Publisher Comments
An engaging, enlightening “biography” of the ancient Hindu manuscript that became the world’s most famous sex manual The Kamasutra is one of the world’s best-known yet least-understood texts, its title instantly familiar but its actual contents widely misconstrued. In the popular imagination, it is a work of practical pornography, a how-to guide of absurdly acrobatic sexual techniques. Yet the book began its long life in third-century India as something quite different: a seven-volume vision of an ideal life of urbane sophistication, offering advice on matters from friendship to household decoration. Over the ensuing centuries, the Kamasutra was first celebrated, then neglected, and very nearly lost—until an outrageous adventurer introduced it to the West and earned literary immortality.
In lively and lucid prose, James McConnachie provides a rare, intimate look at the exquisite civilization that produced this cultural cornerstone. He details the quest of famed explorer Richard F. Burton, who—along with his clandestine coterie of libertines and iconoclasts—unleashed the Kamasutra on English society as a deliberate slap at Victorian prudishness and paternalism. And he describes how the Kamasutra was driven underground into the hands of pirate pornographers, until the end of the Lady Chatterley obscenity ban thrust it once more into contentious daylight.
The first work to tell the full story of the Kamasutra, The Book of Love explores how a remarkable way of looking at the world came to be cradled between book covers—and survived. James McConnachie is a journalist, travel writer, and broadcaster. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he has lived and traveled widely in Nepal and India. His articles and book reviews have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, and The Independent, among other publications. He lives in Winchester, UK. The Kamasutra is one of the world’s best-known yet least-understood texts, its title instantly familiar but its actual contents widely misconstrued. In the popular imagination, it is a work of practical pornography, a how-to guide of absurdly acrobatic sexual techniques. Yet the book began its long life in third-century India as something quite different: a seven-volume vision of an ideal life of urbane sophistication, offering advice on matters from friendship to household decoration. Over the ensuing centuries, the Kamasutra was first celebrated, then neglected, and very nearly lost—until an outrageous adventurer introduced it to the West and earned literary immortality.
In lively and lucid prose, James McConnachie provides a rare, intimate look at the exquisite civilization that produced this cultural cornerstone. He details the quest of famed explorer Richard F. Burton, who—along with his clandestine coterie of libertines and iconoclasts—unleashed the Kamasutra on English society as a deliberate slap at Victorian prudishness and paternalism. And he describes how the Kamasutra was driven underground into the hands of pirate pornographers, until the end of the Lady Chatterley obscenity ban thrust it once more into contentious daylight.
The first work to tell the full story of the Kamasutra, The Book of Love explores how a remarkable way of looking at the world came to be cradled between book covers—and survived. “An altogether first-rate work of intellectual history for ordinary readers . . . Brings the story up-to-date without stinting on the entertaining pen portraits and anecdotes.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “Elegant and stylish . . . Paints an enticing picture of the society in which the Kamasutra was written.”—William Dalrymple, The New York Review of Books “An altogether first-rate work of intellectual history for ordinary readers . . . Brings the story up-to-date without stinting on the entertaining pen portraits and anecdotes.”— Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“The truth is far more intriguing than the clichés . . . A scholarly, stylish, and entertaining study.” —The Sunday Times (London)
"A delightfully racy and adventurous life story of a book, combining thorough scholarship with fascinating Orientalist gossip, The Book of Love illuminates both the luxurious third-century world that gave rise to the Kamasutra and the nineteenth-century colonial explorations that brought it to Europe, as well as our own often hilarious response to it.”— Wendy Doniger, Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, and translator of the first definitive English edition of the Kamasutra
"Tracing the celebrated sex manual from its palm-leaf manuscript origins in third-century India to contemporary coffee-table book, travel writer McConnachie adeptly explains that in addition to teaching 64 erotic techniques, the seven-volume Kamasutra details every aspect of a rich man's lifestyle, including grooming, home decor and entertainment. The treatise on pleasure also offers a rare ancient depiction of women's social and sexual lives. The author relates the tale of the famed British explorer and Orientalist Richard Burton, who brought the work to the West. An Indian Army officer in the 1840s, Burton devoted himself to the study of Indian languages and sexual culture. Around 1870, as a British consul, Burton became involved in a project to translate obscure erotic classics into English (though contrary to popular belief, he did not translate the Kamasutra himself) and masterminded the work's promotion in a repressive Victorian climate. McConnachie also relates the key role of Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot as Burton's collaborator. Though less titillating than the topic would imply, this is a solidly researched, absorbing glimpse into the history of erotica publishing." —Publishers Weekly
