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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  VATSYAYANA MALLANAGA

  Kamasutra

  A new, complete English translation of the

  Sanskrit text

  with excerpts from the

  Sanskrit Jayamangala commentary of

  Yashodhara Indrapada,

  the Hindi Jaya commentary of

  Devadatta Shastri,

  and explanatory notes by the translators

  Translated and edited by

  WENDY DONIGER and SUDHIR KAKAR

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  KAMASUTRA

  THE Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, probably in North India and probably sometime in the third century of the common era, most likely in its second half, at the dawn of the Gupta Empire. Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, other than his name and what we learn from this text.

  WENDY DONIGER (O’FLAHERTY) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and the author of translations of Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda (1981) and the Laws of Manu (1991), as well as books about India—Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1988)—about myth—Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes (1984)—and about sex—Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (1973) and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000).

  SUDHIR KAKAR is a psychoanalyst and currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. He is the author of many books on India that cover a wide spectrum from Hindu childhood to India’s healing traditions, from male-female relations to Hindu-Muslim violence, from classical love tales to modern mysticism. His most recent books are The Ascetic of Desire (1999), a fictionalized account of the life of Vatsyayana, the author of the Kamasutra, and the the novel Ecstasy (2001).

  For Katha and Kali

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I. The Text

  The Text and its Author(s)

  The Genre of the Kamasutra

  The Science and Magic of Numbers

  The Kamasutra as a Play in Seven Acts

  The Genders of the Kamasutra

  Psychology and Culture in the Kamasutra

  II. The Commentaries

  Yashodhara’s Jayamangala

  Devadatta Shastri’s Jaya

  III. Translations into European Languages

  Burton et al.

  Other Translations

  The Present Translation

  Sexually Explicit Vocabulary

  Contemporary Pleasures of the Text

  A Note on Presentation

  KAMASUTRA

  with excerpts from Yashodhara’s commentary, the Jayamangala

  BOOK ONE · GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

  ONE Summary of the Text [1]

  TWO The Means of Achieving the Three Aims of Human Life [2]

  THREE Exposition of the Arts [3]

  FOUR The Lifestyle of the Man-about-town [4]

  FIVE Reasons for Taking Another Man’s Wife

  The Work of the Man’s Male Helpers and Messengers [5]

  BOOK TWO · SEX

  ONE Sexual Typology According to Size, Endurance, and Temperament [6]

  Types of Love [7]

  TWO Ways of Embracing [8]

  THREE Procedures of Kissing [9]

  FOUR Types of Scratching with the Nails [10]

  FIVE Ways of Biting [11]

  Customs from Different Regions [12]

  SIX Varieties of Sexual Positions [13]

  Unusual Sexual Acts [14]

  SEVEN Modes of Slapping [15]

  The Accompanying Moaning [16]

  EIGHT The Woman Playing the Man’s Part [17]

  A Man’s Sexual Strokes [18]

  NINE Oral Sex [19]

  TEN The Start and Finish of Sex [20]

  Different Kinds of Sex [21]

  Lovers’ Quarrels [22]

  BOOK THREE · VIRGINS

  ONE Courting the Girl [23]

  Making Alliances [24]

  TWO Winning a Virgin’s Trust [25]

  THREE Making Advances to a Young Girl [26]

  Interpreting her Gestures and Signals [27]

  FOUR The Advances that a Man Makes on his Own [28]

  The Advances that a Virgin Makes to the Man She Wants [29]

  The Advances that Win a Virgin [30]

  FIVE Devious Devices for Weddings [31]

  BOOK FOUR · WIVES

  ONE The Life of an Only Wife [32]

  Her Behaviour during his Absence [33]

  TWO The Senior Wife [34]

  The Junior Wife [35]

  The Second-hand Woman [36]

  The Wi
fe Unlucky in Love [37]

  Women of the Harem [38]

  A Man’s Management of Many Women

  BOOK FIVE · OTHER MEN’S WIVES

  ONE On the Characteristic Natures of Women and Men [39]

  Causes of Resistance [40]

  Men who are Successful with Women [41]

  Women who can be Won without Effort [42]

  TWO Ways of Becoming Intimate [43]

  Making Advances [44]

  THREE Testing her Feelings [45]

  FOUR The Duties of a Female Messenger [46]

