This essay was written in 1979 in Bombay and London as an Introduction to the first edition of The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra. It was published by Hamlyn the following year and not revised for subsequent editions. Some of the things I wrote thirty years ago I would put differently now, however I decided to leave the original essay as it was. Points where I wish to quarrel with myself are marked with Notes. Other changes: Sanskrit words are given in italics the first time they are used, but not thereafter. I’ve taken the opportunity of adding some illustrations to what was eight pages of uninterrupted text.I’ve also introduced subheads as a guide and aid to the reader. – Indra Sinha, Sussex, 2010

WITH THE PROBABLE EXCEPTION of svastika, no two Sanskrit words are more widely known and misunderstood than Kama Sutra In the West the work is commonly believed to be a salacious, anecdotal account of exotic lovemaking, yet in India it is often given to young brides to read before their weddings. My own introduction to it was when, at a boarding school in the Rajasthan desert, a bearded, turbanned college-servant smuggled in a poorly-printed copy of the Burton translation for a friend who had heard it was a ‘hot’ book. I can still remember our boredom and disappointment.

Kama Sutra contains no anecdotes and is very far from being merely a sex manual. Only one book of its seven deals with the techniques of physical lovemaking. The rest cover subjects as diverse as how to furnish and decorate a house, how to woo a bride, how husbands and wives are to behave to one another, how religious festivals are to be celebrated, the kitchen provisioned and the garden planted. Kama Sutra is an attempt, the earliest extant (See Note 1), to define the whole relationship between a man and a woman.

At the heart of this relationship, of course, is the sexual act. The questions Kama Sutra sets out to answer are: with whom should this act be performed, under what circumstances should it be performed, and how should it be performed? The approach, therefore, is that of a shastra or scientific text, which is why it was composed in sutras, propositions or aphorisms. Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Patanjali’s yoga teachings were also composed in sutras.

Kama, which is the name of the Hindu god of love, means ‘pleasure’. Not just sexual pleasure, but any pleasure which can be experienced through the senses, for instance sniffing a rose or listening to music. Kama Sutra itself defines the term thus:

Kama is the delight of body, mind and soul
in exquisite sensation;
awaken eyes, nose, tongue, ears and skin,
and between sense and sensed
the essence of Kama will flower.

Kama Sutra can thus be translated as ‘Aphorisms on Pleasure’.

The work was composed by Mallanage Vatsyayana, some time between the second and fifth centuries CE. My own inclination is to place Vatsyayana in the middle of the fourth century, during the reign of the Gupta emperor Samudragupta, but the question is unresolved. (See note 2) We know nothing of the author beyond what he tells us himself: that he was a celibate yogi who had attained samadhi, which might vulgarly be translated as enlightenment. In his day he was perhaps as famous a teacher as are, for instance, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh or Maharish Mahesh Yogi today (indeed Vatsyayana has been called Maharishi in India for centuries). (See Note 3) He himself states quite clearly that the work was not written for any motive other than to enable people to understand Kama and to use and enjoy it properly.

Kama is one of the three great aims of Hindu life, but it must always be pursued in harmony with the other two, Dharma and Artha. These terms have no English equivalents, but are crucial to the understanding of Kama Sutra. Dharma, from the Sanskrit root ‘dhru’, to hold, is religious, moral and social duty. It means acting in accordance with religious teachings, the laws of society and one’s own conscience and nature. It is a duty determined, as much as anything, by gender. caste and status, and is therefore not the same for everyone. The warrior’s Dharma, as Lord Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, is to fight and kill; the priest’s is to bless and conduct sacrifices; the labourer’s is to labour, and the courtesan’s is to give pleasure to her clients. By fulfilling one’s Dharma, so the belief goes, one is freed from the accumulated sins of one’s past lives and from the cycle of life and death.

Artha is simpler – the duty to amass wealth and possessions for the benefit of one’s family. It is interesting to note that learning and craft-skills are considered part of Artha. The practice of Artha must always be tempered by Dharma, otherwise it is sheer opportunism. Kautilya, in his Arthashastra (The Science of Artha) often out-Machiavellis Machiavelli. Kama, Artha and Dharma are to be pursued in harmony, no one overshadowing the other two. In Bhagavad-Gita Lord Krishna says: ‘I am that Kama which is consonant with Dharma.’ It is the Dharma of a married man to make love to his wife, and if there is merit to be gained in doing something, there is more merit to be gained from doing it well. No wonder Kama Sutra and the medieval love texts are so prodigiously detailed, written to create connoisseurs of sensuality; it is all part of Dharma.

