by Seema Anand
For instance, Bihari (a seventeenth-century poet) tells us, ‘It was a religious festival. As the priests sit around the prayer fire he (our hero) picks up a lotus flower and looking at her (our heroine) touches the flower to his head. In response she lifts up her aarsi (ring with a mirror in the centre) and catching his reflection as well as the reflection of the sun in it, she puts it to her breast. He smiles and is content.’
The flower to the head means ‘charan kamal’ or ‘your lotus feet’. A man would only have the woman’s feet on his head after they made love (i.e. they are lovers). When our hero touches the lotus to his head after looking at his beloved, he is begging his lover to meet him that night. When she catches his reflection in her mirror ring, she is agreeing to meet with him. Catching the sun and then ‘placing’ it to her breast signifies that she will meet him after the sun has gone to rest in his mountain home.
Now if he had been ignorant of the love symbols....
The needs of lovers are endless and so are the symbols to express those needs. There was an entire range of love messages based on food and spices—cheap and easy to find.
To indicate love—a pouch of betel nut (hard supari) and catechu (katha).
Passionate love—cardamom, nutmeg and cloves.
In the grip of feverish passion—bamboo.
A booty call (I want you right now)—a bunch of grapes.
I am all yours—santol (cotton fruit).
I give you my life, sigh—cumin.
Be careful, I think someone suspects—wood apple (bilva).
It’s okay, the danger has passed—haldi (turmeric).
In contrast, the most expensive and the most public love messages were based on clothes—torn clothes—and this was specifically to express turbulent, frantic and uncontrollable emotions. Lacerated by the arrows of Kamadeva, you were so beside yourself that you went out in polite company in torn clothes. The more important and well known the beloved, the more expensive were the clothes you chose to wear—old and bad quality clothes would have been an insult to your love.
The clothes were strategically torn at the sleeves, the shoulders and the hem. One or two tears meant you were burning in the fire of extreme love, several tears (especially at the hem) depicted a breakup and re-sown patches with large visible stitches said you had made up and could not contain your joy.
The symbols and codes of love and lovers so captured the imagination of the poets and artists—this way of suggesting the actions of lovers rather than stating them—that very soon, the love codes of the Kama Sutra became the love language of the epic romances and miniature paintings of ancient and medieval India.
Imagine this is the fourth century, a time before text messages and WhatsApp. The only place you are likely to run into your lover is at a crowded mela or festival and you have to use subtle gestures to have a very intimate conversation, to set up a date.
Using body language, this is how the conversation would go:
You are surrounded by hundreds of relatives and friends. Your eyes meet across the room.
You touch your ear—which means ‘How are you?’
In response your lover touches the earlobe—‘All the better for seeing you’.
Two hands to the heart and then one hand briefly to the head—‘I’m going crazy thinking about you. When can we meet?’
At this point you hope that your beloved will run her fingers through her hair—running your fingers through your hair expressed erotic desire. If you were really lucky she would also curl a bit of hair around her index finger and pull it—that meant she was aroused and imagining a previous sexual encounter.
Thrilled with her reaction you now have to set up a date. This was the complicated bit and was done by counting the divisions on each finger (there are fourteen in total—three on each finger and two on the thumb). These represented the fourteen days of the fortnight, starting at the bottom-most division of the little finger for the first day of the moon and ending at the top of the thumb for the full moon. The nights of the waxing moon are indicated by the left hand and the waning moon by the right hand.
First, you would place your middle finger on top of your little finger and hold up your hand—that meant ‘give me a date’. Then you would hold your hand up and start the count. When you got to the appropriate date, the beloved joined her hands together and held them up above her head and the date was set! Phew! Talk about logistics!
The next question would be ‘where’. Generally, the meeting would take place at a rendezvous that the lovers had used previously. A raised thumb indicated the one to the east, the little finger the south, the middle finger west and the index north.
This secret exchange in a public place—of expressing attraction and arousal and setting up a rendezvous to slake that arousal—was as erotically charged as the physical act itself. The thought of sexual intimacy in public places, with the imminent fear of being caught at any time is obviously not a modern-day invention, it seems to have been a fantasy since the beginning of time.
Everything had its own meaning in the love code.
Women wore different pieces of jewellery to promise different positions and games of foreplay (see the chapter Jewellery and the Arts of Seduction). Similarly, men wore fresh flower garlands according to the season and the time of day to indicate their intentions. A garland of champa flowers was worn to get the attention of the beloved at a crowded festival—at the sight of the champa garland she would know he wanted her to sneak out somehow in order to meet him secretly. A garland of delicate jasmine flowers was to start a flirtation. A garland of amaranth flowers, as mentioned earlier, was for an ‘amorous dalliance’ because the flowers were very sturdy and would not shed ‘during caressing, kissing or hugging’.
