WendyDoniger

THE KAMASUTRA: IT ISN'T ALL ABOUT SEX

texthe Kamasutra, whichmanypeopleregard the paradigmatic as

book for sex, the sex text, was composed in North India, probably in the third century C.E., in Sanskrit, the literarylanguageof ancient India. (Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana, other than his name and what we learn from this text.) There is nothing remotely like it even now, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisticated; it was already well known in India at a time when the Europeans were still swinging in trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking. The Kamasutra is known in English almost entirely through the translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton, published well over a century ago, in 1883.1 A new translation that my colleague Sudhir Kakarand I have prepared, for Oxford World Classics,2 reveals for the first time the text's surprisingly modern ideas about gender and unexpectedly subtle stereotypes of feminine and masculine natures. It also reveals relatively liberal attitudes to women's education and sexual freedom, and far more complex views of homosexual acts than are suggested by other texts of this period. And it makes us see just what Burton got wrong, and ask why he got it wrong. Most Americans and Europeans today think that the Kamasutra is just about sexual positions, the erotic counterpart to the ascetic asanas of yoga. Reviews of books dealing with the Kamasutra in recent years have had titles like "Assume the Position" and "Position Impossible."One Web site offered The Kamasutraof Pooh, posing stuffed animals in compromising positions (Piglet on Pooh, Pooh mounting Eeyore, etc.); another posed Kermit the Frog in action on an unidentified stuffed animal. My Palm Pilot has a copyrighted "Pocket Sutra: The Kama Sutra in the palm

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Wendy Doniger of your hand," which offers "lying down positions," "sitting positions," "rear-entry positions," "standing positions," "role reversal," and many more. In India, KamaSutrais the name of a condom;3in America, it is the name of a wristwatch that displays a different position every hour. A recent Roz Chast cartoon entitled "The Kama Sutra of Grilled Cheese" began with "#14: The Righteous Lion" ("place on hot, well-lubricated griddle. Fry until bread and cheese become one").4 Robin Williams includes in his act what John Lahr calls "a fantasy of lascivious Olympic figure skating"and Williams himself calls "the KamaSutra on ice."5 A book called The Popup Kamasutra failed to take full advantage of the possibilities of this genre; the whole couple pops up. More seriously, Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, took the Kamasutra as a root metaphor for literary as well as physical desire: "The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself)."6The text for sex is thus the sex of the text, too. V. S. Naipaul in his recent book, HalfA Life, offers as the contemporary Indian attitude to the Kamasutra what is more likely his own view:
[lIn our culture there is no seduction. Our marriages are arranged. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me of the Kama Sutra. Nobody talked about that at home. It was an upper-caste text, but I don't believe my poor father, brahmin though he is, ever looked at a copy. That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past, and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims.7

In India today, westernized yuppie types will often give a copy of the Kamasutra as a wedding present, to demonstrate their open-mindedness and sophistication, but most people will merely sneak a surreptitious look at it in someone else's house.8 This statement by an adolescent girl in Vikram Chandra'sstory, "Kama," rings true: "SisterCannina didn't want to tell us. It'sthe Kama Sutra, which she says isn't in the library.But Gisela'sparents have a copy which they think is hidden away on the top of their shelf. We looked it up there."And the adult to whom she tells this says, "Youput that book back where you found it. And don't read any more."9The liminal position of the Kanasutra in India today is strikinglysimilar to that of the New Burlesque in Manhattan,as Adam Gopnik describes as:
In some measure, the New Burlesque is a way of ushering the old erotic theatre out of the straw and stick houses of pornography and into the little brick house of downtown art,

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which, huffand puffas he will,the Mayor cannotblowdown.(Thisis becausethe drafty holes in the downtownbrickhouses are stuffedwith the Arts & Leisuresection of the
lymes )10

Outside of India, the part of the Kamasutra describing the positions may have been the best-thumbed passage in previous ages of sexual censorship, but nowadays, when sexually explicit novels, films, and instruction manuals are available everywhere, that part is the least useful. The real Kamasutra, however, is not just about the positions in sexual intercourse, not the sort of book to read in bed while drinking heavily, let alone holding the book with one hand in order to keep the other free. It is a book about the art of living-about finding a partner,maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs-and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. In the Burton translation, which we read now in the shadow of EdwardSaid, it seems to be about orientalism, a simultaneously racist and romanticized European attitude to colonized peoples. Read in the wake of Michel Foucault, it seems to be about power, and in the wake of contemporary feminism, about the control of women. I really do not think that these are its primary concerns. As for power, it is almost unique in classical Sanskrit literature in its almost total disregardof class and caste, though of course power relations of many kinds-gender, wealth, political position, as well as caste-are implicit throughout the text. And it seems to me to be as much about the control of men as about the control of women, though in very different ways. But it certainly is about gender, and to that extent Said, Foucault, and feminism are essential companions for us as we read it today. What is its genre? Beneath the veneer of a sexual textbook, the Kamasutra resembles a work of dramatic fiction more than anything else. The man and woman whose sex lives are described here are called the hero and heroine, and the men who assist the hero are called the libertine, pander, and clown. All of these are terms for stock characters in Sanskrit dramas-the hero and heroine, sidekick, supporting player, and jester. Is the Kamasutra a play about sex? Certainly it has a dramatic sequence, and, like most classical Indian dramas, it has seven acts. In Act One, which literally sets the stage for the drama, the bachelor sets up his pad; in Act Two, he perfects his sexual technique. Then he seduces a virgin (Act Three), gets married, and lives with a wife or wives (Act Four);tiring of her 20

