Kamasutra

by Vatsyayana Mallanaga

  Babhravya’s assumption (in contrast with Auddalaki’s) is that a woman, like a man, emits semen during orgasm; and that her seed, like his, is necessary for conception. V does not comment on this assumption but seems to share Babhravya’s belief that women do have orgasms and not to share his belief that they have them continually. In focusing upon the issue of women’s pleasure, and not only upon their ability to conceive, V differs dramatically from the medical and legal texts, all of which deal obsessively with the issue of conception. For the story of the two queens, in the Padma Purana, see O’Flaherty, Textual Sources; for the tale of Bhringin, see O’Flaherty, Siva; for menstrual blood and semen, see O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes.

  2.1.21 (and 2.1.35). There is an ambiguity here: whose fluids are used up, his or hers? The phrase could refer to the semen of either the man or the woman, or to the man’s semen and the woman’s lubricating juices, or to the man’s semen and the woman’s menstrual blood, or to both components of any of these options. The ‘wish to stop’ is similarly gender-neutral. Y’s comment in 2.1.35 indicates his belief that both the man and the woman might wish to stop, but V in 2.1.36 tells us that the man runs out of fluid first, from which we might conclude that he is the one intended here too.

  [Y] 2.1.24 The example chosen seemingly at random, the mating of a man and a mare, is actually attested in a number of Hindu myths. See O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes.

  2.1.27 ‘Species’ (or ‘form’, akriti) is replaced, in 2.1.30, by ‘genus’, jati, a word, cognate with ‘genus’, that also, significantly, means ‘caste’, in contrast with ‘class’ (varna, as in 1.2.25 and 1.5.1).

  [Y] 2.1.28 Devadatta is the ancient Sanskrit equivalent of John Doe, and the sentence about the rice is the standard sample sentence in Sanskrit, as ‘See Dick and Jane run’ used to be in English. Y uses grammatical terms such as noun and verb, subject and object, and glosses a grammatical sentence as an example, quoting the great Sanskrit grammarian Panini. In this gloss, the sexual act is a sentence in which the man is the subject, the object is sexual pleasure (for both of them), and the woman is the locative case. The double meaning is enhanced by the fact that ‘object’ and ‘meaning’ are the same word in Sanskrit—artha.

  2.1.29 Wood apples, like croquet balls or lawn bowls, are used in a game in which they hit one another.

  2.1.30 The conclusion that the woman must have her orgasm first results from an argument that Y, rather than V, spells out: since a woman can have an orgasm she should have an orgasm (or else she will not conceive a child, according to 2.1.18), and a man cannot satisfy a woman after he has had his orgasm. But cf. 2.1.36, which remarks without comment on the fact that men run out of fluids before women do—yet another submerged assumption that Y spells out: women are not easy to satisfy.

  The Greek philosopher Hippocrates believed that women ejaculated, but in the modern era female ejaculation was first described by the German gynecologist Ernst Graefenberg. It occurs as a result of the stimulation of the ‘Graefenberg Zone’, popularly termed the G-spot. The G-spot is a particularly sensitive area within the vagina, about halfway between the pubic bone and the cervix adjacent to the rear of the urethra. It is constituted out of an erectile tissue and leads to a discharge of a clear, transparent liquid from the urethra during orgasm. This female ejaculation—distinct from the vaginal secretions—and the G-spot, controversial till the 1980s, are now accepted as facts in medical and reference literature. Renate Syed has persuasively demonstrated that besides Yashodhara’s Jayamangala, other Indian erotic texts, such as the Panchasayaka (11th century), Ratirahasya (13th century), and Anangaranga (16th century), describe both the G-spot and female ejaculation in convincing detail. Outside the scientific literature, female ejaculation is already mentioned in a seventh-century verse collection, the Amarushataka. See Ernst Graefenberg, ‘The role of the urethra in female orgasm’ (International Journal of Sexology, 3 (1950), 145–8).

