5.1.42 Religion clearly is an afterthought, but even so this passage contradicts 5.1.10, which insists that women never think about religion at all. The phrase may be a common saying; at the end of the story of the clever and virtuous wife of Muladeva, the author remarks, ‘So you see, your majesty, there really are in this world some women of good family who love their husbands; not all women misbehave always’ (Ocean of Story 124 (18.5).131–237).
[Y] 5.1.44 Y links each of these remedies with an abbreviated version of a problem stated above; he finds a place for all causes except for her fear that ‘He will soon go away. There is no future in it; his mind is attached to someone else’ (5.1.24). Is this because there is no remedy for this problem? Because the fear of the future is the one thing that you cannot talk someone out of? Is this a philosophical moment in the Kamasutra (or in the commentary)?
5.1.50 Vulnerable spots are literally chinks in the armour.
5.1.51 This passage, and its intersection with the next, is different in Goswami’s edition, and Y does not recognize it at all.
5.1.52 Schmidt and Mylius follow Y in assuming a singular rather than plural form for ‘who can be had merely by making advances’, applying it only to the first woman on the list, rather than to all of them.
5.1.53 Manu says that it is no crime to commit adultery with the wife of an actor, ‘for these men have their women embrace other men, concealing themselves while they have them do the act’ (8.362).
5.1.55 The longing here is the desire of a woman for the man.
5.2.7 The friend of a man is always, unless indicated, a man, and of a woman, a woman, whom we have referred to as a girlfriend.
5.2.18 Perhaps he says ‘How amazing!’ in order to avoid saying ‘You must be wrong.’
5.2.19 These methods are described in Book Three.
5.3.5 Burton calls this woman a trifler in love, Schmidt, a coquette. Cf. the teasing male wooer, at 5.1.28.
5.3.13 Y says she is just pretending to be asleep, but V elsewhere (3.5.26) acknowledges that a man may in fact rape a sleeping girl.
5.3.18 What we have translated as ‘rub her the wrong way’ is more precisely ‘go against the hair’, or ‘go against the grain’. See the note to 2.1.4.
5.4.9 This is the very opposite of the opinion given as a ‘common saying’ at 5.2.3.
5.4.10–25 Throughout this section, the subject of each sentence is the messenger, and the other woman is the intended woman. Then, in 5.4.26–9, the woman is the subject, until the messenger is explicitly named as the subject again in 5.4.30.
[Y] 5.4.14 Y tells the same story of Ahalya in a negative mode at 1.2.36, and in much more detail, as a warning to a man about the trouble that desire can cause him. And the story of Shakuntala, which Y does not tell here at all, he tells in a curiously truncated version at 3.5.5. Both of these are, as V says, famous stories. Avimaraka is the hero of a play by Bhasa. The Shabaras are a wild, savage tribe of mountaineers.
[Y] 5.4.15 Here Y goes on to give definitions of both kinds of arts, fine arts and arts of love.
5.4.42 The absolute single-mindedness of the true lover has never been demonstrated more powerfully than here, where a fire, robbery or invasion does not deter him from trying to arrange an adulterous rendezvous.
5.4.54 The unfaithful lover who ‘stumbles on the name’, calling the woman he is in bed with by the name of another woman he is thinking of, is a set piece in Sanskrit erotic poetry and narrative. See Doniger, The Bedtrick.
5.4.58 The naive wife is a stereotype, the wife who is so innocent of sexual technique, and perhaps has been so unresponsive to her husband’s initial attempts to arouse her, that her husband has stopped sleeping with her. The woman who intends to sleep with this wife’s husband helps the wife to ‘send a message’ to her husband, not in words but in her actions; the wife thinks that the message is that she herself desires him, but the husband knows that the actual message is that the other woman desires him. The title can be glossed either as ‘the messenger of a foolish person’ or as ‘the foolish messenger’. Y’s gloss explicitly makes the title fit the second description by making the wife herself the foolish messenger, even though this interpretation requires a sudden shift of subject at the end of this paragraph, and back again in the next, which is awkward, though not impossible. The wife is explicitly the messenger in the next passage, but she differs from the foolish (wife) messenger in that the husband manipulates the wife as messenger, whereas the other woman manipulates the foolish (wife) messenger.
