The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

  When another new, English Kamasutra was published in Bombay, in 1961, it came with the same self-applied restrictions. S.C. Upadhyaya’s edition carried an apologetic prefatory note announcing that the book was intended ‘for members of the medical and legal professions, scholars and research students of Indology, psychology and social sciences’. A foreword by the scholar of Indian painting and ancient history, Moti Chandra, stressed Vatsyayana’s ‘cold scientific thoroughness’, and the ‘precision’ and ‘scientific viewpoint’ of his treatment. The four pages of introductory quotations, however, told a very different story. Worthies ranging from Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore to Havelock Ellis and Richard Burton were all quoted as approving the importance of love. Reading between the lines, it was clear that this Kamasutra was not, in fact, intended for specialists only; it was for anyone who could experience love. Somehow, the awkward fact that almost all these quotations referred to ethereal or transcendent love, and almost none had any relation whatsoever to kama and the rampantly libertine world of the nagaraka, was sidestepped – as was the question of the relation between the text of the Kamasutra and the fifty black-and-white photographs of Indian temple sculptures and erotic miniatures that accompanied it.

  Upadhyaya’s Kamasutra was such a beautiful production that Western publishers eager to cash in post-Chatterley scrambled to import it, notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of UK Customs to stop them. It was a truly landmark publication. Not only was it the first post-Chatterley Kamasutra, it was also the first original translation into English to appear in the West for eighty years. Astonishingly, it remained the only alternative to the 1883 version for another quarter-century. Despite the excitement of the rediscovery of Vatsyayana’s book in the 1960s and 1970s, and the tens of thousands of versions of the ‘Burton’ translation sold in that time, no Westerner seemed inclined to attempt a new translation of their own. Serious Sanskritists were hardly encouraged to involve themselves with a book that was retreating ever further into the semi-pornographical twilight of the shelf under the coffee table. Liberals and radicals, on the other hand, just didn’t have the Sanskrit – and the Kamasutra was a notoriously difficult text.

  Finally, in 1987, an eminent German Sanskritist, Klaus Mylius, put his head above the parapet with a new translation; and three years later, Cinzia Pieruccini’s Italian version followed. Astonishingly, these were the first translations by Western scholars since Richard Schmidt ninety years earlier. Both were serious, considered works and both managed to access popular audiences to boot – the full-colour, coffee-table version of Mylius’s translation helped it sell 100,000 copies in Germany – but they could not match the 1883 text for notoriety. To compete with Burton, the late-twentieth century would require a character of equivalent complexity and colour.

  The ‘new Burton’ finally appeared in 1992, brandishing his Kâma Sûtra in one hand and pointing the finger accusingly at Western society with the other. His name was Alain Daniélou, and his path to the Kamasutra was a surprising one. As an artist friend of Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob, international playboy, student of Rabindranath Tagore, popularizer of Indian Classical music, Hindu proselyte and, ultimately, translator of the Kamasutra, he tried on even more disguises than Richard Burton. Throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s, Daniélou lived in a crumbling but elegant riverside palace in Varanasi with his lover, Raymond Burnier, studying Hinduism, Sanskrit and Indian music – like Vatsyayana’s nagaraka, he learned to play the vina lute. Daniélou took the name Shiv Sharan and succeeded in underpinning his dilettante lifestyle with serious scholarship. On his return to France, he became a prolific writer on Hinduism and a proselytizer for ‘traditional’ Indian culture. He paid particular attention to its sexual aspects. The worship of the ‘primordial’ god he called Shiva-Dionysus was, he claimed, the only path to salvation. ‘Only those who faithfully practice phallus-worship will be saved,’ he wrote in one book; ‘eroticism may become the means, and perhaps the only means, of attaining Liberation,’ he declared in another. He was known for wearing a little golden lingam on a necklace, hanging outside his shirt. At least he was no exponent of what he derisively termed ‘drawing-room yoga’.

  Daniélou turned to the Kamasutra in the last years of his life, working on deciphering the Sanskrit for four whole years. When his translation appeared in 1992, two years before he died, he gave it the subtitle Le Brévaire de l’amour, or ‘the breviary of love’. The title owed much to France’s distinctive relationship with India and the Kamasutra. Where Indology in Germany was a professional affair founded on philological principles, French students of India had tended to conjure it as a place at once more mystical and sensual. In 1891, Pierre Eugène Lamairesse, the publisher of one of the earliest pirated, Parisian printings, had even described Vatsyayana’s book as a ‘Théologie Hindou’. Daniélou shared this notion that the Kamasutra was a religious tract, calling it a traité and bemoaning the fact that Western books that reproduced secular Persian miniatures as accompaniments to the text ran completely counter to the spirit of this ‘texte sacré’.

