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| Home > Indian Literature > Classical Poetry > Kamasutra
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| | Kamasutra
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Kama Sutra, is an ancient Indian text on human sexual behavior, widely considered to be the standard work on love in Sanskrit literature. The text was composed by Vatsyayana, as a brief summary of various earlier works belonging to a tradition known generically as Kama Shastra, the science of love. Kama is literally desire. Sutra signifies a thread, or discourse threaded on a series of aphorisms. Sutra was a standard term for a technical text, thus also the Yogasutram of Patanjali. The text is originally known as Vatsyayana Kamasutram ("Vatsyayana`s Aphorisms on Love"). Tradition holds that the author was a celibate scholar. He is believed to have lived sometime between the 1st to 6th centuries AD, probably during the great cultural flowering of the Gupta period.
The Kama Sutra contains a total of 64 sexual positions and depicts positions as arts. Vatsyayana believed there were eight ways of making love, multiplied by eight positions within each of these. In the book, they are known as the 64 Arts. The chapter listing sexual positions is the best-known, and a translation (different from Burton`s) is in wide circulation on the Internet. This chapter was pirated from the 1980 translation of Indra Sinha and first appeared on the internet server wiretap.spies in the late eighties. It is commonly mistaken to be the entirety of the Sutra.
However, only about 20 percent of the book is devoted to sexual positions. The remainder gives guidance on how to be a good citizen and insights into men and women in relationships. The Kama Sutra describes making love as "divine union". Vatsyayana believed that sex itself was not wrong, but doing it frivolously was sinful. The Kama Sutra has helped people enjoy the art of sex at a deeper level and can be considered a technical guide to sexual enjoyment, as well as providing insight into the sexual mores and practices of India in those times.
Beyond the 11th century the use of Sanskrit in general literature had declined, most importantly because of emergence of literature in vernacular Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi etc. Sanskrit came to be used largely for Hindu religious and philosophical literature. Some important works from the 1st century include Katha sarit Sagar by Somadeva, apoetic adaptation in Sanskrit of Brihat - Katha written in 5th century B.C. in Paishachi dialect. One of the famous stories in this series is that of Vikram and Betal known to every Indian child even today and vastly read and enjoyed.
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