Sex writers have built whole sub-careers around the Kamasutra brand. Dorling Kindersley, the publisher of glossy illustrated books, offers an entire range of Kamasutra-branded sex manuals by the veteran sex therapist and writer Anne Hooper. Many less well-informed writers simply use the Kamasutra to add a dash of exotic spirituality to sex, as if adding a spoonful of curry powder to fast food. Tantrism is a favourite combination flavour, in spite of the lack of any authentic relation between Tantra and Vatsyayana. Witness The Kama Sutra of Sexual Positions: The Tantric Art of Love, The Kama Sutra of Erotic Massage – billed as ‘the Tantric art of touch’, Sex and the Perfect Lover: Tao, Tantra and the Kama Sutra, Sextasy: Master the Timeless Techniques of Tantra Tao and the Kama Sutra to Take Lovemaking to New Heights. In 2006, New Age ‘holistic healer’ Deepak Chopra and Virgin Books launched Deepak Chopra’s Kama Sutra: the Seven Spiritual Laws of Love. Chopra is the sort of sexpert who can unctuously murmur that ‘in Ancient India we didn’t distinguish between spirituality and sexuality’. The true spirituality of his ‘version’ can best be judged by its press release, which announced the highly saleable marriage of ‘two of India’s most well-known and established brands’ – Deepak Chopra and the Kamasutra. Chopra hoped his ‘interpretation’ would be ‘a rebirth for a classic text that understands human sexuality in the context of a meaningful life’.
Of course Chopra is an Indian writer – albeit one based in California. As a non-Westerner writing on the Kamasutra, he is a relatively rare quantity, for the book of love today is still what it was in the nineteenth century. It is a classic imperial commodity – an exotic product that the West imports raw, processes and feeds to itself in a more easily swallowed form. Sexual gourmands can actually feast on the Kamasutra in the shape of Kama Sutra Chocolates decorated with pictures of positions. Lovers with stamina can apply Kama Sutra Lubricants, which promise to smooth and soothe otherwise painful-sounding ‘unlimited hours of passion’; afterwards they might want to soak in Kama Sutra Bath Oils. Couples lacking inspiration can play Kamasutra The Game, which allows lovers to ‘get carried away in the sensual and romantic world of the oriental love mysticism’. The Kama Sutra Spinner Game, on the other hand, will let them simply ‘discover the joys and pleasures of each other’.
Whether or not Vatsyayana’s third-century book of love is actually any use as a modern sex manual – still less as the inspiration for a board game – is questionable. The original subscriber’s prospectus for the 1883 edition advertised that many of Vatsyayana’s remarks ‘are so full of simplicity and truth that they have stood the test of time, and stand out still as clear and true as when they were first written, some eighteen hundred years ago’. True; but the Kamasutra has nothing whatsoever to say about contraception or, Kama forbid, conception. Its recipes for aphrodisiacs, even where they are intelligible, are of dubious utility. In terms of technique, Burton’s early biographer, Thomas Wright, was right to say that ‘a man who could not kiss properly after reading the Kamasutra would be a dullard indeed’, but a man seeking to bring a woman to orgasm could be excused for being in more doubt. Vatsyayana never mentions the clitoris. He does vaguely describe how a man touches a woman ‘here and there’ and ‘caresses her between her tightly closed thighs’, and he states that before a man enters a woman, ‘he puts his hand, like an elephant’s trunk, inside her and agitates her until she becomes soft and wet’. When ‘her eyes roll when she feels him in certain spots’, Vatsyayana adds, the man should press her in precisely those places. These ‘certain spots’, according to the sage Suvarnanabha, are ‘the secret of young women’. And yet the Kamasutra does not exactly unveil the mystery. As for cunnilingus, Vatsyayana fails even to give it a name, acknowledging only, and reluctantly, that ‘Sometimes men even perform / This act upon women’.