"Scholarly investigation into the history, purpose and context of the notorious ancient Indian text and its entry into Western society through the efforts of a few Victorian eccentrics. Although modern Western audiences tend to reduce the Kamasutra to a mere sexual-position manual, the contorted, gymnastic poses so firmly associated with it had no place in the original; such illustrations weren't added until centuries later. Nor, to the dismay of its American readers in the late 1960s, does the text unlock the spiritual secrets of tantric erotica, for that tradition emerged much later as well. As first-time author McConnachie reveals in urbane prose, the history of the Kamasutra is a lesson in misrepresentation. Western readers, he writes in one of his strongest sections, consistently approached the book as a reliable source of information about modern, not ancient, Indian sexuality. Its translators, editors and publishers used the Kamasutra to signify whatever they needed it to mean, adding and excising material to better embody each generation's vision of sexuality. The original, written in the third century by Indian philosopher Mallanaga Vatsyayana, contained much broader social instruction, intended to provide an encyclopedia of pleasure for the young, aristocratic male. McConnachie's insightful scholarship restores to the Kamasutra its full history, presented in an easily readable chronology. “A delightfully racy and adventurous life story of a book, combining thorough scholarship with fascinating Orientalist gossip. The Book of Love illuminates both the luxurious third-century world that gave rise to the Kamasutra and the nineteenth-century colonial explorations that brought it to Europe, as well as our own often hilarious response to it.”
—Wendy Doniger, Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, and translator of the first definitive English edition of the Kamasutra
“An altogether first-rate work of intellectual history for ordinary readers... Brings the story up-to-date without stinting on the entertaining pen portraits and anecdotes.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “Elegant and stylish... Paints an enticing picture of the society in which the Kamasutra was written.”
—William Dalrymple, The New York Review of Books “The truth is far more intriguing than the clichés.... A scholarly, stylish, and entertaining study.” —The Sunday Times (London) James McConnachie is a journalist, travel writer, and broadcaster. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he has lived and traveled widely in Nepal and India. His articles and book reviews have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, and The Independent, among other publications. He lives in Winchester, UK. Chapter One The Wheel of Sexual Ecstasy In the beginning, sings the ‘Creation Hymn’ of the Rig Veda, the holiest and most ancient of India’s scriptures, ‘there was neither non-existence nor existence’. Then, out of nothing and from nowhere, arose kama. Kama was sexual desire, the urge to create and procreate, the atom-like essence of creation itself. According to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the greatest and oldest of India’s philosophical texts, the First Being ‘found no pleasure at all; so one finds no pleasure when one is alone. He wanted to have a companion. Now he was as large as a man and a woman in close embrace. So he split his body into two, giving rise to husband and wife… He copulated with her and from their union human beings were born.’ Kama, then, was the first itch that brought the world into being, and humanity with it. Where the Judaeo-Christian tradition begins with ‘light’, you could say that Hinduism starts with kama. In the beginning was sex, and sex was with god, and sex was god. By the middle of the first millennium BC, long after the Vedas and Upanishads were composed, kama had come to signify not just primal desire, but the particular pleasures of love and lovemaking. In poetic epics of the era like the great Mahabharata, kama was transformed from divine essence into personified god: kama became Kama, an Eros-like figure of youthful beauty praised as the firstborn, the god above all other gods, the son of Brahma, the creator. Kama was said to carry a bow made of deliciously sweet sugarcane, strung with a line of languorously humming bees and capable of firing flower-tipped arrows more deadly than any steel arrowhead. As a god and as an idea, kama was the expression of the divine creativity in humans, an essential principle of existence to be celebrated, praised, enjoyed and expressed through procreation. But as ever, there was a serpent in paradise. Kama was also a threat to the practice of meditation and the pursuit of the divine. It diverted the questing soul from the ultimate spiritual goal of ‘release’, or liberation from the world of birth and death. Hindu myths are full of tales of jealous gods sending heavenly nymphs to distract holy men whose austere meditations had made them too powerful. And the