For the Internet worm, see Kama Sutra (Internet worm).

Kamasutram, generally known to the Western world as Kama Sutra, is an ancient Indian text on human sexual behavior, widely considered to be the standard work on love in Sanskrit literature. The text was composed by Vatsyayana, as a brief summary of various earlier works belonging to a tradition known generically as Kama Shastra, the science of love. Kama is literally desire. Sutra signfies a thread, or discourse threaded on a series of aphorisms. Sutra was a standard term for a technical text, thus also the Yogasutram of Patanjali. The text is originally known as Vatsyayana Kamasutram ("Vatsyayana's Aphorisms on Love"). Tradition holds that the author was a celibate scholar. He is believed to have lived sometime between the 1st to 6th centuries AD, probably during the great cultural flowering of the Gupta period.

Preceding history

• The earliest text of the Kama Shastra tradition, said to have contained a vast amount of information, is attributed to Nandi the sacred bull, Shiva's doorkeeper, who was moved to sacred utterance by overhearing the lovemaking of the god and his wife Parvati.
• During the 8th century BC, Shvetaketu, son of Uddalaka, produced a summary of Nandi's work. However
  
  
  
  this "summary" was still too vast to be accessible.
• A scholar called Babhravya, together with a group of his disciples, produced a summary of Shvetaketu's summary. This remained a huge and encyclopaedic tome.
• Between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, several authors reproduced different parts of the Babhravya group's work in various specialist treatises. Among the authors, those whose names are known are Charayana, Ghotakamukha, Gonardiya, Gonikaputra, Suvarnanabha, and Dattaka:

— Dattaka composed a work on courtesans which Vatsyayana reproduces almost entirely in Kama Sutra.

— Suvarnanabha's text mentions Shatakarni Shatavahana, a king of the 1st century BC who killed his own wife accidentally during sadistic practices, thus giving a hint on the time period it was written.

• Yashodhara, in his commentary of Kama Sutra, attributes the origin of erotic science to Mallanaga, the "prophet of the Asuras", meaning it originated in prehistoric times. Nandi is then said to have transcribed it for mankind. The attribution of the name "Mallanaga" to Vatsyayana is due to the confusion of his role as editor of the Kama Sutra with that of the mythical creator of erotic science.

Time and background of Kama Sutra

Vatsyayana seems to have lived around the 4th century AD, at a time of cultural prosperity known as the Gupta period. The fact that Varaha Mihira in his Brihad Samhita (around the 6th century AD) claims to have drawn his inspirations from the Kama Sutra, and the Kama Sutra's mention of King Shatakarni Shatavahana who lived in the 1st century BC gives the ranges for the possible production time of the Kama Sutra.

Vatsyayana claims

Contents

The Kama Sutra has 35 chapters, organized into seven parts, each of which are written by individual experts in the respective fields. The parts are:

1. Introduction (4 chapters) - on love in general and its place in the lives of men and women.
2. On Sexual Union (10 chapters) - an in-depth discussion of kissing, various types of foreplay, orgasm, a list of sex positions, oral sex (in both heterosexual and homosexual context), anal sex, paraphilia, and ménage à trois.
3. About the Acquisition of a Wife (5 chapters) - courtship and marriage.
4. About a Wife (2 chapters) - proper conduct of a wife.
5. About the Wives of Other People (6 chapters) - mainly seduction.
6. About Courtesans (6 chapters).
7. On the Means of Attracting Others to Oneself (2 chapters).

The Kama Sutra contains a total of 64 sexual positions and depicts positions as arts. Vatsyayana believed there were eight ways of making love, multiplied by eight positions within each of these. In the book, they are known as the 64 Arts. The chapter listing sexual positions is the best-known, and a translation (different from Burton's) is in wide circulation on the Internet. This chapter was pirated from the 1980 translation of Indra Sinha and first appeared on the internet server wiretap.spies in the late eighties. It is commonly mistaken to be the entirety of the Sutra.

However, only about 20 percent of the book is devoted to sexual positions. The remainder gives guidance on how to be a good citizen and insights into men and women in relationships. The Kama Sutra describes making love as "divine union". Vatsyayana believed that sex itself was not wrong, but doing it frivolously was sinful. The Kama Sutra has helped people enjoy the art of sex at a deeper level and can be considered a technical guide to sexual enjoyment, as well as providing insight into the sexual mores and practices of India in those times.

Translations

The most widely known English translation of the Sutra is that of Sir Richard Francis Burton and Frederick Foster Arbuthnot in 1883. An influential recent translation is that of Indra Sinha, published in 1980. Alain Daniélou contributed a translation called The Complete Kama Sutra in 1994. This translation featured the original text attributed to Vatsayana, along with a medieval and modern commentary. It was translated again in 2002 by the controversial Wendy Doniger (professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago) and Sudhir Kakar (Indian psychoanalyst and senior fellow at Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard).

References

• The love teachings of Kama Sutra, Translated by Sinha, Indra ISBN 0722532377
• The Complete Kama Sutra, Translated by Daniélou, Alain ISBN 0892814926
• Kamasutra, Translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar, ISBN 0192802704

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