When you talk of the Kama Sutra, you immediately think, ‘Oh, it’s just a book of sex positions.’ What if I tell you it’s not? Yes, you heard that right. Kama Sutra is NOT just a book about lovemaking or sex positions. There’s a lot more to this ancient Hindu text. So, what exactly is the Kama Sutra?
What is Kama Sutra?
Kama Sutra is an ancient Sanskrit text compiled by Vatsyayana around the fourth century. It is a comprehensive book covering topics like the art of living a good life, finding a partner, and more. The book was written for young men of wealth in a time when women did not know how to read or write and is basically about how to live your best life. The book is divided into seven parts, each focusing on different things in life.
Part 1 – General Principles
The first part of the Kama Sutra gives a history of kama literature, the three goals of life, i.e. Dharma, Artha and Kama. It also talks about building a house – from finding a good location to arranging the furniture in the house. The first part further talks about the life of a young, well-to-do gentleman, his daily routine, socialisation, and entertainment.
Part 2 – Amorous Advances and Sexual Union
The second part of the text focuses on love and sex. This part expands on the different kinds of love, how to communicate with your partner, how to pleasure them, how to embrace your partner, different types of kissing as well as oral sex, and even expounds on the conversation you should have before you indulge in foreplay. It also talks about biting, lying down and even the appropriate sounds to make while engaging in a sexual act. While this section does explore intimacy and sex positions, its primary focus is on how to place your body rather than the act itself.
Part 3 – Acquiring a wife
The third part of the Kama Sutra focuses on the acquisition of a wife. Finding the right girl, making alliances, earning the trust of the chosen woman, and winning her heart are some topics covered in this section. It also talks about what kind of women to stay away from, one of them being that one should avoid marrying a girl whose name starts with ‘R’ or ‘L’.
Part 4 – Duties and Privileges of the Wife
This section of the ancient text throws light on being a good wife. How should a wife behave in the absence of her husband, what should her conduct be to the other wives, how should a virgin widow who has remarried conduct herself, and how to behave in nuclear and joint families are some of the topics covered under the fourth part of the Kama Sutra.
Part 5 – Other Men’s Wives
This politically motivated part emphasises how to seduce another man’s wife. It talks of human nature and the tendencies of men and women, why women lose interest in their husbands and look outside, how to find a woman to engage in an extramarital affair, finding lovers, and deploying messengers are some of the core subjects of the fifth part of the text.
Part 6 – Courtesans
Written around the same time as Chanakya’s Arthashastra, the Kama Sutra’s sixth part talks about the rights of courtesans. It deals with how courtesans should behave, their laws, how to get money, identifying lovers who are losing interest, reuniting with a former lover, and different types of courtesans.
Part 7 – Occult Practices
The final part of the text is on occult practices and how you can use such practices to subjugate the hearts of others, incite desire, make yourself desirable, and take care of your sexual organs, among other things.
It is not that the Kama Sutra doesn’t talk about sex positions at all; it’s just that there is more to the text. In fact, the original Kama Sutra only had about 18 positions. It is only with later adaptations that thousands of positions were added to the text. Sex educator and author Seema Anand addresses the same in a recent podcast with AfterHours with All About Eve. She also talks about sex education, how to approach the topic of sex with your children and more.
Kamasutra, the oldest extant Indian prose treatise (sutra) on the subject of pleasure (kama)—sexual pleasure, desire, love, and the pleasures of good living generally conceived. Popularly known for its depiction of positions for sexual intercourse, the text is more broadly about the life of pleasure, focusing on an adult man of leisure, the women in his life, and their social and physical encounters. The work is part of a tradition of eroticism in Hinduism—including sexual analogies in the Upanishads, Tantric practices, the god Krishna’s amorous adventures in the Bhagavata Purana, and the sexually explicit carvings at the Khajuraho temple complex—to which the text greatly contributed. In recent times the Kamasutra has spread around the globe, and its explorations of pleasure have seeped into the popular imagination.
