Kama is pleasure, and its limbs are
jewellery, perfumed oils, and garlands.
as well as forest groves, roof-top gardens,
the playing of lutes, and wine.
Its base is women—
unrestrained, beautiful, young,
amorous, flirtatious, clever at flattery,
drawing to themselves the minds and hearts of men.
Basic sex is of two sorts: public and private. The private sort is a sexual act done in secret; it is the occasion for a kind of particular kama. The public sort of sex is characterized by getting together for the sexual act. Subsidiary sex takes place when each of the sense organs, beginning with the mind, is intimately united with the appropriate subsidiary attribute; it is characterized by the close contact between the sense organs and their objects, and is the occasion for a kind of general kama. Public sex requires a method if one or the other, the man or the woman, has no desire or is closely guarded, or ashamed, or afraid, because he or she is dependent on someone else, so that nothing is happening. And how could private sex, the sexual act, happen without the knowledge of the sixty-four arts of love? The text is the method. Even private sex requires a method, for it does not happen without the constant, daily efforts of the man-about-town [1.2.18].
Erotic arousal, for Yashodhara, is therefore primary kama even when it does not involve genital contact, because it imagines genital contact. On the other hand, sex ‘in something other than a vagina or in the wrong kind of vagina’ (i.e. self-masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, or bestiality) is not primary kama, not just because it lacks (human) genital contact but because the pleasure does not involve true erotic arousal. Thus, where Vatsyayana’s remarks could easily be read on a quite general level of aesthetics (what Yashodhara calls general kama), Yashodhara narrows them down to focus quite specifically on sexual pleasure (particular kama) and, within that category, on genital contact (primary kama), whether real or imagined.
Devadatta Shastri’s Commentary, the Jaya
There are several published commentaries on the Kamasutra in modern Indian languages, including a Bengali translation and commentary published in Calcutta in 1909, a Tamil commentary published in Kumbhakonam in 1924, and a Telugu transcription of Yashodhara’s Jayamangala commentary, together with a Telugu commentary and translation, published in Madras in 1924. Devadatta Shastri’s Hindi commentary was published along with his translation of the text in 1964. His explanation (vyakhya), as he preferred to call his composition, reflects a traditionalist understanding of sexuality in contemporary Hindu India. He was a modern traditionalist in the sense that, although he had an old-fashioned Sanskrit education, he was also aware of the currents of Western sociological and psychological thought of his time. His commentary, he tells us, was written from the viewpoints of spiritual philosophy and modern social science.
Born in 1912 in a small village in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Devadatta was orphaned at an early age. In protest against ill treatment by his elder brother, he left home at the age of 12 and entered the Sanskrit College at Rajapur, from which he graduated with the title of Shastri. For a short while he was the editor of the Hindi newspaper Hindustan, published from Delhi, before he settled down in Allahabad to the life of a traditional scholar and a Tantric practitioner. He wrote 76 books on the Vedas, Tantras, Puranas and ancient Indian texts of political science. He died in 1982, leaving unfinished a volume on the identity of the author, date, and place of the Kamasutra, which he had announced in his commentary.
We have provided excerpts from his commentary, particularly his expansive summaries of each chapter, as an Appendix.
III. TRANSLATIONS INTO EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
Burton et al.
It is startling to realize that the Kamasutra, the Indian text best known, at least by name, to European and American readers,58 was hardly known at all by such readers just a hundred years ago and even now is not really known, since the very first English translation, which remains the one most widely used and reused, long out of copyright and in the public domain, does not say what the Sanskrit says. Moreover, it is not even the work of the man who is known as its author, Sir Richard Francis Burton. This translation, published in 1883,59 was far more the work of Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, whose name appears on the title-page with Burton’s only in some editions, though Burton later referred to the Kamasutra translation as ‘Arbuthnot’s Vatsyayana’.60 But the translation owed even more to two Indian scholars whose names do not appear on the title-page at all: Bhagavanlal Indrajit and Shivaram Parashuram Bhide.61 (There is a pre—post-colonial irony in the fact that Arbuthnot later tried to get the censors off his trail by stating, in 1885, a half-truth that he almost certainly regarded as a lie: that the translation was done entirely by Indian pandits.62) It really should, therefore, be known as the Indrajit-Bhide-Arbuthnot-Burton translation, or perhaps the IBAB translation, but since Burton was by far the most famous member of the team, it has always been called the Burton translation, and we will continue to refer to it in the conventional way.