5.4.64 This verse can be read in two ways. What it seems to say, literally, is that in order to make the intended woman hate her own husband, the messenger praises his sexual charms and makes her jealous by reminding her that many other women have enjoyed them. But Y reads an implicit shift from the husband, in the first quarter of the verse, to the would-be lover, in the rest of the verse, contrasting the husband’s ugliness (alluded to in Y’s commentary on the first passage that he quotes here, 5.4.3) with the lover’s sexual charms. And Y therefore says that the ‘Other women’ in the last line merely hear about the lover’s sexual accomplishments, where we take the Sanskrit to imply that these women have themselves experienced the husband’s sexual accomplishments.
5.5.2 The three worlds are sometimes said to be sky, air, and the earth, or heaven, earth, and hell. In either case, the phrase refers to all the living creatures in the universe. This is the only chapter that Vatsyayana begins with a verse, perhaps to emphasize his moral ambivalence about its contents.
5.5.8 The man in charge of threads superintended the women who had no families and therefore made their living by spinning and weaving.
5.5.27 The word for ‘secret methods’ is in the plural, not the dual, but Y wants to restrict the term to the last two rather extreme methods.
5.5.36 At 1.1.9 Y tells another myth about the origin of adultery. The story of Ahalya, as told in the Ramayana, also contains a statement that it was on this occasion that Indra, the king of the gods, invented adultery.
5.5.37 Surely significantly, the word here used for the king’s pleasure (rata) in the welfare of his people is the word used elsewhere (as in 2.1.32) for the sexual act. The Shatapatha Brahmana, in the 8th century BCE, already tells a parable about the king violating the people sexually. See O’Flaherty, Textual Sources.
5.6.3 Schmidt notes that a manuscript of this text in the Indian Institute in Oxford reads ‘distinct’ rather than ‘indistinct’ sexual characteristics, and this is the reading that makes sense to us. Y, however, reads ‘indistinct’ and glosses that reading.
[Y] 5.6.5 Manu says this about wet-dreams (2.181): ‘A twice-born chaste student of the Veda who has spilled his semen in his sleep, not out of lust, should bathe, worship the sun, and chant, three times, the Vedic verse that begins, “Let my sensual power return to me again”.’ As for sex ‘in things other than the vagina, in things other than the human species’, Manu says (11.174): ‘If a man has shed his semen in non-human females, in a man, in a menstruating woman, in something other than a vagina, or in water, he should carry out the Painful Heating vow.’ (Manu tells us (11.213) that the ‘Painful Heating’ vow is traditionally said to consist of drinking cow’s urine, cow-dung, milk, yogurt, melted butter, and water infused with sacrificial grass, and then fasting for one night.)
5.6.24–5 Hindu mythology tells stories of people who disappeared, leaving behind a shadow or reflection, a kind of after-image, which other people mistook for the person who had disappeared. (See Doniger, Splitting the Difference.) Evidently there are magic spells that enable one to do this, and those are not the spells that should be used in this situation. See also the spells at 7.1.34.
5.6.38 This section begins with the women taking the initiative (1–9), then alternates between male agency (10–28, 36–7) and female agency (29–35), ending with bi-gendered agency (38).
5.6.41 The Arthashastra, the textbook of power and politics, describes (at 1.10.1–20) the trinity (trivarga) of trials tha
t the king is to set for the ministers in charge of the uprooting of dissidents (the trial of religion, dharma), the treasury (the trial of power or money, artha), and the harem (the trial of pleasure or desire, kama), with a fourth test (not moksha, but fear) for his bodyguards. A man who passes all four may become the prime minister, and a man who fails all four may still be used in some distant mines. V quotes as the opinion of ‘scholars’ the part of this traditional quartet that applies to the harem, but he does not recommend applying the traditional test of kama to the harem guards (nor, as the Babhravyas recommend, to the women themselves). Instead, he recommends for harem guards the trial that the Arthashastra thought appropriate for bodyguards (fear) and the uprooters of dissidents (religion).
