[Very little is known about the
origins of the Kama Sutra. No portion of the original text has survived. It was
probably written in Sanskrit by one Vatsyayana. He seems to have been a
compiler of sexual habits, and he blamed another scholar for inventing some of
the very difficult sexual positions. Ms. Doniger believes that the Kama Sutra
is about 2,000 years old, but she told me that this is based solely on circumstantial
evidence.]
 |
“The Mare’s Trap: Nature and
Culture in the Kamasutra” by Wendy Doniger, an American academic, argues, as
some discerning couples may have suspected, that the sex in the Kama Sutra is
more prank than instructional manual. But the grand ambition of her book is to
elevate the Kama Sutra to the status of two great philosophical works that have
influenced Indian society: Manu’s Dharmashastra, which invented castes and
defined women as subordinate to men, embarrassing some fine people who share
the author’s name, and Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a ruthless book on statecraft.
Very little is known about the origins of the Kama Sutra. No
portion of the original text has survived. It was probably written in Sanskrit
by one Vatsyayana. He seems to have been a compiler of sexual habits, and he
blamed another scholar for inventing some of the very difficult sexual
positions. Ms. Doniger believes that the Kama Sutra is about 2,000 years old,
but she told me that this is based solely on circumstantial evidence.
The reason she takes the Kama Sutra so seriously is that even
though she feels that the sexual positions were fantasies, she sees in the rest
of the work nothing short of anthropology, a rare portrait of an affluent
ancient society. Also, there are stylistic similarities between the Kama Sutra
and the works of Manu and Kautilya. All three include psychological analyses
and instructions and divide people into types.
The Kama Sutra is for and about the rich. It has very little to
say about the poor except as sexual prey. Ms. Doniger suspects it was
originally a seven-act play about the art of love. The unnamed protagonist is
referred to as nagaraka, a “man-about-town.” He is urban and rich. He has “a
foam bath every third day,” the Kama Sutra says, “his body hair removed every
fifth or tenth day … and he continually cleans the sweat from his armpits.”
As with men today, his penis is
egalitarian. This is a significant revelation of the Kama Sutra, according to
Ms. Doniger, because it seems to defy the laws of Manu that divide society into
castes and condemns their mingling.
The Kama Sutra does not prohibit women, either, from having
flings with those in the lower castes, but it does ask them to be prudent. It
appears to portray a society that was far less rigid than what Manu ordained,
and that was friendlier to women.
Manu says, “Good looks do not
matter to them [women], nor do they care about youth. ‘A man!’ they say and
enjoy sex with him.” But Vatsyayana says a woman desires “any attractive man”
just as “a man desires a woman. But, after some consideration [by the woman],
the matter goes no further.”
While Manu wants to restrain women, Vatsyayana takes female
promiscuity for granted. He says that men who want to pick up married women
would have a good chance in temples, at weddings and, for some reason, in the
vicinity of a house that is on fire.
If the India portrayed in the Kama Sutra was real,
how did it become such a deeply conservative place? Ms. Doniger dismisses as
“jaded” V.S. Naipaul’s view that the Mughal invasion destroyed this liberal India
Follow Manu Joseph, author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness
of Other People,” on Twitter at @manujosephsan.
