Kamasutra Read online

  The very style in which most of the text is composed, aphoristic prose passages, or sutras, has associations with both religion and science. A sutra is literally a thread (cognate with the English words ‘sew’ and ‘suture’), on which pages (generally palm leaves) and thoughts are strung like beads to form a kind of atomic string of meanings. The text is so intensely condensed, so starkly cryptic, that the task of understanding it frequently seems more like deciphering than translating. A sutra that states literally, in its totality, ‘Because of the close connection with it’ [1.1.4] requires the reader to understand what is being connected with what, most of which, but not always all, may be deduced from the context. (It probably means, ‘Because those subjects are integral to the text [scholars made known their mutual agreement].’) This renders the text ambiguous in many places, and, to that extent, unclear; it cries out for the help of a commentary to unpack it, just as the cryptic nature of the early religious texts, the Vedas, required the help of a guru. (Yashodhara fulfilled that role in the thirteenth century, as did Devadatta Shastri and several other modern commentators in the twentieth century.) That method of transmission lends the Kamasutra a mantle of religious authority; the ‘scholars’ that Vatsyayana cites are called acharyas, the word for a spiritual guide or guru. It also lends it an archaic tone, since, by and large, sutras precede shastras in Indian history. These aspects of the text assimilate it to Foucault’s ars erotica.11

  On the other hand, that very same aphoristic form gives this text the veneer of science, the aura of a grammatical treatise (the basis of all sciences, in ancient India) or a logical discourse, each syllogism boiled down to the most concise form possible, each word an indicator for a complex and previously established concept. Logical syllogisms appear at some length in the first two books and in abbreviated form in Vatsyayana’s arguments with his opponents in the rest of the work. Alexander Syrkin argues that, in contrast with Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, ‘which is the model of artistic didacticism, the Kama Sutra is primarily a scientific-didactic work, reflecting in both expression and content specific features of Ancient Hindu scientific description’.12 Those features would include not only syllogisms but encyclopedic lists and logical debates. The prose form of the Kamasutra also makes it possible for the author to cite other authors by names that might not have fitted into a poetic metre and to quote their texts within his own, taking up the views of several opponents and disposing of them one by one. It allows him to cite observed evidence in each case and to cap it with the assertion: ‘This is evident.’ This is the procedure of the scientia sexualis, and places Vatsyayana, if not in the company of Newton and Einstein, at least closer to Freud and Kinsey than to D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller. By contrast, Manu, the author of the text that does for dharma what Vatsyayana does for kama, claims direct descent from the Creator, has a mythical name (equivalent to Adam), and cites at the start of his text only mythical predecessors, whose voices he incorporates into his text without attribution, so that he often seems to be saying contradictory things in two different places.13

  As a scientific shastra, the Kamasutra is both a model of and a model for (to use Clifford Geertz’s terms), both descriptive and prescriptive (as well as occasionally proscriptive). More precisely, by claiming to be merely descriptive it is able to position its prescriptions and proscriptions as if they were facts rather than suggestions. It situates itself in the no man’s land between the world of possibilities and the world of observations, between ‘should’ and ‘is’. For the shastric ‘should’ functions both in the sense of, ‘The sun should rise in the east at 8 a.m. tomorrow’, and in the sense of, ‘A servant should never look at a Brahmin woman.’ These two mutually enforcing goals are supported by two different literary forms, prose and verse. For the Kamasutra is not entirely in prose. A few verses are cited at the end of every chapter, usually without explicit attribution, and through them some other voices may enter the text; in all, these verses constitute about a tenth of the text. They are in the form of shlokas, not a complex poetic form but the normal improvisational form of poetry, rather like blank verse in English, with a loose rhythm and no rhyme. This is the verse form in which the great Sanskrit epics and the Laws of Manu are composed. The prose, by and large, describes what people do; only in the verses does Vatsyayana explicitly suggest what people should do. He may be quoting some of these verses from earlier texts, though if so it is odd that he does not name the authors, as he does in his prose arguments (and as Yashodhara does in several notes). He himself may have invented some of the verses. The Sanskrit commentator says from time to time that Vatsyayana is quoting someone else because the act in question is not actually forbidden, implying that this is a way of allowing it without actually taking responsibility for it; the verses at the end of a chapter may also serve this function. In any case, the voice of these verses is one of moderation and reason, a voice that speaks not only in Manu’s shloka form but, often, with Manu’s moralizing tone, ‘reeling kama in and contextualizing it within the larger framework of moral and social ideals’, functioning like verbal ‘speed-bumps’ to remind the reader to proceed with caution.14 Some of these verses offer advice on ways to use the text, either by limiting it (specifying that certain acts should be done only in the right time and place, and only by certain people, and so forth) or, on the other hand, by extending it (suggesting that anything that both partners find acceptable can be done, even if the text has not mentioned it).