5.6.45 The word we have translated as ‘restraint’ literally means ‘elephant goad’. The meaning is that the women are out of control, like elephants in rut.
BOOK SIX · COURTESANS
6.1.9, 13, 31 The arts here could refer either to the fine arts or to the arts of love, or to both. Y does not specify.
6.1.10 These fatalists are called Daivapramana (‘those for whom fate, or the gods, are the authority); the fatalists mentioned at 1.2.26 are Kalakarinikas (‘those who invoke fate, or time, as the cause’).
6.1.13 Y glosses what we have translated as ‘true to one type’ (ekajatiya) as meaning that the woman does not keep changing her appearance (losing and gaining weight, one might suppose, changing her hairdo, etc.)
6.1.14 These qualities are apparently appreciated in all women, in contrast with the qualities enumerated in 6.1.13, which are appreciated only, or specially, in courtesans.
[Y] 6.1.15 Y takes his examples from each of the three groups of qualities: bad family (the inverse of a great family, the first quality in 6.1.12), ugliness (in contrast with beauty, 6.1.13), and stupidity (in contrast with intelligence, 6.1.14). This means that the faults apply to both men (6.1.12) and women (6.1.13–14).
6.1.16 ‘Worms in the faeces’ may offer a speculative explanation for some venereal disease.
[Y] 6.1.17 Y assumes that women have semen, a belief that he and the Babhravyas express in the discussion of female orgasm (at 2.1.18). Ravana raped Rambha by threatening to kill her, but she cursed him so that he could never rape another woman again. This story is told in the Ramayana; see Doniger, Splitting the Difference. Devadatta and Anangasena are two courtesans, and Muladeva is a master-thief, in Somadeva’s tenth-century Ocean of Story and Kshemendra’s eleventh-century work the Kalavilasa.
6.1.20 ‘And so forth’ may refer to the twenty reasons for a courtesan to take a lover, listed in 6.1.17; though why ‘fear’ should come first and stand for the group in this case is puzzling; one would expect ‘passion’, the first reason listed there.
6.2.11 The word for leftover garlands also means the flowers left over from an offering to the gods, whose leftover food (called prasada) is distributed to worshippers together with the leftover flowers, or to a king, as described at 4.2.57.
6.2.13 These techniques are discussed at 2.2.3.
6.2.26 This can mean either that she expresses her passion for him by faking drunkenness and so forth and then blames them on her sexual deprivation, or that she uses those feigned conditions that strip away pretences as an excuse to tell him how she feels. Y takes the first two (drunkenness and sleep) in the first sense and the third (disease) in the second sense.
6.2.31 She says, ‘Live!’ in the spirit of our ‘God bless you’, or ‘Gesundheit’, and for a similar reason: the widespread folk belief that the soul temporarily leaves the body during a sneeze (when the heart does in fact stop for a split second).
6.2.36 The word vrittha, that we have translated as ‘false’, can also mean ‘casual’ or ‘in vain’, and the compound as a whole can apply either to him or to her. Y takes it in the sense of ‘false’, and applies it to the woman’s infidelity; but it could also apply to him in this sense, or be taken in the sense of ‘casual’, and applied to either him or her: ‘When s/he has been accused of a casual infidelity …’ Her fasting in the context of his infidelity is well attested in Sanskrit literature, which makes it more likely that it is the man’s infidelity that V intended. The word vyasana, that we have rendered as ‘misfortune’, may also mean ‘addiction, evil passion, vice’, presumably his, but, again, possibly hers.
6.2.47 Or, if this quarrel is between them, and about the vow mentioned in the previous passage, she may be arguing that it is too demanding even for him to carry out.
6.2.54 She asks that when she is reborn, he be reborn as her husband.
6.2.69 A pot full of presents is distributed to anyone who brings good news.
6.2.70 Crows are said to be auspicious omens with the power to make wishes come true.
6.2.72 To follow him beyond death means to die a natural death after his death and wait to be joined with him in heaven or in the next rebirth. Only later, and very rarely, did it come to mean mounting his funeral pyre alive to burn to death with his corpse.
