22 The total number of sections is actually sixty-seven, according to Vatsyayana’s own list of sections in 1.1.15–22. Vatsyayana does not allude to the sections anywhere in the text except once in Book Seven, but Yashodhara identifies them all. He makes it come out at sixty-four by failing to number two sections in Book Six (‘Reasons for Taking a Lover’, which he appends to the first section, and ‘Types of Courtesans’) and one section in Book Four (‘A Man’s Management of Many Women’). In addition, one section in Book One, ‘Reasons for Taking Another Man’s Wife’, is referred to as such a section at the start of Book Five but is not mentioned in the list at 1.1.15–22. Yashodhara balances this out by numbering the extra section in Book Five (in which the introduction lists eleven sections but counts only ten). If we add this section to the sixty-four numbered sections and the other four unnumbered sections, we end up with the one number [sixty-four + five = sixty-nine] that has strong sexual associations in English, sixty-nine, which is what Vatsyayana calls ‘sex in the style of a crow’ [2.9.38]. For our culture, too, has its number mysticism. It is possible that the list of sections in the introduction was added by a redactor of the text at some period after the time of Vatsyayana and before that of Yashodhara.
23 This sort of casual enumeration continues to the present day. Sanjeev Bhaskar, interviewed about his documentary on the Kamasutra, admitted to lying for years about the text when people assumed, wrongly, that he knew it. Sometimes he would say that there were three positions, sometimes that there were 237; sometimes he said it was written in 1932, sometimes in 1847. Lane, ‘A Book at Bedtime’.
24 Personal communication from Laura Desmond, January 2001.
25 2.5.1–18. This method is reminiscent of the scene in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, where the gaze of the McCarthyite senator, who is struggling to lend an air of authority and precision to his anti-Communist witch-hunts by answering the demand for a precise number of infiltrators, lights upon a bottle of Heinz Tomato Catsup (‘57 Varieties’), and we next see him, in the Senate, declaiming, ‘There are precisely FIFTY-SEVEN known Communists …’.
26 Doniger, The Laws of Manu, lii–liv.
27 In keeping with the text’s character as a dramatization, it might have been more appropriate to translate the terms for the major divisions (what the Kamasutra calls adhikaranas) as Acts, the subdivisions (adhyayas) as Scenes, and the sub-sub-divisions (prakaranas) as Episodes. We decided not to do this, but there is support for it in the Sanskrit tradition, in which major works give distinct names to their subdivisions: the Mahabharata, for instance, calls its sections parvans (bamboo segments), the Ramayana calls its kandas (segments of any plant), the Ocean of Stories calls its tarangas (waves), and the Rig Veda calls its mandalas (circles).
28 For the framing technique, see O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion.
29 These stories were collected in The Ocean of Story [Kathasaritsagara] in about the tenth century.
30 Erica Jong, Fear of Flying.
31 Personal communication from Sheldon Pollock, January 2001.
32 Bhattacharya, History, 90–1.
33 The assumption that the intended reader is male persists even in popular culture today, where Vinod Verma, apparently hoping to rectify this imbalance, published (in 1997) The Kamasutra for Women: The Modern Woman’s Way to Sensual Fulfillment and Health (Tokyo: Kodansha International), applying Ayurvedic techniques to female heterosexual relationships.
34 See e.g. Manu 11.36–7.
35 For a discussion of the ways in which being forbidden to speak Sanskrit enables one woman, Ahalya, to commit adultery with relative impunity, see Doniger, Splitting the Difference.
36 There are open or concealed lovers [1.5.27–8], or men that a courtesan takes up with for love or for money [6.1.2], and there are six sorts of ex-lovers [6.4.3–9].
37 Underlying these behavioural differences, both men and women are divided into nine basic physical types according to the size of the organs, the time it takes to reach the climax, and the temperament of the partners, each of these three factors divided into three levels [2.1.1–31].
38 Not so. Manu [8.364] prescribes death or corporal punishment for a man who rapes an unwilling virgin, but does not inflict even that punishment on a man who rapes a woman who is not a virgin; and a Brahmin who rapes a Brahmin woman is merely fined [8.378].
39 Doniger, The Implied Spider, ch. 5. Frances Zimmermann agrees that there is a woman’s voice in the Kamasutra; personal communication, April 1994.