  FIVE The Sex Life of a Man in Power [47]

  SIX The Life of the Women of the Harem [48]

  The Guarding of Wives [49]

  BOOK SIX · COURTESANS

  ONE Deciding on a Friend, an Eligible Lover, and an Ineligible Lover [50]

  Getting a Lover [51]

  TWO Giving the Beloved what He Wants [52]

  THREE Ways to Get Money from Him [53]

  Signs that his Passion is Cooling [54]

  Ways to Get Rid of Him [55]

  FOUR Getting Back Together with an Ex-lover [56]

  FIVE Weighing Different Kinds of Profits [57]

  SIX Calculating Gains and Losses, Consequences, and Doubts [58]

  Types of Courtesans

  BOOK SEVEN · EROTIC ESOTERICA

  ONE Making Luck in Love [59]

  Putting Someone in your Power [60]

  Stimulants for Virility [61]

  TWO Rekindling Exhausted Passion [62]

  Methods of Increasing the Size of the Male Organ [63]

  Unusual Techniques [64]

  Appendix: Excerpts from Devadatta Shastri’s Commentary

  Explanatory Notes

  Bibliography

  Glossary and Index

  INTRODUCTION

  I. THE TEXT

  The Text and its Author(s)

  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 a book 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. The two words in its title mean ‘desire/love/pleasure/sex’ (kama) and ‘a treatise (sutra).1 It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India (related to Latin, in ancient Rome, and ancient Greek, in Greece). The data relevant to a determination of its date are sparse and the arguments complex, but most scholars believe that it was composed sometime in the third century of the common era, most likely in its second half,2 and probably in North India. Its detailed knowledge of Northwestern India, and its pejorative attitude to other parts of India, particularly the South and the East, suggest that it was written in the Northwest; on the other hand, its reference to Pataliputra alone among cities suggests that it may have been written in Pataliputra (near the present city of Patna, in Bihar), as Yashodhara (who wrote the definitive commentary on this text, in the thirteenth century) believes to be the case. It would be good to have more information about social conditions in India at the time when the Kamasutra was written, but the Kamasutra itself is one of the main sources that we have for such data; the text is, in a sense, its own context. The cultural context is urbane and cosmopolitan, with a real consciousness of the possible regions of ‘India’, what one scholar has called a ‘pre-Imperial consciousness’, setting the stage for the Gupta Empire that would dominate North India from the fourth century to the sixth.3

  Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, other than his name and what we learn from this text; and all that he tells us is 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’. But Vatsyayana tells us something important about his text, namely, that it is a 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 Suvarnanabha. These other authors, called ‘teachers’ or ‘scholars’, supply what Indian logic called the ‘other side’ (literally, the ‘former wing’, purvapaksha), the arguments that opponents might raise. In this case, they are ‘former’ in both the logical and chronological sense of the word; Vatsyayana cites them often, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement. Always his own voice comes through, as he acts as ringmaster over the many acts that he incorporates in his sexual circus. The Kamasutra was therefore certainly not the first of its genre, nor was it the last. The many textbooks of eroticism that follow it, such as Kokkaka’s Ratirahasya (also called the Kokashastra, pre-thirteenth century) and Kalyanamalla’s Anangaranga (fifteenth century), cite it as a foundational authority. The Nagarasarvasva of Bhikshu Padamashri and the Panchasayaka of Jyotirishvara (eleventh to thirteenth century) explicitly base themselves on the Kamasutra, the first on Books Two, Five, and Seven, and the second on Books Two, Three, Five, and Seven. The Kamasutra also made a deep impact on Indian literature; its vocabulary and taxonomies were diffused into later Sanskrit erotic poetry.4

  The erotic science to which these texts belong, known as kamashastra (‘the science of kama’), is one of the three principal human sciences in ancient India, the other two being religious and social law (dharma-shastra, of which the most famous work is attributed to Manu, the Manavadharmashastra or Manusmriti, known as the Laws of Manu) and the science of political and economic power (arthashastra, whose foundational text is attributed to Kautilya, the minister of Chandragupta Maurya). (There were many other sciences, preserved in texts about medicine, astronomy, architecture, the management of horses and elephants, and so forth.5) The Kamasutra opens with a discussion of dharma, artha, and kama, known collectively as the three aims of human life (purusharthas) or the trinity (trivarga). For assonance, one might call them piety, profit, and pleasure, or society, success, and sex, or duty, domination, and desire. More precisely, dharma includes duty, religion, religious merit, morality, social obligations, the law, justice, and so forth. Vatsyayana’s commitment to dharma emerges frequently at the end of a chapter. Artha is money, political power, and success; it can also be translated as goal or aim (as in the three aims of human life), gain (versus loss), money, the meaning of a word, and the purpose of something. Kama represents pleasure and desire (what the Germans call Lust and Wollust), not merely sexual but more broadly sensual—music, good food, perfume, and so forth.

