The "Kamasutra": It Isn't All about Sex

Author(s): Wendy Doniger

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter, 2003), pp. 18-37
Published by: Kenyon College
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4338414 .
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 WendyDoniger

THE KAMASUTRA:
IT ISN'T ALL ABOUT SEX

T text-
he Kamasutra, whichmanypeopleregardas the paradigmatic
book for sex, the sex text, was composed in North India, probably
in the third century C.E., in Sanskrit, the literarylanguageof ancient
India. (Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana, other
than his name and what we learn from this text.) There is nothing
remotely like it even now, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisti-
cated; it was already well known in India at a time when the Europeans
were still swinging in trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking. The Kama-
sutra is known in English almost entirely through the translation by Sir
Richard Francis Burton, published well over a century ago, in 1883.1 A
new translation that my colleague Sudhir Kakarand I have prepared, for
Oxford World Classics,2 reveals for the first time the text's surprisingly
modern ideas about gender and unexpectedly subtle stereotypes of femi-
nine and masculine natures. It also reveals relatively liberal attitudes to
women's education and sexual freedom, and far more complex views of
homosexual acts than are suggested by other texts of this period. And it
makes us see just what Burton got wrong, and ask why he got it wrong.
Most Americans and Europeans today think that the Kamasutra
is just about sexual positions, the erotic counterpart to the ascetic asanas
of yoga. Reviews of books dealing with the Kamasutra in recent years
have had titles like "Assume the Position" and "Position Impossible."One
Web site offered The Kamasutraof Pooh, posing stuffed animals in com-
promising positions (Piglet on Pooh, Pooh mounting Eeyore, etc.); another
posed Kermit the Frog in action on an unidentified stuffed animal. My
Palm Pilot has a copyrighted "Pocket Sutra: The Kama Sutra in the palm

18
 Wendy Doniger

of your hand," which offers "lying down positions," "sitting positions,"

"rear-entry positions," "standing positions," "role reversal," and many
more. In India, KamaSutrais the name of a condom;3in America, it is the
name of a wristwatch that displays a different position every hour. A
recent Roz Chast cartoon entitled "The Kama Sutra of Grilled Cheese"
began with "#14: The Righteous Lion" ("place on hot, well-lubricated
griddle. Fry until bread and cheese become one").4 Robin Williams
includes in his act what John Lahr calls "a fantasy of lascivious Olympic
figure skating"and Williams himself calls "the KamaSutra on ice."5 A book
called The Popup Kamasutra failed to take full advantage of the possibili-
ties of this genre; the whole couple pops up.
More seriously, Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, took
the Kamasutra as a root metaphor for literary as well as physical desire:
"The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists:
it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its
Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself)."6The text for
sex is thus the sex of the text, too. V. S. Naipaul in his recent book, HalfA
Life, offers as the contemporary Indian attitude to the Kamasutra what is
more likely his own view:
[lIn our culture there is no seduction. Our marriages are arranged. There is no art of sex.
Some of the boys here talk to me of the Kama Sutra. Nobody talked about that at home. It
was an upper-caste text, but I don't believe my poor father, brahmin though he is, ever
looked at a copy. That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past,
and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims.7

In India today, westernized yuppie types will often give a copy of the Kama-
sutra as a wedding present, to demonstrate their open-mindedness and
sophistication, but most people will merely sneak a surreptitious look at it
in someone else's house.8 This statement by an adolescent girl in Vikram
Chandra'sstory, "Kama,"rings true: "SisterCannina didn't want to tell us.
It'sthe Kama Sutra, which she says isn't in the library.But Gisela'sparents
have a copy which they think is hidden away on the top of their shelf. We
looked it up there."And the adult to whom she tells this says, "Youput that
book back where you found it. And don't read any more."9The liminal posi-
tion of the Kanasutra in India today is strikinglysimilar to that of the New
Burlesque in Manhattan,as Adam Gopnik describes as:
In some measure, the New Burlesque is a way of ushering the old erotic theatre out of the
straw and stick houses of pornography and into the little brick house of downtown art,

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which, huffand puffas he will,the Mayorcannotblowdown.(Thisis becausethe drafty

holes in the downtownbrickhouses are stuffedwith the Arts & Leisuresection of the
lymes )10

Outside of India, the part of the Kamasutra describing the posi-

tions may have been the best-thumbed passage in previous ages of sexual
censorship, but nowadays, when sexually explicit novels, films, and
instruction manuals are available everywhere, that part is the least useful.
The real Kamasutra, however, is not just about the positions in sexual
intercourse, not the sort of book to read in bed while drinking heavily, let
alone holding the book with one hand in order to keep the other free. It is
a book about the art of living-about finding a partner,maintaining power
in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using
drugs-and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. In the Burton
translation, which we read now in the shadow of EdwardSaid, it seems to
be about orientalism, a simultaneously racist and romanticized European
attitude to colonized peoples. Read in the wake of Michel Foucault, it
seems to be about power, and in the wake of contemporary feminism,
about the control of women. I really do not think that these are its primary
concerns. As for power, it is almost unique in classical Sanskrit literature
in its almost total disregardof class and caste, though of course power rela-
tions of many kinds-gender, wealth, political position, as well as
caste-are implicit throughout the text. And it seems to me to be as much
about the control of men as about the control of women, though in very
different ways. But it certainly is about gender, and to that extent Said,
Foucault, and feminism are essential companions for us as we read it
today.
What is its genre? Beneath the veneer of a sexual textbook, the
Kamasutra resembles a work of dramatic fiction more than anything else.
The man and woman whose sex lives are described here are called the
hero and heroine, and the men who assist the hero are called the libertine,
pander, and clown. All of these are terms for stock characters in Sanskrit
dramas-the hero and heroine, sidekick, supporting player, and jester. Is
the Kamasutra a play about sex? Certainly it has a dramatic sequence,
and, like most classical Indian dramas, it has seven acts. In Act One,
which literally sets the stage for the drama, the bachelor sets up his pad;
in Act Two, he perfects his sexual technique. Then he seduces a virgin (Act
Three), gets married, and lives with a wife or wives (Act Four);tiring of her