The Kamasutra was evidently not written for women. While fellatio is described in no less than a dozen energetically descriptive sutras, the technique for going down on a woman is skimmed over as being a matter merely of ‘transposing the procedure for kissing a mouth’. (Vatsyayana is under no illusions about the incredible sexual potency of cunnilingus, however. It is for this, he says, that courtesans ‘reject virtuous, clever, generous men, and become attached to scoundrels, servants, elephant-drivers, and so forth’. Modern scoundrels and elephant-drivers may take heart.) Women are seen as potential sexual partners who may have to be aroused but somehow never need to be seduced. Their availability and compliance is assumed. The chapter on ‘devious devices for weddings’ even covers the practices of slipping virgins intoxicating drinks, having sex with them while they are sleeping, and carrying them off by force with the help of a gang of murderous helpers. Of course, Vatsyayana is describing as much as he is prescribing, and in fact he recommends the ‘love-match’ as far superior to this kind of skulduggery, ‘since mutual love is the fruit of wedding rites’. Modern, liberal readers may breathe again. A woman’s perspective is presented only in the books on ‘Wives’ and ‘Courtesans’. The emphasis of the former, however, is on wifely duties, while even the courtesans’ guide that is Book Six focuses on how a prostitute can keep her favoured male clients, not on how she herself can achieve sexual pleasure.
Men are unequivocally the heroes and principal audience of the Kamasutra. Even when Vatsyayana recommends that women study his text, as well as men, it isn’t entirely clear whom this is designed to benefit. Nevertheless, modern women need not entirely reject the book of love. Almost uniquely among ancient writers, from any culture, Vatsyayana champions women’s right to sexual pleasure. Because men and women are ‘not of different species’, he suggests, their goal – orgasm – is the same. Sex, therefore, is just like ‘when two rams batter one another’, or when ‘two wrestlers are locked together in a fight’. It may be combative, but mutuality is the key. Vatsyayana theorizes that a woman is the ‘passive locus’, while a man is the ‘active agent’, but in practice, a surprising number of the ‘ways of embracing’ described in the Kamasutra reverse the roles. In the ‘close embrace of the pelvises’, the woman really cuts loose. With her hair flying, she ‘leaps on top of the man and presses his pelvis with her pelvis, to scratch, bite, slap and kiss him’. And when confronted with a man who delights in the Kamasutra’s many varieties of love bites and fingernail marks, the woman is advised to up the ante. She should return bite for bite, and with twice the force. Playing at quarrelling,
She grabs him by the hair
and bends down his face and drinks from his mouth;
she pounces on him and bites him
here and there, crazed with passion.
In the aftermath of this wild, tooth-and-nail eroticism, the lovers find their shared secret binds them together. They playfully display their marks to each other and, although they pretend to rebuke each other, they are in fact showing ‘modesty and concern for one another’s feelings’. As a result ‘their love will never wane, not even in a hundred years’.
The West has chosen not to enquire too closely into the ways in which the Kamasutra treats women, still less the orgasmic efficiency of its techniques. What has loomed largest in the popular imagination is the sheer scale of the book’s imaginative variations on the sexual act, a brazen creativity most obviously made flesh in its infamous sexual ‘positions’. These ‘postures’ are the chief source of the Kamasutra’s modern fame. They are what has distinguished it in the Western imagination from potential rivals such as Chinese pillow books – some of which are more ancient than the Kamasutra, but none of which conceive of more mind- and body-bending ways in which two people can arrange their limbs around an interlocked vagina and penis.
For over 2,000 years, the West has been primed for the arrival of just such a book. Ever since the demise of Rome there has been a gap on the shelves that only the Kamasutra, with its ambitious sexual positions, could adequately fill. The West, it seems, was even more careless with its erotic inheritance than India had been prior to Vatsyayana’s rescue mission. Martial’s epigram 12.43,
the ‘Wanton Verses of Sabellus’, mentions ‘the little books of Elephantis’, which apparently described a number of ‘radical positions for lovemaking, such as a dissolute fucker would dare’. But Elephantis’s books are lost. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, meanwhile, proclaims that ‘there are a thousand fun-filled ways for sex’. But Ovid, rather bathetically, troubles to list only a few simple positions (including one ‘of no great effort’, in which ‘she lies semi-reclined on her right flank’ and one for men who are unusually tall, whom Ovid advises to ‘kneel with your head turned slightly sideways’). Friedrich-Karl Forberg’s 1824 collection of obscene epigrams, De Figuris Veneris, listed no less than ninety sexual postures supposedly known to the ancient world – but Forberg was widely suspected of making them up. All that remains are little worn-out medals or spintriae that depict interlaced couples, without explanation. The rest of ancient Rome’s sexual wisdom, if wisdom it was, has disappeared.