Some messages were one-word signals that were meant to be whispered into the beloved’s ear as you passed her in the street, with no one else being any the wiser that a meeting had been set up. If your lover said ‘ankush’ (a hook-shaped goad used for training elephants), it meant he wanted to ‘hook’ up for the night. You could choose to accept—the word ‘red’ meant you accepted the meeting with love, ‘yellow’ said you accepted with passion, ‘orange’ said you accepted with indifference—‘I will come and have sex with you, but frankly I could take it or leave it’. Or you could choose to say no—a firm ‘wall’ which was the modern day equivalent of ‘talk to the hand’. And the dreaded ‘black’ which meant ‘I despise you, don’t even try calling me again.’
Love bites (see chapter Love Bites) and love scratches (see chapter Scratching in the Art of Lovemaking) had their own complex code of messages between lovers that were meant to arouse, to communicate, to remind and sometimes even to forget.
Possibly the most subtle and evocative was the love code of paan or betel leaf (see chapter Paan and the Arts of Seduction). Paan was offered as the very last thing in foreplay—to finish foreplay and begin sex. This particular paan was traditionally offered by the woman to her lover. If she filled it with a combination of valerian, jackfruit, camphor, cardamom and cloves stuck together with ginger paste, it meant that she was at the perfect state of arousal and he knew that the gates of ecstasy would open for him. There was a huge vocabulary in the giving and taking of paan—shapes, fillings, what time of night or day they were delivered, all carried their own message—messages unparalleled in romance, messages that could make your heart race and pulse stop.
The list of symbols was as unending and complex as the range of emotions that lovers can feel and there was a way to express them all.
My Advice
During his pre-election campaign, Warren Harding, the 29th President of the United States of America, sent his mistress, Carrie Fulton, a long list of code words which he explained they would now have to use in their letters to each other. The list included words like ‘cloudy’ which meant ‘message not clear’, ‘repair’ which meant ‘I will meet you in New York’ and (my favourite) ‘grateful’ which stood for ‘all my love to t
he last precious drop’. As you can see, their code language was not just utilitarian—it had been carefully constructed to contain all the romance of a beautifully crafted love letter, and yet remain hidden from prying eyes.
For as long as time, lovers have been using secret languages to communicate with each other and express their desires. It is a tried and tested way to romance your partner.
Studies show that the more made-up and secret words for ‘nooky’ that lovers have between them the more playful and intimate their relationship tends to be.
It is arguably the easiest thing you can do to keep your romance going strong. A few secret words and inside jokes to share with your lover are incredible tools of closeness. It not only creates intimacy, but also an unseen periphery, a boundary wall within which to keep a relationship safe.
Do you have a secret word for your favourite position? Or for a personal moment?
Do you have a coded way to tell your lover, in public, that something has made you think of your most intimate moments together?
Do you have a collection of trigger words that can come up randomly in conversation and will take you both on a mutual flight of fantasy—your own little private fantasy—no matter how many people are around you?
Do you have certain objects or symbols that lead you to have mental sex?
No one spends all their time having (physical) sex—but having a mental and emotional connection is extremely exciting.
Lovers are advised to spend time creating their own secret code. Unfortunately, the extraordinary symbols and codes revealed in the text can no longer be used to set up a secret rendezvous because they have become public knowledge and are no longer ‘secret’. The Kama Sutra advises that lovers spend time creating their own secret language because it is indispensable for a satisfying and successful relationship.
Love Bites
Just as the ocean is aroused into crashing waves by the rays of the moon so is the mind of the lover aroused by the sight of the beloved’s throat framed by a necklace of love bites....
Just as the velvet flesh of the night is ornamented with stars which are the love bites of the moon, so is the body of the beloved covered with the jewels left by the lover’s teeth.
The Kama Shastras are the only texts in the world that describe love bites in terms of romance and refinement, giving them the delicate and evocative vocabulary of a love letter. Lovers who express their mutual passion through love bites, the Kama Sutra says, will not see their love decay, even in a hundred years.
The love bite is generally described in unromantic headings. It is either the ‘hickey’, or worse, ‘Odaxelagnia’, which is its medical term. And let me sink the standards of romance just a little bit further by telling you that research into Odaxelagnia was obtained by studying donkeys biting each other’s necks during sex!
But the Kama Sutra says love bites have an erotic currency that few other things can compare with. Of the six things that are done one after the other in order to build up passion (biting, scratching, moaning, sighing, etc.), love bites are at the top of the list. There is no sensation quite as exquisite as the feel of your lover’s teeth on your already tingling and aroused flesh.
It is said that of all the arts of foreplay and seduction, the most amount of time and expertise went into creating the vocabulary for love bites. Even deciding what parts of the body were suitable for which bite took more debate than anything else in the ancient sexual treatises.
The Kama Sutra considers love bites to be one of the sixty-four essential skills that need to be learnt—with an emphasis on the word ‘learnt’. Bites were part of the secret language of lovers—except not so secret—because love bites were meant to be seen. This was the world of court romances, everything was public and you were judged by your dexterity in the arts of love—biting being one such art.
Lovers left bite marks on each other as messages. The messages could be fairly simple, like ‘I love you’, or more complex, like ‘I love you this much’.
There were different bite marks for different occasions—if one type of bite had the poignant passion of ‘I am going away for a few months so the memory of this night will have to last me for a while’, another had the excitement of reunion: ‘I have just come back from a long journey and have been thinking of your body next to mine.’
