The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra
by James McConnachie
272pp, Atlantic, £17.99
In The Book of Love James McConnachie lays to rest some of the enduring myths surrounding the Kamasutra: it is not a sex manual but a book of good conduct. It is not illustrated and it has nothing to do with Tantric sex.
Little is known about its author, Vatsyayana, but he probably lived in third-century northern India. What we do know is that he started a trend - some have called it a revolution - when he decided to write a sutra or scholarly treatise about kama or sexual desire.
The word kamasutra has become a sort of shorthand for "advanced fucking", says McConnachie, but it doesn't really deserve its reputation as a book of sexual gymnastics. The sexual positions Vatsyayana discusses ("the crab", "the lotus", and so on) are not especially acrobatic, nor are there all that many. Certainly not as many as can be found in The Horn-Book: A Girl's Guide to Good and Evil (1899), which lists 62 positions - including the "view of the Low Countries" and the "elastic cunt" - or the Golden Book of Love (1907), which offers 531.
Vatsyayana organises sex into eight distinct topics: embracing, kissing, scratching (love marks were "a major fetish in ancient India"), biting, the notorious sexual positions, moaning, "the woman playing the man's part" (women-on-top) and oral sex (the art of fellatio; cunnilingus is barely mentioned). The Kamasutra is a male fantasy aimed at nagarakas, wealthy young men in the cities, and it presents a world in which women are always available and compliant and never need to be seduced, only aroused in frescoed bedchambers filled with flowers and incense. The effect of the work, says McConnachie, is to surround us in a kind of "erotic cocoon". If Vatsyayana has advice for women, it is how to keep men happy, not how to enjoy themselves sexually. His greatest crime in modern eyes is not that he never once questions the caste system, but that he appears totally unaware of the existence of the clitoris.
What McConnachie calls the "coffee-table Kamasutra" is a modern invention, usually borrowing erotic images from medieval India, long after Vatsyayana was writing. The Kamasutra is also travestied in modern editions as a book of Tantric sexual positions, but as McConnachie shows Tantrism was a much later development and its aim of harnessing the power of sex to attain spiritual knowledge is at odds with Vatsyayana's extremely practical and entirely secular approach to sex as an end in itself.
McConnachie's chapters on the original Kamasutra are interesting, but he is more concerned with the book's reception in the west. His account only really picks up pace with the entrance of Richard Francis Burton, the charismatic sexual anthropologist whose pioneering 1883 edition introduced The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana to modern Europeans. "The free treatment of topics usually taboo'd will be a great national benefit," argued Burton, and McConnachie shows how he was the first of many translators to regard the Kamasutra as a key book in the battle against sexual repression. Burton successfully avoided prosecution by emphasising the text's scholarly credentials: it was not a dirty book at all, but a monument to Oriental wisdom, albeit kinky wisdom. As McConnachie reveals, the shady "Kama Shastra Society" responsible for the landmark 1883 edition was a bizarre mix of Sanskrit scholars and erotic bibliophiles, serious Indologists and creepy erotologists. He is especially good on the curious link between sexual libertinism and religious relativism.
The 1883 Kamasutra was as much of a revelation in India as it was in Europe, its open eroticism hinting at an ancient liberal past that had been totally suppressed by a triple whammy of Hindu asceticism, Victorian prudery and Islamic repression (although one of the last great Sanskrit sex manuals, the Ananga Ranga, was composed in the 16th century for a Muslim ruler, Lada Khan). "Could this be the country that created the Kamasutra?" wondered the filmmaker Mira Nair when her film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996) was banned by India's Board of Censors. It seems much has changed since Vatsyayana's time.
The Kamasutra remained an under-the-counter commodity until the end of the Chatterley ban in 1960, which led to what McConnachie calls "the great sex rush" in publishing. For Dr Alex Comfort in The Joy of Sex (1972) the Kamasutra offered an ancient model of sexual sophistication, "devoid of stupid patriarchal hang-ups about the need for her to be underneath", while in the 90s Alain Daniélou's translation of the Kamasutra made it a gay text, changing all the pronouns in the chapter on fellatio from "she" to "he". In the past, translators have tended to "dequeer" the Kamasutra, says McConnachie, for it does mention lady-boys and masseurs, but Daniélou's translation goes to the opposite extreme.
Today the Kamasutra brand - given a spurious New Age, Tantric twist - has launched a thousand tacky spin-offs lacking all the subtlety and grace of the original, from Viz Fat Slags Kama Sutra to FHM's Kama Sutra 2, in which two exquisitely bored young women in black lingerie demonstrate the "reverse seated cowgirl" or "extended doggie". It all has precious little to do with the original Kamasutra, according to McConnachie, and this scholarly and enjoyable book rescues Vatsyayana's masterpiece from the grubby little corner of the bookshop to which it has been condemned for so long.