  Daniélou was determined to position India as the natural home of sexual liberation, in militant contrast to the repressiveness of the West. ‘The persecution of sexuality – the essential element of happiness,’ he wrote, ‘is a characteristic technique of all patriarchal, political or religious tyrannies.’ The real India, Daniélou believed, existed in a state of Rousseau-like perfection, where sexuality was ‘presented and taught like one of the Fine Arts’. ‘In traditional India,’ he claimed, ‘a six-year-old schoolboy has already studied texts of the Kamasutra which explain all the secrets of loveplay and its variations.’ Vatsyayana, of course, had recommended that the text be taught to the young. The West, it was implied, dissipated its efforts in sexual instruction by, say, merely training their six-year-olds not to masturbate.

  Daniélou’s idealized vision of the place of the Kamasutra in Indian sexual culture owed more to his disgruntlement with the West than to his knowledge of Indian six-year-olds. The Kamasutra may have been published in numerous Indian editions, but it was by no means to be found beside the bed in every village household. As had been the Orientalist habit for centuries, Daniélou somehow elided the centuries between the society described in the Kamasutra and contemporary Indian culture. Just like the early colonists, he still saw India as an inchoate mass of ancient practices – even if personally he found those practices more attractive than those of the ‘advanced’ and ever-advancing West.

  Daniélou’s Kamasutra was quickly retranslated into English, where it found an eager market as The Complete Kama Sutra: the First Unabridged Modern Translation of the Classic Indian Text – a title that cleverly incorporated both a twist on the old pornographers’ trick of promising, this time, the real deal, uncut, and an indication that this was not mere pornography: it was a text. The incorporation of not only Yasodhara’s thirteenth-century Jayamangala, but also the 1960s Hindi commentary by Devadatta Shastri, the Jaya, really helped reinforce the notion that the book was weightily authoritative; at over 500 pages, it truly looked the part.

  The book became a landmark in its own right. It never surpassed the ‘Burton’ version for ubiquity but was nevertheless to be found on tens of thousands of bedside bookshelves on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the translation was distinctly quirky. In the long tradition of writers and translators of the Kamasutra, Daniélou had a number of agendas. First and foremost was his passionate espousal of Hinduism. If the Kamasutra did not fit comfortably into Hindu tradition, Daniélou would bend over backwards to make sure that it could be interpreted in such a way that it did. The object of eroticism, according to his introduction, may be ‘firstly a search for pleasure’, but the ultimate ‘goal of the techniques of love is to attain a paroxysm considered by the Upanishads as a perception of the divine state, which is infinite delight’. Similarly, for Daniélou, ‘a magical significance’ apparently lurks behind the sexual positions which, ‘if they are used in
erotic ritual, correspond in their psychological and physical effects to the postures of yoga’. There is, of course, no Tantric or yogic ritual in Vatsyayana’s book, even if the positions do recall yoga’s asanas, or postures.

  The Kamasutra had been wielded on behalf of many causes before Alain Daniélou picked it up, but it is fitting that its chief use in the 1990s was as a weapon in the campaign for the political legitimization of homosexuality. A hundred years earlier, just as Victorian society was beginning to question many of its sexual values, Arbuthnot had held the Kamasutra up to the West as an example of sexual sincerity and rationality; now, as gay rights were being asserted across much of the world, Daniélou would do the same for the homosexual-focused material. His prime target, however, was India. Daniélou wrote that ‘true love, pure love can only be aberrant and illegitimate’. This was an orthodox point of view in the bhakti tradition, which viewed Krishna’s relations with the cow-girls to be adulterous and therefore necessarily all the more passionate. But for Daniélou, as a Hindu convert and the rogue scion of a traditional French Catholic family – his brother was a cardinal, albeit one who died of a heart attack on the stairs of a prostitute’s house – aberrance and illegitimacy had a different meaning. He was ‘out’ at a time and in a place when it was rare to be openly gay, and the conviction that drove him to be open about his sexuality also motivated his publication of the Kamasutra.

