘would rather tread on Mrs Grundy’s pet corn than not. She may howl on her big bum to her heart’s content.’
Burton and Payne were then working on rival translations of the Arabian Nights. They corresponded on the topic of expurgation, but Payne could not persuade his rival to adopt his way of thinking. Looking back, Payne later wrote, ‘I could never get him to understand my objection to filth for filth’s sake, altogether apart from all question of prudery. He himself had a “romantic passion” for it.’ Burton threatened to produce a mirror-image ‘Black Book’ of the Nights, ‘with all the horror between two pasteboards’, but his true passion was not for ‘filth’ itself – although he did relish it – but for completeness. When it was finally issued, Burton’s Nights would be triumphantly different from Payne’s precisely because it presented the entire text, unexpurgated. Cutting out the lewd passages, Burton claimed, was like presenting the public with ‘the grin without the cat’. To be consistent, he fumed, the censor of morals ‘must begin by bowdlerizing not only the classics’ but also
Boccaccio and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rabelais… Sterne, Swift and a long list of works which are yearly reprinted and republished without a word of protest. Lastly, why does not this inconsistent puritan purge the Old Testament of its allusions to human ordure and the pudenda; to carnal copulation and impudent whoredom, to adultery and fornication, to onanism, sodomy, and bestiality? But this he will not do, the whited sepulchre!
Burton was unabashedly triumphant that his wife’s later, ‘family’ version of the Arabian Nights was a commercial failure, selling only 500 copies. He declared that ‘even innocent girlhood tossed aside the chaste volumes in utter contempt, and would not condescend to aught save the thing, the whole thing and nothing but the thing, unexpurgated and uncastrated’. It is typical of Burton to conceive of his sixteen-volume set as some kind of resplendent male member, longed for and demanded by virgins. He saw the expurgation of a book as nothing less than a sexual mutilation, and hated and feared the thought of his own books suffering in this way.
Just as circumcision and genital mutilation had fascinated Burton as an anthropologist, so editorial censorship obsessed him in the last, literary phase of his career. When he described earlier English translations of the Nights, he called them ‘unsexed and unsouled’, almost as if the two concepts amounted to the same thing. Similarly, when he called earlier editions ‘vapid, frigid and inspid’, he implied that something sexless was not only bland but empty. It is tempting to relate these opinions to Burton’s life in Trieste, where he told the writer Alfred Bate Richards that he and his fiercely Catholic wife were ‘like an elder and younger brother living en garçon’; Isabel agreed that they lived ‘like brothers’. In this light, biographer Frank McLynn’s speculation that Burton was also impotent seems plausible, and the private, painful sources of his fierce campaign to publish erotic texts whole and ‘uncastrated’ may be better understood.
That the Kamasutra should remain unmutilated was particularly important to Burton. The book’s reputation had long rested precisely on the notion that it provided an analysis of sexuality that was definitive and complete. A bowdlerized translation would have been a travesty. Even a subtle concealment of the more obscene words, as Arbuthnot had attempted in Early Ideas, would be like ‘the bathos of the painter who makes a pretty woman terminate in a damned red herring’, as Burton quipped in a letter to his patron, Richard Monckton Milnes. Arbuthnot finally came round to Burton’s point of view. At least, he admitted that ‘some parts of the work may be considered somewhat objectionable, but it was better to give the whole work without any expurgations, and as the work has only been brought out for the benefit of the learned, and of those interested in all kinds of Oriental literatures it was far better to give it in its original entirety than to cut out parts of it.’
By August 1882, the momentous decision to publish had been taken. Burton took up his pen on Arbuthnot’s behalf, writing to Payne to ask him not to ‘forget my friend, F.F. Arbuthnot, and benefit him by your advice about publishing when he applies to you for it. He has undertaken a peculiar branch of literature – the Hindu Erotic, which promises well.’ By December of that year, Arbuthnot and Burton had gone further, reviving the idea first mooted in Bombay – that of creating a ‘Kama Shastra Society’ as a cover for publishing a string of Oriental erotic classics. The Society would no longer be an amusing fantasy, they resolved, but a genuine enterprise. For Burton, the Kama Shastra Society was yet another disguise, another way to explore sexual culture – and his own identity. For Arbuthnot, it was as good a nom de plume as ‘Anaryan’ and it had the advantage of conferring a rather learned air on his activities while simultaneously poking fun at the pretensions of genuine Indological societies.
