THE rs%

TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY ALEX COMFORT

WITH A PREFACE BY W. G. ARCHER

 —
$6.00

THE j/C*lu» ^^M^StTV*

And /
Other ^Medieval Indian Writings on Love

Translated with an Introduction

and Notes by Alex Comfort,
with a Preface by W. G. Archer

7he Xoka Shastra and its associated texts

are to medieval literature what Jhe Kama Sutra
was to ancient. This new translation, which
preserves the flavor of joy in the originals, will

be of interest not only to scholars, critics, and

psychologists concerned with Indian erotology,
but to the general reader for its insights into a

culture which accepted sexuality and its ex-

ploration as part of the good life.

Dr. Comfort contrasts the Indian attitudes

of acceptance and pleasure with our own
awareness of clanger and guilt. How different

are these Indian erotic texts, even in their in-

structional aspects, from the mechanical or

sentimental "marriage manuals" known to
Americans. The Indian works, describing the

forms of love-play /
the multifarious postures
for intercourse, and the ways of satisfying a

woman's passions in bringing her to orgasm, in

some ways seem strikingly different from the
Western texts. We are told about coital posi-

tions so intricate they would seem to require

a greater command of the body than West-

erners who are not acrobats could possibly
enjoy. We are told of love-marks, recipes, love-

blows, love-cries, and love-spells which must

seem quite exotic. Some Westerners will reel

from the comments on plural intercourse, the

matter of "relations with strange women," or
the emphasis given the different genital char-

acteristics. But will not the imaginative West-

erner admit that many Indian love practices

(sec back //<</>)

 u 2

THE KOKA
SHASTRA
Being the Ratirahasya of Kokkoka

AND OTHER MEDIEVAL INDIAN WRITINGS ON LOVE

STEIN AND DAY /Publishers/New York

THE KOKA
SHASTRA
TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALEX COMFORT,. M.B., DSC.

Preface by W. G. Archer

<&
 NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

Not Sanskrit diacritical marks are available. In

all

transliteration of Sanskrit names and words c =

English 'ch' as in chin, and s=English 'sh' as in ship;
r when used as a vowel is pronounced rri (i.e. mrgl
is pronounced approximately mrrigi).

First published in the United States of America by Stein and Day, 1965
This translation © Alex Comfort 1964
Preface © George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1964
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-13605
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair
dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review,
as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion may be reproduced
by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed
to the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

Stein and Day/ Publishers /7 East 48 Street, New York, N.Y. 10017
 1 1

CONTENTS

Preface by W. G. Archer 1

INTRODUCTION
I General 43
II The Later Texts 80

1 The Pancasayaka (The Five Arrows) 81

2 The Kandarpacudamani (The Tiara of the

Love-God) 83
3 The Smaradipika (The Light of Love) 84
4 The Ananga Ranga (The Stage of the Love-God) 86
5 The Ratimafijari (The Posy of Love) 88
6 The Dinalapanika sukasaptati
(The Seventy Discourses of the Parrot) 95
7 Other texts 98

THE KOKA SHASTRA

1 Of the Physical Types and their Seasons 1 03
2 Of the Lunar Calendar 107
3 Of Physical Types by their genital characters 111
4 Of Women by their Ages, Temperaments and
Dispositions 115
5 Of Women by Custom and Place 121
6 Of Embraces 126
7 Of Kisses 128
8 Of Love-marks 130
9 Of Coition and the various coital postures 133
10 Of Love-blows and love-cries 145
1 The Wooing of a Bride 149
12 Concerning Wives 152
13 Concerning relations with Strange Women 155
14 Concerning Love-spells 168
15 Concerning Recipes 168

References 170
 —

PREFACE BY W. G. ARCHER

In 1882 Sir Richard Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot founded in

London the Kama Shastra Society. Its purpose was to
publish 'the Hindu erotic' and amongst the first texts it

issued was medieval Indian classic, the Ananga Ranga

a
or 'Stage of the Love-God'. The book was written in the
sixteenth century by an Indian poet, Kalyan Mall, and was
a subtle and detailed treatise on love and sex. During the
years 1868 to 1879 —
the period when Arbuthnot worked in
—
Bombay as a senior Indian Civil Servant the book was still
one of the most popular with Indians and, as a means of en-
lightening the British public on Indian sex, it seemed to
Arbuthnot an obvious choice for translation. Burton agreed
and in about 1869 Arbuthnot set to work. He employed
Indian pundits or scholars and, while translating with
them, he found two intriguing references. These named a
certain Vatsya as chief authority and respectfully cited his
ancient book. In 1872 Arbuthnot went on furlough but on
his return to India in 1874 a quest for Vatsya's classic
began. 'No Sanscrit library was supposed to be complete
without a copy' and although the search was in fact far
longer than this claim suggests, at last the book was found.
It was the Kama Sutra of about the third century A.D.
the earliest and most profound discussion of love and sex
written in India. Once more Arbuthnot sat with pundits.
He made a translation and his version, improved and
given style by Burton, was the first text to be published by
the new society.
Arbuthnot's work did not end here. From the ancient he
returned to the medieval and the result was the discovery
of a whole series of Indian writings on sex. The latest in

11
 —

The Koka Shastra

date was the Ananga Ranga. The earliest was the Ratira-
hasya, 'The secrets of Rati, spouse of the Love-God'. It was
—
known as the Koka Shastra 'the scripture of Koka' and —
had been composed in the twelfth century by a poet named
Kokkoka. Like the Ananga Ranga it discussed in detail
coital postures, forms of love-play, and ways of satisfying a
woman's passion. Burton and Arbuthnot did not translate
it. They had happened on the book as part of their enquiry

into Indian life and were content merely to list it along

with other erotic texts. They did not ask what attitudes
these expressed, how they differed from the Kama Sutra
or how they fitted into an Indian tradition. They rather
left them as they were — as books which were 'part of the
national life', which might one day help the reader to
understand India and from which every Victorian husband
could profit. In a footnote to the Ananga Ranga's definition
of the woman who can most easily be subdued
—'she who
has never learned the real delight of carnal copulation'
they wrote 'which allow us to state is the case with most
English women and a case to be remedied by constant and
intelligent study of the Ananga Ranga scripture'.
Today, as we can see, the importance of these texts is
very much greater. There is something ironic in the fact
—
that although Burton and Arbuthnot two British scholars
— discovered them, it was left to a German scholar,
Richard Schmidt, to translate and analyse them. There is
something equally ironic in the fact that the Koka Shastra
has had to wait until now for an English translation, and
that it is an English poet and doctor who has had the
initiative to produce it. The delay can hardly have been
more fortunate since in Dr Alex Comfort's version, the
Koka Shastra obtains the sensitive treatment it requires.
Not only does Dr Comfort render the original with dis-
cerning skill, but his delicate and lively English communi-
cates the subtle poetry of the original. His version continues
the pioneer work on Indian culture begun by Burton and

12
 The Koka Shastra
Arbuthnot and enables the English reader to assess for the
first time the importance to India of this classic text.

II

Medieval India is not ancient India. The Koka Shastra is

not the Kama Sutra. Any discussion of the Koka Shastra

must begin with these two axioms for only then can we
grasp its true significance.
The Kama Sutra had been put together in the third
century a.d. Itsauthor did not claim to be original. He
rather summed up existing wisdom. His book had authority
and thousand years no one else wrote anything
for almost a
like it. It was the
classic treatise on Indian love and sex.
In the twelfth century, Kokkoka returned to the theme
and the very audacity of his step determined, in part, his
treatment. Indian life was no longer what it was. A new
approach was needed yet the early pages suggest that we are
reading a new abridgement of the classic work, a sibling
rather than a sequel. Like the later author of the Ananga
Ranga, Kokkoka refers with nostalgic reverence to 'the
Founder of our Science'. He looks back to Vatsyayana much
as the Renaissance looked back to ancient Greece or, as in
our own day, Lawrence Durrell, recapturing the spirit of
Alexandria, looks back to Cafavy, the 'old poet'. He is a
W. H. Auden expressing liberal values and looking back
to an older liberal, E. M. Forster.

'Here, though the bombs are real and dangerous,

And Italy and King's are far away,
And we're afraid that you will speak to us,
You promise still the inner life shall pay.'

Though he is facing new conditions in India, Kokkoka can

never quite rid himself of the feeling that Vatsyayana had

15
 —

The Koka Shastra

expressed the ultimate wisdom —that he had said almost, if
not quite, the last word. We
find him, therefore, giving an
account of his master's principles, distinguishing those
which are Vatsyayana's own from those of two other
authors on whom Vatsyayana had drawn. Only then can he
—
move to his proper subject love and sex in his own time.
'This work,' he explains, 'was composed by one Kokkoka,
poet, as a light to satisfy the curiosity of the Most Excellent
Vainyadatta concerning the art of love.' And he concludes:
'With zeal was this book written by Kokkoka for the greater
enjoyment of all lovers.' The questions we must ask are:
Who were these lovers? How did they regard the Koka
Shastra? What part did Kokkoka's book play in medieval
India?
Kokkoka's lovers were obviously very different from those
of Vatsyayana. The ancient India of the Kama Sutra was
gay and happy. It was like tribal society in modern India
Santal, Uraon and Naga. Women moved freely in public
and were not secluded. Girls were courted by young men.
Marriage was normal, sometimes on a plural basis. Pre-
marital love was common. So too was extra-marital sex.
Courtesans were greatly admired, but other women also
had sexual adventures. Vatsyayana thought it worth while
to discuss these at some length and it is noteworthy how
very few kinds of women were really excluded. With
women of castes higher than the man's own or with those of
the same caste but who had previously been enjoyed by
others, sex was strictly forbidden. Certain others, he said,
were 'not to be enjoyed' but perhaps more in the sense
that he strongly advised against it than of rigid and total
prohibition. Some were barred on grounds of hygiene and
aesthetics — a leper, a lunatic, a woman who was either
over-white or over-black, a bad-smelling woman. Others
—
were banned for defects of character a woman turned out
of caste, one who reveals secrets, one who is so blatantly
riggish that she 'publicly expresses desire for sexual inter-

14
 The Koka Shastra
course'. With some, such as near relations and 'female
friends' — with whom the man had grown up as a
girls
child— sex might well be socially too embarrassing. In a
similar way a woman who led the life of an ascetic was also
to be avoided —
perhaps because her mode of life gave her
magical charms and sex with her would therefore be
dangerous. But apart from these, and always excepting a
special code for adultery, sex in ancient India was quite
extraordinarily free.
When he composed the Brihat Samhita or Complete
System of Natural Astrology in the sixth century A.D.,
Vaharamihira described what contemporary life was like.
It was ruled, he believed, by planets, stars, moon and sun
and it was these that accounted for annual variations. Yet
the basic pattern was remarkably constant.
'In the course of a year ruled by the Moon, the sky is
covered with clouds that, showing the dark hue of snakes,
collyrium and buffalo's horn, and resembling mountains in
motion, fill the whole earth with pure water and the air
with a deep sound such as arouses a feeling of tender
longing. The water-sheets are decked with lotuses and
water-lilies, the trees are blossoming and the bees humming in
the parks the cows yield abundant milk lovers unceasingly
3 5

delight their delightful paramours by amorous sports the 5

sovereigns rule an earth rich in flourishing towns and mines,

in wheat, rice, barley and plantations of sugar-cane, whilst
she is dotted with fire-piles and resounding with the noise of
greater and smaller sacrifices.'
In a year ruled by the planet Venus, 'Earth is decked
with rice and sugar-cane, for the fields are copiously
watered by the rain poured from mountain-like clouds by 5

her numerous tanks adorned with beautiful lotuses, she

shines like a woman brilliant with new ornaments. The
rulers of the country destroy their powerful enemies. The
good rejoice and the wicked are put down. At spring-time
there is much sipping of sweet wine in company with dear

15
 The Koka Shastra
loves, much delightful singing accompanied by flute and
lute, much feasting in company with guests, friends and
kinsfolk and Love's shouts of triumph are ringing in a year
ruled by Venus.'
As we relate this account to the Kama Sutra, we are
reminded of ancient Rome under the Emperors. There is
the same prevalence of over-lapping codes a code for —
marriage, a code for sex outside marriage and at all points
there is a cult of intensity in love and sex.
In one further way, ancient India and ancient Rome were
strangely alike. Roman society took adultery for granted
and no attempt was made to square it with Roman ethics
or religion. This was how Romans behaved. Vatsyayana
had much the same approach. Adultery was a fact in
ancient India. It was one of many modes of loving and
although he had several reservations, he discussed it with
rational calm. It should never, he thought, be lightly
undertaken and with wives of relations, Brahmins and
Kings, it must definitely be avoided. Yet certain circum-
stances presented no difficulties. If adultery might lead the
woman to influence her husband and if, for business or other
reasons, the lover needed to influence the husband, it was
the obvious thing to do. At least thirteen such circum-
stances existed and Vatsyayana explained all of them with
patient care. 'For these and similar other reasons,' he said,
'the wives of other men may be resorted to.'

Seductions of this kind were nothing if not calculated.