  Mainstream Indian society in the 1940s and 1950s certainly frowned on homosexuality, and traditional Hinduism hardly approved of it either, although the ancients were not in fact overly troubled. While the Laws of Manu saw anal sex between men as an offence that technically meant losing caste, in practice it recommended a ritual bath as sufficient penance. The Arthashastra simply stipulated fines for men having sex with other men, and set the rate at 48 to 96 panas, or 24 panas for lesbian women. (A fully trained soldier or top spy was paid 500 panas a year.) The Kamasutra, as ever, had a more liberal approach. Vatsyayana described two kinds of men who have sex with men (or, more specifically, ‘people of the third nature’ who give nagarakas sexual satisfaction) without condemnation. There was the person ‘in the form of a woman’, who would imitate women’s behaviour, their ‘dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty and bashfulness’; there was also the person ‘in the form of a man’. One might call them ‘femme’ and ‘butch’, though Vatsyayana differentiated the two types by profession, not by sexual style: the ‘femme’ lived like a courtesan, whereas the ‘butch’ worked as a masseur. Fascinatingly, Vatsyayana used the feminine pronoun ‘she’ for both. This may simply reflect the fact that the Sanskrit word for ‘nature’, prakriti, is feminine, but it also suggests that gender was seen as dependent on sexual role: both kinds of men were significant to the nagaraka only in that they might give him a blow-job or jerk him off. This was not an entirely one-sided sexual service. Vatsyayana described the femme as getting ‘her sexual pleasure and erotic arousal as well as her livelihood from this’, while the butch would conceal ‘her desire when she wants a man’.

  People who were not of ‘the third nature’ were also known to enjoy homosexual encounters. The verses at the end of the Kamasutra’s chapter on oral sex described how ‘young men, servants who wear polished earrings indulge in oral sex only with certain men’. They were evidently choosing their partners on the basis of attraction. ‘And, in the same way,’ the verses continued, ‘certain men-about-town who care for one another’s welfare and have established trust do this service for one another.’ Vatsyayana also reported the opinion of ‘some people’ who held that the person of the third nature counts as another ‘sort of woman who can be a lover’, on the grounds that ‘there is no difference in the purposes for which they are used’.

  Daniélou was not the first commentator or translator to read the Kamasutra and be struck by its depiction of sex between men, but he was one of the first to be publicly comfortable with it. Yasodhara squeamishly decided that the nagarakas who service each other must equate to ‘the ones who are practically women’. He did imagine, however, that this oral sex must feel good. When the nagarakas go down on each other simultaneously ‘by turning their bodies head to foot’, he observed that they lose ‘all sense of time because of their passion’. In 1911, Pandit Madhavacharya here footnoted that ‘such boys do not engage solely in oral activity, they also engage in another kind of unnatural fornication’ – presumably the misuse of what he described as the ‘bad path’. The pandit’s readers were further warned that ‘people involved in theatre commonly are puppets of that type of vice’. Even fifty years on, the Hindi commentator, Devadatta Shastri, was remarking frown-ingly that the ‘extremely base’ act of oral sex between men was evidently ‘not a new but an old and wicked deed in our tradition’. It can only have been included, he assumed, ‘because a shastra is a reference book on sex, and fellatio is a sexual act’. With similar unease, the 1883 Kamasutra described the people of the third nature as eunuchs. More shockingly, it entirely expurgated the sentence in which ‘some people say’ that the person of the third nature is another sort of woman who can be a lover. (This must have been the work of Arbuthnot and the translating pandits. It’s a safe bet that if Burton had ever seen the original Sanskrit, the sentence would have stayed.)

  In edition after edition, the Kamasutra had been deliberately dequeered. Alain Daniélou made the mistake of over-compensating. He changed all the pronouns in the chapter on oral sex from ‘she’ to ‘he’, referred to the person performing oral sex as ‘the boy’ and construed the reference to mutual oral sex between nagarakas as ‘there are also citizens, sometimes greatly attached to each other and with complete faith in one another, who get married together’. He also translated the svairini, or independent, sexually unrestrained woman, as ‘lesbian’, when Vatsyayana mentions sex between women only once, and in a distinctly un-lesbian context – the women of the harem are imagined as dressing each other up as men and using dildos to give each other pleasure.