20
 Wendy Doniger

(or them), he seduces other men's wives (Act Five), and when he tires of
that, he frequents courtesans (Act Six). Finally,when he is too old to man-
age it at all, he resorts to the ancient Indian equivalent of Viagra:
aphrodisiacs and magic spells (Act Seven).
Whom was it written for? It is difficult to assess how broad a spec-
trum of ancient Indian society knew the text firsthand. It would be good
to have more information about social conditions in India at the time of
the composition of the Kamasutra, but the Kamasutra itself is one of the
main sources that we have for such data; the text is, in a sense, its own
context. The production of manuscripts, especially illuminated manu-
scripts, was necessarily an elite matter; men of wealth and power, kings
and merchants, would commission texts to be copied out for their private
use. It is often said that only upper-class men were allowed to read San-
skrit, particularly the sacred texts, but the very fact that the texts dealing
with religious law (dharma) prescribe punishments for women and lower-
class men who read the sacred Sanskrit texts suggests that some of them
did so.
Vatsyayana argues at some length that some women, at least,
should read this text, and that others should learn its contents in other
ways:
A woman should study the Kamasutra and its subsidiary arts before she reaches the prime
of her youth, and she should continue when she has been given away, if her husband
wishes it. Scholars say: "Since females cannot grasp texts, it is useless to teach women this
text." Vatsyayana says: But women understand the practice, and the practice is based on
the text. This applies beyond this specific subject of the Kamasutra, for throughout the
world, in all subjects, there are only a few people who know the text, but the practice is
within the range of everyone. And a text, however far removed, is the ultimate source of
the practice. (1.3.1-14)

Clearly some parts of the book, at least, were designed to be used

by women. Book Three devotes one episode to advice to virgins trying to
get husbands (3.4.36-47), and Book Four consists of instructions for wives.
Book Six is said to have been commissioned by the courtesans de luxe of
Pataliputra,presumably for their own use. The commentator, Yashodhara,
writing in the thirteenth century tells us how this happened:
A Brahmin named Dattaka learned all the arts and sciences in a short time. One day he
had the idea of learning the finest ways of the world, best known by courtesans. And so he
went to the courtesans every day, and learned so well that they asked him to instruct them.
A woman named Virasena, speaking on behalf of the courtesans de luxe, said to him,

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 The Kenyon Review

"Teach us how to give pleasure to men." But another quite plausible story is also widely
believed: Dattaka once touched [the god] Shiva with his foot in the course of a festival to
bless a pregnant woman, and Shiva cursed him to become a woman; after a while he per-
suaded Shiva to rescind the curse and let him become a man again, and because of that
double knowledge he made the separate book. But if the author of the Kamasutra had
known that he had such double knowledge, then he would have said, "Dattaka,who knew
both flavors, made this book."(1.1.11)

It is an inspired move on the part of the commentator to make the author

of this text a Teiresian bisexual, who "tastes both flavors,"or, as we would
say, swings both ways or bats for both teams. (The Arabic expression is
"he eats both pomegranates and figs," and the British, ". . . oysters and
snails.") Yet this is also a move that greatly mitigates the strong female
agency in the text: where Vatsyayana tells us that women had this text
made, the commentator tells us that an extraordinary man knew more
about the courtesans' art than they knew themselves. During the millen-
nium that separates the text from the commentary, the control of women
by men increased dramatically,and this erosion of their status is reflected
in the transition from the text's statement that women commissioned the
text to the commentary's statement that a man did it better than they
could do it.
The powers of these courtesans may have been extensive but frag-
ile; the devious devices that the courtesan uses to make her lover leave
her, rather than simply kicking him out, are an example of what James
Scott has taught us to recognize as the "weapons of the weak," the "artsof
resistance." The text sets out her strategy:
She does for him what he does not want, and she does repeatedly what he has criticized.
She curls her lip and stamps on the ground with her foot. She talks about things he does
not know about. She shows no amazement, but only contempt, for the things he does know
about. She punctures his pride. She has affairs with men who are superior to him. She
ignores him. She criticizes men who have the same faults. And she stalls when they are
alone together. 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. She is disgusted
by wounds made by nails or teeth. When he tries to hug her, she repels him by making a
"needle" with her arms. Her limbs remain motionless. She crosses her thighs. She wants
only to sleep. 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.... And at the end, the
release happens of itself. (6.3.39-44)
There is no male equivalent for this passage, presumably because a man
would not have to resort to such subterfuges: he would just throw the
woman out.