Indeed there is a sense in which Vatsyayana is rational
almost to the point of chilly detachment. Yet even as he
pleads for a logical approach, he abandons it. He sees that
passionate desire —desire of the most frantic and irrational
—
kind may override prudence. In such circumstances,
intensitywas the deciding factor. When 'passion love' was
so great that the lover was beside himself with longing,
nothing short of adultery might save his life. As a man
perceived that his love for a married woman was moving

16
 The Koka Shastra

from one degree of intensity to another, from love of the

eye to attachment of the mind, and then on to 'constant
reflection, destruction of sleep, emaciation of the body,
turning away from objects of enjoyment, removal of
shame, madness, fainting and finally death' in such —
circumstances, there was no alternative.
We meet, in fact, an issue which in some respects is

strikingly modern. Denis de Rougemont in Passion and

Society has forcibly expounded the view that 'passion love'
is fatal. But instead of vindicating adultery, he approaches

the problem from the opposite side. To save life, he argues,

'passion love' should be avoided.
—
'Love and death, a fatal love in these phrases is
summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is
popular, whatever is universally moving in European
literature, alike as regards the oldest legends and the
sweetest songs. Happy love has no history. Romance only
comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and
doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest
flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful
contentment of the settled couple not the satisfaction of
5

love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we

have the fundamental fact.
Our eagerness for both novels and films with their
identical type of plot 5 the idealized eroticism that pervades
our culture and upbringing and provides the pictures that
fill the background of our lives: our desire for 'escape',

which a mechanical boredom exacerbates everything—

within and about us glorifies passion. Hence the prospect of a
passionate experience has come to seem the promise that
we are about to live more fully and more intensely. We
look upon passion as a transfiguring force, something
beyond delight and pain, an ardent beatitude. In 'passion'
we are no longer aware of that 'which suffers', only of what
is 'thrilling'. And yet actually passionate love is a mis-

fortune. In this respect manners have undergone no change

17
 —

The Koka Shastra

for centuries, and the community still drives passionate
love in nine cases out of ten to take theform of adultery.
No doubt lovers can invoke numerous exceptions. But
statistics are inexorable and they confute our poetic self-

deception.
'Can we be in such a state of delusion, can we have been so
thoroughly "mystified", as really to have forgotten the un-
happy aspect of passion, or is it that in our heart of hearts
we prefer to what must seemingly fulfil our ideal of a
harmonious existence something that afflicts and yet
elevates us? Let me examine the contradiction more closely,
notwithstanding that to do so must seem disagreeable, since
it threatens to uncover what we would rather not see. To

assert that passionate love is tantamount to adultery is to

insist upon a fact which our cult of love both conceals and
distorts 5 it exposes what by the cult is dissimulated, re-
pressed, and left unnamed, so as to leave us free to give our-
selves up ardently to something we should never dare
claim as our due. In the reader's very objection to recog-
nizing that passion and adultery are commonly indistin-
guishable in contemporary society, we have a first indication
of the paradox that we now desire passion and unhappiness
only on condition we need never admit wishing for them as
such.' 1
In ancient India, love and death were equally intermixed.
But the approach was the very reverse. Adultery might
cause unhappiness, yet, equally, unhappiness might sanction
adultery. Adulterous love was 'fatal' —but only when it was
repressed. In practice, therefore, Vatsyayana made large
concessions. A man or woman had only to fall in love
to be gripped by an overwhelming passion — for their
situation tobecome 'fatal'. When that happened, all controls
and restraints were suspended. Indeed, there is a
strange contrast between the Vatsyayana who counsels
1
Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society (second ed.; reprinted, London,
1962), 15-16.

18
 The Koka Shastra
prudence and the author who faces life as it is. Life in
ancient India involved extra-marital love. Life in ancient
India had its own rationale. It was more vital than theory.
Practice over-rode precept and, as a result, a number of
pages in the Kama Sutra discuss in detail how best to seduce
a married woman —
once the feverish passion is on. It is
clear that certain married women were ready to be seduced
and the lover had only to follow some obvious rules to
love to satiety. Vatsyayana, in fact, returns again and
again to love and sex as something a-moral, something
which transcends ethics and has its own justifications. He
observed: 'A wise man having regard to his reputation
should not think of seducing a woman who is apprehensive,
timid, not to be trusted, well guarded or possessed of a
father-in-law and mother-in-law.' But the implication is

plain. Provided the married woman is not handicapped in

any of these ways, the lover should bring the affair to its
logical conclusion. Then, he calmly sums up, 'Desire, which
springs from nature, and which is increased by art and
from which all danger is taken away by wisdom, becomes
firm and secure. A clever man, depending on his own
ability and observing carefully the ideas and thoughts of
women and removing the causes of their turning away from
men, is generally successful with them.'
—
Such a philosophy of love and sex we might almost
define it as rapturous opportunism —
was part of ancient
India. But here we must make an important point. It in
no way conflicted with or contradicted religion. Religion or
Dharma did not presuppose communion with God. It was
rather a form of public conduct, a set of rites, a series of
festivals, a code of offerings and sacrifices. It was these that
constituted 'merit'. Life itself was one long series of births
and rebirths and whether under Buddhism or Brahmanical
Hinduism, the ultimate goal was release from living
through integration with God. This was rarely achieved at
once. Each life brought a man nearer or further from

19
 The Koka Shastra
his goal. What he did in one life affected where he started
in the next. By living correctly, by scrupulously observing
the proper rites, he gained a better position in his next
re-birth. In that way he moved by gradual stages towards
ultimate release. Living correctly, however —and this is
the vital point — did not exclude loving. It applied rather
to aspects of life other than sex. It meant avoiding 'sin'.

But 'sin' was more than of ethics. Only

a breach of purity
if sex involved 'pollution' was it 'sin'. Such 'sin' could

be cancelled by deeds of 'merit' and if, despite all lapses,

a man's stock of 'merit' was large, he could still be
promoted to a higher stage and thus better his final
chances. In certain circumstances he could even earn a
respite in heaven, a temporary reward for Dharma
successfully adhered to in a former life. 'The frequently
seen ideal of the Indian, and above all of the warrior, of the
blissful life, is intercourse with thousands of lovely women
in the bloom of youth, smiling with long lotus-eyes at the
man, winding their rounded arms about his neck, and
pressing their swelling firm breasts against him —women
who press their great swelling hips and thighs
banana- like
stems against his body, who give lips red as the bimba-
fruit to be sucked by his and as they glow in the act of sex
not only receive but also give.' 1 Heaven, in fact, is in-
habited by celestial glamour-girls and these are not merely
enjoyed in heaven but can sometimes be summoned to earth.
Indeed the Ramayana includes a vivid passage describing
how a rishi or holy man greets the army of Bharata as it
goes to fetch the banished Rama. 'From out of Indra's
paradise he called down the whole host of the apsarases
and from other heavens other divine women. Twenty
thousand of these wondrous beauties were sent by Brahma,
twenty thousand by Kubera, twenty thousand by Indra,
even the creepers in the forest did the yogi turn into
delightful women. Seven or eight of these charming
1
J. J. Meyer, Sexual Life in Ancient India (London, 1952), II, 317-8.

20
 The Koka Shastra
examples of ravishing womanhood gave each warrior,
mostly married, their service for the bath and offered him
heady drink and the flower-cups of their divine bodies.' 1
Nothing in fact could better illustrate the basic attitudes of
ancient India. Not merely is sex one thing and religion
another. In certain circumstances love and sex are actual
rewards for 'religious' living.

Ill

Against this bland and sensuous regime, medieval India

stood in sharp contrast. The goal of life was still the same.
It was a final breaking-out from a chain of births and re-
births. But the terms of living were now much harsher.
Rigid had been adumbrated. Morals were
principles
tighter. There was more strain.
The first sphere in which a new severity appears is
marriage. A medieval text, the Brahma Vaivarta Purana, is

in no doubt as to the role of a wife. 'A chaste woman server

her husband, the source of her own dignity. To a chaste
woman, the husband is a friend and a god. She is helpless
without him. He represents all her prosperity. The husband,
the source of her virtue, happiness, contentment, tran-
quillity and honour can solely appease her jealousy and
elevate her to dignity. Of all substantial things in the world
prized by a woman, the husband is the best. He is the best of
her friends. He maintains her, preserves her, gives her mat-
erial prosperity, is lord of her life, enjoys her. There is none
dearer than the husband to a woman. A son is dear to her, as
he is the offspring of her husband. The husband is dearer to a
woman than a hundred sons. A wicked woman who does
not know the merits of her husband adopts the evil path.
Ablution in all holy waters, initiation in all ceremonies,
asceticism, vows and gifts of all kinds, fasts, worship of the
preceptor or the gods and other difficult rites are not equal

21
 The Koka Shastra

in point of merit to a sixteenth part of the devotion of a

woman to her husband.'
It follows that chastity is a woman's supreme virtue and
the authors of the Brahma Vaivarta Purana do not merely
inveigh against an unchaste woman but load a chaste
woman with exaggerated praises. Their words are neither
musical nor sweet but in general attitude, they strike a
note that might almost be Milton's.

'What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield

That wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin,
Wherewith she freezed her foes to congealed stone?
But rigid looks of chaste austerity
And noble grace that dashed brute violence
With sudden adoration and blank awe.
So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity,
That when a soul is found sincerely so
A thousand liveried angels lacky her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
. .Till all be made immortal: but when lust
.

By unchaste looks, loose gestures and foul talk

But most by lewd and lavish act of sin
Lets in defilement to the inward parts
The soul grows clotted by contagion
Imbodies and imbrutes till she quite loose
The divine property of her first being.'

It is hardly surprising that, in such circumstances,

adultery should be denounced as the most heinous of
offences. Not only does it defy the ideal so eloquently pro-
claimed but, in accordance with the ever-increasing im-
portance attached to 'purity', it flouts society in its most
sensitive sphere. It is a crime against the husband on two
grounds. It insults his position but, even more, it cere-

22
 ;

The Koka Shastra

monially pollutes him and, for these reasons, it carries
terrible penalties.
'Whoever enjoys the society of a woman courted by
another man dwells in the hell called the thread of time so
long as the sun and the moon exist. A vile woman is not
fit for an manes or the gods. The husband
act sacred to the
loses his grace and valour by embracing her. Brahma him-
self has said that oblations to fire or offerings of water
made by such a man
do not satisfy the gods or the manes.
That is why learned men carefully preserve their wives
otherwise they are consigned to hell. A wife and a cooking
vessel should always be carefully preserved; for they are
consecrated by the touch of the owner and desecrated by the
touch of others. A woman who defrauds her husband and
courts another lover is consigned to hell as long as the sun
and the moon exist. The myrmidons of Yama (the god of
death) chastise her if, afflicted with tortures, she tries to
run away. She is always bitten there by worms as big as
snakes. The bite causes her to scream in pain but does not
affect her life. For the sake of pleasure, which only lasts for a
few minutes, the wretch forfeits fair fame in this world and
is consigned to hell hereafter. Therefore the virtuous try

their best to shield their wives from the gaze of others. In a

word, the woman is truly blessed who is not touched even
by the rays of the sun. A vile woman who is independent of
the control of her husband resembles a sow in all her
features/ No writer in ancient India would have expressed
so complete a repugnance or done it in so shrill and virulent
a manner.
Yet if women must be moralso also should men and, in
the medieval conception of religion, human virtues were
sometimes those of God himself. By the sixth century, God
was being thought of as the Hindu Trinity. This com-
prised Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the loving Preserver
and Siva the Procreator and Destroyer. It was by directly
—
approaching Vishnu and Siva reciting their names, saying

25
 The Koka Shastra
prayers, making offerings —that a man
not only lived a
better life but life itself was better. Before the Indian
Middle Ages, Vishnu had had nine incarnations. He had
taken flesh, dwelt on earth, killed demons and supported
the righteous. His early incarnations do not concern us but
his seventh, Rama, is the equivalent in religion of the very
moralistic code we have just discussed. Rama embodies
virtue. He is moral.He observes the rules of Dharma. He is
a model king with a model consort, Sita. When Sita is
abducted by a demon, he searches for her until he finds her.
But morality must not only be respected but seen to be
respected. Although Sita was abducted, she has in fact
preserved her chastity. Rama's subjects cannot believe this
for the very situation in their eyes had made chastity im-
possible. In deference to the new morality, Rama there-
fore discards Sita —
violating in the process human 'good-
ness' but powerfully reinforcing the current ideals of
marriage and chastity. In the form of Rama, the 'moral
man', the 'ideal hero', Vishnu appealed to much of medieval
India for his worship involved not only love of God but love
of morals.
So stern an ordering of life, so blatant a denial of the
senses provoked its own reaction. When rigid fixity informs
society, when sex is viewed with shuddering disapproval
except when moral, the very fact of repression
strictly
engenders revolt. In medieval India, religion itself developed
certain cults and sects as if in compensation. In these
cults, passionate abandonment was given direct expression
and sex received mystical and symbolic interpretations.
A first sign of this contrary tendency is the cult of Krishna,
the divine lover. Following Rama, Krishna had been born as
Vishnu's eighth incarnation. His purpose was to slay
demons and encourage the righteous. He was born a
prince and brought up, not in princely circles, but among
cowherds. During his brief idyllic youth, he made love to
all the young married women. He also ridiculed offerings

24
 —

The Koka Shastra

and sacrifices, humbled Indra, the conventional lord of the
gods and outwitted the city Brahmins (or official priesthood)
of Mathura by inducing their wives to meet him against
their husbands' wishes. Among the cowgirls he had a
special love, Radha, and his love forher and the other cow-
girls involved the very 'crime' inveighed against in the
Brahma Vaivarta Purana. Indeed this Purana, confronted by
so defiant a breach of medieval morals, endeavours to per-
suade the reader that Krishna's love for Radha was not at all
—
adulterous that from eternity they have in fact been
married. Its special pleading is totally unconvincing for the
meaning of Krishna's romance with Radha is that it
places love before duty. Vishnu as Krishna brings a new
—
element into Indian religion an element which goes to the
opposite extreme from that of Rama. Love, from being out-
side religion, is made its crux. Love of Krishna or Vishnu
enraptured devotion to the holy character and name
could win the devotee immediate 'release'. It short-
circuited the laborious process of births and rebirths, the
painful climbing from one level to the next. It was an act
of grace, a grant of salvation, a divine reward not for correct
living but for love and adoration.
Such love was not sexual love but sexual love was its
closest analogy. In the sixth century, Krishna's story was in-
cluded in the Vishnu Purana but its full meaning was
suppressed. In the tenth century, it was told in greater
detail in the Bhagavata Purana and although Radha's
name was omitted, Krishna's sexual raptures with the
cowgirls were conceded. It is only in the twelfth century
at the time when Kokkoka was writing his treatise
that the meaning latent in the story was given clear
expression. The Sanskrit poet, Jayadeva, not only mentions
Radha but makes her romance with Krishna the very heart
of his great poem, the Gita Govinda. Their love is nothing
if not sexual but the relationship is viewed as a mystical

allegory. Radha in adoring Krishna is the soul adoring God.

