The new fashion was for the Kamasutra to be prefaced by serious-minded essays from celebrity contributors, preferably with an Indian background. The latest production of the Medical Press of New York came with an approbatory introduction by the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand, who had published his Homage to Khajuraho two years earlier. E.P. Dutton, meanwhile, rushed out their own Kamasutra with a foreword by the Indian travel writer, Santha Rama Rau. She somehow assumed that Vatsyayana was describing the sex lives of contemporary Indians – an assumption based, presumably, on the old, patronizing hypothesis that India was primitive and unchanging. Accompanying her foreword was an essay by John W. Spellman who, unlike Rau, was an authority on ancient India. Unwittingly, Spellman gave a fillip to a no less misleading tradition by discussing the sexual aspects of Tantric belief and practice as part of the Kamasutra’s cultural context. Tragically, the spurious link between the Kamasutra and Tantra was made, and would prove almost impossible to untie. Over the next forty years, endless pulp sex books naively portraying the wonders of ‘Indian sexuality’ would roll the Kamasutra and Tantrism into one.
In London, William Kimber’s 1963 edition tried to frame the Kamasutra in a more interesting context. This time, Vatsyayana’s book of love was accompanied by a new translation of the Phaedrus, as if to suggest that these two Classical texts on erotic love were somehow in conversation – and that Vatsyayana could fight his corner with Plato, no less. Kenneth Walker’s learned introduction even speculated on the Indian origins of Greek thought. Courtesy of the erotic pull of the Kamasutra, the idea that the West might have something to learn from it – something other than extreme sexual positions, that is – was finally reaching mass audiences.
As curator for their rival London edition, the respected house of George, Allen and Unwin chose W.G. Archer, the renowned Keeper of the Indian Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Like Arbuthnot, Bill Archer had worked as a British civil servant in India; like Burton, he had travelled extensively in the country with his wife – herself an acclaimed scholar of Indian art. In India, Archer had been no friend to the bridge-and-tiffin lifestyle of the Raj. He later recalled that he had been at his happiest when travelling in the Indian countryside, campaigning for village welfare as a district officer. He was that rare thing in the Indian Civil Service: a left-winger. He had been ‘warmly friendly with Indians’ and had even campaigned for independence. In a letter to a friend, he explained that his motivations had been emotional as much as political. ‘I had found fulfilment in merging myself with the local people,’ he wrote, in going ‘deeper and deeper into Indian life and customs’. He had been, he confessed, ‘the very opposite of aloof’. On returning to England in May 1948, Archer tried to settle in Oxford but found himself lost and unhappy. He missed the ‘voluptuousness in the climate of India’, the ‘indescribable softness which soothes the mind and gives it up to the most delightful sensations’. He had, he said, ‘acquired a sense of Indian identity’.
Editing the Kamasutra, then, was about more than scholarship. Archer was convinced of the ‘vital importance of the Introductory essays’. Following Arbuthnot’s lead, he realized that they had the power to turn pornography into Indology, and Indology into politics. Which, of course, also made them a convenient shield against prosecution – and the risks were still very real. In December 1964, the Edinburgh magistrate Norman McQueen declared that the Kamasutra and The Perfumed Garden ‘were capable of promoting and encouraging immoral practices and of inviting an unhealthy disregard for the proper limits of sexual behaviour’. Fortunately, Bailie McQueen’s powers to set those limits were themselves somewhat limited. He ‘admonished’ a local bookseller, James Paterson, and confiscated his modest stock. Paterson promptly appealed, his advocate arguing that ‘there is nothing shameful or indecent about love’.
Archer’s introduction was not just window dressing. It was magnificent. He uncovered (most of) the story of the Kama Shastra Society, capturing the sense of risk and excitement felt by Arbuthnot and Burton – and pointing out that Burton had done little of the actual translation work. (Though nobody, apparently, was listening.) Unlike his rival American editors, Archer also knew a vast amount about the erotic in ancient India and could begin to place the Kamasutra in its real context. For Archer, the Kamasutra was fascinating not as a sex manual but as a monument to Indian civilization. The discovery of the Kamasutra’s existence, he wrote, ‘revolutionised the Western approach to Indian culture. It showed how central and natural to Indian thought and life was sex… It is not too much to claim that from this classic translation in 1883 the modern understanding of Indian art and culture derives.’
