2.10.27 The lover’s mistake in calling the woman with whom he is actively making love by the name of another woman, termed ‘stumbling on the name’ (gotraskhalana), is a classic trigger for lovers’ quarrels. See Doniger, The Bedtrick.
[Y] 2.10.37 Y spells out what remains in V merely an implicit etymology, based on the equation of puja (which means to ‘respect’ or ‘revere’ or ‘honour’ or, stretching it a bit, ‘delight in’) with nandana (‘delight’).
[Y] 2.10.39 Y here is anxious to include all four kinds of eligible women in this list, and so argues that the fourth, the second-hand woman, is implied within the third, other men’s wives.
BOOK THREE · VIRGINS
3.1.1 At 1.5.1, V gives a somewhat different set of criteria for the qualities of the ideal wife.
3.1.4 ‘Both sides’ may refer to both parents, probably of the man (whose parents are mentioned earlier in this same passage) but also possibly of the girl; but it might simply refer to the man and the girl, as V specifies at 1–5-35
3.1.6 Impersonating a fortune-teller is a minor blasphemy, but not as bad as the Arthashastra’s advice to the king, to have spies dress up as gods and praise the king.
3.1.8 It was a custom to take note of the first words overheard outside the family quarters, and regard them as an omen.
3.1.11 ‘Tawny’ is an educated guess at the hapax word ghona, which Shastri translates as ‘reddish-blond’. ‘Promiscuous’ (samkariki) is glossed by Monier-Williams, from lexicons, as, ‘a girl said to be unfit for marriage (as having applied fire to her father’s or other person’s house)’; Upadhyaya makes this ‘a girl who has lit her father’s funeral pyre’. Y suggests that it means ‘defiled by another man’, and Shastri glosses it as ‘promiscuous’. We relate the word to samkaryam, a promiscuous mixture. For phalini, literally, ‘bearing fruit’, which we have translated as ‘pregnant’, Monier-Williams cites the definition by Sushruta (‘a girl whose vagina has been injured by violent intercourse’), while Y says, ‘mute, excluded from communication’. Manu gives rather different criteria (3.8 and .10): ‘A man should not marry a girl who is a redhead or has an extra limb or is sickly or has no body hair or too much body hair or talks too much or is sallow … He should marry a woman who does not lack any part of her body and who has a pleasant name, who walks like a goose or an elephant, whose body hair and hair on the head is fine, whose teeth are not big, and who has delicate limbs.’
3.1.12 Cf. Manu (3.9): ‘A man should not marry a girl who is named after a constellation, a tree, or a river, or who has a low caste name, or is named after a mountain, a bird, a snake, or has a menial or frightening name.’
3.1.19 Manu (3.27–30) offers more details: ‘It is said to be the law of Brahma when a man dresses his daughter and adorns her and he himself gives her as a gift to a man he has summoned, one who knows the revealed canon and is of good character. They call it the law of the gods when a man adorns his daughter and, in the course of a sacrifice, gives her as a gift to the officiating priest who is properly performing the ritual. It is called the Sages’ law when he gives away his daughter by the rules, after receiving from the bridegroom a cow and a bull, or two cows and bulls, in accordance with the law. The tradition calls it the rule of the Lord of Creatures when a man gives away his daughter after adorning her and saying, “May the two of you together fulfil your dharma.”’ V lists only four official weddings, where Manu lists eight, and although V deals below (3.5.12–30) with the other four kinds of wedding that Manu lists (at 3.31–4), he never names them and seems to regard them all as variations on the form that dominates the Kamasutra, the love-match or Gandharva wedding.
3.1.20 ‘Completing verses’ is one of the sixty-four arts listed in 1.3.15.
3.1.21 The ‘upward alliance’, in which the woman is higher than the man, goes against the grain; cf. 2.1.4 and the note.
3.2.3 There may be a double meaning in the man’s silence, for ‘conversation’ is often a euphemism for sex in India. Referring to a man’s desire for sex, women in the Hindi heartland often say, ‘Admi bolna chahta hai’ (‘A man wants to speak’). See Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations.