  2.1.32 Rati, rata, and surata are all derived from the same word, rata, the past passive participle from the verb ram, meaning, among other things, to enjoy sexual intercourse. The first set of words describes sexual feelings, the second set, sexual actions.

  2.1.35 Y works out the various permutations for men and women of all twenty-seven types, but V realizes that the problem is general: at first, the man has fierce sexual energy and ejaculates quickly, while the woman at that time is slow to rouse and takes a long time to finish, not a satisfactory combination. After that, the man is slower to rouse and takes a long time to finish, while the woman is quick to rouse and does not last long, not so bad as the first coupling but not ideal either.

  [Y] 2.1.36 So too the serial female-to-male bisexual Chudala says, when she is a woman, that a woman has eight times as much pleasure (kama) as a man, which could also be translated as eight times as much desire; but Bhangashvana, the Indian Teiresias (male-to-female), just said women had more desire than men. Some Greek texts maintain that Teiresias, too, said that women have not just more pleasure, but nine times as much pleasure as men—thereby slightly upping the ante in comparison with the Hindu story of Chudala. For Chudala, see O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion. For Teiresias, see Apollodorus 3.6.7; Doniger, Splitting the Difference.

  2.1.38 Cf. 1.1.24, where V speaks in more positive terms of wise people who want to have things spelt out in detail.

  2.1.41 The implication is that, since these activities do not involve the sexual act itself, they generate love only through the erotic arousal of the imagination (abhimana), presumably the imagination of the sexual act. See note to 1.2.12.

  2.1.43 When there is a comparison between a past and a present love, the present lover is loved for his resemblance to the past lover, in a kind of transposed love or idée fixe, as in 2.10.21.

  2.2.1 In this passage and in 2.2.3, V uses the word ‘part’ (anga, literally ‘limb’), perhaps referring to the original portions of the Ur-Kamasutra (which he calls ‘parts’ or ‘limbs’ in 1.1.14), but in fact designating the ‘part’ (of the total text) that we have called ‘Book Two’ (the second adhikarana).

  2.2.2 V himself states at 1.1.23 that his text has sixty-four sections.

  2.2.3 The Rig Veda is sometimes called (according to Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit dictionary) ‘the sixty-four’, because there are sixty-four sections in it (eight parts, each actually called an ashthaka, ‘eight’), or (according to Y) ‘the ten’, because there are ten ‘circles’, a separate enumeration, overlapping with that of the eight eights. The argument seems to be that the Kamasutra as a whole is named ‘the sixty-four’ because (1) it has sixty-four sections and (2) the term ‘sixty-four’ brings the text honour through the connection with the Rig Veda, for several reasons: (a) because both texts are called ‘the sixty-four’ and (b) because both one of the authors of the Rig Veda and one of the authors of the Kamasutra have names that connect them with Panchala, which is a name both of a place and of a family from that place. But Book Two alone is also named ‘the sixty-four’ because (1) that book is about the sixty-four sexual arts (1.3.16) and (2) like the Rig Veda, which is also called ‘the sixty-four’, it is divided into ten parts. In fact, though V does indeed count ten chapters in Book Two (at 1.1.17), they are not precisely the ten that Y cites here (for he omits the introductory and final chapters and compensates by numbering separately each of the two separate sections in chapters seven and eight). Finally, in 2.2.5 V dismisses all the contradictory numbers as mere manners of speaking. At 1.3.16, after listing the sixty-four fine arts (singing, etc.), V remarks that ‘the sixty-four different techniques (prayogas) that come from Babhravya of Panchala are different’.

  2.2.18 ‘Rice and sesame’ has something of the meaning of our ‘peas and carrots’ or ‘rizzy pizzy’: a close mixture from which it is almost impossible to separate the component parts.

  2.3.32 An inspired, if rather loose, translation of this verse by Lee Siegel ends: ‘For love asks an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; | while love gives a truth for a li
e, a lie for a truth’ (Siegel, Love in a Dead Language, 112).

