Rediscovering The Kamasutra

The real text of the Kamasutra have been revealed and added to the literary canon of Oxford World's Classics.  

The most famous book ever published about sex has never before been accurately translated into the English language since it was first written 1,700 years ago.  The translation most widely used today by the eminent Victorian Sir  Richard Francis Burton, dates from 1883 and is full of mistranslations, inaccuracies and flaws. 

Burton (1821-1890) was a famous nineteenth century traveller who stayed in India for sometime with his Indian mistress.  When he finally returned to England, he founded the London Anthropological Society and issued the periodical Anthropologia with the intention, he said, of "educating many Victorian persons of influence about the diversity of human sexual behaviour."  Then a few years later, he co-founded the Kama Shastra Society, a small secretive organisation which  privately published his translation of the Kamasutra for the first time.  It remained the only 'official' English translation of the ancient Hindu love treatise until a landmark court ruling in the mid-1960's which permitted free publication and distribution of the book.

Luckily times have changed and this twenty-first century edition has been translated into English from the original text by religious historian Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and Hindu speaker.  Doniger puts right the mistakes of previous translations and strips out the later additions usually embedded in Vatsyayana's text. 

The clear, vivid, sexually frank English reproduces the original tone of the book which now contains more explicit descriptions of sex acts and positions.  It is also returns the ancient text to it's original form which places emphasis on female sexual pleasure and the importance of gratifying her.  Typifying  his era, Burton's translation downplays the woman's position by mistranslating some of the verses in which women have strong privileges. The original text advises the wife of an unfaithful man to scold him with sharp language, but Burton's translation says she should never do this   Doniger also had to change some of Burton's Sanskrit words which never actually occur in the original.  His unisex terms for the 'genitals' have been corrected to stop the text having a weird 'Oriental' flavour that mutes the sensuality of the long passages which describe the movements of the man inside the woman.  These passages sound silly in Burton but are actually unusually vivid descriptions of the most intimate aspect of sexuality. 

You can purchase Kamasutra from Amazon and save £3.00 on the recommended retail price of  £14.99.

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