Arbuthnot and Burton resolved to begin with the greatest work of erotology of them all, the Kamasutra, and follow it up with the Ananga Ranga – simply a reprint of the Kama Shastra, or the Hindoo Art of Love of 1873, with its original title restored. Next would come Burton’s landmark translation of the Arabian Nights, and finally, the Society would print Edward Rehatsek’s translations of two Persian erotic classics, the Beharistan and Gulistan, which had long waited for an English audience.
The catalogue was like a miniature version of the great translation project of the day: Sacred Books of the East. This grandiose scheme, begun in 1879, was steadily translating the key texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Taoism and Confucianism into English. Two Hindu scriptures were being translated by Georg Bühler, while the editorship was in the hands of F. Max Müller, the leading Sanskritist of the day. Müller’s project was determinedly Humanist. He wanted to present Western scholarship with a body of religious literature that could bear comparison with Judaeo-Christian and Classical texts, and perhaps underpin a kind of second Renaissance. If the scheme was to succeed, it was crucial for it to project an image of the Orient as philosophically minded. It didn’t matter that, as Burton would have argued, there were countless examples of obscenity or vulgarity in the Western canon; the Sacred Books of the East had to be able to stand up to comparison with even the most stately and high-minded Western classics and look them unblushingly in the eye. From Müller’s point of view, to include the Kamasutra or other erotic texts in the list would entirely spoil the intended effect. It would serve, if anything, to reinforce negative Orientalist notions of the East as childish, fantastical and immoral. When Müller’s project finally came to an end in 1904, fifty volumes had been published. None came from within the kama shastra tradition.
The Kama Shastra Society’s scheme was not only an imitation of Sacred Books of the East, but a parody and a challenge. Where Müller presented the East as ‘passive, meditative and philosophical’, the Kama Shastra Society would show it to be vigorous, pragmatic and distinctly sensual. Burton was quite serious about challenging accepted ideas about the East. He had long railed against the common belief that women in the Orient were more oppressed than those in the West. He believed that to describe the real East – including the East in which men and women were relatively free to express their sexuality – was nothing less than his imperial duty. As a translator, he said, ‘I venture to hold myself in the light of a public benefactor. In fact, I consider my labours as a legacy bequeathed to my countrymen at a most critical time when England the puissan-test of Moslem powers is called upon, without adequate knowledge of the Moslem’s inner life, to administer Egypt as well as to rule India.’ What was true for Muslims was also true for the Empire’s Hindu subjects. Burton argued that ‘the free treatment of topics usually taboo’d will be a national benefit to an “empire of Opinion” whose very basis and buttresses are a thorough knowledge by the rulers of the ruled.’ Just as a bubu’s pleasure had to be understood before the young Indian officer could satisfy her, so the imperialist had to understand his colonial dependencies intimately
before he could attempt to master them.
For all the serious Indological and imperialist ideas that motivated Arbuthnot and Burton, as a club the Kama Shastra Society was largely spurious. According to Burton, writing in December 1882, the membership consisted of just Arbuthnot and himself, though Arbuthnot later averred that there was a third member. The society’s chief purpose was to confer anonymity on Arbuthnot and Burton, thus protecting them from prosecution, not only under the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876, which banned the importation of pornography, but also under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The latter was known as ‘Lord Campbell’s Act’ after its sponsor, a man who called pornography ‘a poison more deadly than prussic acid and strychnine or arsenic’. It was extraordinarily broad, defining obscenity as ‘something offensive to modesty or decency, or expressing or suggesting unchaste or lustful ideas, or being impure, indecent or lewd’. It enabled the police to search suspected premises and destroy all printed matter they considered to be obscene. The danger for Arbuthnot and Burton was that while the Act was designed to attack publishers of outright erotica, it also enabled the authorities to crack down on other, apparently worthier publications.
The most notorious case of this kind had been brought in 1876 against Annie Besant and her co-campaigner, Charles Bradlaugh. Besant was an outspoken secularist, feminist and sexual radical who would later embrace the quasi-Hindu Theosophist movement. Bradlaugh was President of the London Secular Society, publisher of the radical newsheet, the National Reformer and, of course, a former intimate of the Cannibal Club. Together, they had printed and distributed Charles Knowlton’s short booklet advocating birth control, The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People, one of a number of neo-Malthusian tracts on population and birth control issued throughout the Victorian era. They attracted the particular wrath of the authorities by daring to republish the pamphlet after its previous British publisher had been convicted of obscenity almost ten years earlier.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 14