On the Kamasutra

The Kamasutra, which many people regard as the paradigmatic textbook for sex, was composed in North India, probably in the third century C.E., in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India. There is nothing remotely like it even now, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisticated; it was already well known in India at a time when the Europeans were still swinging in trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking.

The Kamasutra is known in English almost entirely through the translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton, published over a century ago, in 1893. A new translation that I have been preparing, with my colleague Sudhir Kakar, for Oxford World Classics, reveals for the first time the text's surprisingly modern ideas about gender and unexpectedly subtle stereotypes of feminine and masculine natures. It also reveals relatively liberal attitudes to women's education and sexual freedom, and far more complex views on homosexual acts than are suggested by other texts of this period. And it makes us see just what Burton got wrong, and ask why he got it wrong.

Most Americans and Europeans today think that the Kamasutra is just about sexual positions. Reviews of books dealing with the Kamasutra in recent years have had titles like "Assume the Position" and "Position Impossible." In India, Kamasutra is the name of a condom; in America, one website offered The Kamasutra of Pooh, posing stuffed animals in compromising positions (Piglet on Pooh, Pooh mounting Eeyore, and so forth). The part of the Kamasutra describing the positions may have been the best-thumbed passage in previous ages of sexual censorship, but nowadays, when sexually explicit novels, films, and instruction manuals are available everywhere, that part is the least useful.

The real Kamasutra, however, is not the sort of book to be read in bed when drinking heavily, let alone held in one hand in order to keep the other hand free. The product of a culture quite remote from our own, it is in fact 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. In the Burton translation, read now in the shadow of Edward Said, it seems to be about Orientalism. Read in the wake of Michel Foucault, it seems to be about power, and in the wake of Judith Butler, about the control of women and the denial of homosexuals. I do not think these are its primary concerns, but it certainly is about gender, and to that extent Said, Foucault, and Butler are essential companions for us as we read it today.
We can learn a lot about conventional Indian ideas of gender from the Kamasutra. The author, Vatsyayana, describes typically female behavior: "dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness." The closest he has to a word for our "gender" is "natural talent" or "glory" (tejas) [at Z.7.22]: "A man's natural talent is his roughness and ferocity; a woman's is her lack of power and her suffering, selfdenial, and weakness."
What happens when people deviate from these norms? The Kamasutra departs from conventional contemporary Hindu views in significant ways.
First, it has what appears to be a third gender: "There are two sorts of third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man. The one in the form of a woman imitates a woman's dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness. The one in the form of a man, however, conceals her desire when she wants a man and makes her living as a masseur"
[2.9.1 - 6]. Though the Kamasutra quickly dismisses the cross-dressing male, with his stereotypical female gender behavior, 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 - 241.
In addition, the book's long passage about the woman playing the role of a man while making love on top of a man blurs conventional Indian ideas of gender. Vatsyayana acknowledges that people do, sometimes, reverse gender roles: "Their passion and a particular technique may sometimes lead them even to exchange roles; but not for very long. In the end, the natural roles are reestablished" [2.7.23]. This switch of "natural talents" is precisely what happens when the woman is on top [2.8.6], a position that most Sanskrit texts refer to as the "perverse" or "reversed" or "topsy-turvy" position (viparitam). Vatsyayana never uses this term, referring to the woman-on-top position only with the verb "to play the man's role" (purushayitva). Even while she is playing that role, however, she mimes her own conventional gender behavior [2.8.6]: "And, at the same time, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop."
A thirteenth-century commentary (by Yashodhara) spells out the gender complications: "She now does these acts against the current of her own natural talent, 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." Now, since Vatsyayana insists [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.