The Kama Sutra Explained

What the Kama Sutra actually is

The Kama Sutra is an ancient Indian text, written in Sanskrit, about the art of living well and enjoying love and pleasure as part of a balanced life. Most people in Britain know it as a book of unlikely sex positions, which is a bit like knowing a whole cookery encyclopaedia only for its chapter on puddings. The part about physical intimacy is real, but it makes up only a fraction of the work. The rest deals with courtship, marriage, friendship, social life, manners and how to run a pleasant household.

The title gives a good clue. Kama means desire, pleasure or love in a broad sense, taking in beauty, music and good company as well as sex. A sutra is a short teaching, or a collection of them. So a fair translation might be something like a treatise on pleasure.

Who wrote it and when

The author is usually named as Vatsyayana, a scholar about whom we know very little. He says he was summarising older writers, some of whose work has since been lost, so the Kama Sutra was a compilation of existing knowledge rather than one man's personal discoveries. Dates are uncertain, but scholars generally place it somewhere around the 2nd to 4th century CE, in northern India.

It belongs to a wider Hindu idea about the aims of a good life. Three of these sit at the heart of the book: dharma, meaning duty and virtue; artha, meaning wealth and worldly success; and kama, meaning pleasure. Vatsyayana's argument is that all three matter, and that none of them should crowd out the others. Pleasure, in this view, is not shameful. It is a legitimate part of being human, as long as it is kept in balance and does not harm your other responsibilities. For its time, and for many times since, that was a fairly relaxed and humane way to look at things.

What is inside the book

The Kama Sutra is arranged into seven books. The first covers general principles and describes the lifestyle of a cultured city dweller, right down to the daily bath, the arrangement of the room and how friends might spend an evening together. The second is the famous one, on physical love. The third and fourth deal with finding a spouse and with married life. The fifth discusses relationships with other people's partners, largely in terms of the risks involved. The sixth is about courtesans, who were educated and often respected women in that society, and the seventh looks at ways of increasing attractiveness, including some folk remedies nobody should try today.

Among the most charming parts is a list of 64 arts that a cultivated person was encouraged to learn. These include singing, playing instruments, flower arranging, poetry, cooking, conversation, puzzles and even carpentry. The message is clear enough: someone interesting, skilled and thoughtful makes a far better lover and friend than someone who has only memorised a few tricks.

How it reached Britain

Most English speakers came to the text through a translation published in 1883, associated with the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and his colleague Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot. Much of the underlying translation was done by Indian scholars whose contribution was long overlooked. Because of the obscenity laws of the time, it was printed privately through a so called Kama Shastra Society and passed around quietly among subscribers. It could not be openly published in Britain until the 1960s.

That history helps explain the book's reputation. It arrived as forbidden reading, and its image as a naughty secret stuck. Later illustrated editions, many of which are modern inventions that have little to do with the original, finished the job. If you would like a closer reading, the 2002 translation by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar is widely recommended and much truer to the text.

What still holds up, and a sensible warning

Plenty of the Kama Sutra is very much of its time. It reflects a rigid class system and assumptions about men and women that few would accept now, and parts of it treat consent in ways that are simply wrong by modern standards. It is worth reading as history, not as a rulebook.

Even so, some of its ideas have aged well. It treats pleasure as something both partners deserve, and it pays real attention to women's enjoyment at a time when many writers did not. It insists that setting and mood count for a great deal. It presents courtship as patient and attentive, and it recognises that people differ in temperament and desire, so what suits one couple may not suit another.

Those ideas line up neatly with what relationship therapists say now. Talk to each other. Take your time. Pay attention to the person in front of you. Comfort and trust do more for intimacy than any acrobatics.

The section on positions is the bit that gets the attention, but the descriptions are often brief and rather poetic, and many are named after animals or natural images. The text itself is relaxed about them, and it says some are only for those with practice. There is no virtue in forcing your body into anything uncomfortable just because a book, ancient or otherwise, seems to suggest it. Our short guide to comfort and communication takes a much more practical view, which comes down to a simple rule: if it hurts, stop.

It also helps to be wary of modern websites and gift books that claim to reveal secret techniques from the Kama Sutra. A lot of this has been made up for marketing purposes. The same goes for the remedies in the final book, which should stay firmly in the past. If you have a real concern about sexual health or desire, your GP or an NHS sexual health service is the right place to start.

Why it is still worth knowing about

The Kama Sutra lasts because its central idea remains attractive: pleasure is part of a good life, and it improves when you bring knowledge, manners and care to it. Read that way, it has as much to say about conversation, thoughtfulness and good company as it does about the bedroom.

That spirit fits well with how we think about time spent in good company, too. If you enjoyed learning about the art of conversation and a well spent evening, our guides to intimacy and connection and taking things slowly pick up similar themes in a modern way.