25
 The Koka Shastra
Adoration is the supreme type of 'merit'. In sexual rapture,
there is a sense of self-extinction andsymbol of the
this is a
soul's extinction in God. To love God, the lover, was thus
not only to obtain a mystical experience but to win salva-
tion. While medieval India was pressing romantic love
out of life, Indian religion was contemplating adultery.
The same 'annexation' of sex by religion is reflected in
the worship of Siva. In contrast to the mild benign Vishnu,
Siva was thought of as a strange erratic being, full of moods
and furies, responsible for what was sudden and unexpected,
a destroyer but also a procreator. His worship like Vishnu's
involved daily prayers but these were to avert disaster
and obtain boons rather than to save. It was impossible to
adore Siva. The most you could do was to model your life
on his wild ascetic practices and humour his tantrums. His
idol was a phallus or lingam set in the yoni or female organ
and the very starkness of the symbol gave sex a new signifi-
cance. It was by adoring the lingam that childless women
sometimes got children and men themselves obtained in-
sight. Besides the cult of Siva, other cults resorted to sexual
symbolism. The secret force behind the universe was
sometimes regarded as female, even as maternal, and, in the
cult of shakti, woman became a sacred object, an incarnation
of the Mother. Sensual ecstasy was also identified with
'annihilation', and among certain sub-cults of Siva intensity
was the key These cults were practised by
to worship.
secret societies. They involved acts of sex but their very
prevalence proves how far medieval India had travelled
from the gay and carefree state of early India.
This new upsurgence was reflected in medieval tem-
ples and sculptures. Temples were usually reserved for
Vishnu himself or for Siva. Each resembled a palace in
which, attended by gods and dancing-girls, Vishnu and
Siva held majestic court. Sculpture contributed to this
effect. Ascending the temple facade in row upon row,
sculptures of the gods mingled with bands of glamour-girls

26
 The Koka Shastra
—each girl with her slim vertical form reinforcing the
feeling of exaltation induced by the upward sweep of the
building itself, while her sexual charm hinted at the
rapturous nature of union with God. This erotic element
was, at times, taken still further and lovers were sculpted in
the act of union. Their poses, as Dr Comfort has pointed out,
do not tally with any of those described by either Vatsyayana
or Kokkoka and we can perhaps explain them on only two
hypotheses. Their strange acrobatics, their very im-
possibility —at Khajuraho the lover is even standing on his

—
head gives them an air of ideal fantasy. It is as if the
artificial and extravagant have acquired a special value, as
if only through the unknown and the abnormal can sexual

frenzy be fully conveyed. Just as a period of nervous strain,

of cultural malaise, may well have underlain the Man-
nerist movement in Western art, strain in medieval
India may also have evoked the same kind of fevered
sexuality.
A second viewpoint would regard all standing lovers as in
fact supine, yet shown, for purposes of architecture, as
vertical. Supine or horizontal designs and compositions
would detract from the upward surge of the temple. They
would be appropriate in 'feminine' buildings such as the
Jefferson Memorial, Washington, or the National Gallery,
—
London buildings whose flat lines support a rounded
breast-like dome and whose masculine counterparts are
such nearby structures as Nelson's column or the Washing-
ton Monument. Temples in medieval India were male in
their own right. Their towers were like lingams. As
sculpture, then, the lovers' vertical positions are geared to
But lay them down, make the necessary
this conception.
mental adjustment and what is wild and fantastic is once
again conventional.
Such sculptures may well have had two roles. If in early
India sex was regarded as inherently noble, sexual rapture
was the most compelling analogy for the final beatitude. It

27
 The Koka Shastra
showed what Indian was about. 'In the embrace of
religion
his beloved, a man —
whole world everything
forgets the
both within and without; in the same way he who embraces
the Self knows neither within nor without.' The words are
from an ancient text, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, but
they sum up a whole way of Indian thought. Assuming the
medieval trend towards glad identification, loving couples
have thus a clear and unambiguous function. At the same
—
time, the very fact that sex is public and religious that the
—
couples are sometimes aided by other girls that it is
something unusual and abnormal, gives them a second
function. Here is sex pursued with daring abandonment, sex
that in its freedom appears to exemplify romance and
passion. What is condemned in actual life is countenanced
in sculpture and religion.

IV

It was for such a society that the erotic books of medieval

India, the Koka Shastra and the Ananga Ranga, were
written. They mirrored had now become and both
life as it

in character and in attitude their 'lovers' are quite new.

For ardent seducers and roving adventurers, there was now
but little scope. Men and women no longer met socially.
Pre-marital courtship had gone out. Woman's place was in
the home and there she was constantly invigilated. As a
young girl, a child, she was married before she reached
puberty. Romance had been banished and in its place had
come an even sharper stress on wifely duty. For the very
powerful or the very rich, variety in sex might still be
possible. But it was obtained more by marrying many
wives, installing concubines or hiring dancing-girls and
prostitutes than by free adventure. At Mandu in Central
India in the fifteenth century, a Khilji ruler created a
whole 'city of women' by marshalling 15,000 women at his

28
 The Koka Shastra
court. Later, in the sixteenth century, his Pathan suc-
cessor, Prince Baz Bahadur, fell in love with a Hindu
courtesan, Rupmati. Their romance was as free as in
—
ancient India the two lovers riding together at night and
gazing into each other's eyes. Such a romance, however, was
so abnormal that it later took on a legendary glamour.
From the eighteenth century onwards, Baz Bahadur and
Rupmati were portrayed in Indian painting as vivid ex-
amplars of romance, as rivals in actual life to lovers in
poetry. Only a relationship that cut right across accepted
conduct could have evoked such frequent or such fervent
celebration. In medieval India as a whole, quite other
norms prevailed. We reach, therefore, a surprising position.
In both the Koka Shastra and the Ananga Ranga, the lover
of ancient India has almost ceased to exist. The men for
whom these books were written were not lovers but
husbands.
This purpose is stated with forceful clarity in the Ananga

Ranga. 'No one yet has written a book to prevent the

separation of the married pair and to show them how they
may pass through life in union. Seeing this (its author
writes), I felt compassion and composed the treatise.'
Sex outside marriage was disastrous and in order to combat
its chief cause
—'the want of varied pleasures' and 'the
monotony which follows possession', he explains how 'the
husband, by varying the enjoyment of his wife, may live
with her as with thirty-two different women, ever varying
the enjoyment of her and rendering satiety impossible'. He
concludes: 'If husband and wife live together in close
agreement, as one soul in a single body, they shall be happy
in this world, and in that to come. Their good and charitable
actions will be an example to mankind and their peace and
harmony will effect their salvation.' He then lists all the
factors on which sex in marriage depends, urging again and
again that woman's need for 'carnal enjoyment' is para-
mount and that only if the woman is satisfied can the
29
 The Koka Shastra
husband be pleased. The Ananga Ranga is a marriage
manual, not a lover's hand-book.
Yet its poet-author was clearly faced with a strange
predicament. Romance might be rare. It might even be
inimical to marriage. But society needed to believe that it
could none the less happen. In this respect medieval
India was, in fact, not unlike modern France. The French,
we are told, are adept in liaisons, in adventurous romances,
in a whole range of extra-marital sprees. These are the
French as the repressed and puritanical British would like
to see them. The reality is suggested by a French woman
writing in The New Statesman. 'To the question, "What does
a woman need to be happy?", not one in thousand replied
a
"a good job". And a still more surprising fact, not one in
four replied "Love is necessary for happiness". "Love to
them," she adds, "seems to mean danger. Poetry, passion,
romance: these are interesting when other people ex-
perience them, when they can be enjoyed vicariously in
magazines, films and books. The important thing to
French women is not to experience love but to assure
'
themselves that it can exist."
It was to assure medieval India that love could still
exist that the author of the Ananga Ranga evolved a
compromise. Adhering to marriage as the one true goal, he
revived the more romantic part of the Kama Sutra but
with a difference. Following Vatsyayana, he describes
what kinds of women lend themselves most readily to
seduction, how go-betweens can help and where intrigues
should be carried on. He describes but, at the same time, he
deprecates. He minimizes chances. He magnifies what is
forbidden. Even his manner is different. Where the Kama
Sutra is calm, neutral and objective, the Ananga Ranga at
times resembles the Brahma Vaivarta Purana in its shrill in-
vective. 'The following women are absolutely and under all

circumstances to be excluded from commerce. The wife of a

Brahmin, of a Brahmin learned in the Vedas, of a priest

30
 The Koka Shastra
who keeps up the sacred fire and of
Puranik (reader of the
a
Puranas). To look significantly at such a woman, or to
think of her with a view to sensual desire, is highly im-
proper: what then, must we think of the sin of carnal
copulation with her? In like manner men prepare to go to
hell by lying with the wife of a king or any man of the
warrior caste of a friend or of a relation. The author of the
5

book strongly warns and commands his readers to avoid all

such deadly sins.' Finally he adds a further twenty-four
other types of women, who, he says, 'are never to be en-
joyed, however much a man may be tempted'. Vatsyayana
had listed only two.
There is the same severe restriction on times and places.
With few exceptions, a man must not make love by day or
in the evening, but only at night. He must not make love in
either the hot weather or the cold. Only spring-time
and the Rains are left. He must not make love when
ill with fever, tired from travel, when observing a religious

rite or at the new moon. 'The consequences of congress at

such epochs are as disastrous as if the act took place in a
prohibited spot/
Places are equally limited. The poet bans fourteen in all,

among them 'by the side of a river or any murmuring

stream, on a highway, in the forest, in an open place such
as a meaaow or an upland, in a house of another person'.
'The consequences of carnal connection at such places are
always disastrous.' Admittedly some places still remain, but
they are very few. When Kalyan Mall does describe a place
for love-making, he abandons all pretence of realism and
merely quotes the Kama Sutra. 'The following is the
situation which the wise men of old have described as being
best fitted for sexual intercourse with women.' And he
describes the man-about-town's luxurious house with all its
elegant amenities. Few such opportunities existed in
medieval India. The passage was merely a romantic hark-
ing back to an old and ideal past.

31
 —

The Koka Shastra

In the same way, menacing disapproval awaits the

adulterer. The Kama Sutra had laid down the classical
situation in which adultery was not merely permissible
but absolutely necessary. It was when a man was so
totally in love that nothing else could save his life. In the
Ananga Ranga, this is quoted but even so it is reckoned a
disaster. 'There are seven kinds of trouble which result
from having intercourse with the wife of another man.
Firstly, adultery shortens or lessens the period of life 5

secondly, the body becomes spiritless and vigourless; thirdly,

the world derides and reproaches the lover; fourthly, he
despises himself; fifthly his wealth greatly decreases;
sixthly, he suffers much in this world; and seventhly, he
will suffer more in the world to come.' He may save his life
but at the price of 'ignomy, disgrace and contumely'.
The Kama Sutra had been far more tolerant and humane.
In the end, it is only sex within marriage that the Ananga
Ranga can truly countenance. For this, its author had
abiding admiration. Indeed it is a sign of how far medieval
India has moved that, in dividing women into four types
according to their temperaments and physiques, he makes
each —
an analogue of salvation of Moksha or release
from further transmigration. 'The name of woman,' he
says, 'is Nari which, being interpreted, means No "Ari" or
foe; and such is Moksha or absorption because all love it
and it loves all mankind.' The padmini or iotus' lady is
accordingly 'sword-release' or absorption into the essence of
the Deity. The chitrini or 'picture' lady is 'like those who
having been incarnated as gods, perform m mifold and
wonderful works'. She is 'nearness to the Deity, being born
in the Divine Presence'. The shankhini or 'conch-shell'
lady resembles the Deity 'in limbs and material body'
even as the man who takes the form of Vishnu bears upon
his body the conch-shell, the discus and other emblems of
The hastini or 'elephant' lady is the 'residence in
that god'.
the heaven of some special god'. 'She is what residence in

32
 The Koka Shastra
Vishnu's heaven is to those of the fourth class who have
attributes and properties, shape and form, hands and feet.'
In this treatment it is as if sex is a re-enactment of different
methods of salvation, a form of religion. What sex in
marriage has lost in passion, it has gained in spiritual
mystery.

The same attitude illuminates the Koka Shastra. Kokkoka,

it is true, does not use metaphysical terms or invest each
type of woman with cosmic significance. The grand
apotheosis of woman has still to come. But he is acutely
—
aware of what life is of what is practical and what is
not. He is concerned with how to make the most of sex,
how to enjoy it and how to keep a woman happy. More-
over, like his learned successor, he takes it for granted that
almost by definition the partner in sex will be the wife.
It is for the wife that he instructs his lovers in the four
types of women, tells them how to induce orgasms and how
success in sex is affected by varieties of organ, temperament
and disposition. Women, he knows, differ from place to
place. Local customs vary. These are all matters which a
husband must bear in mind. For the rest, his account of
embraces, kisses, love-marks, love-blows, love-cries and
—
sexual postures has only one aim to improve the art of
sex. But sex is nothing without delicacy and, as he adverts
to physical details, he charges them with poetry. The
Koka Shastra is not a piece of prose. It is very different
from the Kama Sutra. It is neither terse, bald nor plain.
Its descriptions keep nothing back but Kokkoka's style in-
vests them with charm and exhilaration. To read his book
is not to suffer medical instruction. It is to gain a lively,
new appreciation.
This vivifying influence is carried further in its treat-

33
 —

The Koka Shastra

ment The lover is admittedly the husband

of 'passion love'.
but the dwindling in romance, the loss of adventure is
something to which Kokkoka's husbands have still to be
reconciled. They are, in this respect, no different from those
of Kalyan Mall. Like the Ananga Ranga, therefore, the
Koka Shastra Although this
refers in part to ancient India.
'brave old world' had gone, some few traces of its customs
remained and these Kokkoka carefully noted. He describes,
for example, the kind of embraces possible during sudden
slight encounters. 'When a man meets a woman on some
other errand and contrives in so doing to touch her body'
that is one kind. 'If they walk together at a procession or in
the dark and their bodies touch for a considerable time. This
is the embrace by rubbing. If one presses the other against a

wall, it becomes the embrace by pressing.' Even in medieval

India these casual encounters could sometimes happen.
Similarly, seduction, although difficult, might in certain
abnormal circumstances occur. He lists different types of
women by age, remarking that one who is between sixteen
and thirty 'responds to presents of jewellery' and that an old
— —
woman 'one who is over fifty' is won by courteous
speeches and 'by stuffing her with promises of marriage'.
He would hardly mention this if adventurous dealings were
totally ruled out. For the rest, he describes extra-marital
—
sex not as it is but as it once was treating what was as if
it still might be. To this end, he amplifies the list of em-

braces possible in casual meetings. But the more intimate

they become the more they approach make-believe.
Kokkoka does not say how or when the lover can employ
them. Perhaps he did not even know. All he can say is,
'For two that have not yet declared their love, there are
thus four embraces by which they can make known their
mind for those who have shared love-pleasure already,
5

the ancients have recognized eight embraces by which

desire may be quickened.' It is not current practice but the
'ancient past' which excites him with its ardent vistas.