Wendy Doniger (or them), he seduces other men's wives (Act Five), and when he tires of that, he frequents courtesans (Act Six). Finally,when he is too old to manage it at all, he resorts to the ancient Indian equivalent of Viagra: aphrodisiacs and magic spells (Act Seven). Whom was it written for? It is difficult to assess how broad a spectrum of ancient Indian society knew the text firsthand. It would be good to have more information about social conditions in India at the time of the composition of the Kamasutra, but the Kamasutra itself is one of the main sources that we have for such data; the text is, in a sense, its own context. The production of manuscripts, especially illuminated manuscripts, was necessarily an elite matter; men of wealth and power, kings and merchants, would commission texts to be copied out for their private use. It is often said that only upper-class men were allowed to read Sanskrit, particularly the sacred texts, but the very fact that the texts dealing with religious law (dharma) prescribe punishments for women and lowerclass men who read the sacred Sanskrit texts suggests that some of them did so. Vatsyayana argues at some length that some women, at least, should read this text, and that others should learn its contents in other ways:
A woman should study the Kamasutra and its subsidiary arts before she reaches the prime of her youth, and she should continue when she has been given away, if her husband wishes it. Scholars say: "Since females cannot grasp texts, it is useless to teach women this text." Vatsyayana says: But women understand the practice, and the practice is based on the text. This applies beyond this specific subject of the Kamasutra, for throughout the world, in all subjects, there are only a few people who know the text, but the practice is within the range of everyone. And a text, however far removed, is the ultimate source of the practice. (1.3.1-14)

Clearly some parts of the book, at least, were designed to be used by women. Book Three devotes one episode to advice to virgins trying to get husbands (3.4.36-47), and Book Four consists of instructions for wives. Book Six is said to have been commissioned by the courtesans de luxe of Pataliputra,presumably for their own use. The commentator, Yashodhara, writing in the thirteenth century tells us how this happened:
A Brahmin named Dattaka learned all the arts and sciences in a short time. One day he had the idea of learning the finest ways of the world, best known by courtesans. And so he went to the courtesans every day, and learned so well that they asked him to instruct them. A woman named Virasena, speaking on behalf of the courtesans de luxe, said to him,

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"Teach us how to give pleasure to men." But another quite plausible story is also widely believed: Dattaka once touched [the god] Shiva with his foot in the course of a festival to bless a pregnant woman, and Shiva cursed him to become a woman; after a while he persuaded Shiva to rescind the curse and let him become a man again, and because of that double knowledge he made the separate book. But if the author of the Kamasutra had known that he had such double knowledge, then he would have said, "Dattaka,who knew both flavors, made this book."(1.1.11)

It is an inspired move on the part of the commentator to make the author of this text a Teiresian bisexual, who "tastes both flavors,"or, as we would say, swings both ways or bats for both teams. (The Arabic expression is "he eats both pomegranates and figs," and the British, ". . . oysters and snails.") Yet this is also a move that greatly mitigates the strong female agency in the text: where Vatsyayana tells us that women had this text made, the commentator tells us that an extraordinary man knew more about the courtesans' art than they knew themselves. During the millennium that separates the text from the commentary, the control of women by men increased dramatically,and this erosion of their status is reflected in the transition from the text's statement that women commissioned the text to the commentary's statement that a man did it better than they could do it. The powers of these courtesans may have been extensive but fragile; the devious devices that the courtesan uses to make her lover leave her, rather than simply kicking him out, are an example of what James Scott has taught us to recognize as the "weapons of the weak," the "artsof resistance." The text sets out her strategy:
She does for him what he does not want, and she does repeatedly what he has criticized. She curls her lip and stamps on the ground with her foot. She talks about things he does not know about. She shows no amazement, but only contempt, for the things he does know about. She punctures his pride. She has affairs with men who are superior to him. She ignores him. She criticizes men who have the same faults. And she stalls when they are alone together. She is upset by the things he does for her when they are making love. She does not offer him her mouth. She keeps him away from between her legs. She is disgusted by wounds made by nails or teeth. When he tries to hug her, she repels him by making a "needle" with her arms. Her limbs remain motionless. She crosses her thighs. She wants only to sleep. When she sees that he is exhausted, she urges him on. She laughs at him when he cannot do it, and she shows no pleasure when he can.... And at the end, the release happens of itself. (6.3.39-44)

There is no male equivalent for this passage, presumably because a man would not have to resort to such subterfuges: he would just throw the woman out.