Less than a hundred years after Bhagvanlal Indraji’s search for a rare manuscript of the Kamasutra, Vatsyayana’s book of love had finally become ubiquitous. It had not only recovered its place as the authority on sex in India, it was being hailed as one of the great Indian classics. Of course, not all readers agreed with Archer’s judgement. Some preferred to continue to think of the Kamasutra as smut. In the Saturday Review, Robert J. Clements sneered that by pushing the book into the mainstream publishers had taken away all the thrill of the chase. The New York Herald Tribune’s reviewer, by contrast, was glad to assert that proper publication of the Kamasutra would ‘do much to dispel this harem reputation and put it in its proper place as a fascinating – and still in many ways useful – classic of erotic and social psychological and cultural history’. The aside about the Kamasutra’s usefulness is telling. Most reviewers were struck by the book’s dual status as both erotic manual and Oriental artefact – just as Arbuthnot and Burton had been, eighty years before. Curt Gentry, in the San Francisco Chronicle, considered Vatsyayana’s book of love to be quite redundant as a sex guide, suspecting that most readers would find it ‘a strong stimulant, but only to laughter’. He admitted, however, that it might act as a useful corrective to the prevailing cliché of India as a land of asceticism. Mary Barrett, in the Library Journal, was evidently confused about where librarians should shelve this book of love. Vatsyayana’s wholesome criticisms of adultery led her to believe that it could comfortably sit alongside contemporary marriage manuals; but then again the Kamasutra was by no means an uncontroversial text, so Barrett suggested that librarians might prefer to hide it away in Special Collections, or Indian History. This ruse, she felt, might also protect the book from being stolen. Quite ignoring the glaring example of Arbuthnot and Burton, she seemed to assume that students of Indian history would not be drawn to the book’s sexual content.
In the publishing frenzy of 1962 and 1963, half a dozen mainstream editions of the Kamasutra were published in the UK and US alone. George, Allen and Unwin swiftly followed up their success with the Kamasutra’s greatest successor in the Indian erotic tradition: Kokkoka’s Ratirahasya or Koka Shastra. Again, Bill Archer wrote a preface, but the editor, translator and chief motivator was Dr Alex Comfort. At the time, Comfort was best known as a gerontologist, but he was also an acclaimed novelist, an accomplished poet and the author, some fourteen years previously, of two landmark works of sexology. Like Richard Burton, he was a polymath. And like Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, he was committed to social radicalism under the banner of personal sexual liberation. In his novels and sexological works, published in the 1940s and 1950s, Comfort developed his belief, based on a passionately held pacifism, that aggression, including political aggression, had its roots in the stress of sexual constraint and could be safely discharged only by sexual play.
In 1962, two events affected Comfort profoundly: he travelled to India, and he read the Kamasutra. The following year, he was arguing for ‘a literature of sexual enjoyment which treats the elaboration of sexuality as Indian and Arabic works have treated it – at the level of ballroom dancing’. Comfort complained that ‘there are virtually no European works of this kind, for the tradition has not, until recently, permitted them – there are plenty of marriage manuals, certainly, but of a Stopesian squareness which is enough to make on
e abandon the project before the banns are up.’ Comfort’s first response was his edition of the Koka Shastra. His reply to a complaint published in the New Statesman magazine summed up his sense of mission: ‘Mr Simon Raven finds sex “an overrated sensation which lasts a bare ten seconds” – and then wonders why anyone should bother to translate the erotic textbooks of Medieval India. One good reason for doing so is that there are still people in our culture who find sex an overrated sensation lasting a bare ten seconds.’ But Comfort was unhappy with Kokkoka’s original text, protesting that it represented ‘the dilution of Vatsyayana’s astute scholarship with nonsense’. He was also troubled by the use of ancient or medieval writings as practical guides for modern living. ‘Sex doesn’t change an awful lot,’ he later commented. ‘Attitudes, however, do.’
