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Book 3 is about how to obtain, treat, and cajole a virgin bride. There is surprisingly little discussion of caste. It is said only that “one should play, marry, associate with one’s equals, people of one’s own circle.” Wealth, which is by far the more important consideration, should be evenly matched because “whoever marries someone richer becomes inferior in the home.”
The behavior of the wife, detailed in Book 4, is complicated by the politics of the harem and her position within it. For the only wife, things are a lot simpler: “The only wife is totally trusting, considering her husband like a god and completely devoted to him.” On the bright side, widows can remarry, and there is no mention of sati (the rare practice of a widow immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre). The text lays out the advantages of having just one wife.
Book 5 discusses sex with other men’s wives, which, in general, is not to be recommended. Still, there is an entire chapter on the task of the go-between.
Book 6 addresses courtesans: which men to go for, how to get them, how to behave with them, how to squeeze them for money, and how to get rid of them if they no longer have any.
If all else fails, the final book sets out magical and medicinal formulas for manipulating recalcitrant lovers and enhancing sexual prowess.
Those with rosy retrospection of free speech should know that it was not until 1962 that the Kama Sutra could be published in the UK and U.S.
In the UK, prosecutions brought about by the Society of the Suppression of Vice resulted in several publishers being imprisoned. Books that fell afoul of the Obscene Publications Act 1857 could only be circulated privately among the members of a society. For this reason, the traveler and author Sir Richard Francis Burton (d. 1890) founded the “Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares” to bring out the first English translation of the Kama Sutra—a joint effort that bore the name of Richard Burton. Though heavily sanitized, with, for example, the sexual organs abstractly referred to as lingam and yoni, it soon became one of the most pirated books in the English language.
Today, pornography is ubiquitous, but in a time when it could hardly be found, it is the chapter on sexual positions that excited the most interest. In the 1990s, the chapter on sexual positions from the 1980 Sinha translation began circulating on the Internet, and to this day, many people think of the Kama Sutra as no more than a sex manual.
But as Vatsyayana warned, making love without theory is like being an illiterate priest, and who would want to get with that?
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