“The Kamasutra is really quite tame and reasonable, just occasionally over-imaginative.” An Interview with Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger, an American scholar and the author of The Hindus: An Alternative History, is one of the most reputed academics in the field of Hindu studies today. Doniger recently published a new book, The Mare’s Trap: Nature and Culture in the Kamasutra. Based on rigorous documentary research and analysis, The Mare’s Trap unpacks elements of the Kamasutra’s sensory appeal and its elliptical subversions. The book also highlights a significant degree of overlap between Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra and Kautilya’s Arthashastra.

In this email interview with NikhilPandhi, an intern at The Caravan, Doniger speaks about the “Kautilyan Kamasutra,” its historical and popular appeal, the representation of gendered and other identities in the text, and the tensions between the erotic and the ascetic in ancient India. She also challenges the modern conservative lobby inIndia,and expresses hope for theKamasutra’s“revival” in the country today.

Nikhil Pandhi: In your book, you remark, “Though sexual reality may in fact be universal, sexual fantasy seems to be highly cultural.” How important is this in explaining theKamasutra’spopularity among both Indian and non-Indian audiences?

Wendy Doniger: I think both Indian and non-Indian audiences are at first drawn to the Kamasutra because they think, wrongly, that it is about the sexual act, and for some people, that is all that sexual reality is, the physical act, which is basically the same, mutatis mutandis, for all mammals. But many people are interested in the broader and more profound aspects of sexuality, the cultural aspects of sexuality, as it pervades not only marriage but also other human relationships in which the sexual act itself plays no part at all—politics, for instance, and religion, and so much more. Those people may not be inclined to pick up a copy of the Kamasutra at all, thinking that is merely about the sexual act; but of course there is a great deal about the cultural aspects of sexuality in it for them. Part of that cultural reality is purely Indian, and will have different meanings for an Indian and a non-Indian reader—for one, it will have the comfort of familiarity, for the other, the charm of exoticism. Either way, the Indian cultural aspect of the book will be far more illuminating for all readers than the “reality” aspect that most people think they will find in it.

NP: How does theKamasutrareveal the tension between the erotic and the ascetic in ancient India?

WD: Obviously the text is more concerned with the erotic than with the ascetic, but it is also, surprisingly, very much concerned with the control of the senses and the emotions. Even when it is talking about physical pleasure, it argues that control is ultimately more exciting and satisfying than unthinking indulgence. And when it is talking about the role of sexuality in human society, it absolutely insists on control. In this, it is definitely borrowing from the ascetic traditions, which have developed a fine science of the control of the senses.

NP: How do valuations ofkamaitself change and vary in the “KautilyanKamasutra”?

WD: I think both the KS [Kamasutra] and the AS [Arthashastra] regard kama as important, something that one must take into account no matter what one is doing, and dangerous, something that should be controlled. Obviously the KS regards kama as much more worthy of analysis and discussion than the AS does, and it has much more to say about the advantages to be derived from the successful cultivation of kama, but both texts certainly agree that kama can get you into a lot of trouble unless you are very careful.

NP: You characterise theKamasutraas “a revolutionary document for sexually liminal people, and for women.” Yet it became a text that contributed greatly to the culture of violence against women.

WD: On the one hand, it is revolutionary in its attitude to important things like having sex for reasons other than producing babies, caring for women’s pleasure, treating with respect men who have sex with other men, and understanding the reasons why some people commit adultery. It does not, as Manu does, blame women for men’s sexual excitement; it regards men as responsible for their own control of their own passions. But by putting forth a scenario in which, as part of love-play, women pretend not to want sex, and pretend not to want to be struck or bitten, the text clearly advances that particular aspect of the rape mentality: she doesn’t mean it when she says no.

NP: On the “extreme positions” of theKamasutra, you say, “[these] may simply be the artist’s free-ranging fantasies on a theme of sexual possibilities.”