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Wendy Doniger If parts of the text are directed toward women, is it also the case that they reflect women's voices? Certainly not always. The text not only assumes an official male voice (the voice of Vatsyayana) but denies that women's words truly represent their feelings; women's exclamations are taken not as indications of their wish to escape pain being inflicted on them, but merely as part of a ploy designed to excite their male partners:
As a major part of moaning she may use, according to her imagination, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck, and partridge. If she protests, he strikes her on the head until she sobs, using a hand whose fingers are slightly bent. Shrieking is a sound like a bamboo splitting, and sobbing sounds like a berry falling into water. Always, if a man tries to force his kisses and so forth on her, she moans and does the very same thing back to him. When a man in the throes of passion slaps a woman repeatedly, she uses words like "Stop!"or "Let me go! " or "Enough! " or "Mother!"and utters screams mixed with labored breathing, panting, crying, and groaning. Those are the ways of groaning and slapping. (2.7.1-21)

These passages inculcate what we now recognize as the rape mentality"her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes"-a dangerous line of thought that leads ultimately to places where we now no longer want to be: disregarding a woman's protests against physical abuse. Indeed, Vatsyayana lists rape as one of the worst, but still acceptable, of the eight wedding devices (3.5.26-27). He also takes for granted the type of rape that we now call sexual harassment, as he describes men in power who can take whatever women they want:
A young village headman, or a king's officer, or the son of the superintendent of farming, can win village women just with a word, and then libertines call these women adulteresses. Sex with these women takes place when they are engaged in such activities as doing chores, filling granaries, bringing things in and out of houses, cleaning house, working in the field, purchasing cotton, wool, flax, linen, and bark, spinning thread, and buying, selling, and exchanging goods. (5.5.7-9)

These women, at least, have absolutely no voice at all. The Kamasutra, however, often quotes women in direct speech, expressing views that men are advised to take seriously, and it is surpnsingly sympathetic to women, particularly to what they suffer from inadequate husbands. Of course, male texts may merely engage in a ventriloquismthat attributes to women viewpoints that in fact serve male goals. But in numerous places, the Kamasutra expresses points of view clearly favorable to women, particularly in comparison with other texts of the same era. The discussion of the reasons that women become unfaithful, 23

The Kenyon Review for instance, rejects the traditional patriarchalparty line that one finds in most Sanskrit texts, a line that punished very cruelly indeed any woman who slept with a man other than her husband. The Kamasutra, by contrast, begins its discussion of adultery with an egalitarian, if cynical, formulation: "A woman desires any attractive man she sees, and, in the same way, a man desires a woman. But, after some consideration, the matter goes no farther"(5.1.8). The text does go on to argue that women have less concern for morality than men have, and does assume that women don't think about anything but men. And it is written in the service of the hero, the would-be adulterer,who reasons, if all women are keen to give it away, why shouldn't one of them give it to him? But the author empathetically imagines various women's reasons not to commit adultery;and the would-be seducer takes the woman's misgivings seriously, even if only to disarm her:
Here are the causes of a woman's resistance: love for her husband, regardfor her children, the fact that she is past her prime, or overwhelmed by unhappiness, or unable to get away; or she gets angry and thinks, "He is propositioning me in an insulting way";or she cannot imagine being with him, thinking, "He is inscrutable";or she fears, "He will soon go away. There is no future in it; . .. or afraidwhen she thinks, "IfI am discovered, my own people will throw me out"; or scornful, thinking, "He has gray hair";or she worries, "Myhusband has employed him to test me"; or she has regard for religion. (5.1.17-42)

This discussion is ostensibly intended to teach the male reader of the text how to manipulate and exploit such women: "A man should eliminate, from the very beginning, whichever of these causes for rejection he detects in his own situation" (5.1.43). But, perhaps inadvertently, it provides a most perceptive exposition of the reasons that women hesitate to begin an affair,as well as the ways in which inadequate husbands drive away their wives (5.1.51-54). Do these passages express a woman's voice, or at least a woman's point of view? We must admit that we find these women's voices, carrying meanings that have value for us, only by transcending, if not totally disregarding, the original context. Were we to remain within the strict bounds of the historical situation, we could not notice the women's voices speaking against their moment in history, perhaps even against their author. Only by asking our own questions, which the author may not have considered at all, can we see that his text does contain many answers to them, fortuitously embedded in other questions and answers that were more

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Wendy Doniger meaningful to him. Adam Gopnik has made this point well, with reference to some of the western classics: "Alot of the skill in reading classics lies in reading past them.... The obsession with genetic legitimacy and virginity in Shakespeare; the acceptance of torture in Dante-these are not subjects to be absorbed but things you glide by on your way to the poetry.""1 need to read past the outer husk of the Kamasutra's obsesWe sions, not only to get to the precious kernel within-the vivid depictions of sexual psychology-but to get to our own obsessions. In this guarded way, we can learn a lot about conventional and unconventional Indian ideas of gender from the Kamasutra. Vatsyayana tells us that, "By his physical nature, the man is the active agent and the young woman is the passive locus; the agent contributes to the action in one way and the locus in another. The man is aroused by the thought, 'I am taking her,' the young woman by the thought, 'I am being taken by him' " (2.1.10). These gender stereotypes-the passive woman, active man-underlie other gender arguments in the text, too. Vatsyayana tells us what he thinks of as typically female behavior: "dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness." The closest he has to a word for our "gender" is "natural talent" or "glory" (tejas, a Sanskrit term designating light and heat, rather as we might say, "It is what someone shines at"):
A man's natural talent is his roughness and ferocity; a woman's is her lack of power and her suffering, self-denial, and weakness. (2.7.22)

