The Kama Sutra as a Work of Philosophy

By MANU JOSEPH

NEW DELHI — Yoga is hard for most Indians, too, and they certainly don’t practice it while having sex. They probably never attempted such a combination in their whole history. The global view that ancient Indians performed extreme gymnastics while making love was seeded by a late-19th-century English translation of a Sanskrit text called the Kama Sutra, which contained, among other things, details of sexual positions, practical advice on seduction and a note on types of erotic women, who were named after mammals even though, as a book released this month observes, they made noises like birds.

“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. She does not blame Christian missionaries either. She says that the conservative stream was always powerful in Hindu society and that over the centuries it came to dominate — which would explain the decision by the country’s film censor board to ban “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Follow Manu Joseph, author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People,” on Twitter at @manujosephsan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/world/asia/the-kama-sutra-as-a-work-of-philosophy.html?_r=