Kama Sutra: A Guide to the Art of Pleasure

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However, according to Puri, this is a colonial and anticolonial modernist interpretation of the text. The "Hindus were cowering under their scorn", states Doniger, and the open discussion of sex in the Kamasutra scandalized the 19th-century Europeans. The first three chapters discuss how a man should go about finding the right bride, while the fourth offers equivalent discussion for a woman and how she can get the man she wants. Alain Daniélou, The Complete Kama Sutra: The First Unabridged Modern Translation of the Classic Indian Text, ISBN 978-0-89281-525-8. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.

These narratives neither resonate with nor provide the "politics of gender, race, nationality and class" in ancient India published by other historians and that may have been prevalent then. The text also mentions same-sex behavior between two women, such as a girl losing her virginity with a girlfriend as they use their fingers, [90] as well as oral sex and the use of sex toys between women.

Gavin Flood explains [36] kāma as "love" without violating dharma (moral responsibility), artha (material prosperity) and one's journey towards moksha (spiritual liberation). The Mughals, states Doniger, had "commissioned lavishly illustrated Persian and Sanskrit Kamasutra manuscripts".

However, Burton's Kamasutra gave a unique, specific meaning to these words in the western imagination. John Bowker, The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-213965-8, pp.According to Doniger, the Burton version is a "flawed English translation" but influential as modern translators and abridged versions of Kamasutra even in the Indian languages such as Hindi are re-translations of the Burton version, rather than the original Sanskrit manuscript.