54
 The Koka Shastra
In a similar way, he models certain passages on the Kama
Sutra, injecting the drab present with an antique thrill. He
describes things by which a woman may be 'depraved'.
Vatsyayana had treated these at length but, in the broad
context of ancient India, these were part of life. It was

because women could be 'depraved' by certain things

that extra-marital sex was feasible. In contrast, Kokkoka
says: 'Independence, living too long with parents, taking
part in public festivals, over-free behaviour in masculine
company, living abroad, having too many men-crazy
friends, the collapse of her own love affair, having an old
husband, jealousy and travel — these are the things by
which a woman may be ruined.' None of these were
exactly common in medieval India, but the very recital of
them inflamed the fancy.
The fascination which the Kama Sutra exerted is even
clearer in the passage describing preparations for love-
making. Kalyan Mall, in the Ananga Ranga, could not
resist incorporatingVatsy ay ana's idyllic description. And
Kokkoka before him was also quite unable to exclude it.
He describes the 'brightly lit room filled with flowers, the
incense, the handsome clothes, the lively conversation, the
delicate caresses' — all arrangements of the 'man-
the
about-town' when he welcomed an experienced mistress.
But the setting which in ancient India was a reality is now a
romantic idealization. The lover —save in the case of the
rich —
few was as impossible as his mistress.
The same air of fantasy characterizes Kokkoka's last
chapter on relations with strange women. Just as in the
Bible the New Testament cannot entirely supersede the
Old but often refers back to it as the node of ancient wisdom,
Kokkoka includes much that is now obsolete. He knows it no
longer applies, but it was part of ancient practice. It can be
viewed with nostalgia and excitement. He includes,
therefore, the same time-honoured thesis that life and
health are what really matter and that in certain circum-

35
 The Koka Shastra
stances 'passion love' has to be satisfied 'in order to save
life'. Yet his attitude is not so different from that of a
modern critic. 'Strange love,' Sir Herbert Read has said,
'isromantic love, passionate love, and no one could be more
conscious of its predestined liability to disaster than Shakes-
peare. But he does not on that account condemn it: to this
passion, as to all other human emotions, he is the spectator
ab extra, and his own desire is always to "bear free and
patient thoughts". His own involvement in the passionate
varieties of love may be deduced from the Sonnets, w hich T

in themselves, all other poetry set aside, would for ever

justify our human indulgence in this fatal emotion. I have
no desire to be obscure in an issue where the critics of
romantic literature have been so explicit. If I understand
their moralism rightly, they would consider Shakespeare's
Sonnets (not to mention Tristan and all the poetry and
music evoked by that name) well lost if the institution of
marriage could be preserved in its purity. I think that
Shakespeare would have felt that life, in the biological
sense, is independent, if not defiant, of moral codes and ;

though he would surely have held that life, in any sense

worth the living, is promoted by a progressive refinement
of ideals and aspirations, he would have placed high, if not
highest among the vitalizing and life enhancing forces, the
poetic faculty. Whatever feeds its sacred flame is itself
sacred and beyond our human conception of good and evil.' 1
Such a view is strangely parallel to the Indian and in in-
corporating certain passages —romantic, passionate and
intense —Kokkoka may well have had in mind the vital
life-enhancing role of poetry.
It is this same view which explains how love and sex were
treated in Indian painting. From the fourteenth to nine-
—
teenth centuries the period in which Indian miniature
painting flourished —
it was less the act of sex that was

illustrated in painting as the situations and problems of ideal

1
Herbert Read, Phases of English Poetry (second ed., London, 1950), 56.

36
 The Koka Shastra
lovers. Coital postures, as analysed in the Koka Shastra,
were sometimes illustrated and such illustrations were
often called the Koka Shastra itself. In Orissa, in particular,
sets of postures were engraved with a stylus on palm-leaf.
These were not taken from books although they were often
termed 'Koka Shastras'. More recently in Orissa, versions
known as 'brides' books' were painted at village level. All
these books bore only a slight relation to the Koka Shastra
proper. Indeed they sometimes departed quite radically from
its postures, omitting some and adding others. Similar

illustrated sets were current in Rajasthan —

in the style of
—
Jodhpur and in the Punjab Hills at Kangra and Guler.
When Lord Auckland visited Nahan in the state of Sirmur
in the early nineteenth century, he found that the Raja
had many such pictures with which he regaled the party
as soon as the ladies had left. Sets of this sort were painted at
court level. They were made for private delectation, for the
intimacy of the bedroom, but despite their aphrodisiac
qualities their vogue was small compared with other less
amatory texts. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
sets of coital postures were produced in popular and pro-
vincial Mughal styles, the artist giving full vent to acrobatic
fancy. (Two sets of this type are preserved in the Fitz-
william Museum, Cambridge.) It was also not uncommon
for emperors, rajas and nobles to be shown copulating.
Such portraits did not demean the subject. They rather
testified to his virility. Sexual potency was deemed as
necessary to a ruler as skill in hunting or war. It showed he
was a man. The full extent of these portraits has still to be
discovered but it is assume that just as western
fairly safe to
artists —
certainly most modern artists —
have drawn lovers
in union, almost every Indian prince was at some time
portrayed accomplishing the 'act of life'.
Pictures of this kind treated sex directly and to that
extent they paralleled the Koka Shastra. More often, how-
ever, a scene of union was inserted in sets of pictures which

37
 —

The Koka Shastra

otherwise illustrated quite different aspects of romance.
When the moment of climax came, the painter shrank as
from 'the right true end of love' as did the poet. The
little

hero and heroine are reconciled, their joy is 'endless' and

they express their delight in passionate union. Jayadeva's
great poem on Radha and Krishna, the Gita Govinda, is a
case in point. As the drama concludes, Radha and Krishna
make love. The poem was lavishly illustrated at Basohli
in the Punjab Hills in 1730 and again at Kangra in about
1780. Both versions contain over 120 pictures. More than
100 of these depict various phases of the romance. Barely
ten show Radha and Krishna actually making love.
When they do, the postures adopted are so normal that we
must probably exclude too direct a connection with any
book. The Koka Shastra, despite the influence on it of the
Kama Sutra, was based on coital postures as Indians
practised them. Indian poetry derived from this same
source. When, therefore, Radha and Krishna are shown en-
gaged in intercourse, it was as much on life as on the Koka
Shastra that the artist drew.
Such Kangra pictures portrayed the sexual act with
dignity and charm. The painters took sex and then with
almost effortless ease invested the lovers' union with rhyth-
mical poetry. Sex, however, was not their main concern. It
—
was rather the lovers themselves the varying phases of
their romance. In Rajasthan, Central India and the
Punjab Hills, artists constantly showed women in love
hurrying to a awaiting a lover, wilting at his absence.
tryst,
They were far removed from ordinary Indian women. In
certain ways —
delicacy, beauty, breeding —
they might
resemble the inmates of a ruler's palace. These were some-
times the acme of aristocratic charm. It was their behaviour
—their devotion to 'passion love' —which bore no relation
to actual palace life. Ladies at a Rajput ruler's court led as
cramped and huddled an existence as feudal ladies did in
twelfth century France. It was only through prostitutes,

38
 The Koka Shastra
dancing-girls, singers and concubines that a Rajput prince
or noble experienced 'romance'. In such circumstances,
the ladies of Indian painting charmed and delighted
Rajput courts for one essential reason. They were creatures
of poetry, not of real life.

From the fourth to tenth centuries, the period when

Sanskrit love-poetry was at its height, the lovers of ancient
India were treated as prototypes for lovers in poetry. Poets
were expected to make their characters behave like these
early lovers. Love could only be interpreted in poetry if it
was free, romantic, adventurous. Indeed the Indian view-
point exactly tallies with Sir Herbert Read's dictum: 'Only
passionate love evokes poetry of the highest order.' Married
love was admirable, but it was not poetic. Poetry involved
the same attitude of daring abandonment as did extra-
marital sex. As a result, books were written in which the
moral code was suspended and the lover in all his intricate
variety was discussed as if he were the true and only subject
of poetry. The first text to do this was the Rasamanjari (the
'Posy of Pleasures') of Bhanudatta, a Sanskrit poet of the
fifteenth century. Women were divided into those who
were another's and those who were anyone's. By 'another's'
was meant 'married' but liaisons with these were con-
sidered quite as valid for poetry, if not more so, as were any
others. Poetic capability was the test, and in his book,
Bhanudatta classified all types of lover and then showed by
means of examples how passionate situations could best be
interpreted. His analysis was taken still further in the
Rasikapriya of Keshav Das, a Hindi poet of the sixteenth
century.
In both these books, the actual mechanics or tactics
were brushed aside. It was assumed, on the
of 'passion love'
contrary, that no such basic problems even existed. The
nayika (the mistress), if married, would always give her
husband the slip. She would welcome her lover unen-
cumbered by relatives. She would keep a tryst. It was
39
 The Koka Shastra
unnecessary for poetry to say how she did this. The essential
point was that she did. In its bland suspension of all the
actual conditions of love-making, some modern British
writing is as unreal, as idealistic as that of medieval India.
It is to this tradition that the Koka Shastra properly
belongs. Where it is not describing sex, it is hinting at love
that has virtually no connection with Behind the life.

Indian husband lurks the Indian lover but it is in art and

poetry rather than the joint Hindu family that he comes to
life. To give the greatest stimulus —
to excite, enchant and
soothe —poetsand painters dealt with ideal love. And it
Koka Shastra included its
was for this reason that the
obsolete descriptions. To write of the exceptional as if it were
normal gave the medieval lover the stimulus he most
required. It gratified repressed needs. It testified to romance
as a continuing necessity even though an over-rigid society
denied it. The less 'passion love' was practised, the more
essential it became to assert its existence.
Tn my study of Shakespeare's sexuality and bawdiness,'
Eric Partridge has said, 'I have come to feel that, from his
plays and poems, there emerges something basic, signifi-
cant, supremely important and most illuminatingly revela-
tory. Although he never even hinted this, Shakespeare seems
to have held and to have consistently acted upon the opinion
that to write is in fact to create; and to make love is
potentially to create. To write provides a means of releasing
one's intellectual and spiritual energy, whereas to copulate
is a means of releasing one's physical energy. The desire to
write is at least as urgent and powerful intellectually and
spiritually, as the desire to make love (especially, to copulate)
is on the physical plane. Composition is superior to love-
making as a means of satisfying the need for self-expression
(or "the creative urge"). It is almost equal to it as an anodyne
to that loneliness with which all of us, but especially the
literary and artistic and musical creators, are beset, and as a
comfort and a solace. Moreover to write of sex and love

40
 The Koka Shastra
serves both to satisfy —and —
perhaps to justify the intel-
lectual and spiritual need to create and homopathetically to
assuage one's physical desires by that modified form of
sublimation which consists in a not ignoble substitution.'
By treating love and sex with poetic insight, the Koka
Shastra gave medieval India exactly this
— 'a not ignoble

substitution'.

41
 —

INTRODUCTION

GENERAL
The Sanskrit textbooks on the art of love form a continuous
sequence from remote antiquity to the sixteenth century
A.D. or later, and on to the present time in vernacular
versionsand imitations. Most great cultures, as well as
many tribal societies, have had a literature of this kind
our own Judaeo-Christian tradition is almost unique in

lacking one —and have entrusted its production to poets.

Persian, Chinese and Arabic erotologies are nearly as ex-
tensive as Sanskrit, but the influence of the Indian love-
textbooks in their culture is peculiar, because of the place
which sexual imagery occupies in Hindu religious thought.
For over 1,000 years these textbooks have influenced not
only sexual behaviour, but art and literature throughout
—
Hindu India and not only through literate people, for they
have been embodied in 'visual aids' sculpture, painting,
$

palm-leaf books, and erotic designs and posture-sheets, at

all levels from the finest productions of religious art to

pedlars' wares and bazaar ornaments.

The corresponding fear and rejection of sexuality, which
is equally fundamental in our own religious tradition, has

forced successive generations in Europe to turn to the Greek

and Roman Classics, or to books which describe normal
sexual activities under cover of catalogues of sins or of
diseases, to fulfil the same essential needs. Almost the first
full-length picture of a different and less sexually anxious
tradition was given to nineteenth-century Englishmen by
Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, and it is not
surprising that they owe their first contact with Sanskrit
erotology to the same translator, through his versions of the

45
 The Koka Shastra
Kama Sutra and the Ananga Ranga. Neither of these, un-
fortunately, is up
the standard of Burton's Arabic
to
studies, at least to teach us the name of the
but they served
great original source of Indian erotica, the Kama Sutra of
Vatsyayana.
The Kama Sutra is one of the world's great traditional
prose books. Its attributive author, like Homer and Hippo-
crates, is a —the text we now have
name and no more as it

quotes opinions in the third person, along with those of

his
Babhravya, Gonikaputra, and others — but throughout
Indian erotic literature he is treated as the primary Master,
much as medieval medical literature revered Galen and
Aristotle. All the later works are verse renderings, subse-
quent condensations and expansions, or comments on the
Kama Sutra, with the gradual introduction first of astro-
logical and later of Tantric ideas.
The scientific attitude tends to look for quality to the most
recent source —
Indian scholarship, like medieval European,
looks to the most ancient. In this case it is justified, for the
Kama Sutra is vastly superior to its successors. Its real
history is unknown —
most Vedic literature it purports
like
to be a condensation by scholars of an older and lost work
composed or commissioned by a God. Siva, when he fell in
love with his own female emanation, thereby discovering
sexuality, celebrated the pleasures of carnal copulation in
10,000, some say, 100,000 books. According to one
or,
version, these were reduced by his servant Nandin to 1,000,
but successively abbreviated by later sages: according to
another, Dattaka, who had the misfortune to pollute a rite
of Siva, was turned into a woman, and later regaining his
proper form found himself equally conversant with the
sexual habits of both sexes, which, doing honour to Siva,
he proceeded to set down in numerous treatises. The
tradition begins to resemble history at the point where one
Babhravya Pancala became editor-in-chief of a sexual
encyclopaedia. We are told that he entrusted the general

