In Besant and Bradlaugh’s case, obscenity was only the excuse for taking them to court. Their real crime was to separate sex and procreation by openly advocating contraception. They were quite deliberately challenging the Establishment, and the Establishment knew it. In the event, the jury exonerated them from having corrupt motives, but the booklet itself was declared obscene, and the pair were sentenced to six months in prison and a £200 fine. Although the sentence was later quashed by the Court of Appeal on a technicality – and the Fruits of Philosophy went on to sell some 200,000 copies in under three years – the scandal of the trial enabled Annie Besant’s estranged husband to prevent her from seeing their daughter for the next ten years.
In this context, printing the Kamasutra openly, under Arbuthnot and Burton’s own names, was just too dangerous. They might well publicly emphasize their book’s importance for the study of Indology, but underneath this dusty costume was a distinctly fleshy text. It lacked even the earnest undertone of neo-Malthusian publications, whose professed intention was the combatting of poverty through the promotion of birth control. Instead, the Kamasutra painted a glowing picture of unrestrained sexual libertarianism. It contained detailed advice on how to arouse a virgin and how to seduce other men’s wives. It discussed sexual positions in exacting detail, albeit without actual illustrations. It gave, moreover, precise instructions on the delights of ‘sucking the mango fruit’ – or, rather, having it sucked. It made The Fruits of Philosophy look like bedtime reading for the nursery.
Since the Besant–Bradlaugh trial, however, Arbuthnot and Burton had been given some reason to hope that ‘scholarly’ publications could avoid prosecution, even if they contained overtly obscene material. John Payne’s only partially expurgated translation of the Arabian Nights had so far escaped legal attention. Payne himself may well have encourged Burton to proceed, for by January 1883 Arbuthnot and Burton had got as far as finding a printer, and Burton was writing to Payne gleefully informing him that ‘He and I and the Printer have started a Hindu Kama Shastra (Ars Amoris) Society. It will make the Brit[ish] Pub[lic] stare.’
The printer’s identity has been all too successfully concealed, but it was probably James Henry Gaball, an established producer of soft-core erotica. Gaball had already produced Henry Spencer Ashbee’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and Ashbee may have recommended him to Arbuthnot. Gaball was a man who could be relied upon not to run squealing to the authorities – or to stop the presses after printing just a handful of copies, as had happened with the 1873 Kama Shastra. He also had links with the clandestine booksellers and publishers Robson and Kerslake, who were listed as ‘the Society’s Agents’ on a prospectus of Kama Shastra Society publications.
Known to regular clients as ‘the Brothers’, the Kerslakes had their first bookshop on Holywell Street, a murky (and now-demolished) backstreet in the Aldwych area that was notorious among contemporaries as London’s ‘erotica row’. It is telling that the Kerslakes’ premises had previously belonged to another erotic bookseller whose shop was closed down by a police raid. By the time Arbuthnot and Burton were on the lookout for an amenable printer, however, the brothers had joined forces with Bartholomew Robson and moved upmarket to Coventry Street – an address that would later become famous as the home of Charles Hirsch’s Librairie Parisienne, which supplied Oscar Wilde with his ‘private’ reading matter. The new firm of Robson and Kerslake was relatively highbrow. In 1883, it was responsible for the Earl of Haddington’s bawdy collection, Select Poems on Several Occasions. The book (also printed by J.H. Gaball) sold for the staggering sum of £3. This, then, was a team disreputable enough to take on the project and just sufficiently elevated so as not to offend Arbuthnot’s and Burton’s aristocratic sense of propriety.
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, With a Preface and Introduction finally emerged from the shadows of London’s clandestine presses in the spring of 1883. Radical change was in the air. In the same year, a group of clean-living, forward-thinking pacifists founded the proto-Fabian Fellowship of the New Life – the young, virgin, and as-yet-unpublished sexologist Havelock Ellis among them. And in late August, the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted with a force so immense that it would alter the earth’s climate for years to come. The Kamasutra’s impact on the West would ultimately be no less far-ranging or long-lasting. Its irruption was achieved, however, with far less noise or spectacle.
