"Kamasutra" redux

In the Hindu world the pursuit of sexual pleasure was revered as a sort of religious quest. Imagine a world where getting laid was just as important as going to church on Easter.

By Michael Castleman

May 29, 2002 | Everyone knows the "Kamasutra" is ancient India's racy sex manual. The title conjures titillating visions of erotic frescos in which regal maharajas with outsized genitals cavort with naked bejeweled nymphs in positions exotic enough to slip the discs of a yoga master.

But few Americans have read it -- not even the "good parts," the sexual positions that made the book famous, but that account for only about one-quarter of its length (46 of 172 pages). Even those who have read the major English translation of the "Kamasutra" have not fully appreciated the book because that translation -- how can I put this delicately? Well, it sucks. It dates from 1883 and was published just once in the U.S., 40 years ago in 1962. Richard Burton, the British army officer responsible for it, was the editor from hell. He altered the text considerably to shoehorn it into Victorian views about sexuality, notably the then popular notions that only men experience sexual desire and pleasure, and that women are nothing more than the passive recipients of men's lust.

Some 1,700 years after it was written, the English-speaking world is about to get its first glimpse of what the real "Kamasutra" says, thanks to a new translation scheduled to appear in June. It rights the many wrongs Burton did to the text, and reveals the "Kamasutra" for what it truly is -- a guidebook for cultivating a highly eroticized life. It's "Sex and the City" circa A.D. 300, only the focus is on men instead of Sarah Jessica Parker and her girlfriends (though some of the text is clearly intended for fourth century Indian women).

The new translation reveals a "Kamasutra" in some ways remarkably modern and progressive: Women are as sexual as men, and men should work to provide women with erotic pleasure, including orgasms. But before you embrace the book as your new sexual bible, be forewarned. Some of what it says is controversial: Adultery is a fact of life and it's all right, even fun -- for men only -- as long as the women's husbands don't find out. Some of the "Kamasutra" is callous and repugnant: If a woman persistently refuses a man's advances, he is justified in raping her. Perhaps most remarkable, the "Kamasutra"'s vaunted sex advice is surprisingly tame. For example, the book expresses considerable ambivalence about oral sex, a very popular universal element in modern Western lovemaking.

The new translation (published by Oxford University Press) has been compiled by Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, and Sudhir Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst and senior fellow at Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard. They returned to the original Sanskrit, and produced a translation at once more honest and more erotic than its Victorian predecessor. They also include copious notes that place the text in its historical and linguistic context, rather like a well-annotated edition of a Shakespeare play. I doubt the Doniger-Kakar "Kamasutra" will make the bestseller list, but if you're a serious student of sex, or of India, or if you and your honey want to read each other a different kind of pillow book, the new translation is fascinating, thought-provoking and occasionally even amusing.

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