An engaging, enlightening biography of the ancient Hindu manuscript that became the world's most famous sex manual The Kamasutra is one of the world's best-known yet least-understood texts, its title instantly familiar but its actual contents widely misconstrued. In the popular imagination, it is a work of practical pornography, a how-to guide of absurdly acrobatic sexual techniques. Yet the book began its long life in third-century India as something quite different: a seven-volume vision of an ideal life of urbane sophistication, offering advice on matters from friendship to household decoration. Over the ensuing centuries, the Kamasutra was first celebrated, then neglected, and very nearly lost--until an outrageous adventurer introduced it to the West and earned literary immortality.

In lively and lucid prose, James McConnachie provides a rare, intimate look at the exquisite civilization that produced this cultural cornerstone. He details the quest of famed explorer Richard F. Burton, who--along with his clandestine coterie of libertines and iconoclasts--unleashed the Kamasutra on English society as a deliberate slap at Victorian prudishness and paternalism. And he describes how the Kamasutra was driven underground into the hands of pirate pornographers, until the end of the Lady Chatterley obscenity ban thrust it once more into contentious daylight. The first work to tell the full story of the Kamasutra, The Book of Love explores how a remarkable way of looking at the world came to be cradled between book covers--and survived. James McConnachie is a journalist, travel writer, and broadcaster. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he has lived and traveled widely in Nepal and India. His articles and book reviews have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, and The Independent, among other publications. He lives in Winchester, UK.The Kamasutra is one of the world's best-known yet least-understood texts, its title instantly familiar but its actual contents widely misconstrued. In the popular imagination, it is a work of practical pornography, a how-to guide of absurdly acrobatic sexual techniques. Yet the book began its long life in third-century India as something quite different: a seven-volume vision of an ideal life of urbane sophistication, offering advice on matters from friendship to household decoration. Over the ensuing centuries, the Kamasutra was first celebrated, then neglected, and very nearly lost--until an outrageous adventurer introduced it to the West and earned literary immortality.

In lively and lucid prose, James McConnachie provides a rare, intimate look at the exquisite civilization that produced this cultural cornerstone. He details the quest of famed explorer Richard F. Burton, who--along with his clandestine coterie of libertines and iconoclasts--unleashed the Kamasutra on English society as a deliberate slap at Victorian prudishness and paternalism. And he describes how the Kamasutra was driven underground into the hands of pirate pornographers, until the end of the Lady Chatterley obscenity ban thrust it once more into contentious daylight. The first work to tell the full story of the Kamasutra, The Book of Love explores how a remarkable way of looking at the world came to be cradled between book covers--and survived. An altogether first-rate work of intellectual history for ordinary readers . . . Brings the story up-to-date without stinting on the entertaining pen portraits and anecdotes.

--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Elegant and stylish . . . Paints an enticing picture of the society in which the Kamasutra was written.--William Dalrymple, The New York Review of Books

An altogether first-rate work of intellectual history for ordinary readers . . . Brings the story up-to-date without stinting on the entertaining pen portraits and anecdotes.--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

The truth is far more intriguing than the cliches . . . A scholarly, stylish, and entertaining study.--The Sunday Times (London)

A delightfully racy and adventurous life story of a book, combining thorough scholarship with fascinating Orientalist gossip, The Book of Love illuminates both the luxurious third-century world that gave rise to the Kamasutra and the nineteenth-century colonial explorations that brought it to Europe, as well as our own often hilarious response to it.--Wendy Doniger, Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, and translator of the first definitive English edition of the Kamasutra

Tracing the celebrated sex manual from its palm-leaf manuscript origins in third-century India to contemporary coffee-table book, travel writer McConnachie adeptly explains that in addition to teaching 64 erotic techniques, the seven-volume Kamasutra details every aspect of a rich man's lifestyle, including grooming, home decor and entertainment. The treatise on pleasure also offers a rare ancient depiction of women's social and sexual lives. The author relates the tale of the famed British explorer and Orientalist Richard Burton, who brought the work to the West. An Indian Army officer in the 1840s, Burton devoted himself to the study of Indian languages and sexual culture. Around 1870, as a British consul, Burton became involved in a project to translate obscure erotic classics into English (though contrary to popular belief, he did not translate the Kamasutra himself) and masterminded the work's promotion in a repressive Victorian climate. McConnachie also relates the key role of Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot as Burton's collaborator. Though less titillating than the topic would imply, this is a solidly researched, absorbing glimpse into the history of erotica publishing.--Publishers Weekly

Scholarly investigation into the history, purpose and context of the notorious ancient Indian text and its entry into Western society through the efforts of a few Victorian eccentrics. Although modern Western audiences tend to reduce the Kamasutra to a mere sexual-position manual, the contorted, gymnastic poses so firmly associated with it had no place in the original; such illustrations weren't added until centuries later. Nor, to the dismay of its American readers in the late 1960s, does the text unlock the spiritual secrets of tantric erotica, for that tradition emerged much later as well. As first-time author McConnachie reveals in urbane prose, the history of the Kamasutra is a lesson in misrepresentation. Western readers, he writes in one of his strongest sections, consistently approached the book as a reliable source of information about modern, not ancient, Indian sexuality. Its translators, editors and publishers used the Kamasutra to signify whatever they needed it to mean, adding and excising material to better embody each generation's vision of sexuality. The original, written in the third century by Indian philosopher Mallanaga Vatsyayana, contained much broader social instruction, intended to provide an encyclopedia of pleasure for the young, aristocratic male. McConnachie's insightful scholarship restores to the Kamasutra its full history, presented in an easily readable chronology.

