Kamasutra

by Vatsyayana Mallanaga

  3.2, end The core of whatever Vatsyayana has to say in this useful exposition on how to relax a girl is that a man needs to be a specialist in the psychology of women. Without a knowledge of a woman’s emotions, his marriage and married life will be failures.

  3.5, end Love marriage has been common in India since ancient times and has enjoyed great popularity. The choosing of a husband in open assembly by a princess was a love marriage. Nala and Damayanti, Aja and Indumati, Rama and Sita, Udayana and Vasavadatta, Malati and Madhava were all married in this way. In Vatsyayana’s view, even though love-marriage is not ritually the highest form of marriage, it is still pre-eminent. This is because the ultimate goal of marriage is to develop love between the couple, and a love-marriage has this from the beginning.

  4.2.45 The unfortunate among these second-hand women are those who are harassed by the other co-wives. Such an unlucky woman should take the side of a co-wife who is favoured by the husband. She should show the arts that can be exhibited because a demonstration of proficiency often ends misfortune.

  5.1, end In this section Vatsyayana has described ten sexual states of man which come to the fore at the time of separation from a woman. It is not necessary that these states become manifest only in relation to another man’s wife. These ten states appear whenever desire is frustrated. Whether the object of desire is a man or woman, one’s own wife or another man’s, this section is concerned with the states when the object is unavailable. The ten states mentioned by Vatsyayana torment not only men but also women. Just as men sleep with other men’s wives, women sleep with other women’s husbands. The effort made by a man to sleep with the wife of another man is the same as made by a woman to sleep with the husband of another woman. It is a different matter that men have more courage and are less shy while women are more diffident in this particular enterprise. But one should not turn one’s face away from the reality that, like men, women too desire other men. The conversation between Yama and Yami in the Rig Veda gives evidence of this. Commenting on the Chandogya Upanishad’s statement, ‘Do not refuse any woman’, Shankara says that one should not turn away a lustful woman who comes to one’s bed, while Ramanuja writes in his commentary, ‘To sleep with another man’s wife when her longing for intercourse is intense is part of the worship of Shiva, and the adultery is not forbidden.’ Besides, the Puranic legends of Ahalya and Indra, Kunti and the Sun, the stories of Dushyanta and Shakuntala, Malati and Madhava, and many other love stories testify to an unbroken chain of adultery since creation.

  5.6, end Like Vatsyayana, other scholars of erotics have also inquired into the causes of women’s sexual misconduct. Padmashri says that women should take care not to indulge in or listen to lewd talk when they go out to festivals, on pilgrimages, to temples, houses of neighbours or to the fields, because the intoxication of youth robs them of discrimination and they are apt to lose their chastity and virginity.

  6.2, end The author of the Kamasutra has not asked why men frequent courtesans in spite of having young, beautiful, and accomplished wives at home. The answer to this question is given by the verses that speak of the courtesan’s erotic accomplishments. Actually, courtesans are educated in sexual play since childhood. How to attract a man, how to make him a slave through sex, are arts which are uniquely those of the courtesan, not of a housewife.

  6.3, end The essence of this section on the nature of a courtesan is found in the dialogue between the sage Maricha and the courtesan Kamamanjari in Dandin’s Dashakumaracharita. Kamamanjari says that there is an inborn tendency among courtesans to try to transform a girl into a celestial beauty. All the ways mentioned in the texts on erotics and beauty are employed to make her beautiful. From childhood, the girl eats a balanced diet so that bodily defects are corrected and her attractiveness increases. After she becomes five years old, she is hidden from men in such a way that even her father cannot meet her. From this age onwards, the girl is educated in the sixty-four arts and is taught different languages. All kinds of ways to cheat and deceive are taught to her. The arts of intercourse are imparted by a man who will not cause her much pain and will also remain discreet.

  6.5, end The Kamasutra recommends to the courtesan that she determine her own fee according to the country, its state of affairs, the times she is living in, her qualities, beauty, etc. But Kautilya’s Arthashastra gives the right of fixing her fees not to the courtesan but to the administration. Kautilya would appoint a Commissioner of Courtesans who keeps an eye on their security and their doings, keeps track of their visitors and income, and lays down the fee to be charged. The independence enjoyed by the courtesan at the time the Kamasutra was composed was absent at the time of the composition of the Arthashastra.

