The Kamasutra is the oldest extant textbook of
erotic love. But it is more than a book about sex. It is
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, of course,
about the many and varied positions available to lovers in
sexual intercourse and the pleasures to be derived from each.
The Kamasutra was composed in Sanskrit, the
literary language of ancient India, sometime in the third
century, probably in North India. It combines an
encyclopedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of sex with
a closely observed sexual psychology and a dramatic,
novelistic narrative of seduction, consummation, and
disentanglement. Best known in English through the highly
mannered, padded, and inaccurate nineteenth-century
translation by Sir Richard Burton, the text is newly
translated here into clear, vivid, sexually frank English.
This edition also includes a section of vivid Indian color
illustrations along with three uniquely important
commentaries: translated excerpts from the earliest and most
famous Sanskrit commentary (thirteenth century) and from a
twentieth-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by
the two translators.
The lively and entertaining introduction by translator
Wendy Doniger, one of the world\'s foremost Sanskrit
scholars, discusses the history of The Kamasutra
and its reception in India and Europe, analyses its
attitudes toward gender and sexual violence, and sets it in
the context of ancient Indian social theory, scientific
method, and sexual ethics.
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