The solution of writing his own, contemporary Kamasutra arose in a single phone call with a psychiatrist at a London hospital. The astonishing result, in 1972, was The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, which went on to sell more than 12 million copies worldwide. The original back cover claimed that it was nothing less than ‘the Kama Sutra brought up to date’. Indian erotic techniques permeated the book. ‘A surprising number of girls cannot initially be got there at all without prolonged genital kissing,’ Comfort wrote, ‘a fact which Indian love books recognize.’ Referring to the art of biting, he noted that ‘Hindu eroticians classified these at huge length.’ Comfort even concocted his own quasi-Oriental style of lovemaking. Under the heading ‘Indian style’, readers were assured that this manner was ‘now widely familiar from the Kama Sutra, the Koka Shastra and so on. Intercourse on a bed or on cushions, fully naked, but with the woman wearing all her ornaments. Many complicated positions, including some derived from yoga which aim to avoid ejaculation.’ Sadly, the promised ‘complicated positions’ failed to find elbow-room in the Joy of Sex, Comfort dismissing them as a mere ‘human classificatory hobby’ and regretting only ‘the loss of the fancy names, Arabic, Sanskrit or Chinese, which go with them’.
Tantrism found a place in the Joy of Sex, however, as did the ‘Hindu’ positions ‘where he picks her up’. Comfort advised his joyous readers that ‘Indian erotology is the only ancient tradition devoid of stupid patriarchal hangups about the need for her to be underneath.’ In this statement lies the secret of the Kamasutra’s new-found fame. Its very distance from contemporary Western culture meant that it could be used not only as a relative standard by which modern sexual ethics could be judged, but also as a measure against which the repressive sexual attitudes of Judaeo-Christian patriarchy could be found excessively burdensome. Looking back at the West’s authoritarian sexual heritage, radicals and liberals might despair, but in the Kamasutra they were suddenly presented with what could be read as the founding document of an alternative, sexually liberated tradition. The Kamasutra was not just a weapon to brandish against patriarchy; it could be used to challenge the core idea underlying Western paternalism, the idea of cultural superiority based on a more ‘masculine’, energetic progressivity. If the Kamasutra represented a healthier, more sophisticated sexual civilization than the West’s, where had the West gone wrong?
Indian liberals were asking themselves a similar question about modern India, and with even greater urgency. If the erotic ideal had dominated Indian courtly culture until well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seemed obvious that, from the nineteenth century onwards, the ascetic had gotten very much on top. Indian intellectuals began to question what had caused the wheel to turn so dramatically. The simplest and easiest answer was power and patronage. Erotic literature had been the creation of poets and princes, the argument ran, and as ‘lascivious’ Hindu despots had given way to ‘fanatical’ Mughal overlords, the patronage on which erotic literature depended had withered and died. The small problem of Mughal enthusiasm for the erotic arts could be neatly turned by claiming that the spectacular erotic creativity of that era was merely the last, valedictory flourishing of a tragically deracinated tradition. As for the British, their role in the rediscovery of India’s heritage was simply dismissed. They were remembered not for translating the Gitagovinda or the plays of Kalidasa – still less for their painstaking work tracing kama shastra manuscripts in decaying libraries – but for the stiff moralism of Raj-era colonial clubs.
Among liberal nationalists, India’s sexual conservatism could be blamed on an unholy combination of imposed Muslim religiosity and imported British ‘Victorianism’. As always, there is some truth in the cliché, but prudery was not simply an exotic attitude forced on an innately sensual subcontinent. The sexual economics of empire were no less complex than any other form of colonial exchange. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 admittedly defined all non-procreative sex as criminal; Section 497 even threatened men who have ‘sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man’ with five years in prison. While the Code was one of the first acts of the newly established British Raj, it does not follow that it reflected purely British attitudes. In fact, it had something to do with Manu as well as Her Imperial Majesty, given that the British had used Manu’s Laws as a guide in shaping it. Nevertheless, as soon as nationalists could compare such Raj-era strictures to Vatsyayana’s hymn to the joys of ‘Other Men’s Wives’, the result would be painfully glaring. The fact that there was no ancient, Western ‘book of love’ of standing comparable to Vatsyayana’s only reinforced the apparent gulf between the two cultures.