6.3.4 She gets the money ostensibly to pay for the things but actually buys them on credit and keeps the money; he sees the things and thinks she has bought them with the money he gave her.
6.3.36 This may also mean that she does this before he realizes that she is going to take the money and run.
6.3.44 The word ‘release’ (moksha) more generally refers to a person’s spiritual release from the world of transmigration (as in 1.2.4); there may be an intended irony in its use here to designate the release of a man from a courtesan’s thrall.
6.4.12 The idea seems to be that there is no more reason to take him now than there was when the other woman got rid of him, since he still has no money.
6.4.16 ‘As fickle in his affections as turmeric is in its colour’ puns on the word raga, which can mean either ‘colour’ or ‘passion’, and on the fact that turmeric cannot hold its colour for long.
6.4.28 There is some confusion in the editions of this passage about the person who is the object of contempt. According to Shastri’s reading, it is the courtesan; according to Goswami’s, it is the man (treated with contempt by his wife). And according to Y, it is the man’s wife (treated with contempt by the courtesan). We have followed Shastri here.
6.4.40 The attitude to the man who is ‘attached’, according to this verse and, even more sharply, in the commentary on it, is far more cynical than the one expressed in earlier discussions of the attached man, as at 6.2.73. There, he was a willing devotee; here, he seems to be either entirely besotted or simply the man with her at the moment, or both. There, he was cherished; here he is taken for granted and scorned, explicitly contrasted with the man she does love. This may be an example of a different origin for the prose and verse passages of the text.
6.5.5 A series of choices is made here between paired alternatives, and there is a running disagreement about them between V and earlier scholars. In passage 5 the scholars rank at the top the man who gives her what she seeks or needs, a general category that will be broken down, in passage 8, into those who fulfil temporary and future needs and that V, in passage 6, epitomizes in the man who gives gold. Passage 8 offers another set of categories, which are debated in the passages that follow, together with yet other criteria. In passage 9, the scholars rank the generous man over the man in love, and V disagrees in 10–11. In passage 12 (and again in 14, 19 and 22), the scholars rank the man who does what she needs to have done over the generous man, and V disagrees in 13. In 15 the scholars rank the generous man over the grateful man, and V disagrees in 16–18. In 20 the scholars rank the general category of getting money over a friend’s advice, and V disagrees in 21. In 24 the scholars rank getting money over counteracting losses, and V disagrees in 25–7.
6.5.18 The text allows the reading that the man himself cannot be slandered, which is a more logical conclusion from his own good character, but Y links it to passage 16 and takes it to mean that he does not believe slander against her.
6.6.5 This triad may w
ell be a satirical twist on the famous triad of the three aims of human life (1.1.1), which here are reduced to three aspects of one of them: money or power—which (in Sanskrit, artha) itself also means ‘gain’.
6.6.12 This triad is, theoretically, that of losses connected with money, religious merit, and pleasure, though V spells these out neither for gains (which he has discussed at 2.1.1) nor for losses. Significantly, V here reverses the usual order, putting artha first. One might also see a triad in situations that result in positive gain (6.6.13–14), mixed gain and loss (6.6.15–16), and loss (6.6.17–18).
BOOK SEVEN · EROTIC ESOTERICA
7.1.20 ‘Oriental practices’ is a euphemism that V uses (at 5.6.2–3) for the lesbian activities of the women in the harem.
7.1.26 Y specifies both a male and a female object of this magic, assuming both a male subject (as V does) to put the spell on a woman and, presumably, either a female subject or a person of the third nature to put the spell on a man. Shastri assumes a male subject, instructing the reader to smear the powder on his own penis when he makes love to the woman he wants, as V specified in the previous passage. The bird that Y says is not a peacock he calls jivanjivaka, a bird whose call sounds like ‘Jiva! Jiva!’—’Live! Live!’
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