Religions of the East

Stephen Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754629221
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351904759
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Under the rubric of 'Religions of the East', which includes Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Janiism and a myriad of Chinese religio-philosophies, are a vast range of views concerning human sexuality. These contrasting attitudes are mapped through this volume on Religions of the East in The Library of Essays on Sexuality and Religion series. Part 1 presents previously-published articles that explore several Eastern Religions in the way they construct sexuality through expressions of their pertinent holy writings and belief systems, as applied in differing historical and cultural contexts. Part 2 takes sexual renunciation and asceticism as its focus through the traditions of Hinduism, Jainism and the Chinese religious systems. Part 3 explores the connection between sexuality, gender and sexuality in Hindu and Buddhist customs in varied social settings. The final part of the volume includes articles examining Eastern religions in their attitudes towards sexual 'variants' including bi-sexuality, trans-sexuality and contested sexual categories.

Part I
Sexuality and Cultural Expression

[1]

Concerning Kamasutras: Challenging Narratives of History and Sexuality

Jyoti Puri

I wish to thank Diane Raymond and Hyun Sook Kim for their insightful comments on drafts of this article. I also wish to acknowledge the careful readings undertaken by the anonymous Signs reviewers. Their thorough feedback was useful to the process of revision.

History and colonialism arose together in India. As India was introduced to history, it was also stripped of a meaningful past; it became a historyless society brought into the age of History. The flawed nature of history’s birth in India was not lost on the nationalists who pressed the nation-state’s claim to the age of history.... Consequently, history, flawed at birth, has lived an embattled life in India.

-Prakash 1992, 17

I discovered the Kamasutra through the eyes of the West. The Kamasutra was not an integral part of the lives or the sexual development of adolescents like myself coming of age in India. As Moni Nag (1993) confirms, only a small section of the relatively small English-speaking population in contemporary India is familiar with the English translation of the Kamasutra) first published by Richard Burton in 1883 in colonial Britain. That until the 1980s the copy of the Kamasutra held by Delhi University Library was locked in a back room and a faculty member could access it only after receiving special permission illustrates the cultural ambivalence toward the text (Nag 1993, 253–54). Growing up in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), I recall the first time that I stumbled on a reference to the Kamasutra and learned about its existence. It was in the U.S. best-seller Audrey Rose (De Felitta 1975). That what felt like a sexually repressive culture had actually put out a handbook to enhance sexual pleasure was not only astonishing but also paradoxical. How is it that the author of a U.S. best-seller knew about it? Were others in India aware of this book? To say the least, I was intrigued.

At present, multiple, competing representations of the Kamasutra prevail in India and across countries such as the United States. In the United States, popular culture is replete with casual and many detailed references to the Kamasutra that are grounded in hierarchical binaries of East and West, of past and present, suffused with imageries of sensualism, eroticism, and exoticism. Where some have indicted the Christian tradition for its deep-seated hostility toward sex, the Kamasutra is frequently appropriated as indisputable evidence of a non-Western and tolerant, indeed celebratory, view of sexuality.¹ Glancing through the innumerable citations that are related to the Kamasutra) an article in Cosmopolitan (1995), for example, begins with the following challenge to the reader: “You keep a copy of the Kamasutra by your bed, consider yourself an expert in all things erotic. Still, even the most sophisticated sensualist may have missed out on new findings. Take our quiz.” The remarkable aspect of this introduction is not simply that having a copy of the Kamasutra suggests “an expert in all things erotic” but also the banality of the reference. There appears to be nothing out of the ordinary about Cosmopolitan including an article on sexuality and making a passing reference to the Kamasutra.

If the casualness of the reference underscores the cultural familiarity with this text as a signifier of the erotic expert or the “sophisticated sensualist,” then another article more fully reveals how discourses of history and sexuality are tightly woven to enable representations of the Kamasutra. Appearing in a Redbook (1995) article on male sexuality, the Kamasutra is thus summarized: “Although it was written centuries ago, there’s still no better sex handbook, which details hundreds of positions, each offering a subtle variation in pleasure to men and women. Some require that you be a contortionist to pull them off, but many are twists on themes performed by inspired couples everywhere.” In this account, the Kamasutra is represented through the juxtaposition of the ancient past, sex handbooks, pleasure, contortionists, and, elsewhere in the article, Eastern mystics and tantric yogis. Notably, this representation is generated in connection with a discussion on male sexuality within the United States. Promoted as a superior sex handbook, the Kamasutra promises pleasure and substance for inspiration. In effect, an unreflexive account of the Kamasutra reinscribes oppositions between the ancient East and the contemporary West, between contortionists and inspired couples, but also serves as a link between orientalist fantasy and female and male sexuality in the United States. To wit, the politics of historical, unequal relationships based on discursively constructed differences are elided.

In contrast, in contemporary India, not only is imagery associated with the Kamasutra comparatively less apparent in popular culture and far more visible in current academic debates on sexuality, but this imagery invokes a different kind of text. Although, anecdotally, representations of the Kamasutra are present in the popular consciousness of the English-speaking elites, by far the greater emphasis is on the Kamasutra as a matter of serious and, therefore, scholarly concern. For example, Indira Kapoor (1993), director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation at the South Asian Regional Bureau, legitimizes the Kamasutra as a treatise on human sexual behavior dating back to 400 C.E. Neither pornographic nor obscene, the Kamasutra is instead elevated as a scientific and serious study of sexual behavior. Kapoor also suggests that the Kamasutra is secured on an open and honest view of sexuality characteristic of the ancient Indian past, a reality that regrettably has since changed. She suggests, “Although the evidence of the Kamasutra and erotic temple carvings shows an open attitude to human sexuality in South Asia in the distant past, today ignorance and embarrassment cause much unhappiness. More knowledge and sympathy are needed to help young people improve their self-confidence and understanding of their bodies and feelings” (Kapoor 1993, 11).