Arbuthnot’s and Burton’s edition appeared under a heavy cloak of anonymity and discretion, as a private printing offered to a few subscribers. Neither translator, editor nor printer were acknowledged, beyond a reference on the title-page to the mysterious ‘Hindoo Kama Shastra Society’ and a couple of obscure clues hidden away among the footnotes. One note pointed readers to Burton’s 1870 translation, Vikram and the Vampire; another referenced Arbuthnot’s utterly obscure (and anonymous) Early Ideas. Even the Kamasutra’s place of publication was deliberately obfuscated: while the title-page of the first chapter declared that the book had been printed in London, the title-pages of the last six chapters all bore the name of Benares. Benares, of course, was the source of Indraji’s complete manuscript, but Arbuthnot and Burton had other, more urgent reasons for making the misleading attribution. They were laying a false trail for the prosecuting authorities and, at the same time, hanging out a lure for their bibliophile and erotophile subscribers, who were ever eager to follow on the perfumed track of the rare and recherché.
As a physical object, the 1883 Kamasutra was remarkably discreet. There were no pictures, and the book was printed in seven anonymous-looking sections, which the subscriber was supposed to bind together into a complete set. Each section had its own card cover in a tasteful shade of fawn or bluish-grey and carried a warning message: ‘For Private Circulation Only’. In the event of prosecution, Arbuthnot and Burton hoped, this would allow them to argue that their translation was designed to be circulated among ‘members’ only. Publishing the Kamasutra in this furtive way also left Arbuthnot and Burton with a problem. If the book was not going to be sold through ordinary booksellers, how could it be marketed? A few copies could be sold privately through trusted erotic booksellers, such as Robson and Kerslake of Coventry Street, or Bernard Quaritch of Piccadilly – both shops could be relied upon to keep a few copies of ‘private’ and ‘subscription’ editions under the counter for regular customers – but a slow dribble of casual, pornographic bookbuyers would never bring the Kamasutra the fame its backers knew it deserved.
To spread word of the book’s existence, therefore, Arbuthnot and Burton wrote to their many contacts in the two worlds of Sanskrit scholarship and erotic bibliophilia. Gentlemen who knew gentlemen who were interested in that kind of thing would privately pass on the word; the interested party would then be put in touch with the right people, a subscription would be arranged and the book would be posted under separate cover. It was a process that could scarcely count as publication; it was more like the sharing-around of pornography in a playground, passed from hand to hand under wraps among the more daring boys. On the face of it, however, the book was aimed more at scholars than erotophiles. Crisp capitals on the verso of the title page announced that the Kamasutra was:
DEDICATED
TO THAT SMALL PORTION OF THE BRITISH PUBLIC
WHICH TAKES ENLIGHTENED INTEREST IN
STUDYING THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
OF THE OLDEN EAST
Copies were sent out to reviewers who received it in precisely this light, or at least appeared to do so. The Dutch bibliographer, R.C. d’Ablaing, wrote – without mentioning the book’s overtly sexual content – to record his view that ‘The Hindus were very profound thinkers, but they were misled in their philosophical reasonings by the scantity of their truly scientific principles.’ Fernand Drujon, a noted reviewer (in certain circles) and bibliographer of erotica, wrote to the publishers to thank them for ‘this interesting and very surprising work. Indeed, I know nothing stranger, even in Sanskrit literature, which offers us some
very singular traditions.’
The interest of many subscribers, though, was less scholarly than sexual. In 1884, Arbuthnot wrote concerning the book to ‘My Dear Bellamy’ – this was Henry Edward Vaux Bellamy FRGS: publicly, a stalwart of the Royal Anthropological Society; privately, an enthusiast for erotic flagellation. ‘The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana,’ he observed coyly, ‘is being printed by some learned Brahmans who are interested in the humanities.’ Bellamy must have snorted with laughter at the disguise. As for the Brahmans being ‘interested in the humanities’, this was particularly suggestive. The book was ‘concerned about the happiness of man and the comfort of woman’, Arbuthnot wrote. The po-faced allusion might have slipped past the censors, but Bellamy needed no stronger hint. ‘Quaritch in Piccadilly has some copies to sell, but as I have some spare copies by me I should be happy to present you with half a dozen of them for your perusal and for circulation.’ Bellamy’s reaction is not recorded but, given his tastes, it seems likely that he would have headed post-haste for Golden Square – then, as now, the London home of Bernard Quaritch’s bookshop.
