THE VEHICLE TO HEAVEN
Seema Anand wants to introduce readers to the Kama Sutra for its language steeped in nuanced pleasure. An excerpt
This book is a guide to having great sex in the twenty-first century. It seeks to transform what has largely been reduced to instant gratification into a rather more sensuous experience. … Someone recently said to me, ‘All this seduction stuff is crap. Sex is hot and fast. When a lion has sex the female knows it…’ Except, we are not animals. Yes, it is possible to throw yourself on top of your partner and hammer your way to an ejaculation in a matter of seconds but, as journalist and author Yasmin Alibhai Brown says, ‘there is a difference between a fuck and [an] experience’.
...The Kama Sutra, compiled by Vatsayayan some time in the third century, is the oldest and most notable of a group of texts on erotic love from ancient India... The Kama Sutra goes deep into the art of making love, and shows how it can be sophisticated and hugely enjoyable. It offers every permutation of every act of foreplay and lovemaking. After all, we as humans are the only species on earth capable of consciously creating and enjoying mutual pleasure. And it wasn’t just momentary physical pleasure — ancient Eastern cultures believed that a stable society depended on a stable marriage and the secret to a stable marriage was extremely good sex. Marriage was the path to heaven and sex was the vehicle to get you there, and therefore the Kama Sutra — and its fellow manuals — were considered works of divine instruction... Perhaps the real deciding factor, if I had to pick one, as to why I would like to introduce the Kama Sutra to people in the twenty-first century is its language. Far from the crudely misogynistic and downright abusive vocabulary that has come to be associated with sexual practices, the language of the Kama Sutra... is characterized by a degree of refinement, beauty and nuanced pleasure, which even extends to the words used to describe women’s genitalia — the clitoris is referred to as the ‘madan-chhatri’ or the ‘love umbrella’, the vulva is the ‘chandan-mahal’ or the ‘fragrant palace’. If the words that we use define our actions, then this is certainly a book that is very deliberately leading us away from the gratuitous violence of imagined passions or the ennui of stale sex towards a world of pleasure where arousal happens one little nerve ending at a time. As feminist Naomi Wolf has said, ‘Just imagine how differently a young girl today might feel about her developing womanhood if every routine slang description she heard of female genitalia used metaphors of preciousness and beauty, and every account of sex was centred on her pleasure — pleasure on which the general harmony depended.’
... The arts of seduction as prescribed by the Kama Sutra —with all its hundreds of rules and rituals — were meant to bridge the gap between the two sexes... The goal of seduction was more than just a meeting of two bodies — it involved every single sense, beginning with the most erogenous zone of all — the mind. That, according to the Kama Sutra, is the start and end of the road to sexual fulfilment. And to stress this point — although the Kama Sutra invokes the blessings of Kamadeva (the god of love and desire) — the patron deity of the work is Saraswati, the goddess of music, literature, learning; because, as everyone knows, a man who is culturally well informed, the one who can stimulate your mind is the most attractive man of all.
…My main aim in writing this book is to make the idea of seduction part of everyday life... Whether you decide to begin a flirtation using paan or stimulate your own senses with perfume, my hope is that this book will irrevocably enrich your sex life.