Vatsyayan kamsutra photo
Married women are generally not to be seduced, we are taught, but if it helps to gain influence over a powerful husband or even perhaps to erase him from the world and acquire his wealth, it is acceptable to bed the wife as a weapon for one’s personal ambitions and avarice. In Book 1, we learn that if men of culture want to remain men of culture, they must allocate time every five-10 days to the removal of all their body hair.
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The remainder of the Kamasutra, in fact, offers a much wider series of discussions for the benefit of its wealthy and primarily male audience, covering not only sex but also matters of aesthetics and more.īook 5, for example, concerns itself with extramarital affairs and how one ought to go about getting in bed with another’s spouse, while another section in the same book investigates, tantalizingly but ultimately disappointingly, “Why Women Get Turned Off". But despite such interventions, even in that first 1883 translation, of 175-odd pages, Burton could devote only 40 to this theme. Burton, bent as he was on “the sexual liberation of Victorian society", seems to have highlighted these while watering down other elements.
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In actual fact, though, the Kamasutra is more than a manual for love-making-of the seven books that constitute its body, only the second is strictly concerned with methods of human congress. The loosely held opinion that the Kamasutra is a catalogue for boudoir gymnastics also owes much to this context: The pronounced disapproval with which topics around sexuality were viewed meant that its most colourful components acquired, ironically, a life of their own, feelings of taboo fuelling a mischievous appetite for the text. This, even when it wasn’t exactly sincere to Vatsyayana’s moral outlook from centuries before.
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But the gamble paid off-in time, the bogus Kama Shastra Society’s translation would become, as one scholar notes, “one of the most pirated books in the English language", registered across the world as the oldest and foremost classical text on all matters pertaining to love and human sexuality. The Sanskrit word yoni was used in the English text for the vagina, even when Vatsyayana himself never used that word in the actual Sanskrit original. For the Kamasutra, then, it took some creative thinking to evade Victorian prudery.
![vatsyayan kamsutra photo vatsyayan kamsutra photo](https://images-us.bookshop.org/ingram/9782491251673.jpg)
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There were several reasons why Sir Richard Francis Burton was paranoid about advertising his name with the book-British laws on obscenity were so draconian that printing anything even vaguely sexual could show writers the doors to prison. But even as the Kamasutra made its way into the great libraries of the West, the true identity of its translator remained shrouded for years behind this fictitious organization. That the translation, despite its infirmities, was indeed of Vatsyayana’s 1,600-year-old disquisition was not doubted. Ostensibly headquartered in Varanasi, with links to London and New York, the “Society" was actually a work of fiction, born from the minds of a couple of British officials and their associates in faraway India. In 1883, when the Kamasutra first made its appearance in English, European readers of Vatsyayana’s treatise hadn’t the faintest idea that its publisher-the Hindoo Kama Shastra Society-was, in fact, an entirely non-existent body.