Joseph Knight, editor of Notes & Queries, was positively aquiver with satisfaction. He reported that the book was ‘indeed, as you say, a work of great erudition and enormous contribution to our knowledge of Indian thought’ and he promised to provide his copy with a handsome jacket. More viscerally, he felt that ‘The things that are said in it about women are marvellously fine and the book is more charged with suggestion than any work I have read.’ For all the book’s scholarly and erotic qualities, Knight found himself frustratingly unable to express his approval in any forum more public than a personal letter. ‘What a misfortune it is,’ he wrote, ‘that one cannot review a work like this without getting into bother.’
‘Bother’ was a peculiarly English understatement. ‘Bother’, in an era of rampant prudery – and, more to the point, in the era of the Obscene Publications Act – might mean not only a crippling fine and the catastrophic loss of one’s place in society, but the possibility of a jail sentence to boot. Printing or distributing such a book, never mind reviewing it, risked a potentially explosive amount of ‘bother’.
Arbuthnot’s most useful contact was Henry Spencer Ashbee, the eroto-bibliographer who had listed the 1873 Kama Shastra in his Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The two men had corresponded for some time but met only in May 1883. (Ashbee did not get to meet his hero, Burton, until June 1885, when they were introduced at the East India Club; Ashbee recorded in his diary that Burton ‘impresses one at once as a very remarkable man, whose erudition is as vast as his knowledge of the world of humanity’.) Arbuthnot sent a number of copies to Ashbee for distribution among his wide network of friends and like-minded contacts. It was an under-the-counter process, involving sealed parcels within parcels and the like. Ashbee also kept back a single copy for his own, private library of erotica – a collection unrivalled in England since Milnes’ library at Aphrodisiopolis had been destroyed by fire in 1875.
In sending a courtesy copy to Ashbee, the quasi-official curator of pornographic books, Arbuthnot was acting curiously like a conventional publisher sending an obligatory copy to the British Museum. He was eager for the Kamasutra to be taken seriously, for its publication to be recorded in some way – even if the conventional methods of doing so were closed to him. (Ironically, Ashbee’s copy did eventually end up in the Museum after his death, bequeathed along with his entire pornographic collection, which afterwards formed the heart of the long-secret ‘Private Case’.)
Ashbee published a notice of the Kamasutra in the third volume of his eroto-bibliography, Catena Librorum Absconditorum. Arbuthnot had been deeply involved with the process, writing with suggestions for how Ashbee might describe the book and listing over a dozen verses or chapter endings that he might consider quoting. Some, Arbuthnot warned, were ‘pretty strong’, others ‘very moral’; already, the dual reputation of the Kamasutra, as pornography and as sexual-spiritual guidance, was being established. Ashbee also submitted a cautious review to The Bibliographer magazine, which appeared in May 1884 under the playful pseudonym of a certain ‘E.H. Shesba’. He guardedly described the work as ‘a treatise on social life and the relations between the sexes’. He noted Vatsyayana’s hair-splitting tendencies, arguing that the book’s style bore a certain Jesuitical resemblance to ‘the disquisitions of the Romish casuists… especially in the minuteness and subtlety of its definitions’. He also guessed, rather acutely, that the Kamasutra was ‘evidently written for those who have to teach others’.
Ashbee concluded by saying: ‘Few more suggestive works… has it been my good fortune to peruse, nor any that contribute more directly and clearly to our knowledge of Indian thought. From almost every page might be extracted something fresh, or startling to our Western notions.’ The Kamasutra, he realized, was both pornography and Indology, and a challenge to the West’s attitudes towards sexuality to boot. In this almost casual fashion, he neatly summed up Arbuthnot’s and Burton’s three chief motivations for printing the book – and the three main areas in which the book would flourish in the next century.
The first edition of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana quickly sold out. Within a year, Arbuthnot and Burton announced and discreetly advertised a second. This time, they were more confident. Their new book was a handsome object, ready-bound in a soft, sensual, all-white vellum cover, the front and back covers featuring a border elegantly tooled in real gold. More gold featured in the hand-worked lettering on the spine. It announced ‘The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana’ at the top, and ‘Benares, 1883’ at the bottom. The package was elegant, distinguished and discreet. And at the ambitious price of £2 10s, it was excitingly expensive.