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 Wendy Doniger

If parts of the text are directed toward women, is it also the case
that they reflect women's voices? Certainly not always. The text not only
assumes an official male voice (the voice of Vatsyayana) but denies that
women's words truly represent their feelings; women's exclamations are
taken not as indications of their wish to escape pain being inflicted on
them, but merely as part of a ploy designed to excite their male partners:
As a major part of moaning she may use, according to her imagination, the cries of the
dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck, and partridge. If she
protests, he strikes her on the head until she sobs, using a hand whose fingers are slightly
bent. Shrieking is a sound like a bamboo splitting, and sobbing sounds like a berry falling
into water. Always, if a man tries to force his kisses and so forth on her, she moans and
does the very same thing back to him. When a man in the throes of passion slaps a woman
repeatedly, she uses words like "Stop!"or "Let me go! " or "Enough! " or "Mother!"and
utters screams mixed with labored breathing, panting, crying, and groaning. Those are the
ways of groaning and slapping. (2.7.1-21)

These passages inculcate what we now recognize as the rape mentality-

"her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes"-a dangerous line of thought
that leads ultimately to places where we now no longer want to be: disre-
garding a woman's protests against physical abuse. Indeed, Vatsyayana
lists rape as one of the worst, but still acceptable, of the eight wedding
devices (3.5.26-27). He also takes for granted the type of rape that we now
call sexual harassment, as he describes men in power who can take what-
ever women they want:
A young village headman, or a king's officer, or the son of the superintendent of farming,
can win village women just with a word, and then libertines call these women adulteresses.
Sex with these women takes place when they are engaged in such activities as doing
chores, filling granaries, bringing things in and out of houses, cleaning house, working in
the field, purchasing cotton, wool, flax, linen, and bark, spinning thread, and buying, sell-
ing, and exchanging goods. (5.5.7-9)

These women, at least, have absolutely no voice at all.

The Kamasutra, however, often quotes women in direct speech,
expressing views that men are advised to take seriously, and it is surpns-
ingly sympathetic to women, particularly to what they suffer from
inadequate husbands. Of course, male texts may merely engage in a ven-
triloquismthat attributes to women viewpoints that in fact serve male goals.
But in numerous places, the Kamasutra expresses points of view clearly
favorable to women, particularly in comparison with other texts of the
same era. The discussion of the reasons that women become unfaithful,

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 The Kenyon Review

for instance, rejects the traditional patriarchalparty line that one finds in
most Sanskrit texts, a line that punished very cruelly indeed any woman
who slept with a man other than her husband.
The Kamasutra, by contrast, begins its discussion of adultery with
an egalitarian, if cynical, formulation: "A woman desires any attractive
man she sees, and, in the same way, a man desires a woman. But, after
some consideration, the matter goes no farther"(5.1.8). The text does go
on to argue that women have less concern for morality than men have,
and does assume that women don't think about anything but men. And it
is written in the service of the hero, the would-be adulterer,who reasons,
if all women are keen to give it away, why shouldn't one of them give it to
him? But the author empathetically imagines various women's reasons
not to commit adultery;and the would-be seducer takes the woman's mis-
givings seriously, even if only to disarm her:
Here are the causes of a woman's resistance: love for her husband, regardfor her children,
the fact that she is past her prime, or overwhelmed by unhappiness, or unable to get away;
or she gets angry and thinks, "He is propositioning me in an insulting way";or she cannot
imagine being with him, thinking, "He is inscrutable";or she fears, "He will soon go away.
There is no future in it; . .. or afraidwhen she thinks, "IfI am discovered, my own people
will throw me out"; or scornful, thinking, "He has gray hair";or she worries, "Myhusband
has employed him to test me"; or she has regard for religion. (5.1.17-42)

This discussion is ostensibly intended to teach the male reader of the text
how to manipulate and exploit such women: "A man should eliminate,
from the very beginning, whichever of these causes for rejection he detects
in his own situation" (5.1.43). But, perhaps inadvertently, it provides a
most perceptive exposition of the reasons that women hesitate to begin an
affair,as well as the ways in which inadequate husbands drive away their
wives (5.1.51-54).
Do these passages express a woman's voice, or at least a woman's
point of view? We must admit that we find these women's voices, carrying
meanings that have value for us, only by transcending, if not totally disre-
garding, the original context. Were we to remain within the strict bounds
of the historical situation, we could not notice the women's voices speak-
ing against their moment in history, perhaps even against their author.
Only by asking our own questions, which the author may not have con-
sidered at all, can we see that his text does contain many answers to them,
fortuitously embedded in other questions and answers that were more

24
 Wendy Doniger

meaningful to him. Adam Gopnik has made this point well, with reference
to some of the western classics: "Alot of the skill in reading classics lies in
reading past them.... The obsession with genetic legitimacy and virgin-
ity in Shakespeare; the acceptance of torture in Dante-these are not
subjects to be absorbed but things you glide by on your way to the
poetry.""1We need to read past the outer husk of the Kamasutra's obses-
sions, not only to get to the precious kernel within-the vivid depictions
of sexual psychology-but to get to our own obsessions.
In this guarded way, we can learn a lot about conventional and
unconventional Indian ideas of gender from the Kamasutra. Vatsyayana
tells us that, "By his physical nature, the man is the active agent and the
young woman is the passive locus; the agent contributes to the action in
one way and the locus in another. The man is aroused by the thought, 'I
am taking her,' the young woman by the thought, 'I am being taken by
him' " (2.1.10). These gender stereotypes-the passive woman, active
man-underlie other gender arguments in the text, too. Vatsyayana tells
us what he thinks of as typically female behavior: "dress, chatter, grace,
emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness." The
closest he has to a word for our "gender" is "natural talent" or "glory"
(tejas, a Sanskrit term designating light and heat, rather as we might say,
"It is what someone shines at"):
A man's natural talent is
his roughness and ferocity;
a woman's is her lack of power
and her suffering, self-denial, and weakness. (2.7.22)