44
 —

The Koka Shastra

introduction Carayana, the section upon coition to
to
Suvarnanabha, that on the courting of virgins to Ghota-
kamukha, that on the duties of wives to Gonardiya, that on
seduction to Gonikaputra, that on whores to Dattaka, and
that on materia medica to Kucumara. It was this encyclo-
paedia which, says tradition, Vatsyayana, called Mallanaga,
reduced to portable compass to become the Kama Sutra.
The scope of Vatsyayana' s book is that of the hypothetical
encyclopaedia and falls into the same sections. It has been
carefully rendered in German and Latin by Schmidt, and
less well into English by others, chiefly in India. The
Master of Love is a dry, realistic and liberal-minded writer
of signal good sense, with a Thurberesque eye for human
conduct which is never quite satirical, but always close to
satire simply by virtue of its frankness: Rajas dare not do
ill, for being like the sun their movements are observed by

all— if therefore they must be so rash as to undertake

seduction, they should do it in their own palaces, not

venture into other men's houses where they risk being
killed incognito by some base person. The methods normally
adopted by real, as against ideal, Rajas are then described.
They may entice the lady to visit a friend in their harem
they may hire informers to convict her husband of treason
and impound her as a hostage —and so on.
This pithy text is accompanied* everywhere by a Dr
Watson, in the form of a thirteenth-century commentator
of skull-splitting pedantry, Yasodhara, whose commentary
is called Jayamangala: most of the English renderings
transfer large glosses from this commentary bodily into the
text. Sometimes Yasodhara is useful —
the story of Dattaka's
change of sex, for instance, comes from his commentary,
together with the more probable version that this Dattaka
was the adoptive son of a Brahmin, who made up his mind
to find out all there was to be known about whores, and
became so well informed that the profession itself sent its
finest exponent, Virasena, to invite him to write them an

45
 The Koka Shastra
official textbook. Aufrecht says of Yasodhara, 'he seems to be
deficient in knowledge both of the Old Sanskrit in which
Vatsyayana wrote, and of the subject he is trying to handle'.
He is informative, however, and seems to have realized
that his master's work would one day be read by men
unfamiliar with Hindu customary usage and mythology.
The date of the Kama Sutra is variously given from about
—
300 B.C. on there is little here to go upon except the style
and language, and the fact that Kalidasa evidently knows
and quotes the work. Pisani (1954) puts it closer to a.d. 400.
One would love to speculate that Ovid knew it not only —
from his Ars Amatoria, but from the striking likeness of
his Heroides to the nayikas of Indian typology: did he
encounter it when he bought Corinna her parrot, or was
the parrot itself a learned bird like that of the Seventy
Discourses? The successors of the Kama Sutra are of
equally uncertain date. The chief of these are

(1) The Ratirahasya or Secrets of Rati (wife of the Love-

God: her name means dalliance or pleasure) known popu-
larly as the Koka Shastra, and referred by Pisani to the
twelfth, and by Lienhard to the twelfth or possibly the
eleventh century.
(2) The Paficasayaka (Five Arrows) of Jyotirisvara
Kavisekhara (probably late thirteenth or early fourteenth
century).
(3) The Smaradipika (Light of Love), a blunderbuss
name number of different
for a works, the earliest being
probably fourteenth century, which have undergone a
partial interchange of material. These poems represent a
definite tradition of erotics distinct from that of the Kama
Sutra, particularly in the names given to the various
bandhas, or coital poses.
Connected with these works are:

(4) The very short Ratimafijari of Jayadeva (The Posy of

Love), in elegant verse, corresponding in places word-for-

46
 —

The Koka Shastra

word with some versions of the Smaradipika, and probably
of the fifteenth century.
(5) The Kandarpacudamam (Tiara of the Love-God) by
Virabhadradeva, an almost word-for-word transposition of
the Kama Sutra from prose into arya verses, date
uncertain.
(6) The Dinalapanika Sukasaptati, or Seventy Discourses
of the Parrot, in one version of which the learned bird, em-
ployed by a king to educate his son tape-recorder- fashion,
dilates on sexual physiology, while the young prince himself
delivers a discourse —obtained, presumably, from the
parrot —
on erotics. In the course of this he gives us the most
complete extant list of 'advanced' coital postures, corres-
ponding to the exhibition figures of the tango and the
quickstep. This in turn appears to come from another
erotic work,
(7) The Srngaradipika (Lamp of Affection) of Harihara
which lists the same names, but without the details.
(8) The Ananga Ranga (Stage of the Love-God) of
Kalyanamalla, is one of the more celebrated texts because of
the Burton- Arbuthnot translation, and next in popularity, in
India, to the Ratirahasya and Kama Sutra. Schmidt tries
to make it a seventeenth-century work, but it is almost
certainly a good deal earlier than this —
probably mid-
sixteenth at the latest.
These are the major texts. Minor and derivative works
include the Nagarasarvasva (Complete Playboy) of Pad-
masri, the Kamaprabodha of Vyasya Janardana, the
Ratiratnapradipika (Jewel Lamp by Maharaja
of Rati)
Devaraja, and the Ratisastraratnavali by Nagarjuna Siddha.
Not that this list exhausts Indian erotic textbooks
with a few additions it covers only those transliterated or
translated by Richard Schmidt in his Beitrage zur Indischen
Erotik, the work which stands in the same relation to this
book of mine as Vatsyayana does to his successors, and from
whom I draw most of my material. There are dozens more
47
 The Koka Shastra
similar poems and treatises which Schmidt can cite only in
title, and which have never been translated.
Although the texts cannot be placed in any very reliable
chronology, they fall readily into literary pedigrees by
—
content the KandarpacudamanI derives wholly from
Vatsyayana: the Paficasayaka and Ananga Ranga form
another unit, with the Ratirahasya not far off: the Smara-
dipika and the Ratimanjari form a third. Between the
first and second of these groups, much astrology and

Tantric magic has been introduced which was absent from

Vatsyayana, while the third seems independent, describing
different postures of intercourse (bandhas) and giving the
rest different names.
The late Sanskrit palm-leaf books in Oriya character,
produced chiefly round Puri, and now largely replaced by
erotic playing cards, seem to represent a quite different
tradition —one have examined, probably of nineteenth
I
century origin, gives sixty bandhas which follow none of the
classical texts, either in order or in character: most are
complicated sedentary positions with the man in an odd
half-kneeling attitude, and with much leg-crossing; they
are drawn in 'exploded' form and supported in the Persian
manner by drum-shaped cushions, while the sthita
(standing) positions, the test of peculiarly Indian erotology,
number only three and are drawn without much practical
conviction. think that the origins of these texts are
I
probably Moslem rather than Gastric. The same applies to
the bandhas shown in a recently published old Gujarati
version of the Vasanta Vilasa (Brown, W. N., 1962). In
fact, I have yet to see an Indian posture-book which
exactly corresponds with literary erotology.
One may guess at what point the first and
revision
revival of the master-work is likely to have occurred, and
what evoked the wave of poetic imitations of the classic
original; some time about the end of the first millennium
A.D. the city civilizations of East and Central India under-

48
 The Koka Shastra
went an explosive sexual renaissance. The natural history
of this was less like that of our European renaissance than of
the ascetic and evangelical 'revivals' of the West, but in the
opposite psychological direction. Certainly it resembled the
Western Renaissance in its effect on art. In the court
society of the local rajas, such as the Kings of Candella, it

gave rise to a wave of temple-building which still represents

the high point of Indian architecture. Among its surviving
religious monuments are the Kaula-inspired temples of
Khajuraho, where ecstatic lovers have displaced the major
gods from the places of honour in iconography, 1 and the
Sun Temple at Konarak with its innumerable figures of
—
love-making maidens heavenly apsarases, temple prosti-
tutes (vesyakumari), or simply human celebrants of
sexuality nobody seems to know for certain which. 2
5

The liturgical implications of the Khajuraho figures is

plain enough —
in the ecstasy of coition, man becomes god-
like; 3 while the Konarak friezes celebrate release-through-
art and release-through-woman as a single gesture of
aesthesis, the creation of elaborate sexual sensation as a
work of art (they are certainly not, pace modern
positive
Hindu interpreters, there to seduce or warn the sinner).
The secular effects of this same wave of sexual energy
appear in the nayakas and nayikas, heroes and heroines, of
the Indian romance-tradition. Their real existence was
probably brief enough, but they have lived on as in-
exhaustibly as Theocritus' shepherds and shepherdesses and

1
For an account of the Kaula-Kapalika 'revival' in Candella see Goetz, H.
(1958), Chandra, P. (1955-6), Zannas, E. and Auboyer, J. (1960), van Gulik, R.
(1961) (History and influence of Chinese sexual mysticism on Tan trie practice).
2
See Krishna Deva (1959). The tradition of erotic temple sculpture is still a
living one in Nepal, where coital gro\ips are the traditional ornament for
carved gable-brackets. Within India they are also commonly found on the
processional chariots of gods, of which the Konarak temple with its ornate
wheels is a giant replica.
3
maithunena mahayogi mama tulyo na samSayah: this is not the orthodox
interpretation of the text (Pandit, 1957) — but the left-hand Tantrist still
repeats, at each sacrament of the rahasya puja, including ritual coitus, Sivo'ham:
I am Siva.
49
 —

The Koka Shastra

the knights of the chivalric period, in literature and con-
vention, and serve as models for Indian lovers even today.
Over this short period of time, the Indian tradition seems
to have received a vast charge of psychological energy, on
which its art, literature and religion have been running
—
ever since a charge which differed from that imparted by
our renaissance, in that it lay wholly in the unconscious
mind.
In part it seems to have represented the recovery by
Hinduism of its self-confidence and joie de vivre, after the
puritan pessimism of the Buddhist tradition and the dia-
bolism of the early Saktas, who were perhaps the introducers
of mystical erotism into Indian art and practice, but who
mixed it with 'such revolting practices as wearing skulls,
drinking, howling, sacrificing human beings, eating food in
human skulls, and keeping alight sacrificial fires with the
brains and lungs of men' (Panigrahi, 1961). We can see the
development of this gain of confidence in the temple art of
Bhuvaneshwar. Erotic themes appear first on Sakta and
Pasupata shrines, but Eros and the graceful nayikas of the
Rajaram temple come to replace Thanatos and the skull-
bearing Kapalika figures inside the Vaital temple; the
dancing Camundas, terrific to behold, give way gradually to
the Goddess in her demon-slaying capacity (Mahisasura-
mardini), and finally in her wholly pacific manifestation.
Hand in hand with this the ritual erotism, as we see it
depicted, has more to do with love and pleasure and less
—
with magic and ascetic practice instead of esoteric and
ferocious it becomes joyous and popular.
'Our' renaissance generated both emotional and intel-
lectual discovery —Romanticism fuses them —and eventu-
ally science. The Indian Renaissance, after exploding like a
nova, seems to have been driven into the dark again
partlyby the intensity of its own sexual emphasis. The gate
of the pre-Oedipal paradise —
banged once more but the
energy behind much Indian thinking had already been

50
 -

The Koka Shastra

stored, and one has the impression that since that time
almost the whole spiritual and emotional drive of the
culture has been diverted to regaining the 'oceanic' sensa-
tions of infancy by some other means. Hindu sexualism
and anti-sexualism, the features of Indian art, the great
erotic temples, Tantric sexual magic, and the erotic
poems, all seem to be concrete manifestations of this
original energy which comes to the surface again in the cult
of the Loves of Krishna: at the same time, they continue a
pre-existing tradition and are its logical sequel, a renewal
not an innovation.
It is with the secular, not the religious, side of this
sexual Golden Age that the erotic textbooks are concerned —
their readers were men-about-town who decorated their
pleasure-pavilions with the lay equivalents of the Temple
figures. Their matter predates Tantric sexual yoga, for
they contain no reference to its chief doctrine, the 'absorp-
tion' of energy from woman while avoiding ejaculation.
The courtly background which he describes gives us some
idea of the people for whom Vatsyayana wrote. The Kama
Sutra says:

'When a man has completed his education and acquired

wealth by gifts, (i.e. the means
war-prizes, trade or wages'
suitable to each caste, Brahmin, Ksattriya, etc.), 'he should
set up as a man of fashion. He will live in a city, a capital
city, a district centre or a country-town, or wherever there
are men of quality, according to the needs of his occupation.
Near to a source of water, he will build a house with two
bedrooms and a place for the transaction of business, set in a
garden. In the outer room, he will install a soft bed with
pillows and white sheets, and beside it a couch' (one for
sleeping, explains Yasodhara, the other for coition). . . .

'In this room will be found salves and garlands left from
the previous night, a bowl of cooked rice, and a case of
perfume, citron-rind and betel. At the bed-foot, a spittoon:

51
 '

The Koka Shastra

hanging on a peg, a lute: a drawing board and ink-box, a
book: wreaths of yellow amaranth; close by a carpet with a
cushion for reclining: a dice-board and a chessboard. Outside
the dwellinghouse, he will furnish cages of tame birds, and
workshops for spinning and carpentry: in the orchard a well-
upholstered swing, and a flower-strewn, suitably-rounded
bank. Such is the order of the house.
morning he will attend to the calls of nature,
'Rising each
clean his teeth, slightly perfume himself, burn scented
incense and put on a garland, break his fast on a handful of
cooked rice, examine his face in the glass, take pastilles and
betel (or apply rouge and betel to colour his cheeks and his
teeth) and so to business. He will bathe daily, anoint every
other day, use sepia every third day, shave every four
days, and depilate every five or ten. . . . He should eat
twice daily, in the morning and the afternoon . . . after
luncheon he will attend to such matters as teaching
parrots and mynahs to talk, quail-fights, cockfights, rarn-
fights: various aesthetic games: receiving and ordering his
story-teller, his pimp, and his buffoon: midday siesta: in the
afternoon, attend to his toilet, then to play in the evening, —
music. After this he will wait for ladies who come to him on
errands of love, and for friends, in his bedroom, which will
be prepared and scented with incense. (If no ladies come)
he will send a go-between, or go himself, to fetch them. . . .

If the toilet of the ladies who visit him has suffered from
rain and ill-weather he will restore it with his own hand,
or call on one of his friends to do so. This is the prescribed
order for day and for night.

His religious and cultural duties follow. The rich

—
Indian was certainly not in his own estimate idle. To —
be a nayaka one must be rich. Failing means, however, one
can always lecture on the Arts and so attain the position of
chair-presser (pithamarda —
professional conversationalist
and storyteller, an Indian Isaiah Berlin, if the comparison

52
 —

The Koka Shastra

may be forgiven) and can by this means achieve the company
of the Qualityand of the hetairas, who are the first ladies of
the land, in whose houses all cultural activities take place
and all polite society meets.
This, then, is the nayaka for whom Vatsyayana wrote.