But what happens when people deviate from these norms? What, for instance, does the text have to say about people who engage in homosexual acts? Let us begin with the men. Classical Hinduism is in general oddly, perhaps significantly, silent on the subject of homoeroticism, but Hindu mythology does drop hints from which we can excavate a pretty virulent homophobia. The dharma textbooks, too, either ignore or stigmatize homosexual activity. Male homoerotic activity was punished, albeit mildly: a ritual bath was often a sufficient atonement.'2 But in contrast to our modern notion of homosexuality, which is defined by a preference for a partner of the same sex, queerness in ancient India was determined by atypical sexual and gender behavior. The Sanskrit word kliba has traditionally been translated as

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The Kenyon Review "eunuch," but it almost certainly did not mean "eunuch," since eunuchs-men intentionally castrated, particularly in order to serve as guardians in the royal harem-did not exist in India before the Turkish presence in the ninth century, and therefore cannot be recorded in the Kamasutra. Men were castrated in punishment for various crimes in ancient India (and animals were gelded to control them), but such men were not employed as eunuchs. Kliba, rather, includes a wide range of meanings under the general rubric of "a man who does not act the way a man should act," a man who fails to be a man, a defective male, a male suffering from distortion and Lacanian lack. It is a catchall term that traditional Hindus coined to indicate a man who is in their terms sexually dysfunctional (or in ours, sexually challenged), including someone who was sterile, impotent, castrated, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex with other men, who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sexual organs, a man who produced only female children, or, finally, a hermaphrodite. But the Kamasutra departs from this traditional view in significant ways. It does not use the pejorative term kliba at all, but speaks instead of a "thirdnature":
Thereare two sortsof thirdnature,in the formof a womanand in the formof a man.The
one in the form of a woman imitates a woman's dress [etc.: chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness]. The act that should be done in the sexual organ is done in her mouth, and they call that "oralsex." She gets her sexual pleasure and erotic arousal as well as her livelihood from this, living like a courtesan. That is the person of the third nature in the form of a woman. (2.9.1-5)

The Kamasutra says nothing more about this cross-dressing male, with his stereotypical female gender behavior, but it discusses the fellatio technique of the closeted man of the third nature in considerable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing any physical act, and with what might even be called gusto (2.9.17-23). Men of the third nature are always designated by the pronoun "she," because the word "nature"is feminine in Sanskrit (as it, and most abstract nouns, are also in Latin and Greek). Indeed, the very idea of a third gender, rather than a binary division, may come from the basic habit of Indo-European languages to assign three genders-neuter as well as masculine and feminine-to all nouns. Yetthe very use of the word "third" -which clearly implies a previous "first"and "second" -demonstrates that Vatsyayana is thinking primarily in binary, more precisely dialectic,

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Wendy Doniger terns that would have satisfied Hegel or Claude LUvi-Strauss: opposed two terms modified by a third. Vatsyayana actually analogizes men and women to grammatical terms, in a discussion that does not take account of the third nature at all: "By his physical nature, the man is the active agent and the young woman is the passive locus; the agent contributes to the action in one way and the locus in another" (2.1.26). But there is another, better reason that Vatsyayanauses the female pronoun for a person of the third nature, and that is because of her perceived gender: he lists the third nature among women who can be lovers (1.5.27). This use of the pronoun "she"can also be seen as an anticipation of the practices of many cross-dressing gay men of our day. In contrast with these men, two verses describe, with nouns and pronouns that unambiguously designate males, men who seem bound to one another by discriminating affection rather than promiscuous passion, although these men, too, engage in oral sex:
Even young men, servants who wear polished earrings, indulge in oral sex only with certain men. And, in the same way, certain men-about-town who care for one another's welfare and have established trust do this service for one another. (2.9.35-36)

(These are not men of the third nature; perhaps they are bisexuals.) The female messenger must have had bisexual behavior in mind when, praising the man's charm, she says, according to the commentator, "He has such luck in love that he was desired even by a man" (5.4.15). The commentator, as we have seen, even makes the author of the part of the text commissioned by the courtesans a bisexual (1.1.11). Yet the text quotes scholars who warn the bridegroom that if he is too shy, his bride "will be discouraged and will despise him, as if he were someone of the third nature" (3.2.3). At the end of the discussion of the third nature, Vatsyayanagrants that some women, too, perform oral sex, though he strongly disapproves of it and attributes it largely to women from distant parts of India (2.9.2541). (He says that this is one of the ways that a group of men can pleasure one woman [2.6.46-47] in the mythical country where women reign, and he clearly disapproves of such women.) Fellatio, therefore, is permitted for 27

The Kenyon Review (some) men, and not for (our) women. But since, as we have seen, Vatsyayana uses the feminine rather than the male pronoun throughout the description of fellatio, this passage can be read heterosexually, instructing a woman how to seduce a man through oral sex:
She pretends to tease him about how easily he becomes excited, and she laughs at him. If the man does not urge her on, even when it is obvious that he is aroused, she makes advances to him on her own. If the man urges her to go on, she argues with him and only unwillingly continues. (2.9.7-11)

