Kamasutra Read online

  We may search in this way for the voices not only of women but of people who engage in homosexual acts. Classical Hinduism is in general significantly silent on the subject of homoeroticism, but Hindu mythology does drop hints from which we can excavate a pretty virulent homophobia.44 The dharma textbooks either ignore or stigmatize homosexual activity. Male homoerotic activity was punished, albeit mildly: a ritual bath [Manu 11.174] or the payment of a small fine [Arthashastra 3.18.4] was often a sufficient atonement. In contrast to the modern notion of homosexuality, which is defined by a preference for a partner of the same sex, queerness in ancient India was determined by atypical sexual or gender behaviour.45 The Sanskrit word kliba (which has traditionally been translated as ‘eunuch’, but almost certainly did not mean ‘eunuch’) includes a wide range of meanings under the general rubric of ‘a man who does not act the way a man should act’, a man who fails to be a man, a defective male, a male suffering from failure, distortion, and lack. It is a catch-all term that traditional Hindus coined to indicate a man who is in their terms sexually dysfunctional (or in ours, sexually challenged), including someone who was sterile, impotent, castrated, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex with other men, who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sexual organs, a man who produced only female children, or, finally, a hermaphrodite.

  But the Kamasutra departs from this view in significant ways. It does not use the term kliba at all. It mentions sodomy in only one passage, and in the context of heterosexual sex: ‘The people in the South indulge in “sex below”, even anally’ [2.6.49]. (Southerners have a pretty poor reputation in this book composed in the North, and it may be that their geographical position suggested their sexual position in this passage: down under.) Fellatio is regarded as the defining male homosexual act, and Shastri argues that Vatsyayana discusses even this only because his totalizing project forces him to do so:

  It is clear that this act [fellatio] is extremely base and that it is not a new but an old and wicked deed in our tradition, since Dharmashastras condemn it. One might ask if this act is so reprehensible then why does it find a supporter in Vatsyayana? A treatise (shastra) is a reference book. Fellatio is a sexual act; it is related to sexual desire and it has a tradition. How, then, can a treatise ignore it? Giving primacy to human inclinations and local customs, Vatsyayana says that a shastra has no meaning for the dissolute, nor does acting against the shastra bring sin to the wicked. Fellatio is an act which is proper if permitted by local custom or if it suits a person’s particular taste. [At the end of 2.9]

  In fact, though the Kamasutra quickly dismisses the cross-dressing male, it discusses the fellatio technique of the closeted man of the third nature in considerable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing a physical act, and with what might even be called gusto [2.9.6–24]. Moreover, as in several other cultures, the active partner in a homoerotic encounter was not stigmatized as the passive partner was. The Kamasutra’s man-about-town who uses the masseur’s mouth for sexual pleasure is thus not considered ‘queer’; the masseur is. (Elsewhere the text quotes scholars who warn the bridegroom that if he is too shy, his bride ‘will be discouraged and will despise him, as if he were someone of the third nature’ [3.2.3].) Two verses that immediately follow this section describe (in striking contrast with men of the third nature, always designated by the pronoun ‘she’) men who seem bound to one another by discriminating affection rather than promiscuous passion, and although these men, too, engage in oral sex, they are designated with nouns and pronouns that unambiguously designate males [2.9.35–6]. The female messenger, praising the man’s charm, says, according to Yashodhara, ‘He has such luck in love that he was desired even by a man’ [5.4.15]. Colin Spencer’s The Gay Kamasutra (1996), which does not pretend to be a translation, mines the parts of the text ostensibly designed for heterosexuals and finds in them possible readings of sexual relationships between men. Yashodhara, as we have seen, even makes Dattaka a bisexual [Y1.1.11].