  But Daniélou’s most overt ‘queering’ of the Kamasutra was his introduction, which used the text to appeal for sexual tolerance not just in the West, but in modern India. He contrasted the way in which ‘male homosexuality forms an integral part’ of the sex life of the nagaraka with the penal code promulgated by Nehru’s government, which, under article 377, prohibits ‘sexual relations against nature with a man, woman or animal, whether the intercourse is anal or oral’. (Daniélou quoted Nehru as pronouncing that ‘such vices in India were due to Western influence’, an unusual riff on the common conservative-nationalist claim that Muslim invaders were to blame. Fascinatingly, this belief can be traced back to none other than Burton, who observed in one of his footnotes to the Kamasutra that oral sex ‘does not seem so prevalent now in Hindustan, its place perhaps is filled up by the practice of sodomy, introduced since the Mahomedan period’. Anal sex, in the Kamasutra, is in fact mentioned only as an ‘unusual’ practice between men and women ‘in the South’.) Thanks to its illiberalism regarding homosexuality, ‘the country of the Kama Sutra’, Daniélou protested, has ‘been relegated to the level of the most backward countries in the sphere of liberty’. Fortunately for Daniélou, on a personal level the traveller could apparently ‘find amorous adventures that show that the people of India have forgotten nothing of the teachings of the Kama Sutra’.

  The Kamasutra’s many translators and popularizers all sought to use the book of love in the service of an agenda, and Alain Daniélou was no exception. But in spite of his efforts, and those of Arbuthnot, Burton, W.G. Archer and Alex Comfort, the Kamasutra’s afterlife has not centred on Indology, anthropology, pornography, sexology or indeed gay rights. Not in the West, at least – though in India the Kamasutra’s resurgence continues to bring all those issues into focus. In the West, by contrast, the book of love has become a mere manual for sex instruction; the very word ‘Kamasutra’ is now a synonym for advanced fucking. If this was not what the earnest patrons of the book of love
thought the West needed, it was what the West would prescribe for itself in the twenty-first century.

  IF YOU COAT your penis with an ointment made with powdered white thorn-apple, black pepper, and long pepper, mixed with honey, you put your sexual partner in your power. If you make a powder by pulverizing leaves scattered by the wind, garlands left over from corpses, and peacock’s bones, it puts someone in your power. If you pulverize a female ‘circle-maker’ buzzard that died a natural death, and mix the powder with honey and gooseberry, it puts someone in your power. If you cut the knotty roots of the milkwort and milk-hedge plants into pieces, coat them with a powder of red arsenic and sulphur, dry and pulverize the mixture seven times, mix it with honey, and spread it on your penis, you put your sexual partner in your power. If you burn the same powder at night, you can make the moon, viewed through the smoke, appear golden. If you mix the same powder with monkey shit and scatter the mixture over a virgin, she will not be given to another man.

  Kamasutra

  Book Seven: Erotic Esoterica

  Chapter One: Putting Someone in your Power

  translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kama Commodified

  Lovers today can choose between the Modern Kama Sutra, New Kama Sutra, Essential Kama Sutra, Pocket Kama Sutra, Cosmo Kama Sutra, Everything Kama Sutra, Real Kama Sutra, Complete Kama Sutra, Illustrated Kama Sutra, Complete Illustrated Kama Sutra, Little Book of the Kama Sutra, Bedside Kama Sutra and, just occasionally, Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra. ‘Advanced’ couples can reach for Beyond the Kama Sutra, Kama Sutra for Life, Red-Hot Sex the Kama Sutra Way, Kama Sutra Tango and Pure Kama Sutra – presumably while they wait for the ‘impure’ sequel. Exhibitionists can furnish themselves with the Office Kama Sutra, ‘Being a Guide to Delectation and Delight in the Workplace’, or the Outdoor Kama Sutra. Women can opt for the Kama Sutra for Women, Women’s Kama Sutra and the French Kama Sutra revu et corrigé par les filles, which is ‘a playful way to discover 77 previously unseen and rare positions’. Gay men are well provided for, with the Gay Kama Sutra, Gay Man’s Kama Sutra and the Kama Sutra of Gay Sex, while gay women have, as yet, only one dedicated publication, the Lesbian Kama Sutra. Men going solo have the Kama Sutra for One, billed as ‘the single man’s guide to self-satisfaction’ and authored by a certain Richard O’Nan and Pamela Palm. Playful readers may appreciate the Kama Sutra Illuminated, the sketchy Purple Ronnie’s Kama Sutra, the irreverent Kama Sutra of Pooh, the grotesque Viz Fat Slags Kama Sutra, the boggling Kama Sutra in 3D, the intriguing Kama Sutra for Cats and no less than two versions of a Pop-up Kama Sutra – sadly, neither of which capitalizes on the most obvious pop-up opportunity.