The Kāmasūtra

The Kāmasūtra (“Aphorisms on Love/Pleasure”), attributed to Vātsyāyana Mallanaga and composed probably in the third century CE, is the classical Sanskrit treatise on kāma — pleasure, desire, love and sexuality — one of the three aims of life (trivarga) alongside Dharma (virtue) and artha (wealth and power, the subject of the The Arthaśāstra). It is famous in the West as a sex manual, but most of it is about something broader: the cultivated life of the urban gentleman and lady, courtship, marriage, the management of a household, relations between co-wives, the arts of conversation and pleasure, and the psychology of love.

Contents

Book 1 places kāma among the aims of life: dharma is higher than artha, artha than kāma, but each has its proper time; one should pursue all three without letting any destroy the others. Against those who say pleasure is dangerous and should be avoided, Vātsyāyana answers that pleasures are as necessary for the body as food, and that “people do not stop cooking because there are beggars, nor stop sowing barley because there are deer”. He describes the daily life of the nāgaraka, the cultivated man-about-town — bathing, dressing, perfuming, visiting friends, enjoying music, poetry, picnics, drinking parties and festivals — and lists the sixty-four arts (kalās) that a cultivated person, man or woman, should know: singing, instrumental music, dancing, painting, decorating with flowers, perfumery, cooking, sewing, carpentry, architecture, chemistry, magic, riddles, poetry composition, teaching parrots to speak, chess, gymnastics, languages and many more.

Book 2, on sexual union, describes types of lovers, embraces, kisses, scratches, bites, positions, the roles of men and women, and quarrels. It insists that the woman’s pleasure matters and that the man should know when she is satisfied. Books 3 to 6 describe courtship and acquiring a wife, the duties of a wife and of co-wives, the seduction of other men’s wives (with warnings), and the life and strategies of courtesans — told largely from the courtesan’s point of view. Book 7 gives recipes for aphrodisiacs and charms.

Significance

The Kāmasūtra is the earliest surviving text of a tradition of kāmaśāstra that included later works like the Ratirahasya and Anaṅgaraṅga. Its presence in Sanskrit literature shows that classical Indian culture treated pleasure as a serious subject, deserving its own science. Modern scholars — Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar — have read it as a document of social history and a sophisticated psychology of love, with surprisingly modern attention to the woman’s perspective. Its Victorian translation by Richard Burton made it notorious in the West.