  Lesbian activity is described at the beginning of the chapter about the harem, in a brief passage about what Vatsyayana calls ‘Oriental customs’ [5.6.2–4].46 These women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits that have the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual characteristics. But they do this only in the absence of men, not through the kind of personal choice that drives someone of the third nature. As for other sorts of lesbians, Manu says that a woman who corrupts a virgin will be punished by having two of her fingers cut off [8.369–70]—a hint of what Manu thinks lesbians do in bed; Yashodhara specifies that that is how a woman deflowers another woman [7.1.20]. Shastri comments on lesbians [at the end of 2.9 and 5.5]:

  In passage 2.9.36, Vatsyayana hints at homosexuality. The commentator Yashodhara has explicated Vatsyayana’s opinion by mentioning homosexuality in men and also in women. These days, the act of women rubbing their vulvas together is called a chapati. [A chapati is an Indian bread shaped somewhat like a pita bread.] Vatsyayana has discussed all kinds of natural and unnatural means for the satisfaction of unslaked sexual desires. But it is surprising that he does not talk of ‘chapati’ [lesbian] intercourse among unsatisfied queens. Perhaps ‘chapati’ intercourse had not yet appeared at Vatsyayana’s time; otherwise, it could not have remained hidden from his penetrating gaze. Today, when the emphasis on virginity has increased, the playing of ‘chapati’ and the employment of artificial means for sexual satisfaction among girls are also increasing.

  The commentators, therefore, seem more troubled by the topic than Vatsyayana is.

  And so, despite the caution with which this topic is broached, there are ways in which some parts of the Kamasutra might be read as a text for homoeroticism. More precisely, it is possible to excavate several alternative sexualities latent in the text’s somewhat fuzzy boundaries between homoeroticism and heteroeroticism. At the end of the discussion of the third nature, Vatsyayana grants that some women, too, perform oral sex, though he strongly disapproves of it and attributes it largely to women from distant parts of India [2.9.25–41]. (He says that this is one of the ways that a group of men can pleasure one woman [2.6.46–7], and even that it is what makes women prefer otherwise useless men to good men [2.9.39], and he clearly disapproves of both of these types of women.) Fellatio, therefore, is permitted for (some) men, and not for (our) women. But the fact that the word ‘nature’ is feminine in Sanskrit (as it, and most abstract nouns, are also in Latin and Greek), leads Vatsyayana to use the feminine rather than the male pronoun throughout the description of the masseur seducing his male client. (He also lists the third nature among women who can be lovers [at 1.5.27].) This passage, therefore, can be read heterosexually, instructing a woman how to seduce a man through oral sex.

  By the same token, one might argue that the female pronoun used for the active partner in the section on ‘the woman playing the role of the man’ (the woman on top) might refer to a male of the third nature and represent homoerotic rather than heteroerotic sex. The belief that the children produced when the woman is on top might be ‘a little boy and a little girl with reversed natures’ [Yashodhara on 2.8.41] supports this view: the ‘reverse’ intercourse of parents was thought to wreak embryonic damage, resulting in the reversed gender behaviour of the third nature—significantly, for a boy as well as a girl.47 (Here, as in his treatment of the third nature, Vatsyayana is far more relaxed than other texts of the period, which generally stigmatize the ‘reversed’ position; the bloodthirsty goddess Kali, for instance, is depicted ‘on top’, straddling the corpse of her husband Shiva.) Though Vatsyayana never uses the verb ‘to play the man’s role’ (purushayitva) when he describes lesbian activities [5.6.1–4], Yashodhara cites one text in which that verb is used of a woman with another woman [2.1.18]. Alain Daniélou’s translation takes this possibility to two extremes, reading this passage first as the sodomization of a man by a woman using a dildo and then as an encounter between two women, one of whom s
odomizes the other with a dildo. This is an ingenious and suggestive reading, but at the cost of ignoring the gender of the pronouns and the meaning of several key Sanskrit words in the text. Daniélou makes the woman the subject and the man the object (‘she unties his undergarment’), reversing the genders expressed in the text [2.8.8]; he translates svairini, designating an independent and presumably promiscuous woman (which we translate as a ‘loose’ woman), as ‘lesbian’. When the text uses the phrase that always describes the man’s sexual organ inside the woman’s (yukta-yantra, literally ‘when the instrument has been attached’), Daniélou interprets this as meaning that the woman inserts a dildo in her partner’s anus. But Vatsyayana always uses apadravya, not yantra, to designate a dildo that women use. Even this often cryptic text is not infinitely elastic; it simply will not stretch to accommodate these readings. Our suggestion that the pronouns in the passage about the third nature might also be read with reference to a man and a woman, as an alternative, or perhaps even a subversive, subtext, is a far cry from suggesting, against the pronouns and much else, that the passage about the woman on top is only about two women.48 Yet, without going so far as to distort the text with sodomizing dildos, that passage could be read in lesbian terms.