But what happens when people deviate from these norms? What, for
instance, does the text have to say about people who engage in
homosexual acts? Let us begin with the men. Classical Hinduism is in gen-
eral oddly, perhaps significantly, silent on the subject of homoeroticism,
but Hindu mythology does drop hints from which we can excavate a pretty
virulent homophobia. The dharma textbooks, too, either ignore or stig-
matize homosexual activity. Male homoerotic activity was punished, albeit
mildly: a ritual bath was often a sufficient atonement.'2 But in contrast to
our modern notion of homosexuality, which is defined by a preference for
a partner of the same sex, queerness in ancient India was determined by
atypical sexual and gender behavior.
The Sanskrit word kliba has traditionally been translated as

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"eunuch," but it almost certainly did not mean "eunuch," since

eunuchs-men intentionally castrated, particularly in order to serve as
guardians in the royal harem-did not exist in India before the Turkish
presence in the ninth century, and therefore cannot be recorded in the
Kamasutra. Men were castrated in punishment for various crimes in
ancient India (and animals were gelded to control them), but such men
were not employed as eunuchs. Kliba, rather, includes a wide range of
meanings under the general rubric of "a man who does not act the way a
man should act," a man who fails to be a man, a defective male, a male
suffering from distortion and Lacanian lack. It is a catchall term that tra-
ditional Hindus coined to indicate a man who is in their terms sexually
dysfunctional (or in ours, sexually challenged), including someone who
was sterile, impotent, castrated, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex
with other men, who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sex-
ual organs, a man who produced only female children, or, finally, a
hermaphrodite.
But the Kamasutra departs from this traditional view in signifi-
cant ways. It does not use the pejorative term kliba at all, but speaks
instead of a "thirdnature":
Thereare two sortsof thirdnature,in the formof a womanand in the formof a man.The
one in the form of a woman imitates a woman's dress [etc.: chatter, grace, emotions, deli-
cacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness]. The act that should be done in the
sexual organ is done in her mouth, and they call that "oralsex." She gets her sexual pleas-
ure and erotic arousal as well as her livelihood from this, living like a courtesan. That is the
person of the third nature in the form of a woman. (2.9.1-5)
The Kamasutra says nothing more about this cross-dressing male, with
his stereotypical female gender behavior, but it discusses the fellatio tech-
nique of the closeted man of the third nature in considerable sensual
detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing any physi-
cal act, and with what might even be called gusto (2.9.17-23).
Men of the third nature are always designated by the pronoun
"she," because the word "nature"is feminine in Sanskrit (as it, and most
abstract nouns, are also in Latin and Greek). Indeed, the very idea of a
third gender, rather than a binary division, may come from the basic habit
of Indo-European languages to assign three genders-neuter as well as
masculine and feminine-to all nouns. Yetthe very use of the word "third"
-which clearly implies a previous "first"and "second" -demonstrates
that Vatsyayana is thinking primarily in binary, more precisely dialectic,

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 Wendy Doniger

terns that would have satisfied Hegel or Claude LUvi-Strauss:two opposed

terms modified by a third. Vatsyayana actually analogizes men and
women to grammatical terms, in a discussion that does not take account
of the third nature at all: "By his physical nature, the man is the active
agent and the young woman is the passive locus; the agent contributes to
the action in one way and the locus in another" (2.1.26).
But there is another, better reason that Vatsyayanauses the female
pronoun for a person of the third nature, and that is because of her per-
ceived gender: he lists the third nature among women who can be lovers
(1.5.27). This use of the pronoun "she"can also be seen as an anticipation
of the practices of many cross-dressing gay men of our day. In contrast
with these men, two verses describe, with nouns and pronouns that
unambiguously designate males, men who seem bound to one another by
discriminating affection rather than promiscuous passion, although these
men, too, engage in oral sex:
Even young men, servants
who wear polished earrings,
indulge in oral sex
only with certain men.
And, in the same way, certain men-about-town
who care for one another's welfare
and have established trust
do this service for one another. (2.9.35-36)

(These are not men of the third nature; perhaps they are bisexuals.) The
female messenger must have had bisexual behavior in mind when, prais-
ing the man's charm, she says, according to the commentator, "He has
such luck in love that he was desired even by a man" (5.4.15). The com-
mentator, as we have seen, even makes the author of the part of the text
commissioned by the courtesans a bisexual (1.1.11). Yet the text quotes
scholars who warn the bridegroom that if he is too shy, his bride "will be
discouraged and will despise him, as if he were someone of the third
nature" (3.2.3).
At the end of the discussion of the third nature, Vatsyayanagrants
that some women, too, perform oral sex, though he strongly disapproves
of it and attributes it largely to women from distant parts of India (2.9.25-
41). (He says that this is one of the ways that a group of men can pleasure
one woman [2.6.46-47] in the mythical country where women reign, and
he clearly disapproves of such women.) Fellatio, therefore, is permitted for

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(some) men, and not for (our) women. But since, as we have seen, Vat-
syayana uses the feminine rather than the male pronoun throughout the
description of fellatio, this passage can be read heterosexually, instructing
a woman how to seduce a man through oral sex:
She pretends to tease him about how easily he becomes excited, and she laughs at him. If
the man does not urge her on, even when it is obvious that he is aroused, she makes
advances to him on her own. If the man urges her to go on, she argues with him and only
unwillingly continues. (2.9.7-11)