3.2.6 ‘Gentle persuasion’, saman, is also the term for negotiating a treaty with an enemy (especially when one does not have the force to win by an outright attack).
3.2.22 The ‘gooseflesh’ scratch is described at 2.4.12.
3.2.31 What we have translated as ‘rub her the right way’ is more precisely ‘with the hair’ or ‘with the grain’. See the note to 2.1.3.
3.2.33 The beast (pashu) is either any animal, in contrast with a human, or more particularly a domesticated or farm animal, in contrast with a wild animal, or most particularly, an animal used for sacrifice (bull, horse, sheep, or goat) in contrast with an unconsecrated animal.
3.2.35 We have translated vidvishta as ‘hated’, presumably by the man (taking the last syllable as a passive suffix), but it might also be translated as ‘full of hate’, presumably for him (taking the last syllable as an agent-suffix or a periphrastic future). This is a significant ambiguity, but the sense of ‘hated’ is perhaps the more commonsense reading and recurs with this meaning, unambiguously, in 3.5.6; because he hates her, he refuses to sleep with her, and so she finds another man. A further ambiguity is raised by the possibility that, if she is ‘full of hate’, that hatred might be directed either at him or at pleasure in love-making; cf. 3.2.6, where she is said to hate sex itself if mistreated at the beginning of her experience. Y takes it to mean that she hates him, precisely because he has not given her pleasure, though this might just as likely drive her from sex altogether as into the arms of another man.
3.3.7–8 Games for grown-ups are described at 1.4.28. The game of the fist apparently consists in guessing what is held in the fist; ‘eyes shut tight’ is like our ‘hide-and-seek’; and the game of six pebbles is very much like the game of jacks that American girls used to play.
3.3.10 The foster-sister, more precisely the nurse’s child, is defined among the friends, at 1.5.32.
3.3.16 The word we have translated as ‘little penis’ (medhraka) also means ‘little ram’, which is the sense in which previous translators, and Y, have taken it, in conjunction with the next phrase, ‘male and female’ (ignoring the ‘and’, so that they render it, ‘two sheep, male and female, joined together’). This overlooks the fact that sheep are listed separately in the very next item. But could one give a young girl a carving of entwined penises? Perhaps. Images of the lingam, the erect penis of the god Shiva, have been, for centuries, everyday items in any Hindu household; the yab-yum image of god and goddess in intercourse is widespread in Tibetan and Tibetan-influenced cultures; and right here in the Kamasutra, at 3.4.4, the man is said to give a virgin an image of a man and woman coupling, cut out of a leaf (though Y quickly bowdlerizes this as a couple of geese).
[Y] 3.3.20 Spring and summer in North India are too hot for outdoor sports (and, perhaps, for indoor sports). In traditional poetry, the rainy season (when travellers have to return home and/or remain at home), autumn, winter, and spring are the erotic seasons.
3.3.21 The sixty-four techniques, in contrast with the fine arts mentioned in the previous passage, are the sexual arts described in Book Two.
3.3.32 According to Padmashri, as quoted by Shastri on 2.2.31, a young girl (bala) is under sixteen years old; the woman in the prime of her youth (yauvane sthita) is between sixteen and thirty; and the mature woman is between thirty and fifty. The arts here are probably, as Y suggests, the fine arts, mentioned in 3.3.20, but they may be the arts of love, mentioned in 3.3.21. Shastri says that these are the sixty-four arts of the science of kama, surely the erotic techniques.
3.4.3 The ‘touching’ embrace is described at 2.2.8.
3.4.7 The game of ‘new leaves’ is among the group games mentioned at 1.4.28.
3.4.34 These gestures and signals (usually given by facial expressions, especially the eyes) are sometimes said to be involuntary, sometimes i
ntentional. In the Kamasutra, they are usually, but not always, intentional.
3.4.36 Cf. the rather different qualifications for a man in this situation mentioned in 3.3.1.
3.4.40 Apparently she is treating him as if he were a young girl, a role reversal akin to that of the woman playing the man’s part (in 2.8).
