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This was the first new English translation of the Kama Sutra to be published in the west for nearly 100 years - it was preceded only by the 1888 translation of Burton and Arbuthnot. This translation was published in 1980 and is the famous version whose chapter on lovemaking positions, thanks to a long-ago act of cyber-piracy, can now be found right across the internet.

THE FAMOUS CHAPTER ON POSTURES - CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

A lot of people think the lovemaking chapter is the whole of the Kama Sutra, but Vatsyayana's text is not just about sex. It is a fascinating glimpse into the life, culture and manners of ancient India.

ARTS & SCIENCES

Fashionable men and women were advised to become expert in sixty-four arts and sciences which included performing on musical instruments, blending perfumes, horticulture and plant medicine, inventing a private language and wood-carving. Indian courtesans, like their Greek counterparts, were highly cultivated, sophisticated people. Vatsyayana promises that a woman who knows these arts can always make a good living.

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ON SOCIETY LIFE

Vatsyayana gives us a fascinating description of the daily life of a wealthy man, who sleeps in a bed strewn with fresh flowers, perfumes his body with sandalwood and outlines his eyes with collyrium. He spends his days teaching parrots to talk, attending cock fights and going out to taverns or pleasure houses to talk of art, poetry and listen to singers. Later, he will welcome his lover to his beautifully appointed house, and if she has been caught in a shower of rain, will offer to towel her dry.

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The chapter on beginning and ending lovemaking is one of the tenderest things in the book.

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LIFE IN A WEALTHY INDIAN HOUSEHOLD c350CE

Flowers and herbs for the garden, supervision of kitchen and servants, production of food and drink and ways to practise small economies – all these are the domain of the woman of the house. Let her fulfil her wifely dharma, says Vatsyayana, and she will be spared the curse of having co-wives.

Should a woman be unlucky enough to find herself one of a number of wives, Vatsyayana offers her advice on how to act to her best advantage. Instructions for manipulating other women and their common husband are given with complete sangfroid. The Kama Sutra is a book for pragmatists.

 

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT KAMA SUTRA

The Kama Sutra is neither a sex-manual nor, as also commonly believed, a sacred or religious work. It is certainly not a tantric text. In opening with a discussion of the three aims of ancient Hindu life – dharma, artha and kama – Vatsyayana's purpose is to set kama, or enjoyment of the senses, in context. Thus dharma or virtuous living is the highest aim, artha, the amassing of wealth is next, and kama is the least of the three.

Having paid lip service to the higher aims of life, Vatsyayana begins to show us a brilliant and amoral society with pleasures as refined as those of ancient Rome or Athens. Religion is soon forgotten. In the Kama Sutra's list of desirable accomplishments, chanting from sacred texts comes between composing tonguetwisters and quoting from the latest plays.

True, the citizen is urged to take part in drama festivals staged in the temples of Saraswati but he is expected to throw parties for the actors. Other named festivals are those of Shiva, Ganesh and the Yakshas (which Burton misread as "akshas" or dice, thus giving rise to the nonsensical instruction to spend nights playing dice). The reader is specifically told to avoid secret sects which practise degrading rituals and this may be a reference to early tantric practices. (For a discussion of the origins of such practices see my book Tantra.)

Many people wish to believe that Vatsyayana wrote with a high moral purpose, but the evidence of the text is to the contrary. The Kama Sutra is amoral from beginning to end, advocating all sorts of opportunistic, selfish and unsocial behaviour, including seducing the wives of friends and strangers, raping peasant girls and, if one is a king, capturing and enslaving any woman one likes. In its unabashed advocacy of whatever conduces to one's own advantage, it is like Kautilya's Arthashastra. (SEE THIS BIZARRE STORY) The closest thing in western literature is Machiavelli.

WHY A NEW TRANSLATION

Some time in the late 1970s I was reading Burton’s version and thinking how inadequately the Victorian English represented Vatsyayana’s unembarrassed original, composed in the exuberant Gupta Empire between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE.

The Gupta emperors were great patrons of the arts. Under their rule, poetry, drama, dance and music flourished. Large cities had art galleries, chitrashalas where people could go to look at paintings and sculpture. The standing positions (chitrasanas or "picture-postures") in the text are so-called because they resemble groups of erotic statuary.

The carving above is from a Khajuraho temple built by Chandela kings in the 10th and 11th centuries. There can be no doubt that the poses were influenced by those described in the Kama Sutra, but the sculptors may have had a hard time deciphering Vatsyayana's text, which was composed in sutras, or aphorisms, condensed to the point of inscrutability.

vadaveva nishturam avagrhniyaad iti vaadavakam aabhyaasikam

Like a mare cruelly gripping is the Mare, it needs practice.

Meanings of sutras like this one had to be explained and expanded by commentators. The Jayamangala commentary which accompanies most Sanskrit editions of the Kama Sutra was written in the 12th century, some eight centuries after the original. For the sutra above the Jayamangala adds that the "Mare's Trick" was perfected by courtesans and popular among women of the Andhra region of south central India. When you read the translations of Burton and others you are in fact mostly reading the Jayamangala.

I decided to take a different tack and expand the sutras into stanzas of rhythmic prose, bringing in facts, ideas and imagery from the commentary and from poets whose work explores the mysteries of kama, above all trying to recreate and vividly bring to life the era and culture in which Vatsyayana lived and wrote. Mine, therefore, is not a literal word-by-word translation but more an idea-by-idea reconstruction. The miniatures were sourced by my wife during a three month trip we made to India.

OTHER TRANSLATIONS

Since our version appeared in 1980, there has been a wonderful edition of the Burton text by my old friends Mulk Raj Anand and Lance Dane (1982) which I can thoroughly recommend, plus excellent new translations, notably by Alain Danielou (1993), the great authority on Indian classical music, and Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002).

However the version my wife and I created during our trip to India – which was also incidentally the first to use Indian miniatures to illustrate the text – remains unique in its approach. The English edition has now been in print continuously for almost thirty years and has been re-rendered into languages as obscure as Brazilian Portuguese and Finnish.

Indra Sinha, published 1980		Mulk Raj Anand, published 1982
Alain Daniélou, published 1993		Wendy Doniger, published 2002

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