He is remarkably contemporary figure, lacking only an

a
expense account and a heated swimming pool to make him
modern. At the same time, the chief of his pleasures, for
which all the others were a preparation, can fortunately
still be enjoyed without cost, for more of us than ever

before have privacy, plumbing, contraceptive facilities

and physical hygiene which no third century Indian
gentleman could purchase regardless of wealth we may —
regret that we lack his proficiency in making the most of
them, but, according to Vatsyayana, we need only apply
ourselves to learn.

Some previous translators of Indian erotica, usually the least

reputable, have made great play with the purity of their
devotion to Sanskrit grammar and their innocence of any
intention to provide sexual information for the unscholarly.
This pretence seems hardly worth maintaining: for the
overwhelming majority of readers, scholarly or otherwise,
the chief interest of these works is in the information they
give about sexual behaviour in an unfamiliar culture,
coupled possibly with a conscious or unconscious hope that
the knowledge may give them insight into their own.
Neither of these aims requires any apology. At the same
time there is so much of literary and psychological interest
in Indian erotology that it seems well worth producing the
texts with a substantial amount of learned comment
readers who only wish to get on with the technicalities of
the bandhas can omit this at their discretion. In the same
way, great stress has sometimes been laid on the un-
familiarity, oddity and unpracticability of the content. This

55
 The Koka Shastra

ispure Englishmanship. Some of it is indeed unique to the

Indian cast of mind, but leaving aside the mannerisms of the
tradition —
its mania for classification and its belief that there

is a technique for everything, definable by scholarship

rather than trial —our sense of the oddity of the prescriptions
isvery largely the result of living in a society which restricts
our observation of sexual behaviour. One can see as good
examples of nakhacchedya (erotic scratch-marks, the stock
Indian love-token) in the London Underground as on any
medieval Indian lady.
There is an English version of the Ananga Ranga,
which one can now buy as a paperback, and which, retrans-
lated into French by Lamairesse, has long served to intro-
duce it to a great many English readers. The translators are
F. F. Arbuthnot and Sir Richard Burton. If Burton of the —
—
Arabian Nights really had much to do with the actual
translating —
as against the publishing —
of this rendering,
his knowledge of Sanskrit, and, more surprisingly, in view
of his other works, his knowledge of Indian erotic tech-
niques, fall substantially short of his reputation for both;
Schmidt grimly points out, the text is full of blunders,
for, as
and a good deal of it, particularly in the account of the
bandhas, or postures, is a fabrication of the translators.
I were unfortunate in the pandits they con-
suspect they
sulted. Some of the renderings of Sanskrit names raise the
suspicion that this version was taken not from the Sanskrit
original, but from an inferior vernacular paraphrase. This
may explain some of these shortcomings: the style, however,
is often unmistakably Burton's. Arbuthnot appears to have

been the principal translator, and Burton probably 'worked

up' his version. The introduction contains one story
which is vintage Burton, and serves to introduce the poem I
—
have chosen to render here the Ratirahasya of Kokkoka:

'A woman who was burning with love and could find
none to satisfy her inordinate desires, threw off her clothes

54
 '

The Koka Shastra

and swore she would wander the world naked until she
met with her match. In this condition she entered the
levee-hall of the Raja upon whom Koka Pandit was
attending, looked insolently at the crowd of courtiers
around her and declared that there was not a man in the
room. The king and his company were sore abashed, but
the Sage, joining his hands, applied with due humility
for royal permission to tame the shrew. He then led her
home and worked so persuasively that well-nigh fainting
from fatigue and from repeated orgasms she cried for
quarter. Thereupon the virile Pandit inserted gold pins
into her arms and legs, and, leading her before his Raja,
made her confess her defeat and solemnly veil herself in
his presence. The Raja was, as might be expected, anxious
to learn how the victory had been won, and commanded
Koka Pandit to tell his tale, and to add much useful
knowledge on the subject of coition. In popular pictures the
Sage appears sitting before and lecturing the Raja, who
duly throned and shaded by the Chatri or royal canopy,
with his harem fanning him and forming tail, lends an
attentive ear to the words of wisdom.

Koka Pandit, it appears, be identified with Kokkoka,

is to
author of the Ratirahasya. From him, it is popularly
—
known as the Koka £astra, Koka's Book the name, how-
ever, has become generic for the class of literature, and is
sometimes applied equally to the Ananga Ranga. From
Burnell's catalogue of MSS, Schmidt quotes, 'This shameless
book is a great favourite in South India, and there are
several vernacular versions of it. The one in Tamil has been
printed (in spite of the police). There were formerly in the
Tanjore Palace a large number of pictures to illustrate
this and similar books, but they have nearly all been
destroyed.' Luckily for the intelligibility of some of the
bandhas (postures), and in spite of the newly-acquired
prudery which banned 'Lady Chatterley' in India, they

55
 The Koka Shastra
persist in folk-art and can be purchased as palm-leaf books
or as printed sheets for the instruction, in a visual form, of
rajas and plebeians alike.
The surreptitiously-printedTamil version is no doubt the
Kokkokam, attributed to Ativira Rama Pandian, King of
Madura in the sixteenth century, who, like Donne, turned
from erotic to religious poetry at the end of his life, and
wrote some celebrated psalms. This is a spirited production
— unlike many of the classic treatises, which one can readily
credit to have been written, as they claim, by disinterested
ascetics, the Kokkokam is clearly the fruit of experience, and
if anything better verse and sense than the original. It has

been reasonably well done into English, together with

much of the Ratirahasya itself, by Professor T. N. Ray
(1960) —
and seems as popular in paper jackets as it ever was
on palm leaves.
The Ratirahasya is well-situated in its tradition to act
as a specimen of its kind. Although it is in all respects
inferior to the Kama Sutra more nearly represents the
it

fashion in Hindu erotic science and the influences still at

work in Indian sexual folklore, for it covers both the
early and the later traditions —
that of Vatsyayana; the
astrological system of physical types and lunar calendars for
courtship (Candrakalas); and the influence of Tantrism, re-
flected in spells, japas (sound of magical power to be
muttered on appropriate occasions) and far-fetched pseudo-
medical recipes like that which requires 'both wings of a bee
which has alighted on a petal blown from a funeral wreath'.
In a sense the dilution of Vatsyayana's astute scholarship
with nonsense is depressing, but in reality it represents a
process which we see in the writings of European al-
chemists. Like Aristotle, Vatsyayana had taken his subject
as far as it could reasonably be taken by scholarship and
intelligence without ad hoc investigation. The magicians
'investigated' without the discipline of science, invented
some results and obtained others: they recognized the need

56
 The Koka Shastra
for more empirical knowledge but had no reliable means of
obtaining it. The later Indian erotic authors are wallowing
in the gap between traditional scholarship and science. Of
their works, the Kandarpacudamani repeats in verse what
the Kama Sutra says in prose, with more or less additions
and omissions, the Ananga Ranga has already been
translated, and the other poems can most conveniently be
dealt with by parallel quotation. I have settled in this
version for a translation of a typical example of the whole
series, plus a dipika or series of glosses, in the Indian
manner, in the form of extended footnotes, and excerpts
—
from the others apart from the Ratimafijari, which is
short enough to quote in full (this, so far as I know, is the
first time it has been rendered in English).

Our general discussion can accordingly be focused on the

Ratirahasya.
In view of the mixed character of its contents modern
readers will be bound to ask how much of the practical
advice given in Kokkoka's —
poem magic noises, con-
coctions —
and astrology apart is to be taken seriously. The
answer seems to be that much of it is uncommonly sound.
There is not much risk of mistake: only believers in the
Wisdom of the East who are quite beyond argument will
try to follow the perambulations of the Love-God from the
big toe upward according to the Moon's phases (though
others who had not previously noticed it may come to
recognize that in some women sexual response is cyclical in
both time and site). On the other hand, a man who has
married a very young wife could do worse, mutatis mutan-
dis, than follow Kokkoka's recipe for handling her; most of

the 'outer' and 'inner' embraces, and such things as

'love cries', adult people will usually have discovered for
—
themselves they may still be interested to see them so

57
 The Koka Shastra
ably classified, however, for in our culture these common
human experiences have only just come to be verbalized
at all without embarrassment.
The Indian erotic writings are based originally on
astute observation —long transmitted, however, and fos-
silized by authority. In this they resemble the post-
Aristotelian biology and psychology of the Middle Ages,
without its layer of theological dogma. They are not
science in the modern sense —
they have not grown from
their compiler's own use of his eyes and ears, and they
contain much evident nonsense. Even compared with Al-
Nafzawi's Arabic, they owe little to personal observation.
To get a true idea of their merit we need to compare them
with the truly stupendous body of nonsense about sexual
behaviour which was being written in Europe by medical
and medico-religious experts far into the Renaissance and
on into the nineteenth century, and which has set the key
for European medico-hygienic literature until the present
day. The classic fount and monument of such nonsense is
Sinibaldi's Geneianthropeia, which is the direct ancestor of
a long succession of admonitory works, and the source of
almost all the fallacies about sexual behaviour which make
up popular and medical folklore today. Even with Tantrism
and astrology thrown in, the Ratirahasya contains materially
less really foolish comment about human sexuality than
many serious English medical and religious books of, say,
1900, and what nonsense it contains is far less mischievous.
For these reasons we need have very little scruple about
leaving Kokkoka where the children might read him. If
they would do better with a work of science, at least they
will not be taught that sexual behaviour is hostile, danger-
ous, and fraught with guilt, or that it will produce blindness,
insanity and pimples. Kokkoka, indeed, unashamedly
catalogues pleasures, where the Christian tradition has
catalogued threatening us, successively, as times have
sins,
changed, with spiritual guilt, physical mischief, or emotional

58
 —

The Koka Shastra

'immaturity' to rationalize its prohibitions: the real value to
us of Indian and other exotic works on sexual behaviour is

in the contrast of attitudewhich they provide with this

tradition —
they may help us to escape from it, even when
they have their facts wrong. There are, indeed, Buddhist
prescriptive lists of sins almost as hilarious as those of
Sanchez, but no other culture has maintained its sexual
anxiety at so high a level as Christendom for so long.
Kokkoka no harm, and married people
will certainly do us
who wish to do so may experiment with his
just as well
techniques as with yoga, Indian dancing, or curry they —
may easily learn something, if only an attitude of mind.
The Indian emphasis on bodily types and physical
proportion in sexual adjustment seems overdone to us
we usually assume in counselling that these are not factors
which contribute much to frigidity, and attribute its
commonness in our culture to upbringing. This psycho-
logical emphasis is probably just — at the same time there
has been so little serious research into the mechanics of
coition that it is not really possible to contradict the
Indian view.
We might be more inclined, however, to agree with the
Plain Girl of the Su-nu-miao-lun: '
"Men much by
differ as
nature in their genitals as in their face . . .some small men
have large members, and some tall men have short:
some lean and asthenic men have robust members, some
big and robust men have small and flabby members . . .

all that really matters is that the organ should not be such

as to hinder copulation."
'The Emperor asked: "Wherein lies the difference
between high, middle and low-placed vulvae?"
'The Plain Girl replied: "The virtue of a queynt lies not
in position but in use; all three, high, low and middle, have
desirable qualities provided only that you know how to
make use of them. The woman with the middle-placed
queynt is suitable for all four seasons and every kind of

59
 The Koka Shastra
posture, for indeed the golden mean is always best. The
woman with the high forward-set queynt is best on a cold
winter night, for she should be taken under the painted
bed-curtains and you lie on top of her. The woman with
the low-set queynt is best in the hot days of summer, for
you can take her from behind, while you sit on a stone
bench in the bamboo shade, making her kneel before you.
This is what is called making the most of your woman's
'
anatomy."
—
One type of disproportion in relative speed of reaching
—
orgasm is a much more frequent cause of maladjustment.
There is not much ground for thinking that a choice of wife
according to the Indian typologies, rather than by a direct
experiment, would make for any better agreement here,
though the careful preliminaries to intercourse emphasized
by Kokkoka might. Dickinson (1933) attempted to relate
coital satisfaction to anatomy, but his work has had no
successors. However, most counsellors find that there is a
proportion of unresponsive women for whose frigidity
there is no immediately obvious cause, either physical or
psychological: possibly some of them are 'mismatches' in
—
Kokkoka's sense it is among these cases that a change of
— —
technique or of husband sometimes produces remarkable
results.
The proliferation of postures (bandhas) is characteristic
not of Indian of or Oriental erotic literature, but of erotic
literature generally: it represents a preoccupation of all

sexually articulate cultures very like the elaboration of

dance figures. The variety of these is such that, as Schmidt
and Burton both pointed out, they can be understood only
with the aid of diagrams: Indian texts were not illustrated
to make them sexually exciting, only comprehensible. We
would probably now interpret this intense human interest
in coital posture psychoanalytically, and no doubt the emo-
tion it arouses has unconscious origins but at the same time
$

there is a large body of human experience in favour of the

60
 The Koka Shastra
practical significance of such experiments: it is an amusing
comment on our sexual performance as a culture that this
should need saying. 'There are many males and some
females,' wrote Professor Kinsey, 'who are psychologically
stimulated by considering the possibilities of the positions
which two human bodies can assume in coitus. From the
time of the most ancient Sanskrit literature there have . . .

been numerous attempts to calculate the mathematic pos-

sibilities of the combinations and re-combinations. . . .

Descriptions of a score, or of several score, or even of a

couple of hundred positions have been seriously undertaken
in various literatures. In view of the lack of evidence that
any of these positions have any particular mechanical
advantage in producing orgasm in either the female or the
male, they must be significant primarily because they
serve as psychological stimulants.'
With the first would
half of this proposition, nobody
quarrel. Elliott Paul whose interest in permuta-
had a friend
tion theory was so stimulated on this topic by a porno-
graphic album that he became a mathematician (this is,
in fact, a perfectly sober observation of one of the un-
conscious motivations behind the symbolism of numbers)
while the more determined posture-collectors such as
Weckerle, who describes 530, * might well be reckoned
compulsive. The latter part of Kinsey 's remarks, however,
isa the equally correct view that there are only
little like

two wines, red and white, and only two tunes, loud and soft.
Apart from the question of shades of sensation, clinical if not
personal experience hardly supports the view that all

postures are 'equally effective mechanically' for a given

couple, though this may well be so statistically for the
public as a whole. Whether the Indian attempt to link these
preferences with body build and configuration is correct
or not, both modern and ancient counselling experience

X
L. van der Weck-Erlen (J. Weckerle, pseud.) (1907).

