That sex is chaotic, mad, perverse, risible, enlivening and inspiring, and that in its awkwardness and self-consciousness there might be more real contact than in the simple following of positions, doesn't occur to the author. The minor pleasures may be satisfying and even fulfilling, but the major ones are serious toil. Like Alfred Kinsey's reports at the end of the 1940s and early 50s, the Kama Sutra tries hard to turn passion into science. The interesting question here is whether this is perhaps the truth about sex – whether a Clintonesque "I did not have sexual relations" seems to get it right, and there is really no touching, ever – or if this is wishful thinking. Both would be in a fixed place and the relationship would merely be an exchange of fantasies.
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If it turned out that the woman was also consulting a similar manual then the two characters in this drama would be playing roles that would ensure they'd remain outside the experience. In fact, its routines appear to render any form of sensual transaction uncreative, predictable and controlled, and the male omnipotent. It neglects, for instance, one of the most important parts of love: that one can caress with the voice as well as with the eyes. The Kama Sutra, as a book of technique – a sexual self-help manual for the socially naive, a way for geeks to make it with girls – is fascinating, therefore, in what it omits. Without authorities or taboos there isn't more fun, but more nothing, particularly as we tend to treat ourselves more severely than even the authorities do. It is prohibition that makes serious recreation feasible, just as it is the rules that make sport possible. They are, then, mostly transmitted by being forbidden, and it is this relation to prohibition that amuses and intrigues Stendhal.
The same with many women is called 'the herd of cows'." Although the Kama Sutra doesn't take pleasure seriously enough to be wise, it is certainly a reminder of the central place of sexuality and its pleasures in our lives, and pleasures, as every parent knows, have to be both limited and passed on to the next generation.
It states, for example, that "intercourse with two women who have good feelings for each other is known as the 'combination'. It is arch, comical and amazing – less Byron and more the sort of thing that Jeeves would have said to a priapic Bertie Wooster had Bertie been Indian and PG Wodehouse without the sense to omit sex from his books. It suggests that the gentleman should keep away from lepers, malodorous women and anyone with white spots.
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It contains information about hygiene and sexual positions, and advises how not to cause havoc in a harem, how to deal with courtesans and how to behave towards "the wives of others". It turns out that Kama Sutra: A Guide to the Art of Pleasure is a compendium of advice about social and romantic behaviour, put together 1,600 years ago, for wealthy young men about town. And the longer I didn't read it, the more dreadful this famed carnival of desire and mayhem became in my imagination.
The real business, for me, was in the Robbins, and I ended up never reading the Kama Sutra. My father owned copies of contraband such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita and other such serious stuff, along with Harold Robbins. In the London suburbs in the early 60s, if a young man sought knowledge of sexual matters he had to traipse up to the West End to watch European films, and if particularly desperate during a tiresome evening might even be forced to turn to literature. In the mid-60s, when I first heard of it, the Kama Sutra was, along with The Perfumed Garden and Venus in Furs, considered licentious and filthy, the very gateway to damnation. "W hat a pity it's not a sin!" says a woman licking an ice cream in a story by Stendhal, reminding us that the search for pleasure – and prohibited pleasure at that – is a primary preoccupation for most people a good deal of the time, even for those trying to hide from it.Įven reading the Kama Sutra, in a fine new translation by AND Haksar, feels like a guilty pleasure.
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