Kamasutra, Rediscovered and…’Remastered’
June 15, 2008It’s a widely held belief in the West that the Kamasutra is a vaunted sex guide, filled from cover to cover with acrobatic erotic sexual positions, many of which should only be tried by couples willing to injure themselves. But the Kamasutra was never just a sex guide – in fact the sexual descriptions are primarily in a single chapter.
Artists and publishers have produced works illustrating Chapter 2 to an extent that this provocative imagery is the primary representation of the text. However, Little India has an articledelving into this idea and then discussing the ‘rest’ of the Kamasutra:
To put it bluntly, Kamasutra is not a book on positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of living – about finding a partner, maintaining power in marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs – and also about the positions in sexual intercourse.
An interesting part of the discussion at Little India is the mistranslations in various editions.
That’s incredibbly interesting, do you believe there will be a correct translation put into the mainstream or do you believe those that translated chose to incorporate only those items which they felt were relevant for western society?
I would think so, as the global community now has tools to communicate with each other, it seems likely that someone would.
I’m young and I think I hear east-west across the television sex and Allzzbh and I would like to live this adventure, or learn some thing of us