Overview

The Kamasutra is the oldest extant textbook of erotic love. But it is more than a book about sex. 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, of course, about the many and
varied positions available to lovers in sexual intercourse and the pleasures to be derived from each.
The Kamasutra was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, sometime in the third century, 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 by Sir Richard Burton, the text is newly translated here into clear, vivid, sexually frank English. This edition also includes a section of vivid
Indian color illustrations along with three uniquely important commentaries: translated excerpts from the earliest and most famous Sanskrit commentary (thirteenth century) and from a twentieth-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by the two translators.
The lively and entertaining introduction by translator Wendy Doniger, one of the world's foremost Sanskrit scholars, discusses the history of The Kamasutra and its reception in India and Europe, analyses its attitudes toward gender and sexual violence, and sets it in the context of ancient
Indian social theory, scientific method, and sexual ethics.

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Reviews

A radically different view of the famous sex manual. --The New York Times<br> With its aphoristic advice on attracting, satisfying, keeping and shedding a partner, the book is often more 'Sex in the City' than sex manual. --Jill Lawless, The Associated Press<br> A fresh translation of the Kamasutra, gloriously rendered by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar. Put Doniger, one of the University of Chicago's top historians of religion, and Kakar, India's leading psychoanalyst of sex, together and you've got the kind of moxie and revisionist energy that lead some<br>to try 'splitting the bamboo.' In a highly entertaining and learned 57-page introduction packed with crisp insights and droll asides, they put the Kamasutra in historical context, outline its numerological conceits, and clarify its gender ambiguities. Thanks to two nervy scholars, we now have a<br>Kamasutra in which everyone's on top. --Philadelphia Inquirer<br> Not just for scholars or Casanovas, the KamaSutra is a literary classic for everyone (over age 18), and this translation is the very best in print. --Michael Pastore, Epublishers Weekly<br> If you're a serious student of sex, or of India, or if you and your honey want to read each other a different kind of pillow book, the new translation is fascinating, thought-provoking and occasionally even amusing. --Michael Castleman, salon.com<br>

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