The Curious History of the Kama Sutra

[Guest guest]

Over the counter once more

Ian Pindar

December 15, 2007

The Guardian

 

A Review of

The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

 

[Off topic? Sure! And oft discussed here.]

 

In _The Book of Love_ James McConnachie lays to rest

some of the enduring myths surrounding the Kamasutra:

it is not a sex manual but a book of good conduct. It is

not illustrated and it has nothing to do with Tantric sex.

 

Little is known about its author, Vatsyayana, but he

probably lived in third-century northern India. What we

do know is that he started a trend - some have called it a

revolution - when he decided to write a sutra or

scholarly treatise about kama or sexual desire.

 

The word kamasutra has become a sort of shorthand for

" advanced [intercourse] " , says McConnachie, but it

doesn't really deserve its reputation as a book of sexual

gymnastics. The sexual positions Vatsyayana discusses

( " the crab " , " the lotus " , and so on) are not especially

acrobatic, nor are there all that many. Certainly not as

many as can be found in The Horn-Book: A Girl's Guide

to Good and Evil (1899), which lists 62 positions -

including the " view of the Low Countries " and the

" elastic [yoni] " - or the Golden Book of Love (1907),

which offers 531.

 

Vatsyayana organises sex into eight distinct topics:

embracing, kissing, scratching (love marks were " a

major fetish in ancient India " ), biting, the notorious

sexual positions, moaning, " the woman playing the

man's part " (women-on-top) and oral sex (the art of

fellatio; cunnilingus is barely mentioned). The

Kamasutra is a male fantasy aimed at nagarakas,

wealthy young men in the cities, and it presents a world

in which women are always available and compliant and

never need to be seduced, only aroused in frescoed

bedchambers filled with flowers and incense. The effect

of the work, says McConnachie, is to surround us in a

kind of " erotic cocoon " . If Vatsyayana has advice for

women, it is how to keep men happy, not how to enjoy

themselves sexually. His greatest crime in modern eyes

is not that he never once questions the caste system, but

that he appears totally unaware of the existence of the

clitoris.

 

What McConnachie calls the " coffee-table Kamasutra "

is a modern invention, usually borrowing erotic images

from medieval India, long after Vatsyayana was writing.

The Kamasutra is also travestied in modern editions as a

book of Tantric sexual positions, but as McConnachie

shows Tantrism was a much later development and its

aim of harnessing the power of sex to attain spiritual

knowledge is at odds with Vatsyayana's extremely

practical and entirely secular approach to sex as an end

in itself.

 

McConnachie's chapters on the original Kamasutra are

interesting, but he is more concerned with the book's

reception in the west. His account only really picks up

pace with the entrance of Richard Francis Burton, the

charismatic sexual anthropologist whose pioneering

1883 edition introduced The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana

to modern Europeans. " The free treatment of topics

usually taboo'd will be a great national benefit, " argued

Burton, and McConnachie shows how he was the first of

many translators to regard the Kamasutra as a key book

in the battle against sexual repression. Burton

successfully avoided prosecution by emphasising the

text's scholarly credentials: it was not a dirty book at all,

but a monument to Oriental wisdom, albeit kinky

wisdom. As McConnachie reveals, the shady " Kama

Shastra Society " responsible for the landmark 1883

edition was a bizarre mix of Sanskrit scholars and erotic

bibliophiles, serious Indologists and creepy erotologists.

He is especially good on the curious link between sexual

libertinism and religious relativism.

 

The 1883 Kamasutra was as much of a revelation in

India as it was in Europe, its open eroticism hinting at an

ancient liberal past that had been totally suppressed by a

triple whammy of Hindu asceticism, Victorian prudery

and Islamic repression (although one of the last great

Sanskrit sex manuals, the Ananga Ranga, was composed

in the 16th century for a Muslim ruler, Lada Khan).

" Could this be the country that created the Kamasutra? "

wondered the filmmaker Mira Nair when her film Kama

Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996) was banned by India's

Board of Censors. It seems much has changed since

Vatsyayana's time.

 

The Kamasutra remained an under-the-counter

commodity until the end of the Chatterley ban in 1960,

which led to what McConnachie calls " the great sex

rush " in publishing. For Dr Alex Comfort in The Joy of

Sex (1972) the Kamasutra offered an ancient model of

sexual sophistication, " devoid of stupid patriarchal

hang-ups about the need for her to be underneath " , while

in the 90s Alain Danielou's translation of the Kamasutra

made it a gay text, changing all the pronouns in the

chapter on fellatio from " she " to " he " . In the past,

translators have tended to " dequeer " the Kamasutra, says

McConnachie, for it does mention lady-boys and

masseurs, but Danielou's translation goes to the opposite

extreme.

 

Today the Kamasutra brand - given a spurious New

Age, Tantric twist - has launched a thousand tacky spin-

offs lacking all the subtlety and grace of the original

[....]. It all has precious little to do with the original

Kamasutra, according to McConnachie, and this

scholarly and enjoyable book rescues Vatsyayana's

masterpiece from the grubby little corner of the

bookshop to which it has been condemned for so long.

 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2227660,00.html