topics: |  sex | erotica | india | ancient | social

Excerpts

Introduction

The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It is not, as most people think, a book about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is about the art of living -- about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs --and also about the positions in sexual intercourse and the pleasures to be derived from each. The two words in its title mean 'desire/ love/ pleasure/ sex' (kama) and 'a treatise' (sutra). It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India...

The data relevant to a determination of its date are sparse and the arguments complex, but most scholar believe that it was composed sometime in the third century AD, most likely in its second half, and probably in North India. Its detailed knowledge of NW India, and its pejorative attitude towrds the South and the East, suggest that it was written in the Northwest; on the other hand, its referene to Pataliputra alone among cities suggests that it may have been written in Pataliputra (near Patna), as Yashodhara, who wrote the definitive commentary in the 13th c., believes to be the case. p.1

Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, other than his name and what we learn from the text. He tells us that he composed it "in chastity and in the highest meditation," [7.2.57], about which we may conclude, as he himself remarks about someone else's claim of virtue [5.4.15], that it "may or may not have happened." 2

It is the distillation of the works of a number of authors who preceded him, authors whose texts have not come down to us: Auddalaki, Babhravya, Charayana, Dattaka, Ghotakamukha, Gonardiya, Gonikaputra, and Suvananabha. These authors constitute the purvapaksha (former wing, other side), and Vatsyayana cites them often, sometimes in agreement, sometimes not. Always his own voice comes throgh, as he acts as a ringmaster over the many acts that he incorporates in his sexual circus.

Succeeding texts on erotic science, kamashAstra : 
   * Kakkaka's Ratirahasya (pre-13th c.also called the Kokashastra)
   * Kalyanamalla's Anangaranga (15th c.)
   * Bhiskshu Padamashri's Nagarasarvasva
   * Jyaotirishvara's Panchasayaka (11th-13th c.) p.2

Book two, chapter 2: Ways of embracing

... As a vine twines around a great dammar tree, so she twines around him
and bends his face down to her to kiss him. Or, raising it up again, she
pants gently, rests on him, and gazes at him with love for a while.  This
is the 'twining vine'.  She steps on his foot with her foot, places her
other foot on his thigh or wraps her leg around him, with one arm gripping
his back and the other bending down his shoulder, and panting gently,
moaning a little, she tries to cliomb him to kiss him.  This is called
'climbing the tree'.  These two embraces are done standing.  Lying on a
bed, their thighs entangled and arms entangled, they embrace so tightly
that they seem to be wrestling against one another.  This is 'rice and
sesame'.  Blind with passion, oblivious to pain or injury, they embrace as
if they would enter one another she may be on his lap, seated facing him,
or on a bed.  This is called 'milk-and-water'.  Those are the ways of
embracing closely, according to the followers of Babhravya. 40-41

"Whatever wound a man inflicts on a woman" 2.5.37-43

Whatever wound a man inflicts on a woman...
the response to a 'dot' is a 'garland',
and to a 'garland', a 'scattered cloud'. 
Pretending to be angry, 
this is how a woman picks a quarrel
She grabs him by the hair 
and bends down his face and drinks from his mouth;
she pounces on him and bites him 
here and there, crazed with passion. 
Resting on the chest of the man she loves,
she raises his head and bites him on the neck
with the 'garland of jewels'
or any other bite
she knows. 

When she sees the man, even in the daytime, 
in the midst of a group of people, displaying the mark
that she herself made on him, she laughs
unnoticed by others. 
Then, pretending to wrinkle her face, 
and pretending to rebuke the man, 
as if in jealousy, she displays 
the marks made on her own body. 

When two people behave in this way 
with modesty and concern for one another's feelings, 
their love will never wane,
not even in a hundred years. 
    	   p.50-51    

editor bios

Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History
of Religions, University of Chicago. She is the author of The Bedtrick: Tales
of Sex and Masquerade and Siva, The Erotic Ascetic. Sudhir Kakar is Senior
Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard
University. He is the author of Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological
Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions.

---blurb

[Kamasutra] combines an encyclopedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of
sex with a closely observed sexual psychology and a dramatic, novelistic
narrative of seduction, consummation, and disentanglement. Best known in
English through the highly mannered, padded, and inaccurate
nineteenth-century translation by Sir Richard Burton, the text is newly
translated here into clear, vivid, sexually frank English. This edition also
includes a section of vivid Indian color illustrations along with three
uniquely important commentaries: translated excerpts from the earliest and
most famous Sanskrit commentary (thirteenth century) and from a
twentieth-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by the two
translators. The lively and entertaining introduction by translator Wendy
Doniger, one of the world's foremost Sanskrit scholars, discusses the history
of The Kamasutra and its reception in India and Europe, analyses its
attitudes toward gender and sexual violence, and sets it in the context of
ancient Indian social theory, scientific method, and sexual ethics.