"Tracing the celebrated sex manual from its palm-leaf manuscript origins in third-century India to contemporary coffee-table book, travel writer McConnachie adeptly explains that in addition to teaching 64 erotic techniques, the seven-volume Kamasutra details every aspect of a rich man's lifestyle, including grooming, home decor and entertainment. The treatise on pleasure also offers a rare ancient depiction of women's social and sexual lives. The author relates the tale of the famed British explorer and Orientalist Richard Burton, who brought the work to the West. An Indian Army officer in the 1840s, Burton devoted himself to the study of Indian languages and sexual culture. Around 1870, as a British consul, Burton became involved in a project to translate obscure erotic classics into English (though contrary to popular belief, he did not translate the Kamasutra himself) and masterminded the work's promotion in a repressive Victorian climate. McConnachie also relates the key role of Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot as Burton's collaborator. Though less titillating than the topic would imply, this is a solidly researched, absorbing glimpse into the history of erotica publishing. 8 pages of color illus." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. "You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world." He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies' man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: "But it's just not that great."

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy — of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato's "Symposium" we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.

But for the Western imagination, the East has long represented an escape from this pervasive sexual unhappiness. Baudelaire spoke of tropic realms of "luxe, calme et volupte"; Hawaii and Tahiti once beckoned as Edens of innocent voluptuousness. From the 18th century on, the Orient, in general, seemed a perfumed garden, offering the tender attentions of geishas, bare-breasted island girls and pretty boys. Here, amid erotic graciousness, the darkness of sin was unknown. And yet, even this scented, sensual wonderland turned out to have its guide, its bible: "The Kamasutra," sometimes subtitled "The Hindu Art of Love."

The title alone summons visions of exceedingly ambitious sexual postures. Yet the real "Kamasutra" is even more fascinating than its myth. In his "biography" of this Sanskrit classic, James McConnachie starts by exploring the philosophical and historical background of its 3rd-century text. "Kama" is the Sanskrit word for sexual pleasure or delight; a "sutra" is "a scholarly treatise designed to compress knowledge into a series of pithy maxims." The "Kamasutra" itself is a work of consolidation or reclamation, since its author, Vatsyayana, tells us that he was building on seven earlier treatises about love (all now lost). It was intended "to be a contribution to the great scientific project of the era: the composition of authoritative studies of all aspects of human behavior and understanding." Other treatises were devoted to dharma — a word associated with law, justice, duty and principle — and artha, which covered worldly success.

Under the Gupta dynasty, 3rd-century India developed a highly aesthetic urban culture, and Vatsyayana's intended readers were young men about town, who frequented the theater, practiced the arts and lived playboy lives devoted to pleasure. His treatise (or shastra) is divided into seven "books." In Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar's 2002 translation, these are: General Observations, Sex, Virgins, Wives, Other Men's Wives, Courtesans, and Erotic Esoterica. Full of details from contemporary life, "The Kamasutra" is highly dramatic and has been likened to an extended play. It also strives to establish sex as a humane activity, a cultivated art that rejects both confining Buddhist morality and unchecked sexual aggression.

In the notorious Book Two, Vatsyayana describes 64 kama-kalas, or ways to make love. Surprisingly, these are not 64 positions, notes McConnachie, "but simply a kind of grand total of the categories into which Vatsyayana divides the different moods and modes of lovemaking. Theorists, Vatsyayana says, divide sex into eight different topics, namely 'embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, the positions, moaning, the woman playing the man's part, and oral sex.' As each of these modes of sex is supposed to have eight different particular manifestations, there are thus sixty-four ways in which a man or woman could be said to be having sex in its broadest sense." But, as McConnachie emphasizes, "the kama-kalas are not just tools for successful love making," they also "lie at the heart of what constitutes an educated man."

Yet because he surveys actual practices, not just ideals, Vatsyayana also depicts far more than gentlemanly behavior, including drugging, rape and kidnapping. He is at his most attractive in noting "procedures of kissing," "types of scratching with the nails," "ways of biting" and the character of the female orgasm (though he never mentions the clitoris). His analytic mind neatly tabulates the differing sizes and shapes of the male and female genitalia, formulates ways to ingratiate oneself with young girls or married women, and even categorizes the varieties of ecstatic moan: "As a major part of moaning, she may use, according to her imagination, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck and partridge." Clearly, Vatsyayana must have been something of an amateur ornithologist, and one with a very good ear for birdsong.