Nevertheless, the myth of sexual positions survived the fall of Classical civilization. Ironically, this was partly thanks to the Church, which had long taken the view that any positions in which the man was not on top were actually sinful. A woman driving the sexual act was thought to violate natural laws of male supremacy, and some argued that having sex in this diabolical fashion actually counted as sodomy (the exact nature of which was much debated). Sex ‘from behind’, meanwhile, was uncomfortably reminiscent of the base, animal nature of sexual intercourse. The early fourteenth-century treatise De Secretis Mulierum, or The Secrets of Women, even gave room to the notion that unnatural postures were responsible for birth defects. Experimentation of any kind was strongly discouraged, and a man who loved his wife ‘immoderately’, as Thomas Aquinas coyly put it, was deemed to be an adulterer.
Of course, the more that sexual positions were demonized, the sexier they became, and the positions were celebrated in countless bawdy tales, satires and poems. Most notorious of all these scurrilous works of literature were the sixteen ‘luxurious’ sonnets by the Italian Renaissance satirist Pietro Aretino, the so-called ‘scourge of princes’. Composed to accompany drawings of sexual positions by Raphael’s pupil, Giuliano Romano, they included deliberately shocking lines such as ‘Open up your thighs, then, so I can clearly see / Your pretty arse and cunt, full visible to me.’ Known as the Sedici Modi, the poems – and the positions – were infamous. All known copies of the actual pictures however, were destroyed. The resourceful Fred Hankey could find only substitute engravings by Agostino Carracci to offer Richard Monckton Milnes. In 2006, however, a surviving book of the sonnets with accompanying woodcuts turned up unexpectedly in a Christie’s sale in Paris. It fetched £227,000.
Milnes would have been interested in the book as a bibliophile, but not as an erotomaniac. By his, and Hankey’s, time, knowledge of a mere sixteen positions was nothing to boast of. Burton himself added over two dozen to his translation of The Perfumed Garden. The apocryphally French quarante façons de faire were well known – by name if not in practice – and, by 1899, The Horn Book: A Girl’s Guide to Good and Evil, published in London by the ‘Erotica Biblion Society’, was listing sixty-two positions, among them the ‘baker’, the ‘stork’, the ‘view of the low countries’, the ‘elastic cunt’, the ‘wheelbarrow’, the alarming-sounding ‘wheelbarrow reversed’ and the ‘St George’ – the last-named being the standard term used by nineteenth-century pornography for the woman ‘riding’ on top.
As long as they dwelled on positions, sex writers were locked into a kind of arms race: each new book had to have a greater number than the last. The absurd conclusion of this contest was Joseph Weckerle’s Viennese Golden Book of Love, of 1907. It listed precisely 531 positions in its second volume, which dealt with what it called the Gymnoplastik of love. Theodore van de Velde’s remarkably frank 1928 manual, Ideal Marriage, could not match this number, but it could surpass its rival in systematization. Like Vatsyayana (and like Burton), van de Velde risked publishing a book on sex only in the closing years of his life. What he wrote, however, was astonishingly daring and thorough. He incorporated a flabbergasting ‘Systematised Table of Attitudes Possible in Sexual Intercourse’, with ‘Indications’ and ‘Contra-indications’ noted for various kinds of men and women.