  Yashodhara’s commentary on the woman in the man’s role [2.8.6] suggests other ways in which the Kamasutra does not simply dichotomize gender:

  All of this activity is said to be done with a woman’s natural talent [2.7.22]. The acts he demonstrated before are acts that he executed with roughness and ferocity, the man’s natural talent; she now does these acts against the current of her own natural talent. She hits him hard, with the back of her hand and so forth, demonstrating her ferocity. And so, in order to express the woman’s natural talent, even though she is not embarrassed, nor exhausted, and does not wish to stop, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop.

  Vatsyayana has already defined the ‘woman’s natural talent’ [2.7.22] as ‘suffering, self-denial, and weakness’, in contrast with the man’s natural talent, his roughness and ferocity, just as he has defined the woman’s nature as passive, the man’s as active [2.1.26]. He has also listed the female traits that one sort of man of the third nature imitates: ‘chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness’ [2.9.2]. Now, since he has maintained [at 2.8. 39] that the woman ‘unveils her own feelings completely when her passion drives her to get on top’, the feelings of the woman when she plays the man’s role seem to be both male and female. Or, rather, when she acts like a man, she pretends to be a man and then pretends to be a woman.

  The poet Amaru wrote a verse about a girl who forgets herself, and forgets her womanly modesty, as she makes love on top of her male partner, but then, as her memory returns, and with it her sense of shame, she suddenly becomes aware of her own body and releases [mukta] first her male nature and then her lover.49 The thirteenth-century commentator Arjunavarmadeva glosses the verse, in part, like this:

  An impassioned woman in the woman-on-top position abandons, first, maleness, and, right after that, her lover. What happened? She perceived her own body, which she had not recognized at all while she was impassioned. Only later is there any mention of the distinction between being male or female. She is described as becoming modest only at the onset of memory.50

  The sequence here seems to be that she takes on a male nature, loses her natural female modesty, suddenly regains her memory, regains her modesty, recognizes her female body, lets go of her male nature, and lets go (physically) of the man. The interrelationship between gendered actions (male on top, female on the bottom), gendered natures (males rough, females modest), and gendered bodies, together with the loss and recovery of a sense of one’s own body balanced against the holding and releasing of the body of a sexual partner, is complex indeed. (It becomes even more complex when we recall that ‘release’ is the same word that, on the one hand, Vatsyayana uses for the courtesan’s technique of getting rid of an unwanted lover [at 6.3.44] and that, on the other hand, in a religious context, signifies ultimate liberation from the wheel of rebirth.) Altogether, these readings of homo- and heteroerotic passages, some closer to the text than others, suggest various ways in which the Kamasutra’s implicit claim to sexual totality might be opened out into a vision of gender infinity.