And so forth. By the same token, one might turn the argument upside
down and argue that the female pronoun used for the active partner in the
section on "the woman playing the role of the man" (the woman on top)
might also refer to a male of the third nature and represent male homo-
erotic as well as heteroerotic sex.
This position, with the woman on top, also is heavily laden with
gender implications for women. What we call the "missionaryposition" is
the assumed norn in most Indian texts.'3 But when the Kamasutra
describes this position among all the other, more exotic positions that
"take practice," the commentator scornifuly remarks, "Howdoes he pene-
trate her in this position? It is so easy that there is nothing to worry
about!" (2.6.17). Most Sanskrit texts refer to the position with the woman
on top as the "perverse"or"reversed"or "topsy turvy" position (vipari-
tam). Vatsyayana, however, never uses this pejorative term. Instead, he
refers to the woman-on-top position only with the verb "to play the man's
role" (purushayitva). Here, as in his treatment of the third nature, Vat-
syayana is far more relaxed than other texts of the period.
The commentator's belief that the children produced when the
woman is on top might be "a little boy and little girl with reversed natures"
(2.8.41) refers to the view that the "reverse"intercourse of parents might
wreak embryonic damage, resulting in the reversed gender behavior of the
third nature-significantly, for a girl as well as a boy, the female type not
spelled out by the text's discussion of the "third nature." Vatsyayana
acknowledges that people do, sometimes, reverse gender roles (2.7.23),
and this switch of "natural talents" is precisely what happens when the
woman is on top: "She does to him in return now whatever acts he demon-
strated before. And, at the same time, she indicates that she is
embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop." The commentary spells
out the gender complications:

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 Wendy Doniger

All of this activity is said to be done with a woman's natural talent. The acts he demon-
strated before are acts that he executed with roughness and ferocity, the man's natural
talent; she now does these acts against the current of her own natural talent. She hits him
hard, with the back of her hand and so forth, demonstrating her ferocity. And so, in order
to express the woman's natural talent, even though she is not embarrassed, nor exhausted,
and does not wish to stop, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes
to stop. (2.8.6)

Now, since Vatsyayana insists that the woman "unveils her own feelings
completely / when her passion drives her to get on top" (2.8. 39), the feel-
ings of the woman when she plays the man's role seem to be both male
and female. Or, rather, as the commentator explains, when she acts like a
man, she pretends to be a man and then pretends to be a woman. Thus
Vatsyayana acknowledges a woman's active agency and challenges her
stereotyped gender role.
Vatsyayana is also a strong advocate for women's sexual pleasure.
He tells us that a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love
may hate her man and leave him for another (3.2.35 and 4.2.31-35). If, as
the context suggests, this woman is married, the casual manner in which
Vatsyayana suggests that she leave her husband is in sharp contrast to the
position assumed (as it were) by Manu:"Avirtuous wife should constantly
serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his
lust, and is devoid of any good qualities" (5.154). Vatsyayana also presents
an argument in favor of female orgasm far more subtle than views that pre-
vailed in Europe until very recently indeed, and certainly worlds above the
attitudes of his predecessors, whose cockamamie ideas he quotes (2.1.10-
23-26, 30). Vatsyayana'sconcern for women's pleasure also inspires him
to point out that some women are so fond of mutual oral sex that "It is for
this that courtesans reject virtuous, clever, generous men, and become
attached to scoundrels, servants, elephant-drivers, and so forth" (2.9.39).
Clearly he is, at least here, on the side of the angels.
Vatsyayanaalso tells the man how to recognize when a woman has
reached a climax-or, perhaps, if we assume (as I think we should) that
the text is intended for women, too, he is telling the woman how to fake
it:
The signs that a woman is reaching her climax are that her limbs become limp, her eyes
close, she loses all sense of shame, and she takes him deeper and deeper inside her. She
flails her hands about, sweats, bites, will not let him get up, kicks him, and continues to
move over the man even after he has finished making love. (2.8.17-18)

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Vatsyayana also knew about the G-spot: "When he is moving inside her,
and her eyes roll when she feels him in certain spots, he presses her in just
those spots" (2.8.16). The commentator clarifies the passage: "When she
feels him moving in a certain spot inside her, the pleasure of that touch
makes her eyes whirl around in a circle; he strokes her with his penis very
hard on that very spot, and from that pressure she quickly achieves her
sexual ecstasy." But then the commentary goes on to offer another, quite
different interpretation of it: "There is some argument about this. Some
people say that, when the man is stroking inside her, whatever place the
woman looks at, either specifically or vaguely, that is the place where he
should press her."
In his translation of this passage, Burton makes a basic mistake
that plagues his entire translation: when the text puzzles him, he trans-
lates the commentary and presents it as the text. Here he follows the
"some people" mentioned in the second part of the commentary and gets
it wrong: "Whilea man is doing to the woman what he [sic] likes best dur-
ing congress, he should always make a point of pressing those parts of her
body on which she turns her eyes" (151). By following one part of the
commentary, Burton has missed one point of the passage, how to locate
the G-spot, and by inserting, gratuitously, the phrase "what he likes best,"
he has totally missed the larger point, the importance of learning how to
give a woman pleasure. (And the word "congress"always makes me won-
der what the Senate and the House are doing in bed.)

