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Burton’s The Kama Sutra fueled the widespread interest in Sanskrit texts on kama. What I would like to highlight here is the generative energy of Burton’s publications for a new field of inquiry. In later editions, Burton merged his original text with selections from Vatsayana’s Kamasutra, as well as with a thirteenth-century Sanskrit commentary. These manuscripts, Burton asserted, were compared for their facticity through the tools of comparative philology. He claimed that he collected parts of manuscripts from across India with the help of Hindu pundits. Burton’s The Kama Sutra was a phantasmatic claim to empiricism based in imagination - the selective translation, interpretation, and reinvention of texts, rather than a comprehensive translation of a Sanskrit treatise.īurton’s The Kama Sutra was initially based on the partial translations of a fifteenth-century text, Anangaranga.
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What was presented to the colonial world as The Kama Sutra and taken to be a literal translation of Vatsayana’s Kamasutra was in fact the selective (and poor) translation of one part of a multipart disquisition on erotics and manners. The kama texts that fascinated Burton were in fact not simply treatises on sex but broader inquiries that addressed subjects ranging from domestic practices to cosmetics to gardens. The fascination with Burton led to an almost obsessive interest in searching for his lost accounts. People sought Burton’s fantastical depictions of a “perverse” Indian sexuality. The text gained widespread popularity as Burton’s The Kama Sutra, circulating all over the world (it remains in print today).Īs Anjali Arondekar has demonstrated, even the rumor of Burton’s travels produced a furor. In truth, Burton himself did little of the translation instead, it was the product of his collaborators Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot (1833–1901) and two Indian men, Bhagavanlal Indrajit and Shivaram Parashuram Bhide. Through exaggerated representations of sexual practices and religious superstition, Burton claimed to capture the true social lives of colonized subjects.Ĭover for Durba Mitra's Indian Sex Life (Penguin Random House)īurton’s early translation and interpretation of Kamasutra has become emblematic of the fantastical Orientalism that shaped the late nineteenth-century imagination about India. Likewise, his travel writings through Sindh and Africa and his erotic publications were critical for popular understandings of “native” sexuality. He was perhaps most famous for his transcreation of The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night, which shaped nineteenth-and twentieth-century Orientalist notions of despotism, sexual transgression, and wonder of the Muslim world. He wrote prolifically about his travels and produced interpretive translations of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian texts that became definitive representations of the region.
#Karma sutra archive
Burton is well known for his role in shaping colonial knowledge across the empire and for his many publications on regions as diverse as Africa and Central and South Asia.Ī self-proclaimed explorer, translator, commentator, and ethnographer, he imagined the East as a timeless archive of unchanging social practices from the ancient to the colonial world. It became an object of fascination in the 1880s with the translation and wide circulation of the text by East India Company political agent Richard F Burton (1821–1890) in his The Kama Sutra of Vatsayana. It has been described as everything from the first scientific study of sex, to a vital book of Hindu erotics, to an ancient treatise on love, to a sexological manual, to the definitive account of ancient Indian society.
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The Kamasutra is one of the most widely circulated ancient Indian texts in the modern world. The following excerpt from Indian Sex Life has been republished here with due permission from Penguin Random House.