  A blatant example of the first function of these verses, the limiting function, occurs near the end of the whole text, at the end of the book about drugs:

  The unusual techniques employed to increase passion,

  which have been described as this particular book required,

  are strongly restricted right here in this verse,

  right after it. [7.2.54]

  A more complex example occurs at the end of the long, Machiavellian discussion of ways to seduce other men’s wives [5.6.46–8]. Vatsyayana appends here a few verses insisting that he intends his work not as a handbook for adulterers but, rather, to help husbands detect the clues of other people’s adulteries in order to confound them. Is this the author’s paper-thin attempt to avoid being accused of teaching people to commit adultery? Or a warning that says, in effect, ‘Kids, don’t try this at home’? Or is it a deeper warning, encouraging the reader to imagine himself not as the cuckolder but as the cuckold, to recall that eternal vigilance is the price of fidelity? Or the voice of religion, long silent, returning at a crucial moment?

  The verses that function in the second way, extending the possibilities, seem to have the very opposite effect, opening up the text. For instance, after describing many embraces, some of which ‘can only be learned with practice’, Vatsyayana concludes with these verses:

  Some sexual embraces, not in this text,

  also intensify passion;

  these, too, may be used for love-making,

  but only with care.

  The territory of the texts extends

  only so far as men have dull appetites;

  but when the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion,

  there is no textbook at all, and no order. [2.2.30–31]

  Often Vatsyayana seems to invoke an ancient Indian cultural relativism: certain acts are permitted only in certain regions. This opens up the text until, in some instances, he qualifies it, as he does in the case of violent blows called ‘wedges’: ‘This is a particular local custom. But Vatsyayana says: It is a painful and barbarous thing to do, and not to be sanctioned. So, too, one should not take any other custom used in one particular region and use it in another. One should also avoid, even in the region where it is used, anything that is dangerous’ [2.7.24–7].

  Whether these capping verses limit or extend the preceding chapter, they seem to increase the options by arguing for the particularity of individuals who may use the text. In the context of ancient Hindu social theory, however, they may have precisely the opposite e
ffect, of constraining the possibilities. For they return the reader to another conservative framework that is conspicuously absent from the text: the framework of caste, of the belief that each individual has his (or, in relatively few cases, her) own dharma and therefore his own limited range of actual options appropriate to him, out of the totality of ideal human options. Do these verses express Vatsyayana’s true voice, what he wants the reader to remember and take away? (It is always easier to remember poetry than prose, and the last lines rather than earlier lines.) Does he really believe that the reader should be able to have a choice of all possibilities, and then add the verses at the end merely as a safety net, a disclaimer?15 Or does his dedication to the scientific goal of the totalizing project of the encyclopedia force him to include options that he in fact deplores, and wishes to take back at the end?