And so forth. By the same token, one might turn the argument upside down and argue that the female pronoun used for the active partner in the section on "the woman playing the role of the man" (the woman on top) might also refer to a male of the third nature and represent male homoerotic as well as heteroerotic sex. This position, with the woman on top, also is heavily laden with gender implications for women. What we call the "missionaryposition" is the assumed norn in most Indian texts.'3 But when the Kamasutra describes this position among all the other, more exotic positions that "take practice," the commentator scornifuly remarks, "Howdoes he penetrate her in this position? It is so easy that there is nothing to worry about!" (2.6.17). Most Sanskrit texts refer to the position with the woman on top as the "perverse"or"reversed"or "topsy turvy" position (viparitam). Vatsyayana, however, never uses this pejorative term. Instead, he refers to the woman-on-top position only with the verb "to play the man's role" (purushayitva). Here, as in his treatment of the third nature, Vatsyayana is far more relaxed than other texts of the period. The commentator's belief that the children produced when the woman is on top might be "a little boy and little girl with reversed natures" (2.8.41) refers to the view that the "reverse"intercourse of parents might wreak embryonic damage, resulting in the reversed gender behavior of the third nature-significantly, for a girl as well as a boy, the female type not spelled out by the text's discussion of the "third nature." Vatsyayana acknowledges that people do, sometimes, reverse gender roles (2.7.23), and this switch of "natural talents" is precisely what happens when the woman is on top: "She does to him in return now whatever acts he demonstrated before. And, at the same time, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop." The commentary spells out the gender complications:

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All of this activity is said to be done with a woman's natural talent. The acts he demonstrated before are acts that he executed with roughness and ferocity, the man's natural talent; she now does these acts against the current of her own natural talent. She hits him hard, with the back of her hand and so forth, demonstrating her ferocity. And so, in order to express the woman's natural talent, even though she is not embarrassed, nor exhausted, and does not wish to stop, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop. (2.8.6)

Now, since Vatsyayana insists that the woman "unveils her own feelings completely / when her passion drives her to get on top" (2.8. 39), the feelings of the woman when she plays the man's role seem to be both male and female. Or, rather, as the commentator explains, when she acts like a man, she pretends to be a man and then pretends to be a woman. Thus Vatsyayana acknowledges a woman's active agency and challenges her stereotyped gender role. Vatsyayana is also a strong advocate for women's sexual pleasure. He tells us that a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love may hate her man and leave him for another (3.2.35 and 4.2.31-35). If, as the context suggests, this woman is married, the casual manner in which Vatsyayana suggests that she leave her husband is in sharp contrast to the position assumed (as it were) by Manu:"Avirtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities" (5.154). Vatsyayana also presents an argument in favor of female orgasm far more subtle than views that prevailed in Europe until very recently indeed, and certainly worlds above the attitudes of his predecessors, whose cockamamie ideas he quotes (2.1.1023-26, 30). Vatsyayana'sconcern for women's pleasure also inspires him to point out that some women are so fond of mutual oral sex that "It is for this that courtesans reject virtuous, clever, generous men, and become attached to scoundrels, servants, elephant-drivers, and so forth" (2.9.39). Clearly he is, at least here, on the side of the angels. Vatsyayanaalso tells the man how to recognize when a woman has reached a climax-or, perhaps, if we assume (as I think we should) that the text is intended for women, too, he is telling the woman how to fake
it: The signs that a woman is reaching her climax are that her limbs become limp, her eyes close, she loses all sense of shame, and she takes him deeper and deeper inside her. She flails her hands about, sweats, bites, will not let him get up, kicks him, and continues to move over the man even after he has finished making love. (2.8.17-18)

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The Kenyon Review Vatsyayana also knew about the G-spot: "When he is moving inside her, and her eyes roll when she feels him in certain spots, he presses her in just those spots" (2.8.16). The commentator clarifies the passage: "When she feels him moving in a certain spot inside her, the pleasure of that touch makes her eyes whirl around in a circle; he strokes her with his penis very hard on that very spot, and from that pressure she quickly achieves her sexual ecstasy." But then the commentary goes on to offer another, quite different interpretation of it: "There is some argument about this. Some people say that, when the man is stroking inside her, whatever place the woman looks at, either specifically or vaguely, that is the place where he should press her." In his translation of this passage, Burton makes a basic mistake that plagues his entire translation: when the text puzzles him, he translates the commentary and presents it as the text. Here he follows the "some people" mentioned in the second part of the commentary and gets it wrong: "Whilea man is doing to the woman what he [sic] likes best during congress, he should always make a point of pressing those parts of her body on which she turns her eyes" (151). By following one part of the commentary, Burton has missed one point of the passage, how to locate the G-spot, and by inserting, gratuitously, the phrase "what he likes best," he has totally missed the larger point, the importance of learning how to give a woman pleasure. (And the word "congress"always makes me wonder what the Senate and the House are doing in bed.) I have, until now, ignored in this discussion the most recent translation of the Kamasutra, that of Alain Danielou (1994, from the 1992 French edition),"4but I cannot resist citing him here. Danielou reads this episode, which is actually entitled "The Sexual Moves of a Man," as an encounter between two women, one of whom sodomizes the other with a dildo; he translates svairini, designating an independent and presumably promiscuous woman (which we translate as a "loose" woman), as "lesbian" (2.8.16). (He does at least get the rolling eyes right-"Once the girl is possessed by union with the instrument, the moment when her eyes start vacillating is the moment to make her suffer"-though the translation of "press"as "make suffer"may give us pause.) But the Kamasutra passage about the woman playing the role of a man while making love with a man has nothing to do with lesbianism. Vat-