40 Rig Veda 8.91.4, the song of Apala; O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 256–7.
41 The parivrikta. See Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 99 ff.
42 The Arabic expression is ‘he eats both pomegranates and figs’, and the British, ‘… oysters and snails’.
43 Doniger, The Implied Spider.
44 Doniger, Splitting the Difference.
45 Sweet and Zwilling, ‘The First Medicalization’.
46 The use of the term ‘Oriental’—or ‘Eastern’—for what Vatsyayana regards as a disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be a colonized part of the Gupta Empire suggests that what Edward Said has taught us to call ‘Orientalism’ began not with the British but with the Orientals themselves.
47 Manu [at 3.49] tells us that a male child is born when the semen of the man is greater than that of the woman, and a female child when the semen of the woman is greater than that of the man; if both are equal, a hermaphrodite is born, or a boy and a girl.
48 Daniélou’s error here is much like Burton’s error in putting the commentary into the text instead of offering it as an alternative reading.
49 Amarushataka, verse 89.
50 Thanks to Blake Wentworth for bringing this commentary to our attention and translating it.
51 Richard Schmidt, Beiträge zur Indischen Erotik, 1. Translation by Sudhir Kakar.
52 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, part iii.
53 Kalidasa, Kumarasambhava, 8.1.
54 Kakar and Ross, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, 198–9.
55 Vatsyayana does, however, admit that the man-about-town may on occasion stoop to have a low-class servant-girl [2.10.22].
56 Kakar and Ross, Tales of Love, 202
57 One of the Jayamangala manuscripts says it was written under King Vishaladeva (1243–61), and it is quoted in 1307 by Jinaprabha in his commentary on the Kalpasutra. Yashodhara’s detailed knowledge of South India has led some scholars to suggest that he might have come from the South, the place that Vatsyayana so despised, but there is far too little evidence to judge this.
58 Amartya Sen remarked, ‘There is a similar neglect [in the West] of Indian writings on nonreligious subjects, from mathematics, epistemology, and natural science to economics and linguistics. (The exception, I suppose, is the Kama Sutra, in which Western readers have managed to cultivate an interest)’, Sen, ‘East and West’, 36.
59 The title-page read: ‘The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, Translated from the Sanscrit. In Seven Parts, with Preface, Introduction and Concluding Remarks. Cosmopoli: 1883: for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, and for private circulation only.’
60 Archer, ‘Preface’, 36.
61 This form of gentlemanly appropriation repeated itself almost a century later, when Alex Comfort, a doctor with no formal Sanskrit training, made a brief trip to India in 1964 and immediately published a quite erudite translation of the Koka Shashtra, complete with a preface by William G. Archer (who had written the preface to the first legal edition of the Burton Kama Sutra just one year earlier). Were there Indian scholars who did for Comfort the work that the two pandits did for Arbuthnot and Burton? When Comfort died, his obituary in the 29 March 2000 New York Times began: ‘Dr. Alex Comfort, whose graphically illustrated 1972 book The Joy of Sex became the coffee-table Kama Sutra of the baby-boom generation, died on Sunday …’ But the Times also stated with confidence that Comfort had translated the Koka Shashtra from the Sanskrit.
/> 62 Brodie, The Devil Drives, 357.
63 Archer, ‘Preface’, 17; see also Doniger, “I have Scinde”.’
64 Even the author of The Cartoon Kama Sutra had her doubts: ‘Burton … was reputed to speak over 50 languages, but [and she quotes a mistranslation from Burton’s Arabian Nights]. So who knows what was written in the original Kama Sutra?’
65 Archer, ‘Preface’, 28.
66 Ibid. 28–9.
67 The first edition was printed with the commentary of Yashodhara, except on Book Seven. The new edition, published in Bombay in 1905, was edited by Kedara-Natha Sarma, with Yashodhara’s commentary on Book Seven.
68 The Anangaranga has only ten chapters, with a total of some 453 verses, in comparison with the Kamasutra’s 1,492 or 1,683 passages.
69 Similarly, the Laws of Manu was not nearly so widely used as were its commentaries, which were more detailed and easier to read, unpacking all the tantalizing obscurities.
70 A study of diaries and academic journals from this period might settle these questions one way or the other, but we know of no one who has done such a study.