For the first few years of the twentieth century, the Kamasutra remained in the hands of traditional Indian scholars. Not all were pandit-published efforts, like Durgaprasad’s 1891 edition; some simply chose to remain cautiously cloaked in Vatsyayana’s original Sanskrit, much as Richard Schmidt’s translation had modestly disguised itself in Latin. It was not long, however, before Vatsyayana’s book of love began to shed its Sanskrit clothing. A Bengali edition was the first to reveal itself, in Calcutta, in 1909, and a bilingual Hindi–Sanskrit text popped up in Bombay two years later. Then, in 1921, K. Rangaswami Iyengar, the librarian and ‘First Pandit’ of Mysore’s Government Oriental Library, published his own English translation in Lahore – albeit only with the assurance of ‘the great precautions which the reputed publishers have promised to take in the matter of its circulation’.
The Kamasutra was slowly insinuating itself into the consciousness of modern India – very slowly, if Iyengar’s publishers were true to their word. It was not welcomed universally; far from it. As the British prepared to leave India, the retaining grip of Hindu asceticism only grew tighter. The quintessential exemplar of this ascetic ideal was Mohandas K. Gandhi, the founding father of Indian independence. For Gandhi, realizing the potential of the self and the nation alike required renunciation and discipline. Epitomizing his own ideal of swaraj, or self-governance, he chose to become celibate in 1906, at the age of thirty-six. If Gandhi could be said to represent the traditional Hindu goals of dharma and moksha, or duty and liberation, and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, represented artha, or politics and wordly success, who would stand up for kama? Certainly not Pandit Madhavacharya, whose 1911 Hindi–Sanskrit Kamasutra acquired an extraordinary introduction in 1934 that managed to interpret the text as prescriptive and moralistic. Taking Vatsyayana at his word – that is, that the techniques of adultery were described only so as to warn honest husbands what they might face, Madhavacharya argued that the Kamasutra should be read by young people specifically in order to dissuade them from philandering, and to arrest any ‘improper tendencies in desire’. Citing the holy example of Shri Rama, Madhavacharya held up sex within marriage as the only ideal – and procreative sex, at that. Iyengar’s 1921 translation pulled a similar stunt, apologizing for the Kamasutra’s coverage of adultery, the tricks of prostitutes and oral sex between men. If Vatsyayana mentioned such ‘bad and immoral practices’, Iyengar explained, it was only for the sake of ‘exposing those matters and putting righteous people on
guard’.
Even liberals who wished to reclaim India’s erotic heritage were touchy about any suggestion of personal depravity. In his landmark 1929 study, Social Life in Ancient India, the historian Haran Chandra Chakladar could not refrain from making the aside that oral sex is ‘a very filthy practice’. He interpreted the Kamasutra’s account of the ‘social sore’ that is sex with other men’s wives as ‘a masterly analysis of the psychology of the man who seeks such love – the jealousy, anger, hatred, passion, greed, selfishness that working with the brain of the human animal, cloud his judgment and pervert his tastes’. Despite his moral reservations, Chakladar was one of the first Indian commentators to claim the Kamasutra as a national treasure. For him, it was a trove that could be plundered for its priceless gems of socio-historical detail. After all, no culture except India had ventured to produce – and somehow preserve over the centuries – a work describing the intimacies of daily life in such rich detail.
Chakladar was rare in daring to discuss the Kamasutra openly, but even he was not advocating readership of the text by the masses. He was, after all, a historian, one of Arbuthnot’s ‘small portion’ of the public ‘which takes enlightened interest in studying the manners and customs of the olden East’. As in the West, the Kamasutra in India was discreetly nudged into specialist arenas, notably into the not-so-sterile hands of the medico-sexologists whose literature blurred into semi-pornography at its fringes. In 1930, H.S. Gambers, the author of an amazing range of Indo-sexo-medical booklets including The Sex Organs (Illustrated), Self Pollution, Yoga Exercises for Seminal Disorders and Onions for Health, openly reprinted the ‘Burton’ translation in Amritsar, while the Medical Book Company of Calcutta published a new English translation by B.N. Basu in 1943. Despite the supposedly specialist nature of these publications, Vatsyayana’s work started to attract serious numbers of domestic book-buyers. Within three years the Basu version was in its seventh edition, and it kept on selling for many years afterwards – not, it may be assumed, to medical students only.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 19