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Wendy Doniger syayana never uses the verb "to play the man's role" when he desenbes lesbian activities (5.6.1-4), though the commentator cites one text in which that verb is used of a woman with another woman:
A woman can be impregnated by making love with another woman just as she can by making love with a man. "When a woman and a woman make love together, and emit semen into one another, a child is born without bones." For blood is formed out of the basic liquid of the body and becomes, under certain circumstances, menstrual blood, while semen is formed out of the marrow of the bones. (2.1. 18)'5

Vatsyayanadescribes lesbian activity at the beginning of the chapter about the harem, in a brief passage about what he calls "Oriental customs" (5.6.2-4). (The use of the term "Oriental"-or "Eastern"-for what Vatsyayana regards as a disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be a colonized part of the Gupta Empire-indeed, the Eastern part- suggests that "orientalism"began not with the British but with the Orientals themselves.) These women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits that have the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual characteristics. But they do this only in the absence of men, not through the kind of personal choice that drives someone of the third nature. As for other sorts of lesbians, the Laws of Manu, the most famous of the textbooks of dharma, traditional Hindu law, roughly contemporaneous with the Kamasutra, says that a woman who corrupts a virgin will be punished by having two of her fingers cut off (8.3.69-70)-a hint of what Manu thinks lesbians do in bed; and the commentator on the Kamasutra specifies that that is how a woman deflowers another woman. Danielou gets all of this wrong. When the text uses the phrase that always describes the man's sexual organ inside the woman's (,yuktayantra, literally, "when the instrument has been attached," which we translate, "when he is inside her"), Danielou interprets this as meaning that the woman inserts a dildo in her partner's anus. But Vatsyayana always uses apadravya, not yantra, to designate a dildo that women use. Danielou also reads the preceding passage, about the woman on top, as the sodomization of a man by a woman using a dildo.16Where the text says, in quite unambiguous Sanskrit, "And,at the same time, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop. She moves on him

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The Kenyon Review with precisely the sexual strokes of a man" (2.8.6), Danielou says, "Then, again, if he [!I shows modesty, wishing to rest from his [!I labors, she mounts him and sodomizes him" (2.8.16). This is an ingenious and suggestive reading, but at the cost of ignoring the gender of the pronouns and the meaning of several key Sanskrit words in the text. Even this often cryptic text is not infinitely elastic; it simply will not stretch to accommodate these readings. So much for Danielou. Let us return, gratefully,to Burton, and to the ways in which Burton's translation more subtly distorts gender issues. In his preface to the American edition of 1962, John W. Speilman remarks, "Sanskritistswill certainly find a number of places where they differwith the interpretation that Burton has given. For highly specialized Indological studies, this translation is not considered dependable, but in such cases the scholar will, of course, consult the work in the original Sanskrit."'7 Burton'smain was the courage and determination to publish the work at all; contribution he was the Larry Flynt of his day. To get around the censorship laws, Burton set up an imaginary publishing house, the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, with printers said to be in Benares or Cosmopoli. Even though it was not formally published in England and the United States until 1962, the Burton Kamasutra, soon after its publication in 1883, became "one of the most pirated books in the English language,""8 constantly reprinted, often with a new preface to justify the new edition, sometimes without any attribution to Burton. It is free (at first poached from the illegal editions, then long out of copyright) and recognizable as what people think the Kamasutra should be. Indeed, it is quite a wonderful text: great fun to read, extraordinarilybold and frank for its time, and in many places a fairly approximate representation of the Sanskrit original. It remains precious, like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, as a monument of English literature, though not much closer to Vatsyayana than Fitzgeraldwas to Omar Khayyam. For the Sanskrit text often simply does not say what Burton says it says. A typical misunderstanding is caused by his translation of "third nature" as "eunuch" (the usual mistranslation of kliba). In the fellatio scene, Burton keeps distracting us with phrases such as, "the eunuch presses the end of the lingam with his lips closed together"(156). (We will return to that lingam in a moment). Why did Burton make such an error? 32

