The Kamasutra is a book that has been more discussed than read, more argued over than understood, more sinned against than sinning. As James McConnachie’s scholarly, stylish and entertaining study shows, over the course of its 1,700-year history it has been all things to all men, from grubby under-the-counter sex manual to fount of the highest sensual-spiritual wisdom.

McConnachie’s own first impression was of a book “baroque in its delight in variation and ornamentation, pedantic in its obsessive enumerations, and slightly alarming in the freedom of its sexual play”. His copy, he later discovered, was not the whole Kamasutra – a conduct guide for the smart young urbanite in third-century northern India – but merely its most notorious section, the one on “how to do it”. Intrigued, he set out to learn more about the kind of culture that needed such rules written down – and to find out whether the work really does speak across the centuries to us with a voice both libertine and civilised, putting “the repressive, patriarchal heritage of the Christian world to shame” – as its western advocates would have it.

Naturally the truth is far more intriguing than the clichés. The Kamasutra was written by one Vatsyayana, a man who described himself as a white-haired scholar, long past sexual temptations. There’s no reason to believe him, of course – like Homer, he may have been a useful name for unknown collaborators. McConnachie notes in passing that his account of a young man’s perfect house, complete with a special ivory tusk to hang his lute on, plus two bedrooms, one for sex and one for sleeping, reads like an article from a designer magazine – and is probably just as aspirational.

Before any readers start palpitating with dubiously orientalist ideas of an ancient Indian Eden full of mustachioed studs and sloe-eyed maidens engaged in multiform acts of elegant copulation, the author is quick to remind us of India’s own powerful puritan tradition.Even today, from the remotest villages to the heart of Delhi, it isn’t done for a couple to hold hands in public, let alone kiss. Nor is this a postcolonial, post-Christian development. McConnachie cites texts contemporary with the Kamasutra, in which one Manu condemns the body as “foul-smelling, tormented, impermanent . . . filled with urine and excrement, infested by sickness and polluted by passion”. (Incidentally, these strictures applied to all women except the wives of actors, who were regarded as such sluts that they were pretty much anyone’s.)

Another revelation concerns those delicately obscene miniatures associated with the book. The original was, for centuries, sternly text-only, such miniatures dating from the 15th century onwards. Fascinating to learn, too, that the boastfulness of Indian princes in the 18th century led them to have themselves portrayed as consummate lovers. The English equivalent would have been Gainsborough painting Mr and Mrs Andrews stark naked in the Tortoise position – perhaps with Mrs David Garrick along for a bit of extra.

The latter half of McConnachie’s study considers the Kamasutra’s treatment by western scholars and adventurers, especially that slightly sinister group around Richard Burton (the first English translator), including Richard Monckton Milnes and Frederick Hankey. They may have personified a refreshing wave of sexual candour amid the grim starchiness of mid-Victorian England – or something else altogether. Hankey was particularly keen to acquire a human skin “taken from a young girl while she is still alive”, and was hoping one might come his way thanks to a tribal massacre in Africa. Prototype 1960s swingers? Well, maybe; if you include Charles Manson among that decade’s luminaries.

More comical are the book’s 20th-century interpreters, such as the sexpert and pacifist, Alex Comfort, who praised “Indian erotology” as being “the only ancient tradition devoid of stupid patriarchal hangups about the need for her [the woman] to be underneath”. Some sexpert. There is plenty of woman-on-top fresco-porn on the walls of the Lupanare of Pompeii. Obviously, Comfort never got that far. Another colourful character is Alain Daniélou, stupid as only a French intellectual can be, who saw the Kamasutra as a manifesto for gay rights. His brother was a cardinal who died visiting a brothel, while Daniélou lived in a “palace in Varanasi with his lover, Raymond Burnier”, studying Hinduism and playing the lute. Like a sutra-struck Foucault, he insisted that “pure love can only be aberrant and illegitimate”; that the Kamasutra was tantric; that in traditional India, even six-year old schoolboys knew their Kamasutra “and all the secrets of loveplay and its variations”; and in his own translation, he altered all the pronouns in the chapter on oral sex from “she” to “he”. Like Foucault, he was preposterous, dishonest, and wrong.

Which brings us to Deepak Chopra, the celebrated “holistic healer” and passionate proselytiser for the ancient and mysterious wisdom of the East. (He himself lives in California.) His version of the Kamasutra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Love, promises much, although perhaps not quite as much as his other great work, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, in which he teaches that “You can tell your body not to age.” Oddly, Chopra continues to sag and wrinkle with the rest of us. But he has made an awful lot of money.

Read on....
websites: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ sex/kama/index.htm
Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Kamasutra

THE BOOK OF LOVE: In Search of the Kamasutra by James McConnachie
Atlantic £16.99 pp254
Buy the book here at the offer price of £16.19 (inc p&p)

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