  7.2, end A man cannot satisfy a woman through intercourse once his sexual power weakens. The woman then becomes detached and depressed. Women who suppress their strong wish for intercourse under such conditions often fall sick. They become epileptic, are subject to fainting fits, and become irritable by nature. Vatsyayana has said that a man who comes too soon should first excite the woman and make her wet by means other than intercourse. Such a way of proceeding satisfies both man and woman. At what time each part of a woman’s body is erotically sensitive can be learned through a study of the principles of Moon-Art [a theory that links different parts of a woman’s body to different phases of the moon]. Pressing the appropriate part of the woman’s body at a particular time excites her and she soon becomes wet. The man who comes too soon, whose sexual power has weakened, but who still wants the pleasure of intercourse, should practise Yoga. The Yogashastras talk of the Ashvini-mudra. A person who attains proficiency in this particular mudra will remain sexually adequate.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  V = Vatsyayana Y = Yashodhara

  BOOK ONE · GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

  [Y] 1.1.1 The three aims of human life (purusharthas)—religion (dharma), power (artha), and pleasure (kama)—also known as the triple path (tri-varga), are discussed in the Introduction. The metaphor of the bookworms is analogous to the odds against a monkey randomly typing out the works of Shakespeare. At 1.2.19 Y tells us that Vatsyayana is the author’s family name; Mallanaga (literally, ‘elephant among wrestlers’) is the name given at his initiation. See O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion, for the bookworm metaphor.

  1.1.2 The word that we have translated as ‘text’ is shastra, which sometimes also means a whole body of knowledge, what we would call a discipline or even a science, or sometimes a particular textbook. Pururavas, a mortal king, fell in love with the celestial nymph and courtesan Urvashi; when he broke his promise to her, she left him, though according to later versions of the myth, they were later reconciled. The story that Y tells here closely resembles the Greek myth of Paris, who, forced to choose between three goddesses, chose Aphrodite (= Kama) over Artemis and Athene (roughly = Dharma and Artha), and was cursed by Athene and Artemis. Kama functions as a god quite often in Hindu mythology; the god Shiva burns him to ashes, but he is revived, invisible. He is also invoked as the patron saint of adultery: One day Kama caught sight of the wife of a Brahmin and pricked his heart with his own flower arrow. She, too, was pierced by one of Kama’s arrows and lusted for him. As Kama was wooing her, her husband caught them and cursed Kama to become a leper and the woman to become a broken stone khanda-sila, a pun on ‘broken virtue’. Kama propitiated the sage and was freed from his disease, but the woman remained in the form of a stone. If a man worships her in this form on the thirteenth day (of the month), there will be no offence either for the man or for his lover when adultery occurs. And a woman who is being neglected by her husband should offer flowers to her (Skanda Purana 6.134.1–80). For Pururavas and Urvashi see Rig Veda 10.95 (Rig Veda, trans. O’Flaherty, 253–6); Shata-patha Brahmana 11.5.1.1–17; O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes; and Doniger, Splitting the Difference. For Kama and Shiva, see O’Flaherty, Siva.

  1.1.6 Manu, the son of the Creator, is the mythical author of the Laws of Manu.

&nbs
p; 1.1.7 Brihaspati is the guru of the gods, the planet Jupiter, and the putative author of a Machiavellian handbook of politics from which the extant text known as the Arthashastra, composed by Kautilya, is said to have been derived, just as Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra is said to have been derived from that of the mythical Nandin. The human editions of these two texts, as well as Manu’s text on dharma, are still in existence now, though perhaps not in the form in which V or even Y knew them. The texts cited in 1.1.9–13 no longer exist, but almost certainly existed at the time of V, since he and, later, Y often quote directly from them.

  [Y] 1.1.8 Y is here making explicit the fact that the Nandin in question is actually a god, not merely a human named after a god (as a man, especially in Spanish-speaking countries, might be called Jesus). Nandin, a bull or a bull-headed deity, is the son of the Great God, Shiva, and is often stationed to guard the door to the bedroom door of his parents, Shiva and Uma (also named Parvati). A statue of Nandin often guards the door to a temple of Shiva. It is most appropriate for a bull, and for the god Shiva (whose phallus is worshipped throughout India, but who also controls his sexuality through his asceticism), to be associated with the textbook of sex and pleasure. A year as the gods count them is usually counted as ten thousand human years.

