http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/ae/books/reviews/1500020
Who wrote the book of love?
By CARLIN ROMANO
KAMASUTRA.
By Vatsyayana Mallanaga.
Translated by Wendy Doniger
and Sudhir Kakar.
Oxford University Press,
$26; 250 pp.
VATSYAYANA, as the Dr. Ruth of third-century India usually referred to himself, missed his epoch.
For one thing, he’s got that thoroughly modern, in-your-face bluntness. The following women, he declares, “are not eligible to be lovers: a leper, a lunatic, a fallen woman, a woman who tells secrets, who asks for it in public, whose prime of youth is almost entirely gone, who is too light or too dark, bad-smelling, a relative, a woman friend, a wandering female ascetic, or the wife of a relative, of a friend, of a Brahmin who knows the Veda, or of a king.”
OK – you can nitpick on a couple of those.
For another thing, despite that seemingly misogynistic tilt, he’s actually the best pal ancient Indian women ever had. How’s this advice in a section titled “Ways to Get Rid of Him”?
"She has affairs with men who are superior to him. She ignores him. She criticizes men who have the same faults. … She is upset by the things he does for her when they are making love. She does not offer him her mouth. She keeps him away from between her legs. …
“When he tries to hug her, she repels him by making a `needle’ with her arms. Her limbs remain motionless. She crosses her thighs. … When she sees that he is exhausted, she urges him on. She laughs at him when he cannot do it, and she shows no pleasure when he can. When she notices that he is aroused, even in the daytime, she goes out to be with a crowd.”
Yep, that will get rid of him.
Throw in some reincarnation and publishers would be battling to market Vatsyayana and his gem of Indian erotic literature with a hot new title – Monsoon Sexbook – and a 20-city tour outside the Bible Belt.
Alas, you’ll have to settle for a fresh translation of the Kamasutra, gloriously rendered by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar. Put Doniger, one of the University of Chicago’s top historians of religion, and Kakar, India’s leading psychoanalyst of sex, together and you’ve got the kind of moxie and revisionist energy that lead some to try “splitting the bamboo.” (See text for details – we’re not talking about “the Funky Chicken.”)
Nonscholars misunderstand the Kamasutra. It is not, the authors say, “a book about the positions in sexual intercourse.” Rather, it’s “a book about the art of living.” While it does endure as “the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love,” it retains "its classic status because it is at bottom about essential, unchangeable human attributes – lust, love, shyness, rejection, seduction, manipulation. … "
“Kamasutra is a treatise (sutra) about desire/love/pleasure/sex (kama).” Almost nothing is known about its author beyond his punchy style and his claim he wrote the book “in chastity and in the highest meditation.”
The Kamasutra first gained Western notoriety after Sir Richard Francis Burton published an English translation in 1883. According to Doniger and Kakar, the “inaccurate” translation downplayed a woman’s sexual satisfaction and freedom. The Kamasutra came to be seen “as pornography masquerading as Orientalism masquerading as literature and then became the object of prurient mockery.”
What Burton eliminated, Doniger and Kakar restore. In a highly entertaining and learned 57-page “introduction packed with crisp insights and droll asides, they put the Kamasutra in historical context, outline its numerological conceits, and clarify its gender ambiguities. They also probe its psychology, quote famous commentaries, detail its scandalous popular image, and recall how Burton brought it to light.”
In the Kamasutra, they make clear, principles of kama converse with those of two other aims of human life: artha (power, money) and dharma (religion/law/morality). Vatsyayana, the editors explain, remains “in conversation with the asceticism” of the early Upanishads. Far from being exclusively a clinical sex manual, the Kamasutra was a cutting-edge reflection on love that didn’t censor the bare facts.
Throughout, the editors express admiration for Vatsyayana. They see the Kamasutra as both a brief for sexual pleasure in an age when Buddhism linked love with death, and an effort “to find a haven for the erotic from the ferocity of unchecked sexual desire.”
Carlin Romano wrote this for the Philadelphia Inquirer.