Neither Weckerle nor van de Velde seemed to have read the Kamasutra. Nevertheless, the idea that India held the secret to the ultimate teachings of sexual prowess was becoming ever more widespread. Van de Velde himself referred to ‘the habitual exaggeration of prolonged coitus by the Hindoos, Javanese and other Orientals’, while Helena Wright’s The Sex Factor in Marriage, published in London in 1930, acknowledged that ‘the Indians and the Arabs gradually discovered and wrote down probably all there is to know about perfection in the sex-life’. (Unfortunately, she did not trouble to describe exactly what this supreme knowledge was, and restricted herself to five positions, saying ‘these attitudes are sufficiently varied for adoption at the beginning of married life’; thereafter, the couple would apparently ‘need no further directions’.) When Eustace Chesser published his sex manual, Love Without Fear, in 1941, he too regretted that he would not ‘endeavour to indicate all possible positions’ even though ‘some “love manuals”, both Oriental and Continental, have listed over a hundred’.
When the Kamasutra made its ‘official’ debut in the West, in 1962, it was immediately co-opted as the latest in the long lineage of position-based erotic books. It hardly seemed to matter what was actually in the book of love – as long as it fulfilled the role that the West expected of it. The magical number sixty-four, being the tally of both the ‘arts’ and ‘techniques’ of love in the Kamasutra – in addition, Vatsyayana tells us, to being a nickname for the book itself – was widely assumed to refer to the number of sexual positions. But the Kamasutra’s modern fame doesn’t so much rest on the quantity of postures it includes as on the fact that they are supposed to be so advanced that only a black-belt yogi, if there was such a thing, could achieve them.
The legend of impossibility originated with Burton himself, who added a footnote to the Ananga Ranga to the effect that many of ‘the various postures… would seem to be impossible of accomplishment by stiff-limbed Europeans’. In his introduction to Hamilton’s 1963 edition of the text, the Indian writer Dom Moraes picked up the old canard, put it under his arm and ran with it. He speculated that ‘though some of the postures recommended by Vatsyayana require not only a high degree of credulity but an unusually fevered imagination to envisage, it seems important to remember that the human race has undergone certain physical changes over the last thousand years’. In 1975, the Marxist historian Narendra Nath Bhattacharya was able to state definitively that most of Vatsyayana’s ‘acrobatic techniques’ were impossible.
The myth is only more established today. Linda Sonntag, author of the Photographic Kama Sutra: Exotic Positions Inspired by the Classic Indian Text, recalled that her art directors had been obliged to find replacement models for the shoot, as the original pair had been insufficiently flexible. FHM magazine’s boisterously demotic ‘Kama Sutra 2’ chose to give each of its positions – including ‘the surefooted shower’ and ‘the defiling of the alleyway’ – a rating out of ten for difficulty, as if this was the whole point. ‘If she’s not very supple,’ the strapline warned, ‘this might hurt, so only attempt it with ballerinas, gymnasts and girls who did well in gym class.’
Most revealingly, the British comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar named his TV series, based on the history of the Kamasutra, ‘Position Impossible’. He described how whenever someone mentioned the book to him in conversation he’d instantly know ‘they were trying to check me out as some sort of sexual gymnast’. Awareness of yoga, which in the West has tended to focus on static asanas, or named positions, may have contributed to the preconception that the Kamasutra was about postures. It may also have reinforced the myth of their difficulty. Earnest Westerners who struggle to achieve a ‘downward-facing dog’ in their yoga evening classes, might well imagine Vatsyayana�
��s ‘crab’ or ‘mare’s trap’ to be even more demanding.
But above all, the myth that the Kamasutra was a book about sexual positions was created by the use of Indian erotic art to illustrate it. Arbuthnot and Burton used white vellum to underscore the luxuriousness of their product; later publishers chose to employ glossy images instead. The small problem that the Kamasutra had never been an illustrated book was easily circumvented. Medieval India provided a wealth of erotic images to draw on, and the fact that they bore little relation to Vatsyayana’s era did not seem to matter. The West had a long tradition of setting its own Bible stories in contemporary dress, after all, and while illustrating Ovid with, say, Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress might have raised eyebrows, no one had the same range of historical reference to draw on in relation to India. And in any case, India was widely supposed to be profoundly unchanging, as generations of writers and travellers had observed.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 21