3.4.44 Who is touching whose hidden place(s)? The Sanskrit leaves it ambiguous, since the compound can allow for either an objective or a subjective relationship, and for either a singular or plural. (Y glosses ‘hidden place’ in the singular here but in the plural at 6.2.17.) Y says that she touches him. The text says that he merely wants her to understand his arousal, not necessarily to bring it about (as Y glosses it), though this purpose, too, might be served by having her touch him. On the other hand, the euphemism of ‘hidden place’, which also means ‘a cave’, in the singular sometimes designates the female rather than the male organ. Both his hidden place(s) and hers may well be understood in the context of the text, and perhaps V meant to imply that any of these possibilities would be difficult for her.
3.5.1 The verb here translated as ‘insinuates himself into intimacy’ is precisely the same (upasrip) as the verb denoting a man’s sexual strokes inside a woman. See 2.8.6 and the note.
3.5.5 This story did not turn out so well as V implies; Shakuntala suffers greatly in the version of her story told in the Mahabharata and less, but still significantly, in the version told by Kalidasa a few centuries later.
3.5.13 Whose mother and father does he inform? The passage does not say, but we have specified hers because (1) the man tells his own people two passages later, so that here he is probably telling hers; and (2) the concern, throughout this section, is with her parents, never with his. Shastri says the statement refers to both his parents and hers, but the text clearly specifies one mother and one father.
3.5.18 The love-match wedding is called a Gandharva wedding, because it is consummated by a sexual act witnessed by no one but Gandharvas, demigods concerned with fertility (and horses; their name is cognate with ‘centaurs’). V goes on (at 3.5.19–22) to describe variants of the Gandharva wedding. This is how Manu describes it (3.32): ‘In the wedding in the manner of the Gandharvas, the girl and her lover join with one another in sexual union because they want to, out of desire.’
[Y] 3.5.19 Y assumes that the go-between’s intimacy is with the man, but it might also be with the girl.
3.5.23 This corresponds only roughly to what Manu describes as the wedding in the manner of the Demons (asuras) (3.31): ‘In a wedding in the manner of the Demons, a man takes the girl because he wants her himself, when he has given as much wealth as he can to her relatives and to the girl herself’ But Y (at 35.28) seems to assume that V has described the wedding of Demons after the Gandharva wedding (3.5.18–22) and before the Ghouls (3.5.25–60), which narrows it down to this passage.
3.5.25–6 These two passages regard as two separate types of weddings two of the three methods appropriate to the wedding in the manner of the Ghouls (pishacas), which Manu describes like this (3.34): ‘In the lowest and most evil of marriages, known as that of the Ghouls, a man secretly has sex with a girl who is asleep, drunk, or out of her mind.’
3.5.27 This is the wedding of the Ogres (rakshasas) (Manu 3.33): ‘In the manner of the Ogres, a man forcibly carries off a girl out of her house, screaming and weeping, after he has killed, wounded, and broken.’ V uses the word yoga here in the sense of a trick or an underhanded device.
3.5.28 V lists them in this descending order: Brahma (3.1.19), Gandharva (3.5.18), Demons (3.5.23), Ghouls (3.5.25–6), and Ogres (3.5.27). He differs here from the rankings according to Manu, who, after the Brahma wedding, regards the wedding of Demons as superior to that of the Gandharvas, and that of the Ogres, and the Ghouls as worst of all. It is natural for V to have a higher opinion of the Gandharva wedding than Manu has.
BOOK FOUR · WIVES
4.1.4 At 1.1.12, V names Gonardiya as the author of the section of the primal Kamasutra that deals with wives.
[Y] 4.1.14 ‘Wrongly’ may mean that he pays too little, or pays for shoddy merchandise, or buys from disreputable merchants. Y seems to take it in the second sense.
4.1.19 The word we have translated as ‘infidelities’ can also mean, more rarely, ‘misdeeds’ of a more general nature, but the counter-measure rejected in 4.1.20 strongly suggests that it means ‘infidelities’ here.
4.1.20 Love-sorcery worked with roots is black magic, making use of roots like mandrake, to get a lover back or to destroy an erotic rival. It is alluded to in the Rig Veda and described at some length in the Atharva Veda and in Book Seven of the Kamasutra.
4.2.1 Manu offers different justifications for supplanting a wife (9.80–1): ‘A wife who drinks wine, behaves dishonestly, or is rebellious, ill, violent, or wasteful of money may be supplanted at any time. A barren wife may be superseded in the eighth year; one whose children have died, in the tenth; one who bears [only] daughters, in the eleventh; but one who says unpleasant things (may be superseded) immediately.’ Manu focuses on rules for the inheritance of the sons of the various wives, distinguishing the wives by their seniority and their class (which Vatsyayana, as usual, does not mention) rather than by their sexual past, as V does.
4.2.7 The passage seems to imply that the senior wife treats the co-wife’s children just as she treats her own, but Y assumes that the senior wife has no children, in which case the passage would mean that she treats them just as she treats other children, perhaps the children of the other wives.
4.2.31 We have translated punarbhu (literally, ‘coming into existence again’) as ‘second-hand’, following the inspiration of Laura Desmond (who points out that it has the same connotation of ‘damaged goods’ in both English and Sanskrit). Yashodhara says that these women, who have been owned by men before, are widows; Monier-Williams says they were widowed as virgins; and Shastri (citing the lawbook of Yajnavalkya and the commentary of Mitakshara) says that they are not widows at all, but women who lost their maidenheads before marriage or had a relationship with another man after marriage. The fact that widows are listed separately, in 1.5.22, suggests that the women in this passage are not widows. Manu (9.175–6) groups together, as second-hand women (punarbhu), a woman who remarries after her husband has deserted her, or a widow, or a woman who still has her maidenhead intact (when she remarries), or who returns to a man she had left. In the Kamasutra, the term seems to mean simply that the woman has previously been with a man, not necessarily her husband. The woman with whom she is contrasted is the ananyapurva, the woman who has not been with another man before—the permitted woman (1.5.1); this term covers not just a virgin but a married woman who remains faithful to her husband. The variation in interpretation doubtless reflects the wide swings of the law concerning the rights of women, and of widows, to remarry, in different times and places. This passage invokes the word ‘again’ [punar] to explain the name of the second-hand woman [punarbhu]; the Babhravyas make yet another point about ‘again’ in the next passage.
4.2.34 The implication is that she will not leave a well-endowed lover.
4.2.42 The arts here are presumably the fine arts, mentioned again in passage 45, in contrast with the arts of love mentioned in passage 44. Y says her knowledge is greater than that of the man, but it may be greater than that of the other women or simply greater than average.
4.2.45 The last half of this passage is doubly ambiguous. There are, first of all, two different readings in the Sanskrit text: Shastri has arts ‘that give pleasure’ (prakamya) while Goswami (whom we follow, along with Y) has arts ‘that can be revealed’ (prakashya). And the last sentence can mean either that the unlucky wife has no way of keeping secrets, since she must use what she knows to make alliances with the other wives, or that she has no erotic secrets and therefore has to get the other woman to tell her the tricks that she lacks, since, ironically, not knowing them has kept her out of her husband’s bed, where she might have l
earned some. Shastri seems to take it in the first sense, of ‘the arts that can be exhibited’, because ‘a demonstration of proficiency often ends misfortune.’
4.2.54 For the women lucky or unlucky in love (subhaga or durbhaga), see note to 1.3.22.
4.2.56 The chamberlain and bodyguard are called the Kanchukiya and Mahattarika.
4.2.57 The word used here for these leftovers is nirmalyam, literally ‘leftover garlands’, more precisely designating the leftovers from flower offerings to a god (or, by extension, to a king), returned to the worshippers (or subjects) as a kind of grace (hence the other term for them, prasad, literally, ‘grace’).
BOOK FIVE · OTHER MEN’S WIVES
5.1.30 Here both V and Y conflate size (‘doe’ vs. ‘stallion’) with sexual energy (‘fierce’ vs. ‘dull’).
5.1.31 Presumably the fine arts are intended here, but the arts of love are not out of the question. Y does not specify. The lifestyle of the man-about-town is described at 1.4.
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