In women, the counterpart of violent possession, encompassing the woman’s urge to attract, entrap, and control the male, is rarely expressed in the same way as in men, namely in conscious or unconscious fantasies of conquest, ravishment and mastery. Whereas one of men’s violent fantasies is of penetrating the woman, in women’s imagination the insertion of the penis into the vagina may become not only a loving acceptance but a seizure, for some even a wrenching off of the lover’s organ, to be retained inside her as a victor’s trophy.54 The male version of this fantasy appears in an attenuated form in the Kamasutra’s warning that certain positions ‘must allow a way for the man to slide back’ [2.6.9], because, as the commentator cautions, ‘If he moves inside her too roughly, she can be injured, and the man’s foreskin can be torn off, which physicians call “ruptured foreskin”.’ It is more strongly expressed in the description of the position known as the ‘mare’s trap’, in which she grasps him, like a mare, so tightly that he cannot move [2.6.21].
To fulfil its aim as an authentic textbook of eroticism, the Kamasutra could not gloss over the possessive violence of sexual desire. In its chapters on biting, scratching, and slapping, we again encounter the darker purposes of sexual desire, which, Vatsyayana admits, is combative by its very nature. His effort, though, is to civilize the violence of sex, ritualize the cruelty of intercourse. By giving examples of serious injury caused to women, he warns against the danger of playful violence in sex slipping into murderous cruelty. Sexual desire, then, in which the body’s wanting and violence, the excitement of orgasm and the exultation of possession, all flow together, can easily overwhelm erotic pleasure. Today, when what were once called ‘perversions’ are the normal fare of television channels, video films and internet sites, where small but specialized professions exist for the satisfaction of every sexual excess, the Kamasutra’s second project of rescuing the erotic from raw sexuality would find many supporters. In today’s post-moral world, the danger to erotic pleasure is less from the icy frost of morality than from the fierce heat of instinctual desire. The Kamasutra’s most valuable insight, then, is that pleasure needs to be cultivated, that in the realm of sex, nature requires culture.
Culture, in the Kamasutra’s sense, the sixty-four arts that need to be learned and so on, requires leisure and means, time and money, none of which was in short supply for the text’s primary intended audience, an urban (and urbane) élite consisting of princes and barons, high state officials, and wealthy merchants. Vatsyayana, who disapproves of sexual relations with rural and tribal women because they could have adverse effects on the erotic refinement and sensibility of his reader, the cultivated man-about-town, would have been baffled by Lady Chatterley’s sexual transports with a gamekeeper.55 Erotic pleasure, then, partakes of the moral order and of instinctual desire at the same time as it seeks to emancipate itself from both. As a flag bearer of the erotic, the Kamasutra is a champion of sensible pleasure.
Despite its awareness of the role of violence in sexuality, the feeling-tone of the Kamasutra’s eroticism is primarily one of lightness. In its pages, we meet leisured gallants who spend hours in personal grooming and teaching their mynah birds and parrots to speak. Their afternoons and evenings are devoted to drinking, music and dance; that is, when they are not busy in talking poetry and engaging in sexual banter with artful courtesans. In its light-hearted eroticism, the Kamasutra is part of a literary climate during the first six centuries of the common era when the erotic was associated with all that was bright, shining, and beautiful in the ordinary world. The Sanskrit poems and dramas of this period are also characterized by this lightness, an eroticism more hedonist than impassioned. The mood is a playful enjoyment of love’s ambiguities, a delighted savouring of its pleasures, and a consummately refined suffering of its sorrows. The poems are cameos yielding glimpses into arresting erotic moments, their intensity enhanced by the accumulation of sensuous detail. The aesthetic theory of this period could confidently proclaim that certain emotions such as laziness, violence and disgust do not belong to a depiction of the erotic. The rasa, ‘flavour’ or ‘essence’, of sexual love today knows no such limits.