  Psychology and Culture in the Kamasutra

  The Kamasutra can be viewed as an account of a psychological war of independence that took place in India some two thousand years ago. The first aim of this struggle was the rescue of erotic pleasure from the crude purposefulness of sexual desire, from its biological function of reproduction alone. The first European translators of the Kamasutra in the late nineteenth century, clearly on the side of sexual pleasure in a society where the reigning Christian morality sought to subordinate, if not altogether eradicate it in service of a divinely ordained reproductive goal, regarded the ancient Sanskrit text, devoted to the god of love without even a nod to the divinities who preside over fertility and birth, as a welcome ally. To them, the Kamasutra was the product of a place and people who had raised the search for sexual pleasure to the status of a religious quest. Lamairesse, the French translator, even called it a ‘Théologie Hindoue’ that revealed vital truths regarding man’s fundamental, sexual nature. Richard Schmidt, the German translator, would wax lyrical: ‘The burning heat of the Indian sun, the fabulous luxuriance of the vegetation, the enchanted poetry of moonlit nights permeated by the perfume of lotus flowers and, not least, the distinctive role the Indian people have always played, the role of unworldly dreamers, philosophers, impractical romantics—all combine to make the Indian a real virtuoso in love.’51

  Vatsyayana and other ancient Indian sexologists can certainly be viewed as flag bearers for sexual pleasure in an era where the sombre Buddhist view of life which equated the god of love with Mara or Death was still influential. But they were also inheritors of another world-view, that of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, in which sexual love is usually a straightforward matter of desire and its gratification. This was especially so for the man, for whom a woman was an instrument of pleasure and an object of the senses (indriyartha), one physical need among many others. There is an idealization of marriage in the epics, yes, but chiefly as a social and religious act. The obligation of conjugal love and the virtue of chastity within marriage were primarily demanded of the wife, while few limits were set on a husband who lived under and looked up at a licentious heaven teeming with lusty gods and heavenly whores, otherworldly and utterly desirable at once, and most eager to give and take pleasure. The Hindu pantheon of the epics was not unlike the Greek Olympus where gods and goddesses sport and politic with a welcome absence of moralistic subterfuge.

  Vatsyayana and the early sexologists were thus also heirs to a patrimony where sexual desire ran rampant, unchecked by moral constraints. Indeed, Shvetaketu Auddalaki, one of the legendary composers of the first textbooks on sex, was credited with trying to put an end to unbridled sexual coupling and a certain profligacy in relation to intercourse with married women which is so prominent in the Mahabharata. Prior to Shvetaketu’s treatise, both married and unmarried women were viewed as items for indiscriminate consumption, ‘like cooked rice’, Yashodhara tells us [1.1.9]. Shvetaketu was the first to make the novel suggestion that men should not generally sleep with the wives of other men.

  In addition to rescuing erotic pleasure from the confining morality of fertility and reproduction, the Kamasutra’s ‘freedom struggle’ also had a second aim. This was to find a haven for the erotic from the ferocity of unchecked sexual desire. For desire has an open, lustful intent, imperiously and precipitously seeking satisfaction for its own sake, a tidal rush of gut instinct. Human beings have always sensed that sexual desire may also have other aims besides the keen pleasure of genital intercourse and orgasm. For instance, the sexual fantasies of men and women are often coloured with the darker purposes of destructive aggres
sion.52 Without an imagined violence, however minimal, attenuated, and distant from awareness, many men fail to be gripped by powerful sexual excitement; aggressiveness towards the woman is as much a factor in their potency as are their loving feelings. One of the major fantasies of such men is of taking by force that which is not easily given; some imagine the woman not wishing to participate in the sexual experience but then being carried away by the man’s forcefulness despite herself. We find a variant of this ‘possession fantasy’ in classical Sanskrit love poetry composed about the time of the Kamasutra, with its predilection for love scenes where the woman trembles in a state of diffuse but nongenital bodily excitement as if timorously anticipating an attack, her terror a source of excitement for both herself and her would-be assailant. In the eighth canto of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, a masterpiece of erotic poetry also roughly contemporaneous with the Kamasutra, Shiva’s excitement reached a crescendo when Parvati ‘in the beginning felt both fear and love’.53