  2.4.7 V does not seem to care very much about the right or left hand; at 2.2.18, he says that the man and woman may lie on either side, freeing either hand, but here and at 2.4.7, 2.10.2, and 2.10.7 he specifies the left hand or arm. According to Hindu tradition, people use the left hand to cleanse themselves after emptying bladder or bowels, and their right hand to eat; sex would come in the former category, and require the left hand. Yet V’s considerations here seem to be purely practical: nails on the right hand might become broken in the course of use, and hence unsuitable for the subtleties of scratching. See also the note on 2.6.18.

  2.5.4 The actual order of the bites as they are described differs somewhat from the list of bites in this introductory passage.

  2.5.27 The country where women rule is a mythical land in the far North; there have never been matriarchal dynasties in Indian history, though there are still matrilineal societies, especially in Northeast India and South India.

  2.6.11 What we have called ‘Junoesque’ is literally ‘of Indrani’. Indrani is the wife of Indra, the king of the gods (see 1.2.29 and 35), and resembles Juno, the wife of Jupiter, king of the Roman gods (or Hera, wife of the Greek Zeus), in many ways, including her own enormous sexual appetite and her jealousy about her husband’s notorious adulteries.

  [Y] 2.6.17 Y notes that the second variant of this position, the equivalent of our ‘missionary position’, is so easy, and presumably so common, that it needs no explanation.

  2.6.18 According to this passage, the man, lying on his left side, has his right hand free. To avoid the implication that the man uses his right hand for sex (see note on 2.4.7), Y argues that V is talking about sleeping, not about sex, and that for sex the left hand is free to function, while the right is free only during sleep.

  2.6.21 Hindu mythology uses the mare as the symbol of the hyper-sexualized woman. This position is called Carezza or Pompoir in Europe.

  2.6.33 This is also known as the ‘windmill’.

  2.6.35 Manu forbids a man to emit his semen in water, which the commentator takes to mean ‘when having intercourse with a woman in water’ (11.174). See also 2.6.44.

  2.6.48 The men are said to do this in the king’s harem; see Section 38.

  2.7.6 We have tried to find English equivalents for various Sanskrit terms for what are, after all, inarticulate sounds. The word we have translated as ‘moaning’ is literally ‘making the sound “Seet!”’, which means suddenly drawing in the breath between the teeth in an instinctive reaction to pain or intense pleasure. ‘Screaming’ (viruta) is the generic term, which includes the following: ‘Whimpering’ is making the sound ‘hnnn’, and ‘groaning’ is a sound like thunder. ‘Babbling’ (kujita) and ‘crying’ (rudita) are known from other contexts. ‘Panting’ is making the sound ‘Soot!’, ‘shrieking’ is making the sound ‘Doot!’, and sobbing, the sound ‘Phoot!’

  2.7.12 The climax in question here is presumably hers, though neither V nor Y says so specifically. This same ambiguity applies to this phrase in 2.7.20.

  2.7.20 It is not clear whether the phrases ‘in the throes of passion,’ ‘as passion nears its end’, and ‘until the climax’ refer to him or to her, but their placement makes it more likely that he is intended, and this is what Y assumes. The passage simultaneously suggests that he is getting out of control and hitting her too hard and that she enjoys the slaps and is crying out in ecstasy. This sort of ambiguity is particularly disturbing to a contemporary reader, as it seems to lodge in the very heart of the philosophy of rape.

  2.7.22 ‘Natural talent’ (or ‘glory’ or ‘vital power’ [tejas]) is also, significantly, the word for semen.

  2.7.24 The other forms of slapping were discussed at 2.7.2.

  2.7.28–30 The kings who commit these excesses are all from South India, where V generally locates sexual excess. In contrast with such figures as Shakuntala and Ahalya, these kings are not well known to Sanskrit mythology.