71 Brodie, The Devil Drives, 265–70.
72 None of these texts, apparently, was cited in the later printed editions.
73 Brodie, The Devil Drives, 357.
74 Ibid. 358.
75 Archer, ‘Preface’, 36, citing a note from Arbuthnot to H. S. Ashbee (apparently published in 1885 in Catena Librorum Tacendorum).
76 In our day, the parallels that come to mind are Grove Press or even, perhaps, Larry Flynt.
77 Müller published the first volume of a selected English translation in 1869, and the second volume in 1891, having published the first complete edition of the Sanskrit text, with Sayana’s commentary, in 1849 and the second edition in 1890. In perhaps sardonic appreciation for this ‘discovery’, Hindus often pun on Max Müller’s name, calling him Moksha Mula, or ‘the root of Release’.
78 Unfortunately, it took longer for academics to make full use of the text. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, who composed, in 1899, the great Sanskrit–English dictionary still used by most scholars, lists Vatsyayana but not the Kamasutra as potential sources and seldom, if ever, cites a word from that text in his lexicon.
79 Brodie, The Devil Drives, 358.
80 At 4.1.9, they translate the agentive form of the same word (‘a magician who uses love-sorcery worked with roots’) as ‘witch’, showing a basic understanding of the term.
81 Archer, ‘Preface’, 30.
82 This habit has unfortunately corrupted almost every translator except Richard Schmidt, the first to translate the commentary separately, thus freeing it from the text; Mylius, too, keeps the commentary out of the text.
83 Monier-Williams tells us that it is a root, Arum campanulatum (probably arrowroot), ‘in modern dialects applied to the yam, potato, etc.’
84 Brodie, The Devil Drives, 359.
85 Vatsyayana does use lingam for the male sexual organ in Book Seven, but that has an entirely different tone from the rest of the text. Yashodhara uses lingam and yoni more often, but he too uses several other words.
86 Jaghana could most literally be rendered as ‘bottom’, but only in the British sense of the word (genital) rather than the American (anal).
87 Skanda Purana 1.8.18–19; Doniger, The Bedtrick, 397. There are interesting parallels here with Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a primeval androgyne that split into the ancestors of men and women, who therefore always try to get back together again.
88 Indeed, in some instances National Geographic actually darkened the skin colour of a partially naked Polynesian woman ‘in order to render her nudity more acceptable to American audiences’ (Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic, 82).
89 See the Bibliography.
90 Schmidt, like the first printed edition of the Sanskrit text, lacked Yashodhara’s commentary on Book Seven.
91 Cited by Archer, ‘Preface’, 28.
92 Lee Siegel’s fictional Sanskritist, Roth, made a ‘perverse endeavor to translate the section on fellatial procedures in a way that reverses the conventional nineteenth-century practice of rendering the transgressive texts of a foreign-language discourse into Latin, to put the clean parts in Latin and the dirty parts in English’.
93 See Bibliography.
94 In translating the very first Yashodhara passage, for instance, Daniélou stumbles on the most basic step: separating the Sanskrit words (which are printed with the end of each word combined with the beginning of the next, changing both words in accordance with complex rules). Where the text reads tam upayam achikhyasur acaryamallanaga, which we render, ‘wishing to explain that method, the scholar Vatsyayana Mallanaga …’ Daniélou makes the break differently: tam upayam achikhya asuracaryamallanaga. This deprives the verb (‘explain’) of its desiderative ending and extracts the word asura, designating a kind of demon or anti-god, from a combination of that desiderative ending (asur, ‘wishing to’) and the beginning of acarya (‘scholar’), with this result: ‘the prophet of the Asuras, Vatsyayana Mallanaga … created this science, after studying its means of accomplishment.’ A startling mythological assertion indeed, but, alas, not in the text.
95 Laura Desmond did the fundamental research for the bibliography and for the discussion of the history of the text and the translations, in the introduction. Ajay Rao tracked down the Latin and English names of the Sanskrit plants for Book Seven. Shubha Pathak hunted down all the books and articles we used in Chicago. Vibhuti Mishra of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan provided the information on Devadatta Shastri. David Shulman, Patrick Olivelle, Sheldon Pollock, Dominik Wujastyk, and Richard Gombrich gave precious advice on some of the more recalcitrant parts of the Sanskrit text. We are indebted to Sarah Engel for producing, as her project in the Radcliffe Institute’s summer publishing programme, a virtual publication of a mythical translation of the Kamasutra translation by Wendy Doniger, the blurbs for which were so persuasive that they inspired the production of this actual volume—life, as usual, mirroring art.