The elevated price was not simply a question of Arbuthnot and Burton protecting themselves from prosecution by keeping circulation small. It was a matter of targeting their audience. As they saw it, Oriental erotica was all very well in the soft hands of cultivated men – the nagarakas of their day – who could enjoy it from the proper perspective. In the horny-handed public sphere, however, such material risked being read as mere pornography. Burton publicly argued for heavy fines to be imposed on pornographic booksellers who exposed ‘indecent’ images and ‘immoral’ books in public shop windows, and he wanted the fate of ‘cheap and nasty’ literature to be merely left ‘to the good taste of the publisher and the public’. His view was snobbish but libertarian. Unfortunately, the law was egalitarian and repressive, and observed no distinction between refined Oriental erotica and popular pornography.
The law may well have been right in the case of the Kamasutra. It may have had aristocratic origins in ancient India, but in Britain it instantly became pornographic, or at least partly so. Torn between pride and the necessity for anonymity, Arbuthnot and Burton provided an obscure clue to the true, pornographic origins of their project. On the title-page of the second edition the place of printing was given as ‘Cosmopoli: MDCCCLXXXIII: for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares’. A select few erotic bibliophiles would have smiled at an in-joke. ‘Cosmopoli’ was a fairly standard pornographers’ stand-in for a place of publication. It was also intended as an oblique reference to the master of ‘Aphrodisiopolis’ and presiding chief of a club known as ‘the Cosmopolitan’, Richard Monckton Milnes.
According to Arbuthnot, writing safely after Milnes’ death, in 1885, Milnes had been the Kama Shastra Society’s third member. The extent of his involvement is uncertain. He may have put up some of the initial capital, or simply have provided advice and encouragement. He had already been helping Burton with his career for decades – both in the Foreign Office, thanks to his access to the prime ministerial ear, and in the publishing world, thanks to his literary contacts. ‘Cosmopoli’ also concealed a second, coded, pornographical reference – to the more deeply clandestine world of Fred Hankey. Hankey was probably the co-author of an anonymously published, Sadean French novel, Instruction libertine, which gave ‘Sadopolis’ as the fictional place of pr
inting – though in fact the book was roughly run off at a distinctly under-the-counter press in Brussels.
The oblique references to Hankey and Milnes – the avid, sexually transgressive pornographers and tutors of Burton’s wilder bachelor years – betray that while Arbuthnot and Burton were eager for their book not to sink to the level of public pornography, they were well aware that it would be read for erotic pleasure within the small, private sphere of their own coterie. Compared to explicit erotica such as My Secret Life – a compendious pseudo-confessional of the outrageous sexual exploits of ‘Walter’, which was published in the 1880s and probably written by Henry Spencer Ashbee – the Kamasutra was soft soap. But there was still plenty in the book to titillate and arouse, and the exotic, Oriental associations provided an additional sexual charge.
One section, in particular, they knew would kindle the interest of their Sadist friends. Fred Hankey no doubt would have approved of the chapter ‘On Pressing, or Marking, or Scratching with the Nails’, and perhaps the one ‘On Biting, and the Means to be Employed with Regard to Women of Different Countries’. Love marks appear to have been a major fetish in ancient India; at least, Vatsyayana recommended an elaborate array of patterns that could be left on the lover’s body. ‘The line of jewels’, ‘the broken cloud’ and ‘the biting of the boar’ far exceeded Western nibblings in ambition and imagination.
The Kamasutra even asserted that sexual intercourse itself could be compared to a quarrel, ‘on account of the contrarieties of love and its tendency to dispute’. It listed no less than six areas that may be struck with passion, as well as four kinds of striking – with the back of the hand, with the fingers a little contracted, with the fist, and with the open palm – and eight sounds of pain that striking may provoke. At this point, in the chapter treating ‘Of the Various Modes of Striking and the Sounds Appropriate to Them’, the translators made an egregious error. According to their Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, to the four modes of striking may be added, ‘the wedge on the bosom, the scissors on the head, the piercing instrument on the cheeks, and the pincers on the breasts and sides’. ‘The wedge’, ‘the scissors’ and ‘the pincers’ are interpreted today not as real instruments but as illustrative descriptions of hand positions forming part of a highly elaborated theory of lovemaking. It is tempting to believe that the misreading was Arbuthnot’s or Burton’s own, and that they were misled by their own Sadistic impulses.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 15