McConnachie reminds us that the original text of "The Kamasutra" wasn't enhanced by illustrations, and only in modern times have editions used Indian temple sculpture or Persian-style miniatures to depict innumerable and unlikely interlacements. Similarly, the original "Kamasutra" has nothing to do with the practices of Tantrism — the latter's religious adepts performed their sex-magic without feeling desire. The book does, however, briefly allude to male homosexual practices and closes by offering unlikely recipes for restoring sexual vigor, ensuring fidelity or ending an affair.

By the 16th century, "The Kamasutra" had been largely forgotten in India (and partly replaced by later sex manuals such as the "Ananga Ranga"). We owe the classic's modern revival to Richard Burton, the 19th-century explorer, translator of "The Arabian Nights" and outspoken proponent of sexual freedom. McConnachie's middle chapters briefly chronicle Burton's daring life, his friendships with Victorian connoisseurs of erotica and the gradual rediscovery of ancient Sanskrit literature. While Burton is traditionally given as the translator of the groundbreaking 1883 edition of "The Kama Sutra" (so spelled), the actual work was done by his friend Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot and two Indian scholars, Bhagvanlal Indraji and Shivaram Parshuram Bhide. Burton did some polishing and added a few notes, but he was mainly the driving force for bringing the book into print (under the auspices of the private Kama Shastra Society). About sex, he emphasized in a letter to a friend, "it is the standard book."

The last chapters of "The Book of Love" bring the story up-to-date, without stinting on the entertaining pen portraits and anecdotes. One would like to know more about "The Kamasutra's" notorious French translator, the homosexual Hindu convert Alain Danielou (whose equally complex brother, a Roman Catholic cardinal, I once studied in graduate school: Jean Danielou composed a multi-volume treatise on medieval techniques of biblical exegesis — and died in a brothel). McConnachie also reflects on India's contemporary Puritanism, discusses the trademarking of the word "Kamasutra" as shorthand for sexual acrobatics (in particular by Alex Comfort in "The Joy of Sex"), and concludes with a survey of recent scholarship on the Sanskrit classic. Not least, he even recommends some novels based on Vatsyayana's book, in particular Lee Siegel's "Love in a Dead Language," in which an American scholar falls disastrously in love with a young woman named Lalita Gupta.

McConnachie has written an altogether first-rate work of intellectual history for ordinary readers. Throughout he reminds us that "The Kamasutra" is a repository of both ancient Indian culture and of modern sexual daydreams (most of the postures being either uncomfortable or impossible). In the end, though, "The Kamasutra" itself recognizes that the ultimate transports lie beyond the teachings of art: "When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion,/ there is no textbook at all, and no order."

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda(at symbol)gmail.com.

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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British journalist and travel writer McConnachie writes as much about the Western discovery of the Indian classic as the book itself. It offered men a vision of a libertine paradise and women the nearly equal right to pleasure, he says, and presented the West with a new and sensuous dream to replace the centuries of uneasy nightmares. The primary figures in his tale are Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot and Richard Francis Burton. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

An engaging, enlightening "biography" of the ancient Hindu manuscript that has become the world's most famous sex manual. This work tells the full story of the "Kamasutra" and explores how a way of looking at the world has come to be cradled between book covers--and survived.

An engaging, enlightening “biography” of the ancient Hindu manuscript that became the world’s most famous sex manual The Kamasutra is one of the world’s best-known yet least-understood texts, its title instantly familiar but its actual contents widely misconstrued. In the popular imagination, it is a work of practical pornography, a how-to guide of absurdly acrobatic sexual techniques. Yet the book began its long life in third-century India as something quite different: a seven-volume vision of an ideal life of urbane sophistication, offering advice on matters from friendship to household decoration. Over the ensuing centuries, the Kamasutra was first celebrated, then neglected, and very nearly lost—until an outrageous adventurer introduced it to the West and earned literary immortality.

In lively and lucid prose, James McConnachie provides a rare, intimate look at the exquisite civilization that produced this cultural cornerstone. He details the quest of famed explorer Richard F. Burton, who—along with his clandestine coterie of libertines and iconoclasts—unleashed the Kamasutra on English society as a deliberate slap at Victorian prudishness and paternalism. And he describes how the Kamasutra was driven underground into the hands of pirate pornographers, until the end of the Lady Chatterley obscenity ban thrust it once more into contentious daylight. The first work to tell the full story of the Kamasutra, The Book of Love explores how a remarkable way of looking at the world came to be cradled between book covers—and survived.

James McConnachie is a journalist, travel writer, and broadcaster. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he has lived and traveled widely in Nepal and India. His articles and book reviews have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, and The Independent, among other publications. He lives in Winchester, UK.