Another aspect of the Kamasutra’s eroticism is the discovery of the woman as a subject and full participant in sexual life, very much a subject in the erotic realm, not a passive recipient of the man’s lust. Women are no longer ‘cooked rice’. The text both reflects and fosters the woman’s enjoyment of her sexuality. Of the four kinds of preliminary love-play Vatsyayana describes, the woman takes the active part in two. In one she encircles her lover as a vine encircles a tree, offering and withdrawing her lips for a kiss, driving the man wild with excitement. In the other, familiar from its sculpted representation in the temple friezes of Khajuraho, she rests one of her feet on the man’s feet and the other against his thigh. One arm is across his back, and with the other clinging to his shoulder and neck she makes the motion of climbing him as if he was a tree [2.2.15–16]. In the final analysis, though, given the fact that the text was composed by a man primarily for the education of other men, the fostering of a woman’s sexual subjectivity is ultimately in the service of an increase in the man’s pleasure. The Kamasutra recognizes that a woman who actively enjoys sex will make it much more enjoyable for him. One might speculate that this more active role of the woman in sex was enhanced, if not inspired, by the more active nature of the Goddess in the religious sphere, since the Glorification of the Goddess (Devi-Mahatmya), the earliest Sanskrit text in praise of the Goddess, was composed during this same period.
Women in the Kamasutra are thus presented not only as erotic subjects but as sexual beings with feelings and emotions that a man needs to understand for the full enjoyment of erotic pleasure. Book Three instructs the man on a young girl’s need for gentleness in removing her virginal fears and inhibitions. Erotic pleasure demands that the man be pleasing to his partner. In recommending that the man not approach the woman sexually for the first three nights after marriage, using this time to understand her feelings, win her trust, and arouse her love, Vatsyayana takes a momentous step in the history of Indian sexuality by introducing the notion of love in sex. He even goes so far as to advance the radical notion that the ultimate goal of marriage is to develop love between the couple and thus considers the love-marriage (which the religious texts regarded as ritually ‘low’ and disapproved of, and which is still a rarity in contemporary Indian society) to be the pre-eminent form of marriage.
The erotic love of the Kamasutra is not of the romantic variety as we know it today, from a tradition born in the twelfth century, in Bedier’s Tristan and Isolde in Europe and Nizami’s Laila and Majnun in the Islamic world. Its tenderness and affection for the partner is still, largely, in the service of sexual desire. Thus Vatsyayana’s detailed instructions to the man on the tender gestures required of him at the end of sex, ‘when their passion has ebbed’, end with the words, ‘Through these and other feelings, the young couple’s passion grows again’ [2.10.6–13]. What distinguishes romantic love from the erotic love of the Kamasutra is the pervasive presence in the former of what may be called longing, a willing surrender, adoration and cherishing of the person for whom one lusts. Longing requires an idealization that makes a lover experience the loved one as an infinitely superior being to whom he (in the case of the man) willingly subordinates his desire, to whom he can surrender and obey and thus reverse the accents of the master-servant metaphor of possessive desire. This is no part of the erotic love we find in the Kamasutra or, for that matter, in the classical literature of that period. In the Sanskrit and Tamil love poems, as in the textbook of erotics, the beloved is a partner who is a source of excitement and delight, enlivening the senses. A lover is to be explored thoroughly, in enormous detail, and therefore is not quickly abandoned. Yet the inner life or the past and future of a lover are not subjects of entrancement; the impulse is not of fierce monogamy.
For most modern readers who have an affinity for the personal and the
subjective, this emphasis on love as a depersonalized voluptuous state, while delighting the senses, does not touch the heart. For those whose sensibility has been moulded by romanticism and individualism it is difficult to identify with the impersonal protagonists of the poems. These are not a particular man or woman but man and woman as such—provided he is handsome, she beautiful, and both young. The face of the heroine, for instance, is always like a moon or lotus flower, eyes like water lilies or those of a fawn. She always stoops slightly from the weight of her full breasts, improbable fleshy flowers of rounded perfection that do not admit even a blade of grass between them. The waist is slim, with three folds, the thighs round and plump, like the trunk of an elephant or a banyan tree. The navel is deep, the hips heavy. These lyrical yet conventional descriptions of body parts seem to operate like collective fetishes, culturally approved cues for the individual to allow himself to indulge erotic excitement without the risk of surrender so longed for in romantic love.