I have, until now, ignored in this discussion the most recent trans-
lation of the Kamasutra, that of Alain Danielou (1994, from the 1992
French edition),"4but I cannot resist citing him here. Danielou reads this
episode, which is actually entitled "The Sexual Moves of a Man," as an
encounter between two women, one of whom sodomizes the other with a
dildo; he translates svairini, designating an independent and presumably
promiscuous woman (which we translate as a "loose" woman), as "les-
bian" (2.8.16). (He does at least get the rolling eyes right-"Once the girl
is possessed by union with the instrument, the moment when her eyes
start vacillating is the moment to make her suffer"-though the transla-
tion of "press"as "make suffer"may give us pause.)
But the Kamasutra passage about the woman playing the role of a
man while making love with a man has nothing to do with lesbianism. Vat-

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 Wendy Doniger

syayana never uses the verb "to play the man's role" when he desenbes
lesbian activities (5.6.1-4), though the commentator cites one text in
which that verb is used of a woman with another woman:
A woman can be impregnated by making love with another woman just as she can by mak-
ing love with a man.
"When a woman and a woman
make love together,
and emit semen into one another,
a child is born without bones."
For blood is formed out of the basic liquid of the body and becomes, under certain cir-
cumstances, menstrual blood, while semen is formed out of the marrow of the bones.
(2.1. 18)'5
Vatsyayanadescribes lesbian activity at the beginning of the chapter about
the harem, in a brief passage about what he calls "Oriental customs"
(5.6.2-4). (The use of the term "Oriental"-or "Eastern"-for what Vat-
syayana regards as a disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be
a colonized part of the Gupta Empire-indeed, the Eastern part- suggests
that "orientalism"began not with the British but with the Orientals them-
selves.) These women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits that have
the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual
characteristics. But they do this only in the absence of men, not through
the kind of personal choice that drives someone of the third nature. As for
other sorts of lesbians, the Laws of Manu, the most famous of the text-
books of dharma, traditional Hindu law, roughly contemporaneous with
the Kamasutra, says that a woman who corrupts a virgin will be punished
by having two of her fingers cut off (8.3.69-70)-a hint of what Manu
thinks lesbians do in bed; and the commentator on the Kamasutra spec-
ifies that that is how a woman deflowers another woman.
Danielou gets all of this wrong. When the text uses the phrase that
always describes the man's sexual organ inside the woman's (,yukta-
yantra, literally, "when the instrument has been attached," which we
translate, "when he is inside her"), Danielou interprets this as meaning
that the woman inserts a dildo in her partner's anus. But Vatsyayana
always uses apadravya, not yantra, to designate a dildo that women use.
Danielou also reads the preceding passage, about the woman on top, as the
sodomization of a man by a woman using a dildo.16Where the text says,
in quite unambiguous Sanskrit, "And,at the same time, she indicates that
she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop. She moves on him

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with precisely the sexual strokes of a man" (2.8.6), Danielou says, "Then,
again, if he [!I shows modesty, wishing to rest from his [!I labors, she
mounts him and sodomizes him" (2.8.16). This is an ingenious and sug-
gestive reading, but at the cost of ignoring the gender of the pronouns and
the meaning of several key Sanskrit words in the text. Even this often
cryptic text is not infinitely elastic; it simply will not stretch to accommo-
date these readings. So much for Danielou.

Let us return, gratefully,to Burton, and to the ways in which Bur-

ton's translation more subtly distorts gender issues. In his preface to the
American edition of 1962, John W. Speilman remarks, "Sanskritistswill
certainly find a number of places where they differwith the interpretation
that Burton has given. For highly specialized Indological studies, this
translation is not considered dependable, but in such cases the scholar
will, of course, consult the work in the original Sanskrit."'7Burton'smain
contribution was the courage and determination to publish the work at all;
he was the Larry Flynt of his day. To get around the censorship laws, Bur-
ton set up an imaginary publishing house, the Kama Shastra Society of
London and Benares, with printers said to be in Benares or Cosmopoli.
Even though it was not formally published in England and the United
States until 1962, the Burton Kamasutra, soon after its publication in
1883, became "one of the most pirated books in the English language,""8
constantly reprinted, often with a new preface to justify the new edition,
sometimes without any attribution to Burton. It is free (at first poached
from the illegal editions, then long out of copyright) and recognizable as
what people think the Kamasutra should be. Indeed, it is quite a wonder-
ful text: great fun to read, extraordinarilybold and frank for its time, and
in many places a fairly approximate representation of the Sanskrit origi-
nal. It remains precious, like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, as a
monument of English literature, though not much closer to Vatsyayana
than Fitzgeraldwas to Omar Khayyam. For the Sanskrit text often simply
does not say what Burton says it says.
A typical misunderstanding is caused by his translation of "third
nature" as "eunuch" (the usual mistranslation of kliba). In the fellatio
scene, Burton keeps distracting us with phrases such as, "the eunuch
presses the end of the lingam with his lips closed together"(156). (We will
return to that lingam in a moment). Why did Burton make such an error?