96 Goswami’s version of Vatsyayana’s text differs from Shastri’s only from time to time, and not always with a better reading, but it has a far more complete and less corrupt version of Yashodhara’s commentary than Shastri has, particularly for Books Six and Seven.
97 Shastri and Goswami number the passages differently, though they number the sections in the same way. Schmidt and Burton do not number the passages at all; Syrkin uses Goswami’s system, while Mylius and most of the Indian translators use Shastri’s.
98 We have used Goswami’s readings of Vatsyayana at 3.4.1, 4.2.45, 5.1.51, 5.3.28, 5.4.54–7, 5.6.19, 6.4.41, 6.5.7, 6.5.14, and 6.5.35.
99 Since we have not aspired to a complete translation of Yashodhara, we did not think it necessary to specify which edition of the commentary we were using for each particular passage. Indeed, from time to time we have used the readings of Yashodhara in the edition by Ramanand Sharma.
100 I owe this observation to Judith Butler, personal communication, January 2001.
101 Either the man or the woman may be the agent in 2.6.8, for instance.
102 2.6.3, 8, 10, 11, 13, 19, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32.
103 2.7.9–11, 14, 19; 2.7.15, 20Y.
104 2.7.8, 12–13, 15, 20–1. In Book Four, chapter two, the female protagonist is seldom named but is simply the assumed, unexpressed subject of the verb, while a demonstrative pronoun usually designates her rival. In our translation, we have generally used ‘she’ to designate the subject under discussion (first the senior wife, then the junior wife) and ‘her’ or ‘the other woman’ for her rival (first the junior wife, then the senior wife); sometimes we have supplied the full noun. And when the wife and the messenger are conversing [5.4.3–31], and only the context and the use of different Sanskrit pronouns (designating a person nearer or more distant) indicates who is speaking, we occasionally carried forward the referent noun from the previous line to replace the ambiguous pronoun.
105 www.planetx.com/pooh/ or /pooh/images.phtml. Perversely, they insist that you must swear you are 18 years old or over to use this site—which is, after all, about a children’s book.
106 Anonyme du XIVe Siècle, Le Kamasutra Catalan. Le Miroir du foutre. Anatolia/Le Rocher, 1995.
107 Mr Boffo cartoon by Joe Martin, Inc., distributed by Universal Press Syndicate; published in the Chicago Tribune 29 September 2000. A salesman is saying to a customer, ‘Most people just buy it to get the catalogue.’
108 Cosmopolitan, September 1998, ‘The Cosmo Kamasutra’; September, 1999, pp. 256–9, ‘The Cosmo Kamasutra, 2’.
109 One combines all of Burton’s erotica: The Illustrated KamaSutra, Ananga-Ranga, Perfumed Garden. In America, where information comes in at the eye, like love according to the poet Yeats, a translator foolish enough to tell a friend that he or she is working on the Kamasutra is invariably and immediately asked, Will it have illustrations? This is, in part, because the descriptions of the positions are so stark that they are sometimes hard to visualize without the help of a detailed image.
110 Pichard, The Illustrated Kama Sutra, i, 72, presumably illustrating 2.7.24.
111 Tolputt, The Cartoon Kama Sutra, and Manara‘s Kama Sutra.
112 The Onion, 30 March–5 April 2000, 8, ‘Tantric Sex Class Opens up Whole New World of Unfulfillment for Local Couple’.
113 Jon Spayde, ‘The Politically Correct Kama Sutra’, 56.
114 Ibid. 57.
YASHODHARA’S COMMENTARY
1 Those who talk about pleasure say that pleasure is the most important of the three aims of human life,* because it is both the cause and the result of the other two, religion and power. And realizing that nothing happens without a method to make it happen, and wishing to explain that method, the scholar Vatsyayana Mallanaga created this text, always taking into consideration the opinions of scholars. You can, of course, learn about pleasure from other teachings, just as you can read meaning into a hole shaped like a letter of the alphabet that a bookworm has eaten out of a page, but you do not understand what you should do and what you should not do. And so people say:
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