WD: The ancient Sanskrit scientific texts, the Shastras, codify everything, the colors on the coats of horses, the different fabrics that a man’s sacred thread could be made of, everything. The Shastras implicitly claim, as the Mahabharata (which many ancient scholars regarded as a dharma-Shastra) explicitly states, “There is nothing anywhere [on this subject] that is not in this text.” I think Vatsyayana felt that he had to put into his text every possible variation on sex that anyone had ever thought of, including some that seem counter-productive, to put it mildly. He puts in a number of things that he himself explicitly disapproves of, and even warns people not to do something just because they read about it in some (Vatsyayana’s) book. The kamasutra is his idea of everything anyone has fantasised about sex. In fact, he does not mention a number of extreme sexual acts that one can find nowadays fantasised on film and the internet—real pornography; the Kamasutra has no sadism, no masochism, no bondage, and so forth. By comparison with those contemporary expressions of sexuality, the Kamasutra is really quite tame and reasonable, just occasionally over-imaginative.

NP: TheKamasutracompares the politics of the sexual encounter and the machinations of desire to a battle. Is there always a clear “winner” in this battle?

WD: No, I think this is a mock-battle that, ideally, always ends in a draw, with each of the partners the winner. Some portions of the text (such as those dealing with courtship and with adultery) are written from the man’s point of view, but some (such as those dealing with marriage and with courtesans) from the woman’s point of view, and some (such as the section on mastering the arts and making use of medicinal substances) are for both men and women. Vatsyayana never assumes that the man is the winner; he is always concerned for the woman’s comfort and pleasure. But the sexual game is played out as if one person desired to conquer the other, and the two parties do indeed maneuver like opposed political powers.

NP: Vatsyayana often describes various acts of coupling through animal motifs. What does the mapping of the faunal world onto the landscapes of human fornication suggest about the tension between nature and culture in theKamasutra?

WD: This is a very complicated matter that I have a lot to say about in the book. Basically, Vatsyayana is saying that people are not animals and therefore need a book about sex, in contrast with animals who do not need any text—he says this explicitly right at the start. They’re different because a human woman, unlike a female animal, can have sex when she is not in her fertile period (this is a direct contradiction of the dharma texts), and is “fenced in”—that is, is said to belong to one particular man—in ways that animals are not. On the other hand, Vatsyayana uses animal terminology throughout the text, to label different sorts of human men and women, to characterise certain sexual acts, to describe the sounds that women are said to make, and so forth. So I think he is walking a razor’s edge between admitting that in our sexuality we are animals while at the same time warning that we must not be like animals. We must transcend our animal impulses—including violent impulses—in order to live in a world where there are, after all, all sorts of fences.

NP: You call theKamasutra“an occasion for national pride, not national shame.” What about theKamasutrado you think scares puritans today so much?

WD: Not spending much of my time among puritans, I can only tell you what I’ve learned from what they write, and truly I don’t read much of that either. The first thing that scares them about the Kamasutra is that, since they don’t read it (How can they? They’ve argued that no one should read it), they may genuinely think that it is a pornographic book. Second, they know that the Kamasutra has been a dirty joke among English-speaking people, part of the image of The Orient as oversexed and bestial, ever since Sir Richard Burton published his translation in 1883, and it is therefore not surprising or to the discredit of the so-called puritans that they are embarrassed by that reputation; that is purely the fault of the Orientalist attitudes of the English-speaking world. My hope is that if I just get people to read the book, and to take pride in its brilliance, its human insights, and its liberal attitudes, they could help to spread a counter-narrative about the true nature and value of the book, and get other people to read it too, and to benefit from its wisdom.

NP: What gives you hope about the “revival of theKamasutra”in contemporary India?

WD: I am thrilled by the many strong voices that I read in the Indian press today, protesting against infringements of personal liberty and against the persecution of works of literature and art that are deemed offensive by a small but strongly motivated group. This gives me hope that such people will be open to a re-reading of this maligned text, and that they will persuade others, too, of its value.

This interview has been edited and condensed.