The erotic love of the Kamasutra and the classical Sanskrit literature of the period is bright and shiny; romantic love, by contrast, in spite of its exquisite transports of feeling, is often experienced by the lovers as dark and heavy. In the full flowering of romantic love, sexual desire loses its primacy as the lover strives to disappear in the contours of another, a person whose gender fits the mould but whose flesh is almost incidental to the quest for wholeness.56 The suffering of erotic love, on the other hand, the dark spot on its brightness, has less to do with the soul’s elemental longing to end separation than with the bodily nature of sexual desire. Sexual desire does not subside with seeming satiation. Memory as well as the deliciousness of pleasure’s ache gnaw further, making for the distress that marks the separation of lovers in erotic love. This sentiment casts only a small shadow on the Kamasutra, where it takes the rather different form of the sufferings of the rejected wife and the anxiety of the not-yet-successful suitor. The erotic love of the Kamasutra is then a precarious balancing act between the possessiveness of sexual desire and the tenderness of romantic longing, between the disorder of instinctuality and the moral forces of order, between the imperatives of nature and the civilizing attempts of culture. It is a search for harmony in all the opposing forces that constitute human sexuality, a quest often destined to be futile by the very nature of the undertaking. As Vatsyayana remarks: ‘When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order’ [2.2.31].
II. THE COMMENTARIES
In our translation we have drawn upon the earliest Sanskrit commentary, by Yashodhara Indrapada, and the most recent Hindi commentary, by Devadatta Shastri. These commentaries elucidate obscure or difficult parts of the texts, but they also introduce their own points of view. By comparing and contrasting a modern commentator’s interpretations with those made centuries ago it is possible to see what kind of attitudes, social mores, moral responses and so on, influence their glosses.
Yashodhara’s Jayamangala
A few Sanskrit commentaries on the Kamasutra are known to exist in manuscript form in libraries, such as the commentary called Praudhapriya composed in Varanasi in 1788 by Bhaskara Nrisimha, and another by Malladeva. But only one has been published, the one composed by Yashodhara Indrapada, almost certainly in the thirteenth century of the present era.57 Yashodhara gives us an unusually intimate insight into his own motives, which he repeats as a colophon at the end of the first chapter of each of the first six books: ‘Yashodhara, whose guru gave him the name of Indrapada, made this commentary, called the Jayamangala, in one piece, because he was terrified of suffering a lover’s separation from sophisticated women.’ This erotic motivation stands in striking contrast to Vatsyayana’s claim that his own work was composed in chastity. Moreover, since Yashodhara lived about a millennium after Vatsyayana, he may not always know what was in Vatsyayana’s mind, and we have not always taken his advice, though we have always been glad to have it. But Yashodhara usually makes good sense of the text and is, in any case, also an original source, now some seven centuries old. It is fascinating both to know what someone thought about sex then, too, and to contrast what the two authors say, to see how ideas changed over that millennium. Since the commentary is many times the size of the text, and often tediously technical, we have appended to the translation of Vatsyayana only those portions of Yashodhara that shed light on specific obscurities in the text or that expand that text in interesting ways. But some of Yashodhara’s longer glosses break away from the text to present his basic approach and thus may alert the reader to the general bias of his interpretations.