Richard Burton was born in 1821 at Torquay, England, educated at Oxford, sent to Bombay in 1842 as an ensign in the Indian army, and posted to Sind, in Northwest India (now Pakistan). There he served with the infamous Sir Charles Napier, under whose command he undertook a study of brothels staffed by ‘boys and eunuchs’.63 His biographers insist that he learned Hindustani, Sindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, all in two years,64 and then, in 1844, began moving about Indian society in native disguise, like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. He left India in 1856, returning only for a brief visit in 1876. F. F. Arbuthnot (whom Burton used to call ‘Bunnie’) was a retired Indian civil servant who had been born near Bombay in 1833 and, after going to Europe for his education, returned to India. Burton and Arbuthnot met either in India in 1853–4 or on Arbuthnot’s furlough to London in 1859–60. They remained friends, first in India and then in England (from 1879, when Arbuthnot retired to Guildford and married, until Burton’s death in 1890).
Burton and Arbuthnot first produced a translation of a fifteenth-century text, the Anangaranga, which they tried to publish (under the title of Kama Shastra) in 1873; they disguised their names on the title-page (‘A.F.F. and B.F.R.’) but ran into trouble with the printers and ended up publishing only four proof copies, because the printer allegedly panicked upon reading the proofs and refused to go on.65 They published it more successfully, and under its proper title of Anangaranga (or, in their edition, Ananga Ranga) only in 1885. In the preface to their translation of the Kamasutra, they wrote:
It may be interesting to some persons to learn how it came about that Vatsyayana was first brought to light and translated into the English language. It happened thus. While translating with the pandits the ‘Anunga Runga, or the stage of love’, reference was frequently found to be made to one Vatsya. The sage Vatsya was of this opinion, or of that opinion. The sage Vatsya said this, and so on. Naturally questions were asked who this sage was, and the pandits replied that Vatsya was the author of the standard work on love in Sanscrit literature, and that no Sanscrit library was complete without his work, and that it was most difficult now to obtain in its entire state.66
This little anecdote is rich in paradoxes. If the text was the ‘standard work’ on love, and essential to every library, why was it ‘most difficult now to obtain’? (The Sanskrit text was first published by Pandit Durgaprasad in Bombay only in 1891, eight years after the translation.67) Why had Burton and Arbuthnot never heard of it, when they had heard of the lesser, and much later, work, the Anangaranga?
There are several likely reasons. The Anangaranga was already far better known in India than the Kamasutra because it was a kind of Kamasutra lite, much shorter68 and written in much more accessible Sanskrit. As in the case of the Rig Veda (the most ancient text) in India, or the Constitution in America, people had heard of the Kamasutra and genuflected to it, but the later versions and commentaries were what they ac
tually used.69 More particularly, the Anangaranga cuts to the chase, reducing the Kamasutra to very little that is not in Books Two and Seven, about sex and drugs; the ten chapters of the Anangaranga cover descriptions of women, erogenous zones, the size of sexual organs, types of women, regional peculiarities, ways of gratifying women (the longest chapter), magic recipes, eligible marriage partners, embracing and kissing, and sexual positions. This emphasis on Book Two of the Kamasutra, and particularly on the sexual positions, has persisted, so that most Americans and Europeans today think that the sexual positions are all there is to the Kamasutra. (The New York Times entitled Edward Hower’s review of Sudhir Kakar’s novel about Vatsyayana, ‘Assume the Position’, and Sanjeev Bhaskar’s 2001 sex odyssey, via television documentary, about the Kamasutra is entitled Position Impossible.) The real Kamasutra, by contrast, is not the sort of book to read in bed while drinking heavily, let alone holding the book with one hand in order to keep the other free.