Wendy Doniger Probablyhe used the word "eunuch" in its broader sense, to designate not a guardian in the harem but a man who had been castrated for one reason or another. It is possible that Burton confused the men of the third nature with the Hijras,castrated transvestites who function as male prostitutes in India today, and are often called "eunuchs."'9Burton had written about them in the notes to his translation of the Arabian Nights, but there is no evidence of their existence at the time of the Kamwtsutra.Why, then, did he not recognize the text's reference to sexually entire men who happened to prefer having oral sex with other men? Did he read the text as implying that this was the only option available to them due to some sort of genital malfunction? There is no question about his knowledge of homosexuality, both in the Arabian Nights and in the India of his day; he had undertaken a study of male brothels, staffed by "boys and eunuchs,"20in Karachi in 1845.21 His famous "TerminalEssay" to the Arabian Nights, published in 1885, includes an eighteen-thousand-word essay entitled "Pederasty" (later republished in his collection of essays entitled The Erotic Traveller) that was one of the first serious treatments of the subject in English, though it called it "the vice, the abuse, pathological love" and stated that Hindus held the practice in abhorrence.22 No, Burton's "eunuchs" are, rather,a matter of orientalism: the depiction of "Orientals" as simultaneously oversexed and feminized. The word "eunuch" was bandied about loosely in British writings about the Orient, conveying a vague sense of sexual excess, cruelty, and impotence, and it infected Burton's translation of the Kamasutra, too. There are also numerous places where he erases the female voice. Throughout the text, Burton turns direct quotes into indirect quotes, thus losing the force of the dialogue that animates the work and erasing the vivid presence of the many women who speak in the Kamasutra, replacing these voices with reported speech rephrased by a man. Thus, where the text says, as we have seen, that the woman who is slapped may say "Stop!" "Let go!" "Enough!,"Burton says, "She continually utters words expressive of prohibition, sufficiency, or desire of liberation" (2.7.1-21). Moreover,when the text says that this may happen "When a man [is] in the throes of passion," Burton says it happens "When the woman is not accustomed to striking," reversing the genders and reversing the point. And, finally, where the text says she may call out "Mother!,"Burton says she may say "the words 'father,"mother,'... ," gratuitously suggesting that

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The Kenyon Review she would call on her male parent at this moment. And in the long passage that we have cited above, in which the woman thinks of the reasons not to commit adultery, Burton loses her voice entirely:
The causes of a woman rejecting the addresses of a man are as follows: Affection for her husband; Desire of lawful progeny; Want of opportunity; Anger at being addressed by the man too familiarly;Difference in rank of life;Want of certainty on account of the man being devoted to traveling;Thinking that the man may be attached to some other person; Fear of the man's not keeping his intentions secret; ... Fear that he may be employed by her husband to test her chastity; The thought that he has too much regardfor morality.

Here, too, significantly, in the last line, Burton changes her regardfor religion or morality (dharma) to his regard for it. Burton also erases women's agency. For example, at 4.1.19-21, we have translated the text like this:
Mildlyoffended by the man's infidelities, she does not accuse him too much, but she scolds him with abusive language when he is alone or among friends. She does not, however, use love-sorcery worked with roots, for, Gonardiya says, "Nothingdestroys trust like that."

The Burton translation here reads:

In the event of any misconduct on the part of her husband, she should not blame him excessively, though she be a little displeased. She should not use abusive language towards him, but rebuke him with conciliatory words, whether he be in the company of friends or alone. Moreover,she should not be a scold, for, says Gonardiya, "there is no cause of dislike on the part of a husband so great as this characteristic in a wife."

What is wrong with this picture? In the first place, Burton watered down the passage, padded it, made it almost twice as long as the more direct translation. Second, he mistranslated the word for "love-sorcery worked with roots" (mulakarika), which he renders as "she should not be a scold" (though elsewhere he translates mukzkarka correctly). Third, "misconduct" is not so much a mistranslation as a serious error of judgment, for the word in question (apacara) does have the general meaning of "misconduct," but in an erotic context it usually takes on the more specific a meaning of "infidelity," choice that is supported both by the remedy that the text suggests (and rejects)-love-magic-and by the commentator's gloss (aparadha). But the most serious problem is the word "not" that negates the wife's right to use abusive language against her straying husband, a denial only somewhat qualified by the added phrase, "rebukehim with conciliatory words." Thus where the text acknowledges two ways in

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Wendy Doniger which a wife might curb her cheating husband, and advises her to use one (verbal abuse) but not the other (sorcery), Burton allows her nothing but "conciliatory words." Was this an innocent error or does it reflect a sexist bias? We cannot know. Most unfortunately, Burton "adroitlymanaged to escape the smell of obscenity," as one of his biographers put it, by using "the Hindu terms for the sexual organs, yoni and lingam, throughout."23 This decision was problematic in several ways. First of all, these terms do not represent Vatsyayana's text, which only rarely uses lingam to refer to the male sexual organ and never refers to the female sexual organ as yoni. Instead, Vatsyayana uses several different words, primarilygender-neutral terms such asjaghana, which can be translated as "pelvis,"or "genitals,"or "between the legs," or other terms such as yantra or sadhana, "the instrument," that are neither coy nor obscene. In some places, he circumvents, by indirection or implication, the need to employ any specific word at all. Where Vatsyayana does use lingam (at 2.1.1), the context suggests, and the commentator affirms, that it is, like jaghana, gender-neutral, meant to apply to both the male and female sexual organs. More significantly, the terms lingam and yoni had orientalist implications for most English readers. They were likely to be known to educated readers, particularly to those interested in Indian art, since both Indian English and Indian vernacular languages used the words lingam and yoni primarily to designate the sexual organs of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, which were represented in the form of stylized icons, made of stone, wood, or other substances, in Hindu temples. The words therefore had, in the circles to which Burton would have appealed, somewhat of the currency of "karma" and "dharma"in English today. (Indeed, many people think the book is called the Karma Sutra). The human and divine facets of the terms lingam and yoni were sometimes explicitly compared, as in a text that argued that all creatures in the universe are the natural worshippers of Shiva and Parvati,since all men are marked with the sign of the god Shiva (the lingam) and join with women, who have what Shiva's consort has.24 Burton'sapplication of these two terms to human genitals, therefore, may have had, at the very least, inappropriateovertones and, at the most, blasphemous implications for some Hindus. But for English readers, the use of the Sanskrit term lingam in place of an English equivalent anthropologized sex, distanced it, made it

