| Reviews |
| - ''This translation will change peoples' understanding of this book and of ancient India. Previous translations are hopelessly outdated, inadequate and misguided.'' - David Shulman, Prof. of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, quoted in NY Times 4 May 2002
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| Description | '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 encyclopaedic 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 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 twentieth-century Hindi commentary, and explanatory notes by the two translators.
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Readership: Anyone interested in this classic Indian textbook of erotic love; readers of sex manuals, readers of classic Indian philosophy, religion, customs and practices.
| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Mallanaga Vatsyayana
Translated by Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago and
Sudhir Kakar, Psychoanalyst and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University
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