Kama Sutra

The Kama Sutra is an ancient Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment. It is traditionally attributed to Vātsyāyana, although very little is known about him; some sources suggest he may also have been called Mallanaga or Mrillana. Its date of composition is uncertain: historians have placed it anywhere between the 4th century BCE and the 3rd century CE. The most widely held view is that the surviving version was fixed between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE in the cities of northern India, though the exact place is unknown. The author himself says he compiled and distilled earlier works by other teachers, now lost, and presents his labour as a study undertaken in a religious spirit.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not mainly a manual of sexual positions. It is a didactic work meant to educate young people of the urban and courtly elites in the art of living with refinement: conversation, music, painting, personal grooming, courtship, choosing a partner, married life and relations with others. Sexual positions occupy only a part of its content. Its conceptual framework is the purusharthas, the proper aims of human life, and in particular the trivarga: dharma (duty and moral order), artha (wealth and prosperity) and kama (pleasure and affection). The author insists that all three must be kept in balance, without any one harming the others.

Its reception has been broad and varied. Within the Indian tradition it influenced many later treatises on kama shastra and the arts, as the reliefs and sculptures of Hindu temples show. In the West, Richard Burton's English translation of 1883, heavily revised to suit Victorian tastes, made it an object of both fascination and censorship, and a text associated almost exclusively with eroticism. Modern readings have tended to favour that sexual dimension, while the work as a whole, with its view of pleasure as part of an ordered and cultivated life, remains less known.