  This basic trinity is one of several important triads in Hinduism, whose role in Hindu intellectual history demonstrates that ‘three’ became a kind of shorthand for ‘lots and lots’; these threes represented the multivalent, multifaceted, multiform, multi-whatever-you-like nature of the real phenomenal world. The world of the triads is the India of fabled elephants encrusted with jewels and temples covered with copulating couples. This paradigm began in the earthy, vibrant text known as the Rig Veda, the oldest sacred text in India, composed in about 1000 BCE, and it still prevails in certain sectors of Hindu society and religion today. But it came to share centre stage with another paradigm that might have subverted or destroyed it altogether, but which, instead, simply came to supplement it as an alternative view of human life; this is the ascetic movement. The omphalosceptic yogis who composed the early Upanishads over a period of a few centuries, probably beginning in the seventh century BCE, fled from the sensual world of sex and sacrifice but did not destroy it. The two worlds remain in conversation in the Kamasutra. Why, one might ask, does Vatsyayana go to the trouble of inventing fictive pragmatists, straw men who protest against sex [1.2.32], when there were real people there in India, the religious fringe, who thought that sex was terrible? The answer is that there were good reasons for him to avoid picking a fight with them.

  For renunciation was an essential part of the system in which Vatsyayana lived, and eroticism, like asceticism, depends upo
n the technique of control of the body known as yoga.6 Sometimes the aims of human life are listed not as a triad but as a quartet, in which the fourth goal is release, moksha, the goal of the religious renouncer (Yashodhara speaks of four aims at 1.5.8). Vatsyayana gives very short shrift indeed to release [1.2.4], and even applies the term, surely tongue in cheek, to the courtesan’s successful jettisoning of an unwanted lover [6.4.44–5]. His discussion about whether you can indulge in kama at any stage of life [1.2.1–6] reflects (or perhaps even satirizes?) widespread arguments about whether you can engage in renunciation (sannyasa) at any stage.7 But wandering renunciants meander through the Kamasutra; nuns, on the one hand, and courtesans, on the other, were the only women in ancient India who could move freely throughout the entire social system. And there are literary ties, too, between the Kamasutra and the literature of asceticism. Shvetaketu Auddalaki, the first human author of the Kamasutra [1.1.9], was already famous as a great Upanishadic sage.8 The title of the seventh book of the Kamasutra, which we have translated as ‘Erotic Esoterica’, is actually the ‘Upanishadic Book’, perhaps because it is secret, like those texts, but perhaps because the extreme realms of sensuality and the control of sensuality have much in common. Perhaps Vatsyayana really did remain chaste while he composed this book.

  The Genre of the Kamasutra

  Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality (1990), made a distinction between ‘two procedures for producing the truth of sex’. The first consists of texts of the ars erotica type, characteristic of ‘China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies’.9 The choice of a Latin terminology suggests that Foucault has taken Ovid’s Ars Amatoria as his paradigm for texts of this sort, and lest there be any question of their otherness he adds: ‘On the face of it at least, our civilization possesses no ars erotica.’10 These esoteric texts, technical treatises, remain secret and may be learned only from a master. ‘Our civilization’, by contrast, is the only one to have the scientia sexualis, which Foucault limits, with characteristic Euro-centrism, to Europe, taking as his criterion the element of confession. But if we set confession aside, the subsidiary criteria of the scientia sexualis, such as ‘the testimony of witnesses, and the learned methods of observation and demonstration’, place the Kamasutra in this camp. For Vatsyayana cites witnesses in the form of previous scholars, and his arguments are based on close observation and experience. In fact, however, the Kamasutra has characteristics of both ‘procedures’, thus posing a challenge to Foucault’s taxonomy.