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 Wendy Doniger

Probablyhe used the word "eunuch" in its broader sense, to designate not
a guardian in the harem but a man who had been castrated for one reason
or another. It is possible that Burton confused the men of the third nature
with the Hijras,castrated transvestites who function as male prostitutes in
India today, and are often called "eunuchs."'9Burton had written about
them in the notes to his translation of the Arabian Nights, but there is no
evidence of their existence at the time of the Kamwtsutra.Why, then, did
he not recognize the text's reference to sexually entire men who happened
to prefer having oral sex with other men? Did he read the text as imply-
ing that this was the only option available to them due to some sort of
genital malfunction? There is no question about his knowledge of homo-
sexuality, both in the Arabian Nights and in the India of his day; he had
undertaken a study of male brothels, staffed by "boys and eunuchs,"20in
Karachi in 1845.21 His famous "TerminalEssay" to the Arabian Nights,
published in 1885, includes an eighteen-thousand-word essay entitled
"Pederasty" (later republished in his collection of essays entitled The
Erotic Traveller) that was one of the first serious treatments of the subject
in English, though it called it "the vice, the abuse, pathological love" and
stated that Hindus held the practice in abhorrence.22 No, Burton's
"eunuchs" are, rather,a matter of orientalism: the depiction of "Orientals"
as simultaneously oversexed and feminized. The word "eunuch" was
bandied about loosely in British writings about the Orient, conveying a
vague sense of sexual excess, cruelty, and impotence, and it infected Bur-
ton's translation of the Kamasutra, too.
There are also numerous places where he erases the female voice.
Throughout the text, Burton turns direct quotes into indirect quotes, thus
losing the force of the dialogue that animates the work and erasing the
vivid presence of the many women who speak in the Kamasutra, replac-
ing these voices with reported speech rephrased by a man. Thus, where
the text says, as we have seen, that the woman who is slapped may say
"Stop!" "Let go!" "Enough!,"Burton says, "She continually utters words
expressive of prohibition, sufficiency, or desire of liberation" (2.7.1-21).
Moreover,when the text says that this may happen "When a man [is] in
the throes of passion," Burton says it happens "When the woman is not
accustomed to striking," reversing the genders and reversing the point.
And, finally, where the text says she may call out "Mother!,"Burton says
she may say "the words 'father,"mother,'... ," gratuitously suggesting that

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she would call on her male parent at this moment.

And in the long passage that we have cited above, in which the
woman thinks of the reasons not to commit adultery, Burton loses her
voice entirely:
The causes of a woman rejecting the addresses of a man are as follows: Affection for her
husband; Desire of lawful progeny; Want of opportunity; Anger at being addressed by the
man too familiarly;Difference in rank of life;Want of certainty on account of the man being
devoted to traveling;Thinking that the man may be attached to some other person; Fear
of the man's not keeping his intentions secret; ... Fear that he may be employed by her
husband to test her chastity; The thought that he has too much regardfor morality.

Here, too, significantly, in the last line, Burton changes her regardfor reli-
gion or morality (dharma) to his regard for it.
Burton also erases women's agency. For example, at 4.1.19-21, we
have translated the text like this:
Mildlyoffended by the man's infidelities, she does not accuse him too much, but she scolds
him with abusive language when he is alone or among friends. She does not, however, use
love-sorcery worked with roots, for, Gonardiya says, "Nothingdestroys trust like that."

The Burton translation here reads:

In the event of any misconduct on the part of her husband, she should not blame him
excessively, though she be a little displeased. She should not use abusive language towards
him, but rebuke him with conciliatory words, whether he be in the company of friends or
alone. Moreover,she should not be a scold, for, says Gonardiya, "there is no cause of dis-
like on the part of a husband so great as this characteristic in a wife."

What is wrong with this picture? In the first place, Burton watered down
the passage, padded it, made it almost twice as long as the more direct
translation. Second, he mistranslated the word for "love-sorcery worked
with roots" (mulakarika), which he renders as "she should not be a scold"
(though elsewhere he translates mukzkarka correctly). Third, "miscon-
duct" is not so much a mistranslation as a serious error of judgment, for
the word in question (apacara) does have the general meaning of "mis-
conduct," but in an erotic context it usually takes on the more specific
meaning of "infidelity,"a choice that is supported both by the remedy that
the text suggests (and rejects)-love-magic-and by the commentator's
gloss (aparadha). But the most serious problem is the word "not" that
negates the wife's right to use abusive language against her straying hus-
band, a denial only somewhat qualified by the added phrase, "rebukehim
with conciliatory words." Thus where the text acknowledges two ways in

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 Wendy Doniger

which a wife might curb her cheating husband, and advises her to use one
(verbal abuse) but not the other (sorcery), Burton allows her nothing but
"conciliatory words." Was this an innocent error or does it reflect a sexist
bias? We cannot know.
Most unfortunately, Burton "adroitlymanaged to escape the smell
of obscenity," as one of his biographers put it, by using "the Hindu terms
for the sexual organs, yoni and lingam, throughout."23This decision was
problematic in several ways. First of all, these terms do not represent Vat-
syayana's text, which only rarely uses lingam to refer to the male sexual
organ and never refers to the female sexual organ as yoni. Instead, Vat-
syayana uses several different words, primarilygender-neutral terms such
asjaghana, which can be translated as "pelvis,"or "genitals,"or "between
the legs," or other terms such as yantra or sadhana, "the instrument,"
that are neither coy nor obscene. In some places, he circumvents, by indi-
rection or implication, the need to employ any specific word at all. Where
Vatsyayana does use lingam (at 2.1.1), the context suggests, and the com-
mentator affirms, that it is, like jaghana, gender-neutral, meant to apply
to both the male and female sexual organs. More significantly, the terms
lingam and yoni had orientalist implications for most English readers.
They were likely to be known to educated readers, particularly to those
interested in Indian art, since both Indian English and Indian vernacular
languages used the words lingam and yoni primarily to designate the sex-
ual organs of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, which were
represented in the form of stylized icons, made of stone, wood, or other
substances, in Hindu temples. The words therefore had, in the circles to
which Burton would have appealed, somewhat of the currency of "karma"
and "dharma"in English today. (Indeed, many people think the book is
called the Karma Sutra). The human and divine facets of the terms
lingam and yoni were sometimes explicitly compared, as in a text that
argued that all creatures in the universe are the natural worshippers of
Shiva and Parvati,since all men are marked with the sign of the god Shiva
(the lingam) and join with women, who have what Shiva's consort has.24
Burton'sapplication of these two terms to human genitals, therefore, may
have had, at the very least, inappropriateovertones and, at the most, blas-
phemous implications for some Hindus.
But for English readers, the use of the Sanskrit term lingam in
place of an English equivalent anthropologized sex, distanced it, made it

