The “Kamasutra”: It Isn’t All about Sex

The Kamasutra, which many people regard as the paradigmatic textbook for sex, the sex text, was composed in North India, probably in the third century C.E., in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India. (Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana, other than his name and what we learn from this text.) 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 well over a century ago, in 1883.¹ A new translation that my colleague Sudhir Kakar and I have prepared, for Oxford World Classics,² 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 of 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, the erotic counterpart to the ascetic asanas of yoga. Reviews of books dealing with the Kamasutra in recent years have had titles like “Assume the Position” and “Position Impossible.” One Web site offered The Kamasutra of Pooh, posing stuffed animals in compromising positions (Piglet on Pooh, Pooh mounting Eeyore, etc.); another posed Kermit the Frog in action on an unidentified stuffed animal. My Palm Pilot has a copyrighted “Pocket Sutra: The Kama Sutra in the palm of your hand,” which offers “lying down positions,” “sitting positions,” “rear-entry positions,” “standing positions,” “role reversal,” and many more. In India, KamaSutra is the name of a condom;³ in America, it is the name of a wristwatch that displays a different position every hour. A recent Roz Chast cartoon entitled “The Kama Sutra of Grilled Cheese” began with “#14: The Righteous Lion” (“place on hot, well-lubricated griddle. Fry until bread and cheese become one”).⁴ Robin Williams includes in his act what John Lahr calls “a fantasy of lascivious Olympic figure skating” and Williams himself calls “the Kama Sutra on ice.”⁵ A book called The Popup Kamasutra failed to take full advantage of the possibilities of this genre; the whole couple pops up.