61
 —

The Koka Shastra

agree that some women are emphatically more easily

brought to orgasm in some positions than in others.
'It is recounted on this matter,' says Al-Nafzawi, 'that a

man had a wife of incomparable beauty, full of accomplish-

ments and qualities, whom he was accustomed to enjoy in
the ordinary manner, to the exclusion of all other. This
woman, however, never experienced any of the pleasures
which should result from the exercise, and was invariably
of extremely ill temper. The man complaining to an old
woman, she told him, "Proceed to the other manners of
carnal copulation, and continue searching until you find
—
one which contents her from then on, stick to that manner,
and her devotion to you will be boundless." The man, thus
admonished, made proof amain of all the manners known to
Science until, coming to that known as Dok el-Arz, he
beheld his wife in transports of alarming intensity, ex-
perienced the most satisfactory internal motions therewith,
and heard her say through lips bitten with ecstasy "Now
you have hit on the real way to make love!" '

How far preferences like these are due to anatomy and

how far to psychosymbolism, is still an open question
the most likely answer is that, like our choice of sitting
posture or of gait, they reflect both.
The doubts expressed whether the bandhas, or coital
postures, described in Indian books were ever really
practised, or are even anatomically feasible, are equally
naive. Many, especially in the later textbooks, are certainly
far more difficult than those in other erotic literatures, but
this seems to be a direct result of the widespread use of
hatha yoga gymnastics: the ability to sit, let alone lie, in
padmasana, the stock coital posture for a padmini, or
'lotus lady', takes Europeans, unused to sitting on the
floor, some months to acquire. The coital postures favoured
in different cultures have their own character partly —
dictated by customs in furniture: thus the Arabic literature
specializes in semi-lateral positions and the Chinese in

62
 The Koka Shastra
postures where penile and vaginal axes diverge. As to the
multiplicity of only slightly-differing postures, it has to be
remembered that they are intended to be used not as single
attitudes for a single act, but as sequences, like dance steps,
with several changes during one union, in the course of
which the woman should experience several orgasms to the
man's one; each figure must accordingly lead into the next
—
and minor differences affect the sequence like the differ-
ence between an impetus turn and a natural spin in the
quickstep.
Sometimes this kind of sexual choreography has an
—
even closer symbolic affinity with dancing thus, by adopt-
ing successively the 'fish', 'tortoise', 'wheel' and 'sea-shell'
position (matsya, kaurma, cakra, sankhabandha) one
identifies oneself with the first four avatars of Vishnu:
sceptics over such religious doubles entendres underrate
the Indian love of living at more than one level, which
exceeds even that of the present-day avant-garde dramatist.
In the Indian tradition, indeed, this analogy with the dance
is not merely arbitrary, for there are close affinities between

the erotic texts and the Bharata Natya Sastra, chapter

XXIV of which actually deals with vaisika upacara, the
practice of harlotry, as part of the technique of dance. Not
only did the virtuosi of one art practice the other, but
judging from sculptural representations it was in the spirit
of a dance that ritual, and possibly also secular, coition
was undertaken. This presupposes a degree of control which
some males in our culture find quite incredible, but which is
generally assumed in societies which have elaborated
sexual sensation, and which seems to be largely the result
of Panurge's sovereign remedy for concupiscence, namely
frequent exercise, plus a form of cultural desensitization:
no Indian reader experienced much more anticipatory
excitement from reading the Ratirahasya, even in a richly
illustrated edition, than we would obtain from a book on
ballroom dancing. In India, and still more in China,

63
 The Koka Shastra
ejaculationwas sometimes avoided altogether, particularly
by mystics and philosophers, from a medico-magical pre-
occupation with the need of the male to absorb the sexual
virtue of the female without allowing her to rob him of his
own, embodied in the semen. Sakyamuni, who achieved
buddha-hood by practising Tantric meditation in his
harem, held that 'Enlightenment resides in the sexual parts
of Woman'. (Buddhatvam yosityonisamasritam). Chinese
sages in particular laid down detailed programmes for the
assimilation of this energising principle from a succession
of women, 1 with the warning that what had been gathered
with much labour would be squandered in a single ejacu-
late; if emission took place, the adept became subject again
Wheel of Existence (Eliade, 1958). The superstition
to the
thatsemen is the quintessence of Man and that its loss
means steady decline is still found in English books on
personal hygiene, in defiance of the known vigour of stud
animals. The object of the Sakta rites which inspired the
Khajuraho temples, and which are depicted in the sculp-
tures, was to secure enlightenment and longevity several —
of the Candella Kings who probably took part in these
performances did in fact live to great ages (Zannas and
Auboyer, 1960). The Rajatarangini of Kalhana describes
how King Harsa of Kashmir (c. a.d. 1090) accepted a gift of
slave-girls initiated into the Kaula sexual techniques and
applied himself to enjoy them 'because he wanted to live
long'. Gerocomy (the averting of age in man by commerce
with young women) was a general belief in secular as well
as religiomagical practice. Probably one factor in the
popularity of complicated postures was the growth of a
tradition of 'picture positions', dictated by the sculptural
need in Temple art to depict the lovers standing where —
the artists of Khajuraho require a lying-down position, for
ritual or decorative reasons, to fill a square panel normally

1
Maspero, H. (1937), van Gulik, R. (1961).

64
 —

The Koka Shastra

occupied by a God, they set it on end, supported by maidens,
with one partner head-downwards. 1
The influence of yoga is uniquely Indian, and also
uniquely interesting in the discussion of symbolism versus
physiology in the postures. Its widespread use as a gym-
nastic system (ghatastha yoga) accounts for the ability of
Indians, modern as well as ancient, and of both sexes, to
adopt unusual postures easily. One complete sequence of
bandhas, from Vatsyayana on, appears to derive directly
from yogic exercises, and this sequence becomes longer and
more complicated in the later erotic treatises, until it

includes really exorbitant tours de force, such as coition with

the woman head-downwards in sir^asana, or the phanipasa
and kukkuta bandhas described presently (pp. 137, 138).
The use of yogic postures in this manner would be de-
nounced by some modern gurus, who hold that the function
of hatha yoga is to achieve mastery over the passions to
the point of 'viewing all women alike and with indifference'
— and defended by others, who point out that nowhere is it
more desirable to master the passions than in coition. One
object of these postures is, precisely, to delay ejaculation.
The reported 'desensitization' of Tibetan Tantric adepts
by erotic figures and exhibitions, if true, has probably the
same aim (Foreman, 1936). To us, it is probably even more
interesting to notice that the linking, in hatha yoga, of
physically-induced sensations and fantasy-induced changes
in the body image, is extremely like some of the phenomena
which we see occurring as spontaneous compulsions in
fetishism — particularly the cultivating of sensations of
compression, tension, fettering, and increased intra-
cranial pressure, and schematic symbols such as the desire
to suppress limbs or to conceal external genital characters
as well as bizarre features such as inordinate tongue
protrusion or the ability to pump water into the rectum and
1
The point of this complicated bandha may be that it enacts the mahamudra
or Great Ritual Gesture: in the prone form, it figures in the erotic breviaries
of the Japanese Tantrik Tachikawa sect (see Van Gulik, 1961).

65
 ,

The Koka Shastra

bladder. Not only do many of these fantasies turn up
regularly with a strong sexual cathexis in European and,
indeed, in individual practice, but the tension-postures in-
flicted on the victims in our own extensive sadomasochistic
picture-literature have a strong tendency to conform to
yogic asanas (acrobatic postures of symbolic significance).
There is neither time here, nor, probably, enough fact
available to go into the psychological motives of yogic
mysticism. The overt emphasis in yoga on ecstatic ex-
periences which look like a regression to infancy, and on
the achievement of subjective bisexuality (the yogic adept
not only learns to retract his genitalia until they disappear,
but also fantasies a vulva in his perineum as the point of
origin of the kundalini force which 'ascends' to his brain)
may mislead us into making too much of the symbolism
at the —
expense of direct physical stimuli the fact that the
fetishist gives them symbolic content, while the yoga-
derived bandhas use the physical stimuli directly to arrive
at enhanced sexual sensations, may mean no more than
that such patterns are, to use Freud's term, 'over-
determined', and the stimuli are effective in themselves. At
the same time, in view of the amount of apparent aggression
which we see expressed and possibly discharged in Indian
love-play, it is fascinating to speculate how far the multi-
plication of bandhas had a similar adjustment value in
getting rid of other pregenital compulsions. The similarity
between the use of yogic postures in Indian erotic science,
and the use of contorted postures, erotic bondage and the like
in the sexual practice, art and fantasy of so many other cultures
including our own, can hardly be the result of accident. 1
1
In spite of a few bizarre features, quite the best European treatise on coital
postures, and the only one to approach the Indian spirit is that of Weckerle
already quoted (L. van Week Erlen (J. Weckerle MD, pseud.) 1907); he was a
medical gymnast, whose motto is 'Abgemattet ward durch geschlechtliches
Exxesse nur der ungeturnte Weichling', and who recommends fitting up a
'Sexuarium' complete with a gymnastic mat and bars. Any tendency to laugh
is, or should be, counterbalanced by the fact that his book, unlike most erotica,

is manifestly the product of personal practice and not, like the Ratirahasya, of

66
 The Koka Shastra
The apparent violence of Sanskrit lovers, although in the
written descriptions it appears to our culture excessive, is

more apparent than real, and is kept at the play-level by

the rigid stylization imposed on it. We can easily overrate
the part this element probably played in practice the —
texts make it amounts of painfully violent
clear that the
behaviour acceptable to most people in most regions of
India were slight; they never emphasize pain-infliction for
its own sake, and they enjoin complete conformity to the

tastes of the woman as the weaker partner —

none of these
are aggressively sadistic traits: the biting, scratching and
slapping involved in the classified descriptions are probably
well within the limits of coital behaviour by some normally-
adjusted people in our own culture. Comparative studies
have suggested that the very boisterous type of coition in
which these acts predominate is typical of societies in which
there is a measure of sexual equality, 1 and that the woman
often initiates it. By contrast, there are no markedly com-
pulsive features —
the cathexis of ritual flogging, for
example, which accounts (partly, of course, through censor-
ship) for almost the whole of the permitted erotic literature
in our own culture, never appears at all. In the purusayita-
bandha, the position in which she takes the male role, the
woman consciously acts out the 'domination' of the man,
which generates embarrassment or is repudiated in many
other cultures on grounds of religion, hygiene, or male
dignity it is fully accepted in Indian literature as a fair
;

exchange. This mode is constantly praised in literature it —

is Parvati's way with the Lord Siva, Lakshmi's way with the

Lord Vishnu, and the way of the righteous. 'There are

tradition, or of fantasy. Gymnastic mats apart, a great deal of his advice is

sound: his classification and choice of postures shows no direct Indian influence,
—
and Indian works are not quoted the convergence between Teutonic gym-
nastics, Indian yoga, and Chinese k'ung fu (medical exercises) as correlates of
sexual sensation is all the more interesting. I have used Weckerle as a source of
cross-references to coital postures mentioned in this translation.
1
Ford, C. S., and Beach, F. A. (1952).

67
 The Koka Shastra
men with merit won who sip the honey
in past existences,
of their women's while the women, on top, hair down
lips,

and flower-eyes half closed, fall asleep from the languor of

orgasm. ... It is said that for a man with merit from past
existences, the tongue is silent and the sound of her
anklets is stilled, when the wife rides him in the purusayita
mode.' (Vasanta Vilasa.) According to the poets, she should
wear all her most jingling ornaments (ear-rings, waist-
band, anklets). Radha rides so upon the Lord Krishna
(Gita-Govinda 2-7), while 'Lakshmi astride her Lord,
lying supine, became bashful on seeing Brahma within
—
His navel-lotus therefore she shades His right eye (the
sun) with her hand, to make the lotus close'. (Subasita
Ratnakara.) What is not unmanly in the Gods is certainly
not beneath the dignity of Man.
Indeed, the real tenderness of Man's approach to
Woman is a striking feature of the Indian, as against other
Oriental erotic theories. While she is subject to the man,
and to certain social penalties like those enjoined for her
when he travels, she is expected to recoup herself in the
sexual field. Vatsyayana's comments are all in this direction
— in adultery, Man must consider dharma, though he may
justify breaches of it if they are to his advantage: woman
does not consider it, she loves regardless of it. As the
obverse of this paternalism, it is the whole duty of man to
please her sexually, restricting his own wishes and follow-
ing her tastes and peculiarities even at the expense of his
own.
It would be absurd to depict medieval Hindu culture as
feminist in any contemporary sense, but its attitude seems
markedly more congenial to us than that of other Eastern
erotologies and can be much misjudged if we see it only
through Victorian accounts of widow-burning. Most of
the Arabic textbooks stand in a tradition which looks as if it
has been heavily influenced by slavery as a domestic insti-
tution, so that they often cease to be erotic and become

68
 The Koka Shastra
merely lascivious, woman being less a partner than a
the
subject for infliction,who should be amused in order to
secure her co-operation, but who can very properly be raped
if there is no other way of dealing with her. Some Arabic

writers give grotesque prescriptions for compelling her to

make sexually effective movements, or even to experience
orgasm, against her will.
In the medieval Chinese household depicted in Chin
P'ing Mei (Egerton, 1939), which is an unusually detailed
fictional account of social and sexual behaviour in a poly-
gamous upper-class home, the mistresses and wives of the
womanizing hero are expected to gratify him with no
reference to their own tastes, to be seduced, manhandled,
bound, burned with incense and otherwise subjected to
erotic experiments —
as well as being savagely beaten in
non-sexual contexts if they displease him. Though many
of these sexual activities are traditional and are shown as
being enjoyed, there is not much tenderness about it, and
the women have no opportunity to express aggression them-
selves in coitus —
they do so socially, however, by intriguing
against husbands and each other. The woman of Sanskrit
literature is by contrast allowed, and in fact invited, to
express it, to retaliate if the man is aggressive, to initiate
aggression if she wishes. The man may certainly seek his
own pleasure, but coitus is the woman's
field. Chin P'ing
Mei, as van Gulik (1951) points out, is a picaresque novel,
and it may bear no more resemblance to the real habits of
the period than do our own paper-backs. The erotic tech-
niques of the Ming and earlier textbooks are much less
violent. Yet from the woman's point of view this may not
be a gain if it reduces the possibility of abreacting her
frustrations in a conventional and accepted way which
she knows will not threaten her husband's affection. The
Indian woman of the Kama Sutra is like the secure child
who is able to act out her aggressions in play without fear
of losing parental love.

