Mallanaga Vatsyavanou

When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.' 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 third century CE. It combines an encyclopaedi c 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 nine teenth-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 co mmentary (13th century) and from a twentieth-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by the two translators.

The 1964 publication of Sir Richard Burton´s translation of the "Kama Sutra" was celebrated as a literary event of the highest importance. As vital to an understanding of ancient Indian civilisation as the works of Plato and Aristotle are to the West, the