  2.8.6 The ‘sexual strokes’ (upasriptani, from the verb upa-srip, srip being related to the word for serpent in Sanskrit and in English), are, in particular, the snake-like movements that a man makes with his penis when he is inside the woman; often this term is supplemented by the word for ‘man’ (purusha), as in, ‘a man’s sexual strokes’. Another term for the woman ‘playing the man’s part’ is the ‘inverse’ position (viparita), where the woman acts the man’s part and the man acts the woman’s part, or as we would say, the woman is on top. Significantly, V resists this value judgement and never uses this term. Yashodhara’s commentary on this passage implies that the woman does not resume her ‘natural talent’ until the sexual act is over.

  2.8.7 From the Sanskrit text, we might now expect a description of women doing things to men; but in fact we encounter a passage (2.8.8–31) where the man is the active party. The express subject of 2.8.8 is ‘man’ (purusha), and the express object is ‘woman’ (yoshit); there is no ambiguity at all in the text here. To account for this transition between subjects, Y makes explicit his interpretation of the connection between the two subjects—women acting like men and men acting like men—and points out that the author is now telling us what men do to women. At the end of this passage, at 2.8.32, V reverts to the first sort of ‘acting like a man’, the reversed position with the woman on top.

  2.8.16 This is what we would call the ‘G’ spot. Cf. note on 2.1.30 above.

  2.8.30 See 2.6.16.

  2.8.34 See 2.6.33.

  2.8.36 See 2.8.22.

  [Y] 2.8.41 The belief that a child with ambiguous sexual characteristics will result from incorrect forms of sexual union is a much-discussed topic in ancient Indian medical textbooks. See the Introduction.

  2.9.3 V uses the pronoun ‘she’ for the third nature, the man who plays the sexual role of a woman. What we have translated as ‘oral sex’ literally means ‘upper sex’, a term that, like Freud’s ‘upward displacement’, implies that the bottom line is the genitals.

  [Y] 2.9.27 The passage that Y cites from Vasishtha is at 12.23, where the ancestors of the man who copulates in the mouth of his wife do not starve for fifteen years but, rather, are forced to eat nothing but his semen for a month; he adds that all unusual sexual practices are against the law. Cf. also Manu’s injunction (at 11.174) against emitting semen ‘in something other than a vagina’.

  2.9.31 The word here translated as ‘men of the city’ is nagaraka, elsewhere translated as ‘men-about-town’, but in the present context it probably has a more specifically geographical meaning. Y says the city is Pataliputra, and it may well be.

  2.9.33 The passage appears in this form, more or less, in the Baudhayana Dharmasutra (1.5.9). The verse also appears in Manu (5.130), where it is modified to desexualize it somewhat:

  A woman’s mouth is always unpolluted,

  as is a bird that knocks down a fruit;

  a calf is unpolluted while the milk is flowing,

  and a dog is unpolluted when it catches a wild animal.

  Manu has subtracted from the line about a woman’s mouth the phrase, ‘in the ecstasy of sex’. Cf. also Baudhayana Dharmasutra 1.5.49. The underlying assumption is that, normally, a dog, a calf’s mouth, a bird’s beak, and a woman’s mouth would pollute anything they touched; but when they are needed, the pollution rules are nullified.

  2.9.38 The crow is a symbol of doubling-up, in part because of the Indian folk belief that the crow has just one eye, which he switches to whatever side of his head you happen to be looking at.

  [Y] 2.10.12 The incarnate god Krishna danced in a circle with the cow-herd women, and by his magic powers created doubles of himself so that each woman thought she was dancing with him and making love with him.

  2.10.22 Monier-Williams’s dictionary (citing older Sanskrit dictionaries) glosses ‘coarse servant’ (pota) as a female servant or a woman with masculine features such as a beard; Y says it is a ‘non-male’ (the term he uses as a synonym for someone of the th
ird nature) who swings both ways. The passage itself makes no such allusions but merely designates unskilled female servants, presumably of unremarkable sexuality.