  Devadatta Shastri, at the end of the chapter on unusual sexual acts [2.6], argues for this last option:

  In writing his treatise, Vatsyayana was always vigilant in paying due attention to the character and the inherent principles of a treatise. He has also made it clear in this section that unusual sexual acts are base. Even when the author of a treatise considers something as base, he gives it a place in his treatise because there are all sorts of people in this world with different characters and inclinations. Some have an animal nature; they get enjoyment from unusual sexual acts. The Bhagavata Purana [11.5–11] says that it is necessary to be free from such tendencies: ‘At the times of marriage, sacrifice and other such occasions, we may need to engage ourselves with these inclinations. But our goal should be freedom. Sexual intercourse, drinking, and eating meat do not need an impetus because people are naturally inclined towards them. Because of this natural bent, these inclinations cannot be destroyed. That is why they are regulated and why rules are made governing an engagement with them on special occasions.’ The Rig Veda has openly elaborated on this intention, in verses 10.86.16–17, in which Indrani berates Indra. There is some embarrassment in translating these mantras. Griffith did not translate them into English,16 writing, in a footnote: ‘I pass over stanzas 16 and 17, which I cannot translate into decent English.’17 In his Manusmriti [5.56], Manu has also written that there is no sin or fault in eating meat, drinking alcohol, and having sex because they are natural inclinations of all embodied beings. But one attains happiness in becoming free of them.

  Shastri renews his defence of Vatsyayana again at the end of the first chapter in the book devoted to adultery [5.1], identifying this conservative moment as the true voice of Vatsyayana:

  The treatises on religion require a man to look at another man’s wife as if she were his own mother. The Kamasutra, however, tells us how to seduce another man’s wife. It will not do to maintain that the latter is a treatise on a particular kind of behaviour and has no link to religion. Actually, religion, power, and pleasure are interconnected. The goal of pleasure is related to the other world as much as it is to this one. A treatise never turns its gaze away from reality. The Kamasutra is not a religious text but it does not transgress social and ethical boundaries.

  Based on human psychology, the Kamasutra is a way of looking at the world. After analysing the inclinations of men, good and bad, its conclusions are guided by a concern for human welfare. A treatise incorporates a discussion of both the good and the bad, but one should act only on the good. In the eyes of the author of the Kamasutra, adultery is a great sin. But how could he deny its pervasive reality? How could he not discuss this human tendency which has manifested itself throughout the whole of human history? That is why Vatsyayana gives a place to adultery in the Kamasutra. The Upanishads, too, view the satisfaction of ‘left-handed’ desires as the purpose of sex with other men’s wives. The Ayurveda prescribes adultery as a remedy for erotic fever.

  Vatsyayana was not only a scholar but a reformer and builder of society. He clearly states that a treatise demands the inclusion of everything, good or bad. Using their discrimination, reflective people should accept only the good. Just because the Ayurveda prescribes dog’s flesh for a particular disease, it does not mean that dog meat should be consumed for every disease. Similarly, if a person must sleep with another man’s wife because of the exigencies of a specific situation, then it is not bad—if he does so after a study of the Kamasutra and after employing a mature judgment. But if everyone believes that adulterous sex is a prescription to be followed, then society will lose all its moorings, children will lose their caste. Humanity will become a laughing-stock, religion lose its preeminence, and nation and society take on attributes of the animal kingdom.

  Perhaps all of these voices are Vatsyayana’s, both in prose and in verse, expressing the view of a man dedicated both to the encyclopedic goals of science and the often repressive moral concerns of religion, or a man who tempers his goal of including everything that could be relevant (the view of totality) by admitting that one cannot corral all of the possibilities (the view of infinity).18

  The Science and Magic of Numbers

  One quasi-scientific feature, typical of other ancient Hindu shastric works besides the Kamasutra, appears here in such an exaggerated form that it has become (particularly in Western receptions) a point of satire: the enumerations, particularly of the sexual positions. (Most editions of the Burton translation exacerbate this quasi-scientific appearance by numbering lists that Vatsyayana does not number, or even count, in the Sanskrit original, such as the reasons for women to commit, or not to commit, adultery [5.1].) The numbers alone would not qualify a text as scientific, though they do serve to bolster two more significant characteristics of that genre, the appeal to empirical evidence and the logical syllogism. Numbers are useful in a literature of this genre, as they serve as mnemonic devices and help scribes to check to see if they have left something out. The numbers in the Kamasutra are used in the service of both mystical and scientific agendas.