ascetic could not be too careful: one spilled drop of semen, like Samson’s cut hair, was sufficient to burn away all his tapas, or stored-up spiritual energy. Even the greatest ascetic of them all could be tempted. According to an ancient myth recorded in the Shiva Purana, after many thousands of years of perfect lovemaking the god Shiva abandoned his wife Parvati in order to pursue solitary meditation in the cool heights of the Himalayas. Frustrated and angered by her husband’s neglect of his sexual obligations, Parvati dispatched Kama to disturb Shiva’s concentration by piercing him with one of his potent, flower-tipped arrows. Just as the abstract kama had awoken the primal being from his slumber of non-being, the god Kama easily roused Shiva from his meditation. Enraged, Shiva turned the heat of his third, ‘spiritual eye’ on the god of desire, a heat engendered by aeons of yogic austerities, by centuries of sperm retention. Kama was reduced to ashes, becoming ananga, ‘the bodiless one’, a roving, aerial and ethereal spirit with the power to goad even the greatest ascetics towards the pursuit of pleasure. The myth vividly dramatizes the bow-taut tension in Hinduism between asceticism and sensuality. The uncertain dating of almost all ancient Indian texts, the Kamasutra included, makes it very hard to make general statements about eras, but at the time of the Kamasutra’s birth, in around the third century of the first millennium, the ascetic principle seems to have had the whip hand. In the Bhagavadgita, the ‘Hindu Sermon on the Mount’ composed perhaps a little before the Kamasutra, the god Krishna virtually froths at the mouth as he fulminates against kama. ‘By this is wisdom overcast,’ he shrieks, ‘therefore restrain the senses first: strike down this evil thing!’ The so-called ‘renouncer faiths’ of Buddhism and Jainism, which were flourishing in the third century, rejected the tainted physical world even more emphatically. Asvaghosa’s ‘Life of the Buddha’, which may be a hundred years or so older than the Kamasutra, warns that ‘the one who they call Kama-deva here-on-earth, he who has variegated weapons, flower-tipped arrows, likewise they call him Mara, the ruler of the way of desire, the enemy of liberation’. For Buddhists, Mara was the ultimate tempter and was even known as the lord of death. Not all thinkers were so confident in their rejection of kama. The poet Bhartrihari legendarily lived a life that oscillated no less than seven times between the severe existence of a monk and an abandoned pursuit of sensuality. For this writer, who probably lived within a century or two of the Kamasutra’s composition, there was no middle way between the erotic and ascetic principles. ‘There are two paths,’ he wrote, ‘the sages’ religious-devotion which is lovely because it overflows with the nectarous waters of the knowledge of truth’ and ‘the lusty undertaking of touching with one’s palm that hidden part in the firm laps of lovely-limbed women, loving women with great expanses of breasts and thighs’. ‘Tell us decisively which we ought to attend upon,’ he asks in his Shringarashataka, ‘the sloping sides of wilderness mountains? Or the buttocks of women abounding in passion?’ The Kamasutra was firmly on the side of the buttocks. It mounted the greatest defence of sexual pleasure the world had ever seen – or would ever see. Its method, avowed in its very name, was to capture and distil all previous knowledge on the entire subject of sexual desire. It was a sutra, a scholarly treatise designed to compress knowledge into a series of pithy maxims – a row of pearl-like aphorisms strung together in a necklace. Literally, its title means ‘the condensed version of the teaching on desire’, ‘aphorisms on erotic pleasure’ or ‘the grammar of sex’. Yet none of these English translations comes close to conveying the iconic status of the original Sanskrit words. ‘The book of love’ is less precise, but comes closer to capturing the breadth of the Kamasutra’s scope and the incredible force of its title’s cultural impact. The author of this extraordinary book of love was a man named Vatsyayana, about whom nothing is known beyond what he says about himself in his Kamasutra. Which is – rather surprisingly, given that his book is devoted to sex – that he ‘made this work in chastity and in the highest meditation’, and did not labour ‘for the sake of passion’. In the contemporary religious context, Vatsyayana could be forgiven for sounding a little defensive, but this curious statement may even be true. As Vatsyayana himself explains, the goals of life are different at each stage of manhood. Youth is for pleasure, while old age is better suited to contemplation. It’s tempting, then, to think that Vatsyayana acquired his sexual expertise as a young man, and composed his Kamasutra as a grizzled roué looking back on the adventures of his prime. When or where those adventures, or the recall of them, took place is a mystery. Vatsyayana does not mention any dates in his book of love, nor where it was written or set. A thirteenth-century commentator, Yasodhara, believed that Vatsyayana lived in the great city of Pataliputra, which is a plausible enough theory, as it later became the home of Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Imprint: Metropolitan Books
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 05-27-2008
Pages: 288
Measurements: 9.25in X 6.13in |
