Author: Wendy Doniger
Sudhir Kakar/
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Wendy Doniger / Sudhir Kakar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 231
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0192802704
Description
The text is presented here in an entirely new translation into clear, vivid, sexually frank English, together with three commentaries: translated excerpts from the earliest and most famous commentary and from a twentieth-century Hindi commentary and explanatory notes.
The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It is about the art of living - about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs - and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, sometime in the third century of the Common Era, probably in North India.
It combines an encyclopedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of sex with a closely observed sexual psychology and a dramatic, novelistic narrative of seduction consummation, and disentanglement. Best known in English through the highly mannered, padded and inaccurate nineteenth-century translation of Sir Richard Burton, the text is presented here inch an entirely new translation into clear, vivid, sexually frank English, together with three commentaries: translated excerpts from the earliest and most famous Sanskrit commentary( 13th century) and from a twentieth-century Hindi commentary and explanatory notes by the two translators.
The lively and entertaining introduction by Wendy Doniger discusses the history of the text and its reception in India and Europe, analyses its attitudes towards gender and sexual violence, and sets it in the context of ancient Indian social theory, scientific method, and sexual ethics..
Contents
Introduction
The Text
The Commentaries
Translation into European Languages
A Note on Presentation
KAMASUTRA
WITH EXCEPTS FROM YASHODHARA’S COMMENTARY, THE JAYAMANGALA
BOOK ONE
General Observations
BOOK TWO
Sex
BOOK THREE
Virgins
BOOK FOUR
Wives
BOOK FIVE
Other Men’s Wives
BOOK SIX
Courtesans
BOOK SEVEN
Erotic Esoterica
Appendix: Excerpts from Devadatta Shastri’s Commentary
Explanatory Notes
Bibliography
Glossary and Index