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safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them,

that the text was not about real sexual organs, their sexual organs, but
merely about the appendages of strange, dark people, far away, who have
lingams and yonis instead of the naughty bits that we have-a move that
was also, of course, profoundly titillating. This move dodged "the smell of
obscenity" through the same logic that allowed National Geographic to
depict the bare breasts of black African women long before it became
respectable to show white women's breasts in Playboy. It enabled the
authors to pretend that the book was not obscene because it was about
India, when they really thought it was about sex, and knew that English
readers would think so too.
In fact, the Burton translation is most accurate in the sections that
deal with the sexual positions, the topic for which the book became
famous. Was this because this was what Burton cared about most, or
worked on most carefully? (He continued to publish Oriental erotica,
translations of the Sanskrit Ananga Ranga, the Persian Perfumed Gar-
den, etc.). Was it because later Indian erotic texts elaborated most fully
upon these subjects, thus providing Burton with detailed ponies? Or was
it because the sex act is easier to understand, being universal and natural,
than the cultural information about sexual customs that are specific to
India? We cannot know, but we have learned that where sex may or may
not be the same for everyone in all times and places, gender certainly is
not.

Notes
'Sir Richard Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot, trans., The Kamc Sutra of Vatsyayana, with
a preface by W. G. Archer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963).
2The Kamasutra of Vatsyayna [with the commentary of Yashodharal,a new trans-
lation, introduction, and commentary, with Sudhir Kakar(London and New York:Oxford
WorldClassics. 2002).
3My colleague William Mazzarella is writing a book "about the making and public
careers of KamaSutra, the Indian condom brand." Personal communication, January 9,
2002.
4Roz Chast, cartoon, New Yorker10 Sept. 2001: 78.
5John Lahr,"FullTllt:Robin Williams Strikes Again,"New Yorker,8 Apr.2002: 92-94.
6RolandBarthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York:Hill and Wang, 1975).
7V.S. Naipaul,Half a Life (New York:Vintage Books, 2002) 110.
"Personalconversation with William Mazzarella,Chicago, March 5, 2002.
9VikramChandra,Love and Longing in Bombay (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997) 126.

36
 Wendy Doniger

'?Adam Gopnik, "The Naked City,"New Yorker,23 July 2001: 30.

, "A Purim Story,"New Yorker,18 & 25 February 2002: 26.
12Manu11.174; The Laws of Manu (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991), 267-
68.
13Indeed, it begins in the very earliest Indian text, the Rig Veda, composed in about
1000 B.C., which, in describing the original creation of the universe, imagines the mission-
ary position: male seed-placers, giving-forth above, and female powers receiving beneath.
Rig Veda 10.129.5. The Rig Veda:An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translatedfrom tei Sanskrit
(Harmondsworth:Penguin Classics, 1981) 35.
14Alain Danielou, The Complete Kama Sutra (Rochester, VT:Park Street Press, 1994).
'5The medical textbooks, Manu (at 3.49) and the commentator on the Kamasutra (at
6.1.17) all assume that a woman has seed. Yet other embryologies, also cited by the com-
mentator, assume that the woman's menstrual blood, rather than her semen, combines
with the man's semen to form the embryo; this model gives women a much smaller role in
the child, since it also assumed that semen was a much refined and concentrated form of
blood. (Here, again, Vatsyayana-who argues that the woman must have an orgasm in
order to become pregnant, presumably in order to release her seed, is on the more liberal
side.)
16Theverse that we have translated, "To play the man's part, when he is inside her,
she gets on top and puts him undemeath her. In this way they can make love continually
without interrupting the flow of love-making" (2.8.4), Danielou translates, "She is deter-
mined to unite him with the instrument that she is inserting into his anus, so that he gets
the taste for one pleasure after another."
17John W. SpeUlman,introduction to The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana translated by Sir
Richard Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot. Foreword by Santha Rama Rau (New York:E. P. Dut-
ton, 1962) 50.
"8FawnM. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York:Ballan-
tine, 1967) 358.
19See Serena Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 1990.)
20WilliamG. Archer, "Preface,"to the Kama Sutra (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1963) 17; see also Wendy Doniger, "PresidentialAddress: 'I Have Scinde': Flogginga Dead
(White Male Orientalist) Horse,"Jourdal of Asian Studies 58 (Nov. 1999): 940-60.
2"Brodie369.
22Brodie369-70.
23Brodie359.
24Skanda Purana (Bombay: Shree Venkateshvara Steam Press, 1867) 1.8.18-19;
Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2000) 397. There are interesting parallels here with Plato's Symposium, which tells of a
primeval androgyne that split into the ancestors of men and women, who therefore always
try to get back together again.

Wendy Donigeris the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Serice Professor of the History of Reli-
gions at the University of Chicago. Her most recent publications are The Bedtrick: Tales
of Sex and Masquerade (2000) and a new translation of The Kamasutra(2002).

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