This is why the house is to be filled with flowers, scented with perfumes, decorated with objects to delight the eye, attended by skilled singers, dancers and musicians, furnished with the softest rugs and pillows. Only the most delicious foods and wines are to be served at parties, only the most beautiful clothes worn, and the conversation is always to sparkle with it. So with lovemaking. The lists of techniques provide sensations which can be chosen and savoured like delicacies from a gourmet menu. This need not be as contrived and unspontaneous as it sounds. We could regard the techniques as a grammar of love that has to be mastered before one can express oneself with fluency and felicity. Or, more aptly perhaps, as five finger exercises in raga and tala, melody and rhythms, which need practising before music can be made. Indeed, the reason I have included so many positions from the medieval texts is to illustrate the way lovemaking should flow, like a raga played by an Indian ustaad, from one perfectly executed figure to the next, improvised but effortless.

In hatha-yoga also, and in the dance, we encounter positions (also called asanas) which are held for a few moments and which then flow into the next. We know that Bharata’s Natyashastra, the seminal work on Indian dance, proundly influenced at least the medieval writers on love, but the relationship between hatha-yoga and the love texts has never been sufficiently explored. They have in common that they call their physical exercises asanas and bandhas (knots); Vatsyayana cites Padmasana (the Lotus Posture), the most famous of all yoga postures, as one of his positions. And dozens of the medieval lovemaking postures are clearly yoga-derived. But it is only with the development of tantra that the yoga disicplines of posture and breath-control are at last combined with sexual practices in the service of meditation and to unite the worshipper with the cosmic energy, or shakti, symbolised by the great goddess.

The earliest tantra texts of the Shakta school are said to have been written in about the seventh century AD, but the tradition, even today, is largely oral, and according to one authority was already well developed in the time of the Guptas, which is where I place Vatsyayana. In its earliest forms, it dates back to Vedic times. A shadowy work quoted in the Chandogya Upanishad (c. 800 BC) is the Vamadevya, ‘a song concerned with sexual congress’, which compares the sexual act to a religious sacrifice, identifying each stage with a corresponding stage in the ritual. And the oldest of the Upanishads (the early commentaries on the Vedas), the Brihadaranyaka, says:

Woman is the sacrificial fire,
the lips of her yoni the fuel.
the hairs around them the smoke,
and the vagina itself the flame.
The act of penetration is the lighting,
the feelings of pleasure are the sparks.
In this fire the gods offer up semen-seed,
and from this offering man is born.

The teacher of this doctrine was the guru of Svetaketu Auddalaki, whom Vatsyayana claims as one of his own predecessors.

Could Vatsyayana have been aware of an oral tantric tradition when he wrote Kama Sutra? One place where a covert reference may be intended is a sutra towards the end of Book II, Compatibility, in which he gives a list of synonyms and euphemisms for the sexual act. The order in which these occur suggests two sequences, first the physical chain reaction which is to be harnessed, and second, the techniques to be used in a religious ritual analagous to the secret ritual of the tantras. There is no other logical reason why the list should appear in this place, or indeed at all, and it is followed by the cryptic statement that ‘people of intelligence and sensitivity will find these remarks sufficient.’ My interpretation of the relevant sutra (II 1.32 in the Chaukamba text) will be found on page 44. Of the medieval texts, Ratiratnapradipika is particularly full of references to tantra and actually gives a posture which it attributes to the Kaula tantrics, who used ritualised intercourse in their worship. These speculations should not, perhaps, be taken very seriously. I have laboured the point precisely because the relationship of Kama Sutra to hatha-yoga and tantra remains so unclear. Perhaps some scholar will be goaded to research. It is certainly beyond question that Vatsyayana’s main objective is not to retail mysticism but simply to maximise the pleasure that men and women can get from lovemaking, and to chronicle sexual practice as it existed in his day.

Although he wrote nearly two thousand years ago, Vatsyayana’s chapters on the techniques of lovemaking and seduction seem uncannily modern. He attacks the old belief, propounded by Auddalaki some eleven hundred years before him, that there is no such thing as a female orgasm, and goes further, to say that men should always consider women’s pleasure before their own. The absurd belief that penis-size has anything to do with satisfying a lover is dismissed in the very enlightened section on compatibility.