Kama Sutra: A Guide to the Art of Pleasure

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In contemporary translations, this has been inaccurately rendered as "eunuch" – or, a castrated man in a harem, [note 2] and the royal harem did not exist in India before the Turkish presence in the ninth century. It was thought to have been written in its final form sometime between the third and fifth century CE. Kamasutra, states Kapoor, must be viewed as a means to discover and improve the "self-confidence and understanding of their bodies and feelings". The first English translation of the Kama Sutra was privately printed in 1883 by the Orientalist Sir Richard Francis Burton. The second major contribution was to edit it in a major way, by changing words and rewriting sections to make it more acceptable to the general British public.A long-time career diplomat, he served as the Indian high commissioner in Kenya and the Seychelles, minister in the United States and ambassador in Portugal and Yugoslavia. Vatsyayana Mallanaga is its widely accepted author because his name is embedded in the colophon verse, but little is known about him. Doniger questions the accuracy of Daniélou's translation, stating that he has freely reinterpreted the Kamasutra while disregarding the gender that is implicit in the Sanskrit words. This statement is included in the opening chapter of the text, a common practice in ancient Hindu texts likely included to prevent major and unauthorized expansions of a popular text.

C. Upadhyaya published his translation as the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana: Complete Translation from the Original. The text states that a person should be realistic, and must possess the "same qualities which one expects from the partner". In the early 1990s, its chapter on sexual positions began circulating on the Internet as an independent text and today is often assumed to be the whole of the Kama Sutra. In the colonial era marked by sexual censorship, the Kamasutra became famous as a pirated and underground text for its explicit description of sex positions.According to Doniger, the historical records suggest that the Kamasutra was a well-known and popular text in Indian history.

First, he had the courage to publish it in the colonial era against the political and cultural mores of the British elite. The Kamasutra too has attracted commentaries, of which the most well known are those of 12th-century [66] or 13th-century [67] Yaśodhara's Jayamaṅgalā in the Sanskrit language, and of Devadatta Shastri who commented on the original text as well as its commentaries in the Hindi language.This modern translation of Kama Sutra takes it away from the well-worn image of an erotic, Oriental curiosity. Other techniques of foreplay and sexual intimacy described in the kamasutra include various forms of holding and embraces ( grahana, upaguhana), mutual massage and rubbing ( mardana), pinching and biting, using fingers and hands to stimulate ( karikarakrida, nadi-kshobana, anguli-pravesha), three styles of jihva-pravesha ( french kissing), and many styles of fellatio and cunnlingus. This conscious and incorrect word substitution, states Doniger, thus served as an Orientalist means to "anthropologize sex, distance it, make it safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them, that the text was not about real sexual organs, their sexual organs, but merely about the appendages of weird, dark people far away.

The teachings and discussions found in the Kamasutra extensively incorporate ancient Hindu mythology and legends. It is also a psychological treatise that presents the effect of desire and pleasure on human behavior. The Modern Kama Sutra’ is for the modern couple, catering for both experienced lovers and for those wanting to experiment. Kamasutra was considered to have been put together from a 150 chapter manuscript that had itself been distilled from 300 chapters which in turn came from a compilation of some 100,000 chapters of text.The Burton version was written with a different mindset, one that treated "sexual matters with Victorian squeamishness and a pornographic delight in the indirect", according to Shulman. Burton adroitly avoided being viewed as obscene to the Victorian mindset by avoiding the use of words such as penis, vulva, vagina and other direct or indirect sexual terms in the Sanskrit text to discuss sex, sexual relationships and human sexual positions. Above: 6th- to 14th-century temples in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Nepal.