truth behind ancient Kamasutra
when her passion drives her to get on top.” There is, however, a disturbing aspect to the Kamasutra. The book is rapturous about kinky rough sex, and at times suggests that a woman’s protests and resistance should be taken as signs of real passion. “The Kamasutra is in general remarkably favorable to women,” says Doniger, “but in this one instance, it reflects the darker side of the culture.”
VATSAYANA, breaking with the tradition of anti-gay slurs in Hindu mythology that Doniger calls “virulent homophobia,” uses instead a nonjudgmental term — “person of the third nature.” This can mean a gay man or even a man who transitions to behaving like a woman and is then referred to as “she.” The matterof-fact tone with which such transgenders are described is striking: “There are two sorts of third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man. The one in the form of a woman imitates a woman’s dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty and bashfulness.”
Another person of the third nature is a gay man working as a masseur who teasingly announces his interest with increasingly erotic actions, then when urged on, protests he doesn’t want to continue. Doniger calls this “a remarkably explicit analysis of the mentality of the closet, the extended double entendre of an act that is cleverly designed to appear sexually innocent to a man who does not want, or does not want to admit that he wants, a homosexual encounter.”
As for gay men, the author is nonchalant about “young men, servants/who wear polished earrings/indulge in oral sex/only with certain men/ and, in the same way, certain men-abouttown.”
The implication is that such men are sometimes bisexual: “men-about-town” is the same term used for the book’s accomplished, virile heterosexual guys. The Kamasutra doesn’t suggest there is anything worthy of reproach in such behavior.
The blasé handling of sexual minorities is a secret known only to Sanskrit readers because the main English version, by Burton, contains a major error, according to Doniger. Burton calls these “persons of the third nature” eunuchs. Although Burton did publish one of the first major studies of homosexuality in English, it seems not to have occurred to him that there are men who haven’t lost any body parts who are attracted to other men.
Burton even mangled a (possible) reference to a woman’s G-spot. The text is clear that the relevant section is about female sensual pleasure: “When her eyes roll when she feels him in certain spots, he presses her in just those spots ... this is the secret of young women.”
In Burton’s mistranslation, he writes about the man’s pleasure and misses the reference to the special spot: “While a man is doing to the woman what he likes best during congress, he should always make a point of pressing those parts on her body on which she turns her eyes.” The reference to what “he likes” is simply invented by Burton, Doniger says, and he misses the point, which is how to give a woman an orgasm.
Like Eros and Cupid in Greek and Roman myths, Kama was not just a concept but also a god of desire and one who, like the other two, fired arrows of passion at lovers. When he fired one at the rival god Shiva, the latter angrily responded by incinerating Kama, according to Kalidasa, India’s greatest ancient poet. But in torching Kama, Shiva only made him more powerful: Kama’s magic spread into other enticing things such as moonlight and the arched eyebrows of beautiful women. Doniger finds this a pleasing metaphor: Like the enduring Kamasutra, desire itself can’t be killed off by haters, prudes and censors.