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.
" This] new translation is fascinating, thought-provoking and occasionally even amusing."--Salon.com
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This definitive volume is the first modern translation of Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra to include two essential commentaries: the Jayamangala of Yashodhara and the modern Hindi commentary by Devadatta Shastri. Alain Danilou spent four years comparing versions of the Kama Sutra in Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, and English, drawing on his intimate experience of India, to preserve the full explicitness of the original. I wanted to demystify India, he writes, to show that a period of great civilization, of high culture, is forcibly a period of great liberty.

Kama signifies sensual or sexual pleasure, and sutra literally means a thread or rule that holds things together, or a collection of such aphorisms in the form of a manual. The book of Kama Sutra is not just an exclusive sex manual however, it features a complete guide to a virtuous and gracious living that discusses the nature of love, family life and other aspects pertaining to pleasure oriented faculties of human life.

The 1964 publication of Sir Richard Burton's translation marked the first wide appearance in English of the Kama Sutra and was celebrated as a literary event of highest importance. As vital to an understanding of ancient Indian civilization as the works of Plato and Aristotle are to the West, the Kama Sutra has endured for 1,700 years as an indisputable classic of world literature.

Written with frankness and unassuming candor, the Kama Sutra remains one of the most readable and enjoyable of all the classics of antiquity. A work of philosophy, psychology, sociology, Hindu dogma, scientific inquiry, and sexology, the Kama Sutra's importance is so great that it has at the same time both affected Indian civilization and remained an indispensable key to understanding it.