Redeeming the Kamasutra
By: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 182
ISBN-13: 9780190499280
Subjects: Sanskrit Erotic literature; History and criticism
Description: "The Kamasutra, composed in the third century CE, is the world's most famous textbook of erotic love. There is nothing remotely like it even today, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisticated. Yet it is all but ignored as a serious work in its country of origin-sometimes taken as a matter of national shame rather than pride - and in the rest of the world it is a source of amused amazement and inspires magazine articles that offer "mattress-quaking sex styles" such as "the backstairs boogie" and "the spider web". In this scholarly and superbly readable book, one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient Indian texts seeks to restore the Kamasutra to its proper place in the Sanskrit canon, as a landmark of India's secular literature. She reveals fascinating aspects of the Kamasutra as a guide to the art of living for the cosmopolitan beau monde of ancient India: its emphasis on grooming and etiquette (including post-coital conversation), the study and practice of the arts (ranging from cooking and composing poetry to coloring one's teeth and mixing perfumes), and discretion and patience in conducting affairs (especially adulterous affairs). In its encyclopedic social and psychological narratives, it also displays surprisingly modern ideas about gender and role-playing, female sexuality, and homosexual desire. Even as she draws our attention to the many ways in which the Kamasutra challenges the conventions of its time (and often ours) - in dismissing procreation as the aim of sex, for instance - Doniger also shows us how it perpetuates attitudes that have continued to darken human sexuality: passages that twin passion with violence, for example, and those that explain away women's protests and exclamations of pain as ploys to excite their male partners. In these attitudes, as in its more enlightened observations on sexual love, we see the nearly two-thousand-year-old Kamasutra mirror twenty-first-century realities. In investigating and helping us understand a much celebrated but under-appreciated text, Wendy Doniger has produced a rich and compelling text of her own that will interest, delight, and surprise scholars and lay readers alike"--

"In this scholarly and superbly readable book, one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient Indian texts seeks to restore the Kamasutra to its proper place in the Sanskrit canon, as a landmark of India's secular literature. In investigating, and helping us understand, a much celebrated but under-appreciated text, Wendy Doniger has produced a rich and compelling text of her own that will interest, delight, and surprise scholars and lay readers alike"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: The strange and the familiar in the Kamasutra. Class in the Kamasutra ; The life of a man-about-town ; The Kamasutra as a play ; The Kamasutra and the contemporary reader ; The positions; title: The Kautilyan Kamasutra. The triple set of human aims ; The history of the three texts, and their intertextuality ; The indebtedness of the Kamasutra to the Arthashastra ; Basic similarities of form and argument ; Attitudes to low-life and kings ; Attitudes to other scholars ; Striking points of agreement ; Spying ; Testing ; The need to control the senses ; The Arthashastra and Kamasutra on sex ; Sex and politics; title: The mythology of the Kamasutra. Mythological background ; Tales told to encourage women ; Tales told to warn men; title: Women in the Kamasutra. The Kamasutra for women ; Women's rights ; Women's sexuality ; Sexual freedom ; Women's voices; title: The third nature : gender inversions in the Kamasutra. Traditional and inverted Indian concepts of gender ; Same-sex men ; Sir Richard Burton on the "third nature" ; Same-sex women ; Bisexuality; title: The mare's trap : the nature and culture of sex. Size matters ; The problem of desire ; Positional solutions ; Mechanical and pharmaceutical solutions ; The mare's trap ; Animals and humans : nature and culture ; The culture of the Kamasutra; title: The rise and fall of Kama and the Kamasutra. Kama in the early history of India ; Detumescence under the British ; Sir Richard Burton's version of the Kamasutra ; The demise of Kama ; The rebirth of Kama.