For the whole of last week, there was an elderly gentleman craning his neck hunched over me, peering into my book, however crowded the local train was. I wasn't surprised, because the book in question was a translation of Vatsyayana's 2nd century social treatise Kama Sutra. But had he full access, he would have been disappointed.
For starters, in this finely translated work by scholar AND Haksar, the only thing that remotely resembles an illustration is the picture of a flower on the cover. No raunchy illustrations of buxom ladies or acrobatic men. Not even a statue from Khajuraho. As it turns out -- and the following observation will surely be to the dismay of my fellow train companions -- the Kama Sutra is not a smutty book or simply a compendium of sexual positions.
The second century classic is, in fact, a volume of seven books, only one of which speaks about 'sexual union'. The rest includes an introduction to the book, guides for maidens, wives, wives of other men, and courtesans.
There are pages on 'A Gentleman's Life', which may remind one of similar-titled Victorian treatises, except those would have involved croquet. One whole book of the original is devoted to 'Esoteric Matters' which includes such topics as 'making oneself attractive', 'bewitching a woman', and 'various prescriptions'.
If it sounds tempting, sample this: "To enlarge" the size of the male sex organ, "massage it with the juices of ground cherry, jungle yam, watermelon, aubergine, castor and heliotrope and buffalo butter." Just too much effort and which guy knows what a heliotrope is, anyway?
The classic, as most know, has been frequently translated -- there are 183 listings of the title in the catalogue of the US Library of Congress alone, some of which include the Pop-up Kama Sutra and Pocket Idiot's Guide to the Kama Sutra.
What makes Haksar's work stand out, is his honest translation of the volume as a whole. He presents it as it was intended -- a guide of social and sensual conduct.
As Haksar explains in his introduction, "(The book) is about the art of living - about finding a partner, maintaining power in marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs -- and also about positions in sexual intercourse."
The original Kama Sutra could have been for all you know, a book for the nerd of the second century. Why else would one need a guide on how to woo a woman, which women to keep away from, whether to reunite with an old lover, and for the woman, which man to choose, how to make him interested in her, etc?
Of course there's merit in knowing essential things like that, but some of the advice given is downright frightening. "How to ensure that a woman is not bedded by another: Crush pieces of milkwort, dipped in a mixture of crushed red arsenic and sulphur, dried seven times and made into a powder which is then mixed with monkey shit and sprinkled over her" you-know-what.
However, Haksar's work comes across as clinical and lifeless. Everything is classified and slotted -- from the kind of love bite and scratching and even S&M to the sizes of the sex organs involved, so much so that sex does not appear like sex. The book is also littered with prose like: "There are four other kisses: from the front, from the side, from the back and the hard kiss. A fifth one consists of bunching the other's lips with one's fingers into a ball and kissing them hard without using the teeth. This is the pressing kiss."
It is, without doubt, a difficult work to translate. Celebrated author Wendy Doniger, for instance, had this to say of the classic when she was translating it, "The text is so intensely condensed, so starkly cryptic, that the task of understanding it frequently seems more like deciphering than translating."
Haksar does a fine job of it. I'm simply wondering if we still need the Kama Sutra in this day and age.
Kama Sutra, translated by AND Haksar, published by Penguin, Rs 250. Available in all leading bookstores.
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