  [Y] 1.1.9 The verses that Y cites contrast ‘the guru’s son’, Manu, son of the Self-born (cited in the previous verse), who made the rules about wine, with Uddalaka’s son, who made the rules about other men’s wives.

  Shvetaketu Auddalaki is cited often in the Kamasutra, henceforth just by his patronymic, Auddalaki. The story that Y tells is told at greater length in the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata (1.113.9–20): ‘The great sage named Uddalaka had a son, named Shvetaketu, who became a hermit. Once, right before the eyes of Shvetaketu and his father, a Brahmin grasped his mother by the hand and said, “Let’s go!” The sage’s son became enraged and could not bear to see his mother being taken away by force like that. But when his father saw that Shvetaketu was angry he said, “Do not be angry, my little son. This is the eternal dharma. The women of all classes on earth are not fenced in; all creatures behave just like cows, my little son, each in its own class.” The sage’s son could not tolerate that dharma, and made this moral boundary for men and women on earth, for humans, but not for other creatures. And from then on this moral boundary has stood: A woman who is unfaithful to her husband commits a mortal sin that brings great misery, an evil equal to killing an embryo, and a man who seduces another man’s wife, when she is a woman who keeps her vow to her husband and is thus a virgin obeying a vow of chastity, that man too commits a mortal sin on earth.’ The epic keeps insisting that this is all hearsay, as if to make us doubt it; the primal scene that it imagines is a vivid, quasi-Freudian narrative, explaining a kind of sexual revulsion. Shvetaketu Auddalaki is well known as a hero of the Upanishads, the ancient Sanskrit philosophical texts that argue for renunciation; in those texts, his father teaches him the central doctrines of Indian philosophy. It is surprising to find Shvetaketu here in the Kamasutra cited as an expert sexologist, and this seeming incongruity may have inspired V to allude to, and Y to tell, this story here: it explains how a sage became simultaneously chaste, an enemy of male adultery, and an authority on sex.

  A Brahmin’s right to demand the sexual services of any woman he fancied evoked violent protest in ancient Indian texts; a notorious example is the story of Yavakri, who tried to exert this right on the wife of another Brahmin and died. For Shvetaketu, see Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 6.2.1; Chandogya Upanishad 5.3.1–6; 6.1–16; Kaushitaki Upanishad 1.1. For Yavakri, see O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence; Doniger, The Bedtrick.

  1.1.10 Babhravya, like Auddalaki, is an authority with whom V will argue often in the course of the Kamasutra. We have translated kanya as ‘virgin’, in part to distinguish the term from bala, meaning ‘a female child’, which we translated as ‘a young girl’. Kanya actually covers a range of meanings including maiden, virgin, unmarried girl, bride, and a girl who has not yet menstruated. In the context of this text, whose central concern is the sexual act, we felt that ‘virgin’ was usually the foregrounded meaning. What we have called ‘erotic esoterica’ is ‘Upanishadic’ (which might be translated as ‘mystical’); it designates, in this text, aphrodisiac drugs, magic recipes, sex tools, and so forth.

  1.1.11 The courtesans de luxe are said to be Pataliputrikas, ‘Daughters of the Trumpet Flower’. To touch anyone, let alone a god, with your foot is an act of great disrespect and a common source of curses in India. Men are often turned into women, and back again, in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, as Teiresias was in Greek mythology; Narada, Bhangashvana, and Ila are the most famous of the serial androgynes. The difference between a courtesan and a courtesan de luxe is set forth in 1.3.17 and in Shastri’s note on 1.5.3, cited in the Introduction. For Ila and Bhangashvana, see Doniger, Splitting the Difference; for Narada, see O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion.

  1.1.15 The titles of books given here are repeated in the text at the beginning of each book; the chapters do not have titles. Instead, the text is divided into the sections listed here, and often (though not always) the title of the section is given at the end, set off by the word iti that also indicates the end of a direct quotation or a long list: ‘That is …’. We have inserted all of the section headings at the appropriate places, in brackets, giving them the sixty-four numbers that Yashodhara gives them. There are also three unnumbered sections, at 1.5.1, 4.2.67, and 6.6.50.