Yashodhara loves to divide Vatsyayana’s already somewhat taxonomic text into further taxonomies. Thus, at 1.1.5: ‘Creatures exist in three conditions: creation, sustenance, and dissolution. And sustenance is of two sorts: good and bad. The three aims of human life, too, are of two sorts: acceptable and unacceptable. The acceptable forms are dharma, artha, and kama; the unacceptable, the violation of dharma, loss, and hatred.’ And at 2.1.30 he divides a woman’s pleasure into two (‘the scratching of an itch and the pleasure of melting’) and then divides the melting into two (‘the flowing and the ejaculation of the seed’). He taxonomizes at some length in his discussion of the nature of kama (at 1.2.11–12). Here is the gist of it:
Kama takes two forms, general and particular. It is the general form that operates under the control of the mind and heart joined with the self, which governs the senses, each in its own appropriate sensation: the ear engages in sound, the skin in touch, the eye in form, the tongue in taste, and the nose in smell. The consciousness of sound and so forth is undergirded by a wish to enjoy the appropriate sensation; that wish is kama. And when the self enjoys a sensation through that wish and experiences pleasure, that pleasure is kama of the general kind.
Particular kama has two forms, primary and secondary. The speech organs, hands, feet, anus, and genitals are organs of action, which perform the acts of speaking, taking, moving about, defecating, and experiencing bliss. Now, a man and a women have an organ in their lower parts, the vagina and so forth, which is actually a part of the sense organ of skin, for touch is the essence of skin, and a certain place on the skin, called the sense organ of the genitals, causes the experience of bliss on the occasion of ejaculation. Touching a man on the thigh or calf and so forth, or a woman on the thigh or navel and so forth, is also a particular sensation of touch, but that is not what is meant here, because it is secondary. In fact, this sort of experience is an example of general kama.
What, then, makes the experience described here an example of particular kama? To answer this, Vatsyayana says: ‘It bears fruit.’ When this experience goes on uninterrupted, there is an ejaculation of semen and a simultaneous pleasure and fruit, namely bliss. The pleasure of erotic arousal is the pleasure that comes when kissing, scratching, biting, and so forth are applied to this place and that, arousing the perception of pleasure in a man and a woman through the power of the imagination of passion. This is primary kama. By this definition, even the fruitful experience of the object is not primary kama if it is done in something other than a vagina or in the wrong kind of vagina, or between a man and woman who are not attracted to one another, because it lacks the pleasure of erotic arousal and is therefore secondary.
Here Yashodhara distinguishes between general kama (pleasure) and particular kama (sexual pleasure) and then divides particular kama (sexual pleasure) into two types: primary (involving the sexual organs) and secondary (involving other parts of the body). His assumption that the ‘fruit’ of kama is pleasure may not be what Vatsyayana has in mind; at 1.5.1, for instance, and elsewhere, Vatsyayana mentions sons as one of the fruits of the right sort of kama. Shastri, too, comments on this discrepancy:
The words ‘a direct experience of an object of the senses, which bears fruit’ in this sutra express a serious mood. Yashodhara has taken the word ‘fruit’ to mean the pleasure of kissing, embracing and ejaculation. But it appears to us that Vatsyayana’s vi
ewpoint differs from that of Yashodhara. Here it would be proper to understand the birth of able offspring as Vatsyayana’s chief goal. The Vedas and the Upanishads also express the same intention. [See Atharva Veda 14.2.31, 14.2.32, 14.2.38, 14.1.58, 14.2.36, 14.2.66 and Chandogya Upanishad 2.13.1.] It is thus clear that for the creator of the Kamasutra, the meaning of the fruit of kissing and embracing is the birth of offspring.
Shastri seems to speak here with the full weight of morality and social mores behind him. Where Yashodhara was in many ways apparently freer from social constraints/responsibility, emphasizing the erotic over the reproductive function, Shastri insists on it and finds support in the text. Vatsyayana can be called in to testify on behalf of either of these commentators because he is ambiguous; his text can bear many interpretations, and commentators, as well as other readers, may well interpret it in a way that best suits their personal circumstances
Yashodhara then goes on to make further distinctions between basic sex (centred on the woman) and subsidiary sex (centred on things like gardens and garlands); and between public sex (the meeting) and private sex (the act):
Both general and particular kama depend upon sex. There are two sorts of sex, basic and subsidiary. The base of kama is the woman, and the subsidiary limbs are garlands and such things. And so it is said:
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