What it is
The Kāmasūtra — literally "aphorisms on desire" — is a treatise written in Sanskrit in northern India, probably in the third century of our era. It belongs to a scholarly literature dealing with the three aims of life: dharma (duty, virtue), artha (prosperity, power) and kāma (desire, the pleasure of the senses). Just as other texts codified politics or medicine, this one codifies pleasure: it is written in terse prose interspersed with verse, as numbered rules, and it addresses the nāgaraka, the cultivated, well-off city dweller, whom it teaches how to live, love, court and marry. It is neither a religious book nor an illustrated manual: the erotic miniatures associated with it were painted by Mughal and Rajput artists more than a thousand years later.
Who wrote it
The author calls himself Vātsyāyana Mallanāga. Almost nothing is known of him beyond what he says himself: a Brahmin scholar who claims to have composed his book "in chastity and the highest meditation", summarising older treatises now lost — he cites Babhravya, Shvetaketu and half a dozen others — for the good of the world and not out of passion. The text was later commented upon; the most famous commentary, Yashodhara's Jayamangalā in the thirteenth century, is the one most translations follow.
Europe discovered it late and badly. The first English translation, published in 1883 under the name of the explorer Richard Burton — in reality the work of the Indian scholars Bhagvanlal Indraji and Shivaram Bhide, with Forster Arbuthnot —, was privately printed to evade Victorian censorship, and it distorts the text: it erases part of what concerns women's pleasure and adds interpretations. Yet it is the one that made "Kama Sutra" a synonym for acrobatic positions. Faithful translations exist: Alain Daniélou's in French (1992), with the ancient commentaries, and Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar's in English (2002).
What it contains
The book has seven parts, thirty-six chapters and about 1,250 aphorisms. Only the second part — a fifth of the text — deals with sexual union.
- Book 1, general: the three aims of life, the place of pleasure, the sixty-four arts a cultivated person should know (singing, music, drawing, games, cooking, the art of conversation…), the city dweller's day, his friends and go-betweens.
- Book 2, sexual union: types of lovers by temperament and anatomy, embraces, kisses, caresses, marks made with nails and teeth, positions — about twenty, described in a few lines each —, fellatio and cunnilingus, blows and cries, reversed roles, what happens before and after. This is where the famous list of sixty-four practices appears.
- Book 3, winning a wife: the choice, the betrothal, and above all slowness: the author recommends winning a young bride's trust for several days before any contact, because a woman who is rushed "comes to hate intercourse and the man".
- Book 4, the wife: the married woman's life, running the household, co-wives.
- Book 5, other men's wives: adulterous seduction, its go-betweens, its risks — the most disturbing part for a reader today, and the most revealing about the society of the time.
- Book 6, courtesans: their art, their fees, their strategies.
- Book 7, secrets: recipes for seduction, aphrodisiacs, ointments and procedures to "increase vigour" — the part closest to magic.
What it says about female pleasure
This is its real singularity for its time: the text holds that a woman's pleasure exists, that it has its own rhythms — slower to come, it says, so one must begin with what raises her desire —, that a woman may take the initiative, and that a man's aim is to be loved and not merely satisfied. It describes the signs of female arousal and satisfaction, and it accepts that women, like men, have different temperaments and appetites. All this within a deeply unequal society, which makes the text both modern and dated.
How to use it today
Not as a catalogue of positions: those it describes are few, often sketchy and sometimes anatomically risky, and the illustrated books "after the Kama Sutra" sold today invent most of their content. The text is more useful as a reminder of three things sexology confirms: pleasure is prepared long before the act — kissing, touch and massage take up more space in Vātsyāyana than penetration; female desire has its own tempo, and forcing it puts it out; and variety — of attitudes, places, roles — keeps wanting alive. Its list of sixty-four practices can serve as a starting point for a conversation between two people about what each would like to try, what each refuses and what each has never dared to suggest — which remains, for a couple, the most fruitful use of a seventeen-century-old book.
It is not the only one of its kind: India later produced Kokkoka's Ratirahasya (twelfth century) and Kalyāṇamalla's Ananga Ranga (sixteenth), the Arab world Sheikh Nefzawi's Perfumed Garden (fifteenth), and China "bedchamber" manuals from the Han dynasty onwards. None of them speaks of consent in the sense we give the word: today's reading has to supply it.