  1.1.16 The ‘man-about-town’ is literally the nagaraka, the man of the city (nagara), an urbane playboy.

  1.1.20 Lists of the women with whom one can and cannot have intercourse are set-pieces in the dharma literature; cf. Mahabharata 13.107, Laws of Manu 3.4–50.

  1.1.23 V says here that his text has 1,250 sutras, a nice, round number; the Shastri edition that we are using makes it 1492, also an easy number (date) to remember, and the Goswami edition numbers 1683.

  1.2.1 A hundred years is the ideal lifespan, used as the benchmark in Vedic and Ayurvedic texts; but, as 1.2.5 indicates, it was understood that not everyone reached this ideal age.

  1.2.2 V lists power rather than religion as the predominant goal of childhood, which Manu regards as a period of spiritual rather than worldly education. But V consistently regards knowledge (vidya, which may more specifically designate knowledge of the Veda) as a form of power, as, for instance, in 1.2.9. Moreover, V regards progeny both as an issue of religion, for the son must make the funeral offerings that free his dead father from limbo, and as an issue of power, probably because of the importance of inheritance. Compare Y’s tabulation of the ages of men with Shastri’s tabulation of the ages of women (at 2.2.23): until the age of sixteen, a woman is called a girl, from sixteen to thirty a young woman, from thirty to fifty middle-aged, and after fifty she is called an old woman. After the first age, when they are equal, the men are much older than the women with whom they are matched: a woman is old at fifty, a man at seventy.

  1.2.4 Release (moksha) is the fourth human goal; see Introduction.

  [Y] 1.2.4 The four classes are Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, roughly priest, warrior/ruler, commoner, and servant. The four stages are the chaste student (brahmacarin), householder (grihastha), forest dweller (vanaprastha), and renouncer (sannyasiri). Y, at 1.1.1, does not use the usual terms for the last two stages of life, but calls them a vaikhanasa (literally, ‘digger’, presumably for roots to eat) and a bhikshu (literally, one who begs for food to eat, more broadly designating a monk).

  1.2.6 This passage seems to forbid pre-pubescent eroticism, which the previous passage (permitting the pursuit of pleasure in any stage of life) theoretically allowed. Y here also expands upon the previous passage’s statement that the young student is concerned with power—here not merely knowledge, but land.

  1.2.7 An alternative translation would be: ‘Religion consists in engaging … in sacrifice and other such actions that people do not generally engage in …
and in refraining … from … such actions that people generally do engage in.’

  1.2.8 ‘Sacred scripture’ is shruti, ‘what is heard’, the term for the most ancient Sanskrit texts, the Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads, that are so named because they were ‘heard’ by the ancient sages (presumably from words uttered by the gods). Shruti was followed by smriti, ‘what is remembered’, man-made texts such as the textbooks referred to in 1.1.6–7 and the Kamasutra.

  1.2.10 ‘The Tasks of the Superintendent’ is the title of a chapter in the Arthashastra.

  1.2.12 What we have translated, literally, as ‘bearing fruit’ Y interprets as ‘culminating in a climax’, but V may mean that the fruit is the production of a child. In the light of Babhravya’s remarks cited at 2.1.18 about female orgasm, this passage may refer not only to the man’s climax but also to the woman’s, and to the ejaculation of seed by both of them that results in pregnancy. Y defines what V calls erotic arousal (abhimana) in terms of such things as kissing and caressing. The verb from which the noun abhimana is derived appears (with a direct object) at 1.2.35, where it seems to mean ‘to desire’, ‘to be aroused (by)’. But it also means ‘high self-esteem’ (as well as ‘arrogance’), perhaps combined in an erotic feeling that heightens the sense of self, a meaning which may also be relevant here; it suggests that there is some sort of self-definition involved in the sexual act.

  1.2.15 It seems cynical of V to say that power and wealth (artha) are more important than religion (dharma) for a king; the dharma texts, not surprisingly, rank dharma above artha for a king, but, more surprisingly, so do the artha texts.