SEX AND THE ANCIENT INDIAN WOMAN
In this scholarly work, Wendy Doniger seeks to highlight the Kamasutra’s surprisingly modern outlook to sex and sexuality
Composed in the third century CE, the Kamasutra is the most famous text of erotic love. In this scholarly book, Wendy Doniger seeks to highlight what the book reveals about life in ancient India, the mores and practices, and the surprisingly modern outlook to sex and sexuality. In this excerpt, Doniger looks at the role women played in the Kamasutra and also what female readers took from the book. THE KAMASUTRA FOR WOMEN The assumption that the intended reader of the Kamasutra is male persists in popular culture today… But… The Kamasutra is for women—it was intended to be used by women, and has much to offer to women even today. Vatsyayana argues at some length that some women, at least, should read this text, and that others should learn its contents in other ways: A woman should study the Kamasutra and its subsidiary arts before she reaches the prime of her youth, and she should continue when she has been given away, if her husband wishes it... This is an important text, for it argues for the method by which the Kamasutra (and indeed, other Sanskrit texts) would have been known not only by women, but by the wider population in general; such knowledge was by no means limited to men, or women, who knew Sanskrit. The eighty century CE playwright Bhavabhuti, in his Malatimadhava, depicts women actually citing the Kamasutra (2.2.6-7). At the Wendy Doniger
■ start of act seven, when a woman complains that her friend was raped by her husband on the wedding night, she changes from the dialect in which she is speaking (as most women in Sanskrit plays do) and ‘resorts to Sanskrit’ (as the stage directions indicate) to say, ‘The authors of the Kamasutra warn, “Women are like flowers, and need to be enticed very tenderly. If they are taken by force by men who have not yet won their trust they become women who hate sex.”’ This is important evidence not only of the common knowledge of the Kamasutra in literary circles, but of the use of it by women who knew Sanskrit as well as the dialects in which they conventionally spoke. It is also evidence that the Kamasutra was regarded as a counterforce to the prevalent culture of sexual violence. In addition to this general expectation that all women should know all of the Kamasutra, particular parts of the book were evidently designed to be used by women. Book Three devotes one episode to advice to virgins trying to get husbands, and Book Four consists of instructions for wives. Book Six is said to have been commissioned by the courtesans of Pataliputra, presumably for their own use. WOMEN’S RIGHTS The Kamasutra reveals relatively liberal attitudes to women’s education and sexual freedom. To appreciate this, it is useful briefly to recall the attitudes to women in two important texts that precede it, the Laws of Manu and the Arthashastra. Kautilya, the author of the Arthashastra, is far more liberal than Manu. He takes for granted the woman with several husbands, who is unimaginable for Manu and poses a problem even for the permissive Kamasutra. Kautilya is also more lenient than Manu when it comes to divorce and widow remarriage; where Manu does not allow either of these options for a woman whose husband has died, Kautilya gives a woman some control over her property, which consists of jewellery without limit and a small maintenance; she continues to own these after her husband’s death—unless she remarries, in which case she forfeits them, with interest, or settles it all on her sons. In these ways and others, Kautilya allows women more independence than Manu does. But both of them greatly limit women’s sexual and economic WIKIPEDIA freedom.The Kamasutra, predictably, is far more open-minded than Manu about women’s access to household funds, and about divorce and widow remarriage. The absolute power that the wife in the Kamasutra has in running the household’s finances stands in sharp contrast with Manu’s statement that a wife ‘should not have too free a hand in spending’ and his cynical remark that, ‘No man is able to guard women entirely by force, but they can be safely guarded if kept busy amassing and spending money, engaging in purification, attending to their duties, cooking food and looking after the furniture.’ And when it comes to female promiscuity, Vatsyayana is light years ahead of Manu. Vatsyayana cites an earlier authority on the best places to pick up married women, of which the first is ‘on the occasion of visiting the gods’ and others include a sacrifice, a wedding, or a religious festival. Secular opportunities involve playing in a park, bathing or swimming, or theatrical spectacles. More extreme occasions are offered by the spectacle of a house on fire, the commotion after a robbery, or the invasion of the countryside by an army. Somehow I don’t think Manu would approve of the man in question meeting married women at all, let alone using devotion to the gods as an occasion for it, or equating such an occasion with spectator sports like hanging around watching houses burn down.