Science of sex: genre and authorship
The Kamasutra is classified as a shastra, a genre of texts that aspire to explain everything in a scientific way about their subjects, which include a wide range of topics such as theater, medicine, astronomy, architecture, and the management of horses and elephants. The erotic science, known as kama-shastra (“the science of kama”), is one of the three principal human sciences in ancient India. The other two main areas of human science on which many shastra texts have been written are religious and social law (dharma-shastra, of which the most famous work is the Laws of Manu [Manavadharmashastra]) and the science of political and economic power (artha-shastra) found in Kautilya’s influential Arthashastra.
The Kamasutra was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, probably sometime in the second half of the 3rd century ce, and likely in northern India, perhaps in Pataliputra near the present city of Patna, Bihar state. Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, who tells the reader that his text is a distillation of works, now lost to history, of authors who preceded him. These other authors supply what Indian logic called the “other side” (literally, the “former wing,” purvapaksha), the arguments that opponents might raise. Vatsyayana cites them often, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement, thus making the Kamasutra a text that can be described as an academic debate combined with an encyclopedia of pleasure and a self-help book. Yet Vatsyayana occasionally abandons this scientific approach, as in his declaration: “When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order” (Kamasutra, Book II, chapter 2, verse 31; translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar).
Beyond positions: the full body of the text
The Kamasutra may be best known in popular culture for its section detailing sexual positions, but the Kamasutra as a whole is a book about the art of living for pleasure—finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, and living with or as a courtesan. The text is divided into seven books and subdivided into 64 sections. Numbers and lists are significant in the text and match its encyclopedic sensibility: for example, Vatsyayana enumerates 12 embraces, 17 kisses, 16 bites and scratches, 17 positions, 6 unusual acts, 16 slaps and screams, 8 acts of oral sex, and so forth. While the text’s primary focus and much of its intended audience is male, there are places, too, where Vatsyayana seems to address women and writes about them in ways that make room for women’s agency and speak to their sexual pleasure.
The Kamasutra begins Book I by situating kama as one of the three aims of life along with dharma (religion or law) and artha (wealth or power), and it advises how to balance these objectives. Vatsyayana then turns to the text’s hero, the man-about-town (Sanskrit: nagaraka), and advises him how to set up his house and arrange his lifestyle, use male helpers and messengers, and cultivate the arts. His is a life of luxury, and he spends his day bathing, talking with his pet birds, and arranging for dinner parties; he never visits his mother or concerns himself with business matters.
The various sexual positions are found in Book II, which begins by expounding a sexual typology according to size, endurance, and temperament. It then gives detailed instructions on embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, slapping, moaning, oral sex, ways in which a woman may act like a man, and navigating lovers’ quarrels. Many of these various practices are given descriptive names in the text, such as the “twining-vine” or “climbing the tree” embraces, the “brushing” or “battle of tongues” kisses, the “goose-flesh,” or “half-moon” scratches, or the “garland of jewels” or “scattered clouds” bites. Only after this textual foreplay does the text get to the possible ways of positioning the body during sexual acts. Many of these positions are specific to typologies based on the sizes of the man or woman, and some are specific to geographic regions in India.
Book III takes the socialite playboy through the stages of courtship of a young bride, which include winning a woman’s trust, interpreting her reactions, discerning her interest, and various means to pursue marriage, for both men and women to achieve their hearts’ desire. There is a final section that includes devious means of obtaining a marriage, which offers several types of subterfuge and, if necessary in extremis, marriage by force. The book ends with a set of verses praising love-marriage as superior to marriage by force. The text’s advice on how men should go about making their intentions known can be quite playful and perhaps relatable to a modern audience familiar with romantic comedies: “When they are playing in the water, he dives underwater at some distance from her, comes up close to her, touches her, and dives underwater again right there” (Kamasutra, III, 4, verse 6).