Is the Kama Sutra the Most Misunderstood Text of All Time?

The Kama Sutra is less a book about bodies than a book about people: how they learn, dress, court, marry, quarrel and make up. Its fame rests on one book out of seven.

What is the Kama Sutra, really?

The Kama Sutra is an ancient Sanskrit treatise on kama, a word that means desire, love and the pleasure of the senses. It was written by a man named Vatsyayana, probably in the third century CE, as a guide to a pleasurable, cultivated and balanced life. Sex is one of its subjects, but only one.

A sutra is literally a thread: a string of short, dense statements meant to be memorised and then unpacked by a teacher. Wendy Doniger, who co-translated the text, calls the real book one about “the art of living”: finding a partner, marriage, power within a relationship, and pleasure in all its forms.

The text defines its subject broadly. In the 1883 English translation, kama is “the enjoyment of appropriate objects by the five senses of hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, and smelling, assisted by the mind together with the soul.” Music, perfume, a well-kept garden and good conversation all belong to it.

The numbers make the point. By its own account the work has about 1,250 verses in thirty-six chapters, arranged in seven books. Only one of those books, ten chapters out of thirty-six, is about physical love. The other six deal with everything around it.

Who was Vatsyayana, and when did he write?

Vatsyayana Mallanaga is accepted as the author because his name is built into the text’s closing verse, but almost nothing else is known about him. He probably wrote in a city of north India; Pataliputra, today’s Patna in Bihar, is one likely candidate.

Estimates of the date range from 400 BCE to 300 CE. Doniger argues for the second half of the third century CE: the text mentions the Abhira and Andhra dynasties, which did not rule side by side before about 225 CE, yet says nothing of the Gupta Empire that came next.

Vatsyayana presents his book as a digest of older works by earlier teachers, such as Babhravya and Dattaka, none of which survive. He also says why he wrote: in the 1883 rendering of his closing lines, the treatise was composed “for the benefit of the world, by Vatsyayana, while leading the life of a religious student at Benares, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity.”

He adds that “This work is not to be used merely as an instrument for satisfying our desires.” Whatever one makes of that, it shows how he wanted to be read: as the teacher of a discipline, not a supplier of thrills.

Why is the Kama Sutra so misunderstood?

Because most of the world met it through one Victorian translation, and then through fragments of that. The first English version, printed in 1883 and known by the name of the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, was issued secretly, passed around underground and pirated for decades. Its fame came from the chapters on sex, and the rest of the book faded from view.

The pattern repeated itself a century later. In the early 1990s the chapter on sexual positions from Indra Sinha’s 1980 translation began circulating on the internet as a text of its own, and today it is often taken for the whole Kama Sutra. A treatise on the whole of a pleasurable life was reduced to a list.

Pictures did the rest. The original is prose and verse; the paintings reproduced everywhere as “Kama Sutra illustrations” were made more than a thousand years later, most in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The temple couples of Khajuraho and Konark, often labelled “Kama Sutra sculptures”, belong to a different art, made centuries later for other purposes.

So is it the most misunderstood text of all time? No one can measure that. But it is hard to think of another classic whose popular image covers so little of what it actually says. The rest of this essay opens the book itself: its seven books, its place for pleasure among the aims of life, its cultivated citizen, what it says about consent, and how translators and artists reshaped it.