In fact, it is likely that other, better-read Sanskritists were well aware of the existence of the Kamasutra and might not have been quite so surprised as Burton was to hear ‘Vatsya’s’ name dropped. Some British scholars may actually have known the text or, at the very least, have come across references to it in the erotic poetry that had been translated from the very start of the British colonial awareness of India (beginning with Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, translated by Sir William Jones in 1789, five years before he translated Manu). Burton and Arbuthnot were not great Sanskrit scholars. Burton had buckled his swash through a great deal of ‘Oriental’ erotica but was not likely to have browsed through a lot of Sanskrit court poetry; Arbuthnot wrote three short travel books but never published anything else about Sanskrit literature. It was therefore arrogant of Burton and Arbuthnot to assume that that Kamasutra ‘was first brought to light’ when they first saw it. They ‘discovered’ the Kamasutra only in the sense that Columbus discovered America; Indian scholars certainly, and European scholars probably, had landed on those shores long before. But scholars in the late nineteenth century, the end of the Victorian age, may have regarded such texts as pornographic and hesitated to write about them.70
In any case, once Burton found out about the existence of the Kamasutra he must have felt that he had at last found the erotic literary equivalent of the source of the Nile (for which he had searched, in vain, years before71). He set to work with Arbuthnot. The German Orientalist Georg Biihler, who was to publish a new translation of the Laws of Manu in 1886 and who had worked for years with Indian Sanskrit scholars, put Burton and Arbuthnot in touch with a pandit that Bühler himself had worked with, Bhagavanlal Indrajit, and his associate Shivaram Parashuram Bhide. Indrajit gathered the manuscripts, one each from Bombay, Calcutta, Benares, and Jaipur, some lacking parts of the complete text or the complete commentary.72 The two Indian scholars prepared a version of the translation, which Arbuthnot then doctored and prepared in time for Burton’s brief visit to India, with his wife Isabel, in 1876.73 According to one of Burton’s many biographers, Fawn Brodie, ‘Burton apparently worked through the translation during his holidays in Arbuthnot’s country house outside Bombay.’74 Burton polished the text, possibly in consultation with the manuscripts; Arbuthnot wrote the introduction and preface.75 Burton’s main contribution, however, was the courage and determination to publish the work.76 To get around the censorship laws, Burton and Arbuthnot set up an imaginary publishing house, the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, actually consisting of just the two of them, with printers said to be in Benares or Cosmopoli. Arbuthnot put up the money for the printing. The Kama Shastra Society later published other erotica that Burton translated from the Arabic, such as The Perfumed Garden, as well as Burton’s great masterpiece, The Arabian Nights. But that is another story.
Burton did for the Kamasutra what Max Müller did for the Rig Veda during this same period.77 Widespread public knowledge of the Kamasutra, in both India and Europe, begins with the Burton translation, which had a profound effect upon literature across Europe and America.78 Even though it was not formally published in England and the United States until 1962, the Burton Kamasutra soon became ‘one of the most pirated books in the English language’,79 constantly reprinted, often with a new preface to justify the new edition, sometimes without any attribution to Burton or Arbuthnot. It remains precious, like Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, as a monument of English literature, though not much closer to Vatsyayana than Fitzgerald was to Omar Khayyam.
For the Burton translation is seriously flawed. A detailed criticism of it, line by line, would be neither worth while nor possible, since without a precise knowledge of the text they used, one cannot say with any certainty where they deviated from that text. Nor can we know at what point along the line of transmission such slips occurred: with one of the original manuscripts, the choice of a particular reading among manuscripts, either of the two Indian pandits, Arbuthnot, or Burton. But there is every reason to believe that they used a text very like the one that was published just a few years later and that agrees in general with all the texts published since, and in broad terms it is easy enough to see what they left out, put in, and mistranslated. For instance, at 4.1.19–21 we have translated the text like this:
Mildly offended by the man’s infidelities, she does not accuse him too much, but she scolds him with abusive language when he is alone or among friends. She does not, however, use love-sorcery worked with roots, for, Gonardiya says, ‘Nothing destroys trust like that.’