If the accounts from Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Kapoor show that there are multiple representations of the Kamasutra and, possibly, multiple Kamasutras, then it is also clear that discursive narratives of history and sexuality commonly reify it as a (trans)historical ancient text—a singular blast from the Indian/Eastern past. Even though the Redbook article represents the Kamasutra as an inspiring sex handbook, whereas Kapoor represents it as a scientific and serious study of sexuality, both accounts reproduce questionable narratives of ancient India to promise sexual liberation from degrees of extant sexual repression; put differently, narratives of a liberal Indian/Eastern past and repressive present support the discourse of sexual repression, with “the Kamasutra” as the mediating factor in these cases. Therefore, the Redbook article can promise heightened sexual pleasure through an Eastern handbook, whereas Kapoor can challenge the contemporary cultural discomfort in matters of sexuality that hinders the adequate development of adolescents in India or South Asia. But, if the accounts of the Kamasutra in Cosmopolitan and Redbook need to be challenged for the ways in which they rely on discursive categories of colonialism, then the conflation of “open” and “honest attitudes” with scientific rationality, ancient India, and the pitfalls of modernity in Kapoor’s version are no less questionable or unrelated. Both the peculiarities and the commonalities of the various representations of the Kamasutra need to be investigated.

Groups marginal to the dominant politics of sexuality in postcolonial, contemporary India also strategically appropriate the Kamasutra as a celebratory narrative of sexuality, rooted in a specific representation of the ancient Indian past. In this setting, where homosexuality is frequently attributed to the corrupting influence of the Moghul empire and Westernization, lesbians, gays, and bisexual women and men constantly encounter assumptions that same-sex sexual desire is foreign to the dominant Hindu-Indian ancient tradition. In response, the Kamasutra, along with other Vedic texts, post-Vedic texts, and temple carvings as exemplifications of the Hindu traditions of ancient India, are deployed to argue that past traditions recognized and permitted the expression of homosexuality or gay orientations.² The exploration of an ancient precolonial history of sexuality in India becomes integral to the politics of resistance, and the Kamasutra becomes central to this project. More than ever, there seems to be a sense of urgency about claiming the past and the Kamasutra as ways out of forms of sexual repression.

Precisely because of such widely circulating, competing representations and deployments of the Kamasutra(s), which are nonetheless underpinned by shared assumptions of history and sexuality, I am struck by the absence of critical feminist analyses in this area, with one exception (see Roy 1998). In her article, Kumkum Roy undertakes a critical and useful exploration of the Kamasutra from when it was believed to be compiled between the second and fourth centuries C.E. to the more recent translations. In so doing, Roy makes known not only the limits of the normative original but also the tensions between the original and its more modern translations. However, by not sufficiently problematizing the relationship between the original and the translation, Roy is unable to challenge the underlying narratives of the “golden past” and “sexual repression and sexual liberation” that are so central to the premise of the Kamasutra. Such an approach also obfuscates the ways in which, as Tejaswini Niranjana argues elsewhere, the translation precedes the “original” and that which is historical is made “natural” (1994, 126). By treating the translations as imperfect renditions of an original and using a Sanskrit (the language of Vedic and post-Vedic authoritative texts) version as synonymous with the original, Roy’s approach does not allow us to question how discursive narratives of history and sexuality came to be intertwined in ways that sustain the seeming relevance of a fifteen-hundred-year-old, post-Vedic document across disparate social contexts; the analysis also obfuscates how the original and the translations continue to circulate under the guise of sexual liberation.

In this article, my concern is with questionable narratives of history and sexuality that underpin contemporary representations of the Kamasutra(s).³ Insofar as romanticized accounts of “ancient India or East,” intertwined with the binaries of sexual celebration and repression, riddle circulating versions of the Kamasutra(s), I argue that these versions are flawed; these accounts rely on the elision of the politics of colonialism and dominant anticolonial nationalisms that are imbricated with hierarchies of gender, race, nation, and sexuality. For the purpose of this article, however, I focus on two Kamasutras: the first one is Burton’s The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana (1883), which is considered the “original” translation and continues to circulate as the basis for more contemporary versions (e.g., as sex manuals for heterosexual couples). I then consider a second Kamasutra to explore how, despite the peculiarities of each text, specific narratives of history and sexuality remain consistent across these versions. For this, I explore S. C. Upadhyaya’s Kamasutra of Vatsyayana: Complete Translation from the Original, which was first published in 1961 and is considered among the best-known scholarly English-language translations in postindependent India. By emphasizing it as an exploration of the “science of erotics” (Upadhyaya 1961, 1) in the Vedic and post-Vedic periods, Upadhyaya’s Kamasutra provides a partial counterpoint to Burton’s Kamasutra. Yet, the belief that the Kamasutra provides a transparent glimpse into the positive, even exalted, view of sexuality in what was subsequently defined as ancient India is common to these two texts.

In order to challenge the dual narratives of the golden age of history and sexuality in ancient India, I attempt to contextualize each of these Kamasutras from a critical, feminist viewpoint. Rather than evaluating each of these texts against the “original” Kamasutra (for such an analysis, see Roy 1998), I aim to unravel the intersecting categories and ideologies of gender, nation, race, and social class embedded in and in turn producing the discou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Sexuality and Cultural Expression
• PART II Renunciation and Asceticism
• PART III Eastern Religion: Sexuality, Gender and Patriarchy
• PART IV Eastern Religion: Sexual Variants
• Name Index