They could indicate different seasons—a night of love under the monsoon full moon was different from stolen passion on a moonless spring night.
And most importantly, they had to be worthy of showing off. If the bite marks were clumsy or incorrect, that would bring dishonour to you and your lover (tantamount to social death!)—biting had to be done with precision and skill.
The first rule of biting was—you had to have good teeth. Only if you had good teeth were you allowed to leave love bites on your lover.
The Kama Sutra describes good teeth as even, with clean sharp edges, without gaps or chips, neither too big nor too small, shiny and white and with a surface that would easily absorb colour (from things like paan, betel leaf and black aloe paste). The fashion during the time of the Kama Sutra seems to have been for teeth that were coloured black or red—it’s a fad that passed quickly, because by the fifth century there is no further mention of it. However, the idea of colouring the gums black, so that the teeth appear whiter, remained common practice even as late as the 1700s.
Bad teeth are described as blunt, decayed, overlapping or with wide spaces between them, uneven, chipped, too large or too small. Bite marks left with teeth like these were forbidden because they would bring dishonour to you and your lover.
The next consideration, and subject of lengthy discussions amongst ancient love experts, was where to bite your lover. After much debate, it was decided that love bites could be made on almost all the spots that were good for kissing except the eyes, the eyelids and the tongue. Further taboos depended on local customs—some people (but not all) forbade biting the forehead, the armpits, inside the vulva, and the penis.
How hard should the bite be? Here Vatsyayan takes a very firm stand. He says that biting could potentially cause injury and so it had to be monitored very carefully—any kind of force during sexual passion needs to be used under very strict controls, otherwise it can end in tragedy. The Kama Sutra tells us story after story about lovers who have maimed or even killed their partners in moments of blind, uncontrolled passion. When you are sexually aroused all logic is suspended and pain can seem very pleasurable, and so, it is important to keep it within strict boundaries. Each bite came with its own set of rules: how deep, how much of a mark, and so on.
Bites are made when the lovemaking has progressed. You never begin foreplay with love bites. They are for much later—when the heat is up, when passions are aroused, when orgasm is approaching. Anyone who starts biting their lover right at the beginning of foreplay, according to the Kama Sutra, is no better than a donkey in a rut.
There are ten main types of love bites.
Lovers are supposed to use the bite in the order of the pressure required.
The Gudka or Discreet Bite is the gentlest of the bites and it is made on the lower lip. Press your lover’s lower lip gently but repeatedly with your teeth so that it becomes swollen and slightly red. The mark does not last for very long. Each bite should elicit a moan. ‘Among the multitude of lovers, there was an outbreak of violent embraces…and impetuous hair pulling. After intercourse…the lower lip a little bit reddened from having repeatedly uttered moans of ecstasy’*—the phrase ‘repeated moans’ refers to the beloved enjoying the Gudka. The erotic texts say that this is the most pleasurable bite of all. When the kissing has become very passionate the lover deliberately changes tempo, merely contenting himself with rubbing the beloved’s lower lip with his own for a couple of minutes before once again plunging in with the bite.
The next one is the Impressed Bite or Uchunaka. This is also made on the same spot (the middle of the lower lip) and is basically the same as the Gudka bite, but har
der—hard enough to leave a longer lasting bruise. It has no specific shape and is made by agitating the flesh between an upper tooth and the lower lip.
The Bindu or Dot is the tiniest bite, no larger than the size of a sesame seed and is done by nipping the skin between just two teeth. It was a favourite bite amongst lovers—not because it caused more excitement—but because it gave one status. The dot was such a specifically shaped bite that any kind of chip or unevenness of teeth would show up; only people with the very best teeth and expertise could make this mark to the exact size. Lovers who could make the Bindu were to be highly prized. The Bindu was made on the lower lip and on various other parts of the body as well.
After the Bindu came the Bindu Mala or Necklace of Dots. Here the lover made a series of sesame seed-shaped dots in little looping circles to look like a piece of jewellery. It was the bite of choice on long monsoon afternoons when the air was heavy with rain-soaked clouds chasing away the summer heat. Bindu necklaces were made on the neck, the curve of the waist and the thighs. As you can imagine, this kind of bite took a very long time, but for those who could do it, it was a badge of honour. In some regions of India, the dot necklace was also made to ornament the forehead and underarms, but this was a cultural preference, not everyone permitted this practice. According to the Kama Sutra, the women of North India did not like it at all.
The next two bites were the Coral and Necklace of Corals—Pravalamani and Manimala. These bites are called corals because they leave marks with distinctly red centres—like little pinpricks—but without drawing blood. The Coral is made when the same spot is squeezed several times between the top incisors and the lower lip. Sounds painful? And yet, much in demand because this was a sign of extreme attachment—you had to really care about someone to spend so much time and effort on them! It didn’t need the mathematical expertise of the Bindu Mala, so it wasn’t that much of a status symbol for the giver, more for the person receiving it because it showed that your lover was really into you. The Coral was primarily given on the left ear and the left cheek. It was a favourite of women when biting their lovers.