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The Kenyon Review safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them, that the text was not about real sexual organs, their sexual organs, but merely about the appendages of strange, dark people, far away, who have lingams and yonis instead of the naughty bits that we have-a move that was also, of course, profoundly titillating. This move dodged "the smell of obscenity" through the same logic that allowed National Geographic to depict the bare breasts of black African women long before it became respectable to show white women's breasts in Playboy. It enabled the authors to pretend that the book was not obscene because it was about India, when they really thought it was about sex, and knew that English readers would think so too. In fact, the Burton translation is most accurate in the sections that deal with the sexual positions, the topic for which the book became famous. Was this because this was what Burton cared about most, or worked on most carefully? (He continued to publish Oriental erotica, translations of the Sanskrit Ananga Ranga, the Persian Perfumed Garden, etc.). Was it because later Indian erotic texts elaborated most fully upon these subjects, thus providing Burton with detailed ponies? Or was it because the sex act is easier to understand, being universal and natural, than the cultural information about sexual customs that are specific to India? We cannot know, but we have learned that where sex may or may not be the same for everyone in all times and places, gender certainly is not. Notes
'Sir Richard Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot, trans., The Kamc Sutra of Vatsyayana, with a preface by W. G. Archer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963). 2The Kamasutra of Vatsyayna [with the commentary of Yashodharal,a new translation, introduction, and commentary, with Sudhir Kakar(London and New York:Oxford WorldClassics. 2002). 3My colleague William Mazzarella is writing a book "about the making and public careers of KamaSutra, the Indian condom brand." Personal communication, January 9, 2002. 4Roz Chast, cartoon, New Yorker10 Sept. 2001: 78. 5John Lahr,"FullTllt:Robin Williams Strikes Again,"New Yorker,8 Apr.2002: 92-94. 6RolandBarthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York:Hill and Wang, 1975). 7V.S. Naipaul,Half a Life (New York:Vintage Books, 2002) 110. "Personalconversation with William Mazzarella,Chicago, March 5, 2002. 9VikramChandra,Love and Longing in Bombay (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997) 126.

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Wendy Doniger
'?Adam Gopnik, "The Naked City,"New Yorker,23 July 2001: 30. , "A Purim Story,"New Yorker,18 & 25 February 2002: 26. 12Manu11.174; The Laws of Manu (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991), 26768.
13Indeed, it begins in the very earliest Indian text, the Rig Veda, composed in about 1000 B.C., which, in describing the original creation of the universe, imagines the missionary position: male seed-placers, giving-forth above, and female powers receiving beneath. Rig Veda 10.129.5. The Rig Veda:An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translatedfrom tei Sanskrit (Harmondsworth:Penguin Classics, 1981) 35. 14Alain Danielou, The Complete Kama Sutra (Rochester, VT:Park Street Press, 1994). '5The medical textbooks, Manu (at 3.49) and the commentator on the Kamasutra (at 6.1.17) all assume that a woman has seed. Yet other embryologies, also cited by the commentator, assume that the woman's menstrual blood, rather than her semen, combines with the man's semen to form the embryo; this model gives women a much smaller role in the child, since it also assumed that semen was a much refined and concentrated form of blood. (Here, again, Vatsyayana-who argues that the woman must have an orgasm in order to become pregnant, presumably in order to release her seed, is on the more liberal side.) 16Theverse that we have translated, "To play the man's part, when he is inside her, she gets on top and puts him undemeath her. In this way they can make love continually without interrupting the flow of love-making" (2.8.4), Danielou translates, "She is determined to unite him with the instrument that she is inserting into his anus, so that he gets the taste for one pleasure after another." 17John W. SpeUlman, introduction to The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana translated by Sir Richard Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot. Foreword by Santha Rama Rau (New York:E. P. Dutton, 1962) 50. "8Fawn Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York:BallanM. tine, 1967) 358. 19See Serena Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990.) G. 20William Archer, "Preface,"to the Kama Sutra (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963) 17; see also Wendy Doniger, "PresidentialAddress: 'I Have Scinde': Flogginga Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse,"Jourdal of Asian Studies 58 (Nov. 1999): 940-60. 2"Brodie369. 22Brodie369-70. 23Brodie359. 24Skanda Purana (Bombay: Shree Venkateshvara Steam Press, 1867) 1.8.18-19; Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000) 397. There are interesting parallels here with Plato's Symposium, which tells of a primeval androgyne that split into the ancestors of men and women, who therefore always try to get back together again.

Wendy Donigeris the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Serice Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Her most recent publications are The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000) and a new translation of The Kamasutra(2002).

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