Overview

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 3rd century of the common era, probably in North India. It combines an encyclopaedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of sex with a closely observed sexual pyschology and a dramatic, novelistic narrative of seduction, consummation, and disentanglement. Best known in English through the highly mannered, padded, and inaccurate 19th-century translation of Sir Richard Burton, 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 Sanskrit commentary (13th century) and from a 20th-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by the two translators.

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9780192802705

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A new translation which includes an introduction from Wendy Doniger, a Sanskrit scholar with a worldwide reputation.

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Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago. She is the author of The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade and Siva, The Erotic Ascetic. Sudhir Kakar is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. He is the author of Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions.

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