The Burton translation here reads:
In the event of any misconduct on the part of her husband, she should not blame him excessively, though she be a little displeased. She should not use abusive language towards him, but rebuke him with conciliatory words, whether he be in the company of friends or alone. Moreover, she should not be a scold, for, says Gonardiya, ‘there is no cause of dislike on the part of a husband so great as this characteristic in a wife.’
What is wrong with this picture? In the first place, the passage is watered down, padded, almost twice as long as the more direct translation. Secondly, the translators either had a very different reading or mistranslated the word for ‘love-sorcery worked with roots’ (mulakarika), which they render as ‘she should not be a scold’.80 Third, ‘misconduct’ is not so much a mistranslation as an error of judgement, for the word in question (apacara) does have the general meaning of ‘misconduct’, but in an erotic context it usually takes on the more specific meaning of ‘infidelity’, a choice that is supported both by the remedy that the text suggests (and rejects)—love-magic—and by Yashodhara’s gloss (aparadha). But the most serious problem is the word ‘not’ that negates the wife’s right to use abusive language against her straying husband, a denial only somewhat qualified by the added phrase, ‘rebuke him with conciliatory words.’ Was this an innocent error (and if so, whose?), or does it reflect a sexist bias (again, whose?)? We cannot know.
There are also pervasive patterns of mistranslation. The Burton translation has no commentary and only a few notes, but there is little need for them, for they are incorporated in the text. The pandits admitted relying heavily on Yashodhara’s commentary,81 which the Burton translation often simply inserted into Vatsyayana’s text, a move that accounts for a good deal of the padding.82 The Burton translation also deprives the reader of two essential aspects of the formal construction of the text. First, the translators made almost all of the direct quotes into indirect quotes, thus losing the force of the dialogue that animates the work. And secondly, they failed to recognize most of the verses and printed them as prose, thus failing to alert the reader to the different voice presented by the verses. There are also countless miscellaneous errors, including anachronisms such as translating aluka (at 4.1.29) as potatoes, which did not exist in India in Vatsyayana’s time.83
Most unfortunately, Burton and Arbuthnot, in Brodie’s words, ‘adroitly managed to escape the smell of obscenity’ by using ‘the Hindu terms for the sexual organs, yon
i and lingam, throughout.’84 To the extent that nineteenth-century writers regarded the words themselves, not the actual things that they designated, as obscene, the foreign words, devoid of any English connotations at all, were able to make an end-run around the obscene thought. But this decision of Burton’s was problematic in several ways. First of all, these terms do not represent Vatsyayana’s text, which only rarely uses lingam to refer to the male sexual organ and never refers to the female sexual organ as yoni.85 Instead, Vatsyayana uses several different words, primarily the gender-neutral jaghana (which can be translated as ‘pelvis’, or ‘genitals’, or ‘between the legs’86) or other terms (such as yantra or sadhana, ‘the instrument’) that are neither coy nor obscene. In some places, he circumvents, by indirection or implication, the need to employ any specific word at all. Where Vatsyayana does use lingam [2.1.1], the context suggests, and Yashodhara affirms, that it is (like jaghana) gender-neutral, meant to apply to both the male and female sexual organs.
Secondly, by Burton’s time, the terms lingam and yoni had taken on strong religious overtones, as both Indian English and Indian vernacular languages used them primarily to designate the sexual organs of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati. The human and divine facets of the term were sometimes explicitly compared, as in a text that argued that all creatures in the universe are marked with the signs of the god Shiva and his consort, since, just as Shiva’s lingam is always placed in the pindi (a word for the base in which the lingam is supported), so, too, all females, who have pindis, join with males, who have lingams.87 The exclusive application of these two terms to human genitals, therefore, may have had, at the very least, inappropriate overtones and, at the most, blasphemous implications for some Hindus.
Kamasutra Page 6