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Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar 2002

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2003
Reissued 2009

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

VATSYAYANA MALLANAGA

A new, complete English translation of the
Sanskrit text

with excerpts from the
Sanskrit Jayamangala commentary of
Yashodhara Indrapada,
the Hindi Jaya commentary of
Devadatta Shastri,
and explanatory notes by the translators

Translated and edited by
WENDY DONIGER and SUDHIR KAKAR

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, probably in North India and probably sometime in the third century of the common era, most likely in its second half, at the dawn of the Gupta Empire. Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, other than his name and what we learn from this text.

WENDY DONIGER (OFLAHERTY) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and the author of translations of Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda (1981) and the Laws of Manu (1991), as well as books about IndiaSplitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1988)about mythOther Peoples Myths: The Cave of Echoes (1984)and about sexSiva: The Erotic Ascetic (1973) and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000).

SUDHIR KAKAR is a psychoanalyst and currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. He is the author of many books on India that cover a wide spectrum from Hindu childhood to Indias healing traditions, from male-female relations to Hindu-Muslim violence, from classical love tales to modern mysticism. His most recent books are The Ascetic of Desire (1999), a fictionalized account of the life of Vatsyayana, the author of the Kamasutra, and the the novel Ecstasy (2001).

For Katha and Kali

with excerpts from Yashodharas commentary, the Jayamangala

The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It is not, as most people think, a book about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of livingabout finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugsand also about the positions in sexual intercourse. The two words in its title mean desire/love/pleasure/sex (kama) and a treatise (sutra).

Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, other than his name and what we learn from this text; and all that he tells us is that he composed it in chastity and in the highest meditation [7.2.57], about which we may conclude, as he himself remarks about someone elses claim of virtue [5.4.15], that it may or may not have happened. But Vatsyayana tells us something important about his text, namely, that it is a distillation of the works of a number of authors who preceded him, authors whose texts have not come down to us: Auddalaki, Babhravya, Charayana, Dattaka, Ghotakamukha, Gonardiya, Gonikaputra, and Suvarnanabha. These other authors, called teachers or scholars, supply what Indian logic called the other side (literally, the former wing, purvapaksha), the arguments that opponents might raise. In this case, they are former in both the logical and chronological sense of the word; Vatsyayana cites them often, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement. Always his own voice comes through, as he acts as ringmaster over the many acts that he incorporates in his sexual circus. The Kamasutra was therefore certainly not the first of its genre, nor was it the last. The many textbooks of eroticism that follow it, such as Kokkakas Ratirahasya (also called the Kokashastra, pre-thirteenth century) and Kalyanamallas Anangaranga (fifteenth century), cite it as a foundational authority. The Nagarasarvasva of Bhikshu Padamashri and the Panchasayaka of Jyotirishvara (eleventh to thirteenth century) explicitly base themselves on the Kamasutra, the first on Books Two, Five, and Seven, and the second on Books Two, Three, Five, and Seven. The Kamasutra also made a deep impact on Indian literature; its vocabulary and taxonomies were diffused into later Sanskrit erotic poetry.