  A telltale sign of the scientific genre of ancient Hindu texts is the list, particularly the numbered list (‘the sixty-four arts’), which conveys an aura of totality here as it does in the shastras composed in verse, such as Manu’s.19 In the Kamasutra, no longer corseted by the shloka metre, the lists blossom in even greater profusion. The Kamasutra lists consist of strings of aphorisms, each of which often takes the form of a long compound noun that could be unpacked into a sentence. Thus, the list of married women likely to commit adultery includes a woman who hangs about the house of the young man who is her neighbour, a woman who has been supplanted by a co-wife for no cause, a woman whose husband travels a lot, and so forth [5.1.52–4]. Each item hints at a soap-opera story redolent with messy human implications, but herded together in a list, they give the impression of scholarly tidiness.20

  The Kamasutra begins with a myth about numbers: the original text had a hundred thousand chapters, and it was then boiled down to a thousand chapters, then a hundred and fifty chapters, and finally reached its present form of what it declares to be ‘thirty-six chapters, in sixty-four sections, in seven books, consisting of 1,250 passages’ [1.1.4–23]. This claim to have boiled down a divine original to a human digest is standard operating procedure for an ancient Hindu sacred text; similar declarations are made at the start of the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, the Kathasaritsagara, and other works of that genre.21 But the Kamasutra goes on to play number games of a different sort. Vatsyayana claims that his text has sixty-four sections.22 Now, sixty-four is not merely a nice round number (more precisely, a squared number, in fact the square of a square, or 2 to the 6th power) but a sacred number in India, indeed a ‘natural’ number. Ayurvedic medical texts list sixty-four main diseases of the body, a number that also occurs in the ancient law books. The Laws of Manu, pronouncing on the weight of transgressions committed by the four different classes, says that the guilt of a thief who belongs to the lowest class is eight times the value of the stolen object, of the third class sixteen times, of the second class thirty-two times, and of a Brahmin sixty-four times [8.337–8]. In th
e initiation rites the circle symbolizing the universal spirit is divided into four quarters, every quarter again into four parts, to indicate that the initiate is to receive sixteen branches of knowledge. If each of these sixteen branches is again divided into four, we get the sixty-four arts, which cover the whole circle.

  Vatsyayana’s lists of the sixty-four arts, and his discussion of the traditional lists of the sixty-four positions of intercourse and the elements of foreplay, seem to be efforts to include all that is even remotely possible in the realm of sexual love, even when some of the items on a list appear improbable. Vatsyayana, however, expresses his scorn for this sort of number-crunching: ‘But Vatsyayana says: Since the division into eight theoretical varieties is too few for some categories and too many for others, and since sex involves other categories, too, such as slapping, screaming, the sexual strokes of a man, and unusual sexual acts, this is merely a manner of speaking, just as we speak of the “seven-leaf” devil tree or the “five-colour” offering of rice’ [2.2.5].23 He has already expressed similar misgivings: ‘Since there are nine kinds of sex according to each of the criteria of size, time, and temperament, when they are combined it is not possible to enumerate all the forms of sex. There are just too many’ [2.1.33]. At this, Yashodhara remarks, rather flat-footedly, that they are not innumerable at all: ‘There are nine forms of each of the three categories, making twenty-seven possibilities for each man and the same number for each woman. If these mate in all possible combinations, the total comes to 729 (27 × 27).’ But this is a path down which Vatsyayana disdains to tread. As he remarks [at 2.7.31]: