1.2.16 Now begins what Indian logic calls the ‘other side’ (literally, the ‘former wing,’ purvapaksha), the straw man, the arguments that imagined opponents might raise, followed by the author’s rebuttals. In 1.2.16–20, V defends textbooks of sex against arguments that may in fact have been current in India in his time. In 1.2.21–5, he defends the pursuit of dharma against the materialists, then (in 1.2.26–31) the pursuit of artha against the fatalists, and finally (in 1.2.32–39) the pursuit of kama against the pragmatists.
[Y] 1.2.17 Y here alludes to the well-known Hindu belief that matter consists in three ‘strands’ (torpor, passion, and lucidity), and that different creatures are made up of different proportions of these strands. By omitting scholars of pleasure from his list, he implies that those who make the objections in 1.2.16–17 do not know what they are talking about.
[Y] 1.2.20 The fertile season is the time immediately after menstruation, according to Hindu medical theory. Here Y is quoting Manu 3.45.
1.2.21 Materialists (Lokayatikas) express doctrines that correspond, roughly, to what we call materialism; they are also sometimes called Charvakas and sometimes Nastikas (‘Those who say [the gods] do not exist’), roughly, atheists. Their own texts, if they ever existed, have not survived; they are known only as the straw men in other texts such as this one.
1.2.26 Kalakarinikas, literally, ‘People [who believe that] fate or time is the cause [of everything]’, correspond to our ‘fatalists’.
1.2.29 For Bali and Indra, see O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil.
1.2.32 Pragmatists or utilitarians are Arthachintakas, literally people who are always thinking about success, power, and everything that artha implies. They have also been called ‘opportunists’ and ‘Philistines’. The Sarvadar-shanasamgraha, composed after the Kamasutra, describes the arguments of materialists called Charvakas in these same terms.
1.2.35 Danda, the son of Manu, raped Ara (also called Araja), the daughter of the great sage Shukra (also called Ushanas or Bhargava), who was at that time Danda’s royal chaplain and later became the royal chaplain of the demons. See the Ramayana.
[Y] 1.2.36 Unlike most other variants of this myth, Y’s version does not mention that the king of the gods, Indra, took the form of Gautama to seduce Ahalya; also unique is its suggestion that Gautama had intended to make love to her himself. Other variants also attribute the form of the curse (to have the mark of vaginas all over his body) to the fact that Indra was caught in the ‘womb’ of Ahalya, not of the hermitage. Most famous of all, which is perhaps why Y does not bother to tell the story, is the abduction of Sita, wife of Rama, by the demon Ravana, whom Rama subsequently destroyed. All these seductions involved tricks: Indra pretended to be Ahalya’s husband; Kichaka was foiled (and killed) when a man took the place of the woman he intended to seduce; and Ravana masqueraded as an ascetic to abduct Sita, while (in many tellings after the first Sanskrit version) a shadow Sita took the place of the Sita that Ravana thought he had abducted. All illusory seductions, they were all the more deadly for that. For Ahalya and Sita, see the Ramayana and Doniger, Splitting the Difference; for Kichaka, see the Mahabharata and Doniger, The Bedtrick.
1.2.38 The word for diseases, or ‘flaws’ (doshas), is also a technical term for the three ‘humours’ of the body, the basis of Hindu medical theory; they must be kept in proper balance through a careful diet. The implication is that aspects of sex, too, must be balanced or they will become pathological. The parable of the deer and barley appears in the Shatapatha Brahmana (c.900 BCE) as a metaphor for the seduction of other men’s wives: ‘When the deer eats the barley [the farmer] does not hope to nourish the animal; when the low-born woman becomes the lover of a noble man, [her husband] does not hope to get rich on that nourishment’ (13.2.9.6–9). Cynically, V assumes that people are as unwilling to offer food to beggars as they are to offer up their crops to deer to browse.
1.3.4 The meaning of the techniques and the distinction between arts and techniques or practices are discussed in the note on 1.3.16.
1.3.7 V refers specifically to the uha, the technique of glossing a word.
1.3.14 ‘Girlfriend’ is used through this text in the meaning of a friend who is a girl, not a female friend who is an erotic partner.
1.3.15 ‘The lute and the drum’ are more precisely the vina, a stringed instrument, and the damaru, a small drum in the shape of an hour-glass. ‘Languages made to seem foreign’ (mlecchita, literally ‘barbarianized’) seem to be the antecedent of our Anguish Languish or tricks such as the French phrase ‘Mots d’heures, faux cœurs’, which has another meaning when pronounced in French but heard in English.
1.3.16 The distinction between fine arts (such as singing, described in Book One) and the arts of love (described in Book Two) is sometimes blurred in the Kamasutra. Often, but not always, the arts of love are called the sixty-four ‘techniques’. Thus, at 1.3.22, V contrasts the (fine) arts in one line with the techniques in the next. But at 3.3.20, Y glosses the arts as ‘cutting leaves into shapes, and so forth’, and immediately, at 3.3.21, V refers to the sixty-four techniques. At 4.2.44 Y glosses the sixty-four arts as ‘those beginning with embracing and ending with the sexual movements of a man’, i.e. the arts of love, but at 4.2.45 he switches to the other definition (‘cutting leaves into shapes, and so forth’). Wherever possible, we will specify ‘fine’ when non-sexual arts are intended, and ‘of love’ when sexual arts are intended, but where the usage of the term is ambiguous, perhaps intentionally ambiguous, we will just say ‘arts’, tout court. The term ‘sixty-four techniques’ is unambiguous in referring to the arts of love, not the fine arts.
1.3.17 Both veshya (courtesan) and ganika (courtesan de luxe) are words suggesting multiple sexual partners, veshya from vish (everyone, the people) and ganika from gana (a crowd or host). Other Sanskrit texts seem to use these terms interchangeably, but clearly the Kamasutra differentiates between them. See Sternbach, Texts about Courtesans.
1.3.22 ‘Luck in love’, literally ‘good luck’ (saubhagyam), is a term used in the Kamasutra in the technical sense of the good luck of being loved, particularly of a woman’s luck in being loved by her husband. When applied to a man, it means that he has the luck of being loved by many women, a significant asymmetry. The adjective subhaga also means handsome or beautiful, and the opposite term (durbhaga, for the prefixes su and dur are cognate with our eu and dys/dis) is used particularly for a woman whose husband hates her. (See 4.2.54). Oddly, since bhaga also designates the female sexual organ, durbhaga might also designate a woman with a bad vagina.
1.4.1 The man-about-town (nagaraka) is literally a man who lives in a city (a nagara), but the term designates a sophisticated connoisseur of the good life in general, of pleasure in particular, and of sex even more particularly. In our day, he would be called a playboy. He lives all by himself—which is very strange in India, where people are always connected to their families—and is rich. He has no caste, and V does not even refer to his class, though Y’s gloss on this passage interprets the four sources of his wealth in terms of the four classes.
1.4.4 Betel (tambula, nowadays called paan) is a delicacy made of a betel leaf rolled up around a paste made of areca nuts (sometimes called betel nuts), cardamom, lime paste, catechu, and other flavours, sometimes including tobacco or other stimulants. The finished product, shaped rather like a stuffed grape-leaf, is eaten as a stimulant, digestive, and aphrodisiac, to redden the mouth (it produces a blood-red paste), and to freshen the breath.
1.4.8 The ‘libertine’, ‘pander’, and ‘clown’ are further defined at 1.4.31–4.
1.4.11 Both male and female messengers are mentioned in this text; we will specify the gender when it is not clear from the context.
1.4.15 Sarasvati, goddess of arts and letters, is the appropriate muse for a man-about-town, a connoisseur.
1.4.21 The phrase ‘who love all men equally’ is more literally ‘for whom all men are alike when it comes to love’ and might a
lso be translated ‘who are all the same for men to love’ or ‘who are the same as the men when it comes to love’.
1.4.28 The ‘silk-cotton’ tree (shalmali, Bombax heptaphyllum or Salmalia malabarica) is a great tree with massive thorns that are said to be used to torture people in hell. The ‘morningstar’ tree (kadamba, Nauclea cadamba) is said to put forth its fragrant buds at the roaring of thunderclouds.
1.4.31 The ‘libertine’ is the pithamarda, who appears in Indian drama as the hero’s sidekick. The collapsible chair is a kind of shooting-stick, a portable seat.
1.4.32 The ‘pander’ is the vita, the usual messenger, a well-educated but parasitic courtier. In his commentary on 6.1.24, Y says that the vita is a man worn out by his former life as a man-about-town. Vita may also sometimes be better translated as ‘voluptuary’.
1.4.33 The ‘clown’ is the vidushaka, a kind of jester in the drama, usually a Brahmin who teases the king.
1.4.34 These terms are satirically borrowed from the political players in the Arthashastra, as is Y’s commentary on the next passage, in which he glosses the women’s sophistication in the arts (presumably of love, not the fine arts) by punning on the words for a bawd (kuttani, literally ‘crusher’) and for crushing an enemy army (kutt).
1.4.35 The beggar women (bhiksuki) may be Buddhist nuns. Shaved heads are the sign of a particular kind of beggar, who, like the beggar women listed first, may belong to a religious order, particularly a renunciant order. Female renunciants, being cut off from normal social rules, have, in Sanskrit literature, a freedom denied to any other women except courtesans. But see note to 1.5.23.
1.4.37 This may also be translated, ‘The man who speaks in society neither too elegantly nor too colloquially’.
1.5.2 The passage may also mean that pleasure under these circumstances is a means of getting illegitimate sons, a bad reputation, and social ostracism. Note the switch from the singular in the first passage, about a permitted woman, to the plural in the second passage, about forbidden women. The ‘second-hand’ woman is discussed at 4.2.31–44, and the wife unlucky in love at 4.2.45–54. Y here is quoting Manu 3.13.
1.5.3 ‘Women who may be lovers’ are the nayikas. When they are the subjects of verbs, we generally translate nayaka and nayika as ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’, the male and female protagonists, designating a man or woman who may be a sexual partner. These terms should not be confused with ‘a man’, translating either the term purusha, a male, or the assumed male subject of most verbs with unstated subjects; and ‘a woman’, translating the term stri or one of its synonyms (such as nari or yoshit). In some contexts, nayaka or nayika is best translated as ‘lover’. Where the context does not make clear, in English, the gender of the lover (which is unambiguously indicated by the ending of the Sanskrit word), we specify men or women. Gamya, the sexually accessible man or woman, may also be translated as ‘lover’ (also of both genders), but sometimes as ‘eligible’; it means both permitted and available.
[Y] 1.5.11 Manu (8.350) says it is no violation of dharma to kill a man who has raised a weapon to kill you.
[Y] 1.5.12 Y here paraphrases Manu 8.389 and 10.99.
1.5.20 The verb pra-kr, which we have translated as ‘seduce’, more literally reproduces the English slang usage of ‘make’.
1.5.23 The ‘wandering ascetic’ (pravrajita) is a woman who wanders about, presumably on a religious quest. It is a stunning indication of V’s attitude to religious renunciation that he even considers here, without either approval or censure, a renunciant woman as a potential sexual partner. Yet at 1.5.29 he disqualifies wandering ascetic women as sexual partners.
1.5.26 ‘These women’ are those mentioned in 1.5.22–5.
1.5.27 V simply gives this opinion without commenting on it as he comments on all the others; he appends it after his own statement of judgement. Here, as elsewhere, he refuses to commit himself to any absolute moral view of the third nature. V’s attitude to the third nature is discussed in the Introduction.
[Y] 1.5.28 The context suggests, against Y, that ‘both’ may refer to both the open and the concealed lover.
[Y] 1.5.29 Manu 11.59. Defiling the guru’s bed is the paradigmatic sin in ancient Hinduism, a crime regarded as a form of incest.
[Y] 1.5.30 Draupadi, the heroine of the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, had five husbands, the five sons of Pandu, under circumstances extenuated in various ways by various texts (both in the original Sanskrit version and in various retellings in Sanskrit and in vernacular languages) but never sufficiently to protect her from frequent slurs against her chastity.
1.5.34 It is important for V to define the boundaries of ‘friend’ in terms of both of the goals of this chapter: to make sure, first, that the lover does not sleep with the wife of his friend and, second, that he may use the friend as a messenger. The friends are just the sorts of people who appear on Manu’s list of people to avoid at all costs.
1.5.37 Lee Siegel’s inspired translation of these two final lines is: ‘This man, if knowing when and where to make his passes, | Will surely captivate even the most obdurate of lasses’ (Siegel, Love in a Dead Language, 74).
BOOK TWO · SEX
[Y] 2.1.1 The verse that Y cites is probably using the measurement of ‘fingers’, approximately ¾ in. each. The lengths therefore would be 4½, 6¾, and 9 in. Burton, in the Anangaranga, estimates lengths of 3, 4½, and 6 in., the latter ‘of African or Negro dimensions’.
2.1.3 The couplings with the man larger than the woman are ideally better, though physically more difficult. The social category of hypergamy (in which the woman marries a man—a bridegroom, gamos—above—hyper—her) is what the Hindus call anuloma (‘with the hair’, or, as we would say, ‘with the grain’), while hypogamy (in which the man is lower than she is) is called pratiloma or viloma (‘against the hair’, ‘against the grain’). These two categories, and the favouring of hypergamy over hypogamy, may well have been derived from the more basic cultural assumption expressed in the animal metaphors: in terms of size, all of the couplings are ‘against the grain’, because the biggest man (the stallion) is hardly bigger than the smallest woman (doe), and grotesquely smaller than the largest woman (the elephant cow). The mare is regarded as sexually enormous, bigger than the bull, in Hindu mythology. Here Y uses the terms anuloma and pratiloma in another sense, meaning ‘easily’ or ‘the hard way’: the couplings with the man larger than the woman, though better (and hence anuloma in the sense of social value) are more difficult (and hence pratiloma in the sense of practicality). For the mare, see O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes.
2.1.4 There are two different, conflicting agendas embedded in this passage: ‘equal is best’, but in fact the man has to be bigger.
2.1.10–30 These twenty passages follow the structure of a formal argument like that of 1.2.16; but this one is more complex. Auddalaki states his view (10–12) and imagines an objection (13–143), to which he replies (14b); then another objection is stated (15) and answered (16–17). The followers of Babhravya then state their views (18); an objection is raised (19–20) and answered (21–2). V then states his views (23–6), imagines an objection (27a), and deflects it (27b); he imagines another objection (28) and answers it (29a); and he imagines a final objection (29b) and answers it (29c–30). The objections to Auddalaki and Babhravya are presumably V’s; the objections to V’s views may be those of the scholars that he cites or just the positions of straw men. In order to distinguish the views of the two scholars with whom V argues (Auddalaki or the Babhravyas) from those of their opponent (V), we have placed quotation marks around the views of those scholars, but not around V’s objections to their views. By contrast, we have placed quotation marks around the objections to V’s views, but not around his views. That is: V’s opinions are never in quotation marks.
[Y] 2.1.11 The idea that worms inhabit women’s sexual organs is also reflected in the belief held by Jains in ancient India, that the insects inside a woman are killed by the frictio
n of intercourse, making every sexual act a mass murder.
2.1.12 The word rasa, which we have glossed as ‘feeling’, following Y, also means ‘fluid’. The first meaning seems more relevant here because Auddalaki assumes that women do not emit any fluid at all, and in any case he has not mentioned semen or any fluid of the man from which the woman’s could be said to differ. But the passage might nevertheless mean that the woman emits a different fluid.
[Y] 2.1.15 Y puns on the verb snih which means both ‘to become oily or wet’ and ‘to be affectionate’.
[Y] 2.1.18 Y cites Charaka and Sushruta, authors of the most famous of the medical texts, which include a large section on embryology. Both of them assume that a woman has seed, as does Y (at 6.1.17). Manu, too, states (at 3.49) that a male child is born when the man’s semen is greater, and a female child when the woman’s semen is greater. Some Indian texts also assume that the woman must have an orgasm in order to conceive. Yet other embryologies assume that the woman’s menstrual blood, rather than her semen, combines with the man’s semen to form the embryo; this model gives women a much smaller role in the child, since it also assumed that semen was a much refined and concentrated form of blood. The story of the two women who make love and produce a boneless child is well known: A king died without an heir, and one of his two wives ate a special bowl of rice consecrated to make her pregnant, and the other ‘acted the part of a man’ with her, and she became pregnant; but the child had no bones, because that is the father’s contribution to the embryo. The child lacked bones because the man contributes, from his semen, the white and hard parts of the embryo, bones and sinews, while the woman contributes, from her blood, the red and the soft parts, blood and flesh. There is also an example of the opposite case, in which the child (Shiva’s son Bhringin) is cursed to be without flesh because he denies his mother. (These two embryologies correspond roughly to the European systems that follow Galen—in which the woman has seed like the man—and those that follow Aristotle—in which the man’s semen alone forms the child, and a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg.) Both of these models were available simultaneously at the time of the Kamasutra’s composition. The decision about gender, about whether women are or are not equal, may predetermine the choice of embryological mode, with two seeds or one.
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