69
 —

The Koka Shastra

This attitude is typical of Indian literature generally. If
the abandonment of Sita or the loss of Draupadi at dice seem
incompatible with companionable relations or reverence for
woman, we must remember that they are inherited, like
Jephtha's daughter, from folk-traditions: in their Classical
setting they owe their poignancy precisely to the fact that
later manners have introduced an element of tenderness
into the story which makes the audience react to them, as
we do to Antigone's condemnation. 1
In this connection it is important to realize that the love-
literature in Sanskrit is not intended only to codify manners
—
and act as a source of practical advice it was written as
much, and in the case of the rhetoricians, much more, as a
guide to writers, painters and dramatists, whom it provided
—
with an Affektenlehre a system of depicting love in a
series of set classical contexts.
—instruction in sex and instruction
The two tasks in art
were terms of the
fully congruent: both, in way' 'threefold
— Duty, Sensuality and Living— are functions
Practical of
the satisfaction of the senses and the desires that go with
them (Kama), and within this department all the ex-
periences which we would call separately erotic and
aesthetic are combined in a single type of pleasure, srngara
('affection' and 'affect' rolled into one). This embraces the
appreciation of beauty generally and the appreciation of
the beauty of woman, the pleasure derived from satis-
fying desire engendered by past experience of pleasant

1
The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, which enjoins that coition is a sacrament,
but that the husband may beat his wife if she refuses to cohabit, is at the same
time the textual source for all modern Hindu feminism, in the esoteric teach-
ing given by Yajflavalkya to his wife Maitreyi.
This Upanishad has a direct link with the genealogy of Vatsyayana and the
secular erotica. The sacramental account of sexual intercourse, together with
some hints on eugenics, are given by Pravahana Jaibali of Paflcala to Uddalaka
Aruni, who is seeking answers to the questions of his inquisitive son Svetaketu
(Brhadaranyaka U. vi 4, 4). Uddalaka Aruni is described as a teacher of esoteric
arts: In Vatsyayana we find Auddalaki £vetaketu named as the founder of
erotology and 'the Paflcala country as its original venue ... by connecting
therewith Babhravya, one of its original teachers' (S. K. De 1959).

70
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The Koka Shastra

activities (hunting, music, or sexual intercourse), plus the
'drive' which accompanies pleasant sensations, to secure
their repetition or continuance. The 'drive' is Kama
inferior, in theIndian view, both to artha ('gathering gear'
— useful and profitable activity) and to dharma (knowledge
of the Right Conduct, both religious and rational). Srngara
is the emotion of those whose Kama is for the moment being

satisfied —
and also, since 'separation is a kind of love', the
various bitter-sweet experiences associated with the tempor-
ary baulking of Kama, by which its intensity is eventually
enhanced. These are the subjects of art in general: love
itself is an art, and art concerned with love has a double
efficacy in interpreting or creating two sources of srngara
at the same time. We meet the same idea in the religious
use of sexual subjects —they are at once doctrinally in-
structive, leading us to one kind of release (moksa) through
the truths they symbolize, another through the srngara
of art, and yet another through the invitation to seek the
srngara of sexual activity. 1

Apart from anything they may tell us about nayikas in

our own culture, then, the Indian erotic and rhetorical
writers give us an essential key to the identity and icono-
graphy of the nayikas who are the favourite subjects of
Indian art. Looking at this art without them is very like
attempting to understand Renaissance painting without
knowing the outlines of Greek mythology and the names
of the more important Saints. The rhetoricians laid down a
series of situations proper to the depiction of love in all its
phases, and nayikas and their partners appear in these
situations for our recognition. Thus an Indian artist will
depict the prositapatika (she whose husband is travelling)

1
For a fuller account of Indian rhetorical psychology and of the various
rasas see Kannoomal (1920).

71
 The Koka Shastra
where a Renaissance artist would have entitled his picture
'Penelope', or vipralabdha (she who is jilted and left

waiting at a rendezvous) where Augustus Egg would

have called his picture, 'He cometh not, she said.' The
literary element in Renaissance or Victorian art, Christian
and Indian pictures of nayikas is thus very
pictures of saints,
similar, and the artist in each case is assuming that we will
know the background of his allusion.
In Indian art these nayikas are omnipresent. Those who
dance, bathe, pick flowers or make love in Rajasthani and
similar paintings are often raginis —
that is, nayikas whose
conventional situation is matched to a particular colour and
a particular musical mode. Others are specifically drawn
for picture-books of rasas —the rhetorical typologies, or
'flavours' of love and of mood. The vary from
topics
system to system, but beside the prositapatika and the
vipralabdhS mentioned already we can usually recognize
the svadhinapatika (who keeps her husband with her by
her charms), the virahotkanthita (whose lover has been sent
for but does not answer), the vasakasajja (who is waiting
eagerly for him to come to an assignation) the kalahantarita
,

(who has quarrelled and now regrets it), the khandita (whose
lover comes to her with a poor sexual appetite, bearing marks
she did not make) and the abjiisarika (who abandons all
shame, braving the night and the weather, and goes to find
him). 1 Beside these we have the prosy atapatika (whose
husband talks of a journey, while she, dishevelled and
without her ornaments, tries to persuade him to stay at
home). We also meet a division of each category into
'good', 'medium' and 'poor'
—
'good' who is angry only
when she has cause, 'medium' who sometimes picks needless
1
'If a respectable woman goes on an errand of love, she keeps her ornaments
quiet and hides her face — when a whore goes on a similar errand she goes in
conspicuous clothes, anklets jingling, smiling at the passers-by. ... A field, a
garden, a ruined temple, the go-between's own house, an inn, burning-
ground, wood, or river-bank are the eight places for assignations — or any-
where which is dark.' Sahityadarpana, 116-7.

72
 The Koka Shastra
quarrels but —
makes them up, and 'poor' who scolds and
finds fault —
with a blameless lover and their respective
men, the faithful, the tactfully unfaithful (daksina), the
brazen, and the real cad. The source of these is in the
Kavyalamkara and similar books, but brief accounts of
them have been introduced into some of the works on
erotics proper, such as the Ananga Ranga, in addition to
the purely sexual typologies of 'lotus ladies', 'deer' and the
like— categories based on physique (see pp. 111-113).
In temple sculpture, particularly the medieval temple
sculpture of East and Central India, nayikas are every-
where. Some are yaksis, guardian spirits and female fauns
in the retinue of the god Kubera —
tall girls with snub

noses, types of the 'shell lady' (^ankhini), who serve as

onlookers, panel-fillers, and proppers of door-
caryatids
posts (stambhapattalika). Others are apsarases and sura-
sundaris, types of the 'picture' or 'fancy' lady (citrini),
heavenly assistants to the chief hetaira of heaven Urvasi,
whose mission is to tempt and foil overweening sages when
by austerities they have almost achieved perfection and are
becoming dangerously holy. Others, with their partners, are
gandharvas (angelic musicians) or kinnaras (bird-people)
flying or dancing in tympana of doors or spandrels of arches
and ceiling-corners. But many of them are straightforward
human girls, with the typical figure and face of the region
— thinking, playing with birds, titivating, combing out
hair, and, above all, making love with their nayakas in the
maithuna groups which are one of the unique beauties of
Hindu plastic art. Only a few of them have succumbed to
ecstasy, forgotten that this is a public place, and become
lost to the world in petting or coition —
most are coy or
quietly amorous; figures out of any crowd at a festival who
have forgotten each other long enough to be looking at the
show. A few are married couples (dampati) who are there
in their capacity as donors or patrons. Many are simply
standing together, with a more vivid sense of quiet in each

73
 —

The Koka Shastra

other's company than any other lovers in art. One can
overhear their whispered conversation. Their confident
tenderness often seems to have spread to other categories
of being — the ganas, grotesques who are packed in at the
bottoms of friezes and into medallions which will only
hold a dwarf, or nagas (snake spirits) who with their
naginis have silently intertwined the tips of their tails.
The single figures, who are there, no doubt, in the character
of apsarases, resting momentarily from their dancing, have
become equally human; though alone, they do not intend to
—
be so for long meanwhile they are writing letters, looking
for thorns in their feet, or gazing into mirrors either —
blindly, in preoccupied appreciation of their own beauty,
or more circumspectly, looking for the nailmarks left as
tokens by their last lover.
The cumulative effect of all these women who celebrate
tenderness and pleasure in the situations where our own
religious art celebrates pain and deprivation —divine
women who are not virgins, or will not be virgins a moment
longer than they can help it, who take obvious pride in the
acceptance of love, not in its repudiation —is to give
Hindu religious art aunique warmth in European eyes.
Once we know iconography and assent to its manners
its

to the many-armed deities, reconciled to us now by motion-

photographs, whose retinue all these crowds of human and
angelic beings form —
we are likely to return to Christian
religious art with an increasing sense of emotional starvation.
This need not depend on any Schwarmerei for things Hindu.
Together with its nayikas classical Hinduism has produced
ascetics even more grotesque than our own, but even this
cannot make St Ursula and her 10,000 virgins, or St Lucy
sending her eyes to her lover on a platter, anything but
deeply distasteful by comparison. When occasional Indians
express the wish that the Archaeological Commission
would 'clean up' temple sculpture by tactfully removing the
more erotic of the maithunas, as offensive to modern
74
 —

The Koka Shastra

Indian prudery, one might wish to tell them that they are
looking for obscenity in the wrong and that it would
place,
be much more comprehensible, though no more justified,
if these would-be iconoclasts sharpened their penknives on

some of the more emotionally-mischievous of our own

saints.
The gain which modern English readers are likely
to get from Indian erotic literature is precisely of this kind,
whatever their motives in wanting to read it. Not many will
learn sexual techniques that they do not know, or could not
have invented for themselves. What is profitable to them
—
and us in spite of the distance of time and culture which
separates us from Sanskrit literature, is in the contrast of
attitudes —acceptance and pleasure where we have for
generations been taught to look for danger and guilt.
Moral instruction, which so overweights our sexual
literature, is not neglected — we are warned of the un-
wisdom of vice, but not too zealously. Sometimes Vatsy ayana,
and Kokkoka after him, sound murderously cynical
in detailing the procedure for seduction, for instance, or the
practicalgrounds which excuse adultery. In fact, however,
as anyone in medicine or law who is accustomed to hearing
the real calculations and motives of his fellow-citizens will
recognize, they are only expressing baldly aims and devices
which most of us at some time harbour, but prefer to dis-
—
semble if we do not hire professional bawds to do our
seducing for us, the difference is purely cultural, not moral
— and nobody can say that the Indian Masters often —
—
themselves ascetics fail to warn us of the painful conse-
quences of such irregularity.
The parakiya rasa or adulterous 'flavour' in love has
As seen in the love of Krishna
itself a religious significance.

and Radha it typifies the most selfless form of devotion,

precisely because of the disregard it shows for prudential
considerations.
Unlike Vatsy ay ana, Kokkoka has little to say about

75
 The Koka Shastra
prostitutes — aims at a married woman. The
his seducer
reason for this exclusion is odd —
it is not moral, for the

hetaira was a highly-honoured member of the old courtly

societies comparable in status to the concert pianist or the
ballerina in our own, and equally, as an artist, a ministress
of Kama; the less aristocratic lady-who-lives-by-her-beauty
(rupajiva) was not despised, though a Brahmin should
avoid her. Kokkoka probably left out the professional
because she comes under the domain of Artha (useful and
gainful arts) not only of Kama (pure aesthesis) such a —
practical bias is a higher motive in the Indian view, and
does her credit: Becky Sharp pursuing Artha is more
honourable for that reason than Juliet muddling herself
to death through mere unpractical infatuation arising from
Kama, which profited nobody. But by the same token
professionalism is outside Kokkoka 's terms of reference.
Those things in Kokkoka which will enrage Christians
are only the obverse of those things in Christianity which
make Hindus rate it a religion for barbarians (mleccha-
—
mata) the gulf is unbridgeable but once again, without
5

swallowing Hinduism whole, the difference in attitude is

deeply instructive and tends to give us insight, if we let it,
into our cultural preconceptions.
I have argued elsewhere that the main social function of
erotic literature is in cultivating a sense of permission and
overcoming sexual anxiety, rather than in imparting
specific information. 1 A society able to support an erotic
literature directed specifically to enjoyment, like the
literatures of 'hunting, dancing or music', Kokkoka's other
examples of 'desire generated by the recollection of a
pleasing activity —
abhyasiki priti
—
has overcome most of
'

its sexual anxieties. It is the need for this type of reassurance,

rather than for 'stimulation' in a society where these

anxieties have been artificially fostered and sustained, which
creates the large public demand for a specifically erotic
1
Comfort, A. (1961).

76
 The Koka Shastra
literature today. The informative function is subsidiary to
this —such and development
literature tends to elaboration
as a part of its assertion of acceptance, and of the idea that
physical pleasure is to be frankly celebrated. To Vatsyayana
it was in any case natural that the techniques of Kama as

sexual aesthesis should require study like the techniques of

other aesthetic or practical activities.
'Dharma the right ordering of sacrifices, the knowledge
is

of right conduct, and other matters of permanency, which

are not of this world, and from which we look forno im-
mediate profit 5 also the mortification of the flesh, and such
right actions as tend to immediate profit. It is to be learned
from the scriptures and from associating with philosophers.
The means of getting and increasing knowledge, land,
precious metals, cattle, grain, gear, friends is Artha.
These we learn from administrators, scholars of the sastras,
merchants and craftsmen. The due order and operation
upon the mind after their several fashion of the five
senses ... is Kama. But the sensation arising from the
special contacts proper to the desire of the sexes is the
quintessential Kama. This is to be learned from the text-
books of love and from contact with people. Now the
Kama of beasts is instinctive, and arises of itself, re-
quiring no textbook, say the sages ; but Kama in the
physical union of man and woman requires assistance, and
the manner of this assistance is to be learned from the text-
books of Love, says Vatsyayana. In animals mating takes
place of because the female has no false modesty,
itself,

copulates when
in heat until she is satisfied, and the act is
not accompanied by the need to take thought for anything.'
(Some say that Kama is best avoided altogether, and point
to notable cases where it has produced the undoing of those
who follow it.) 'But in fact, it is as necessary for the well-
being of the body as is food, and in pursuing it we minister
to both Dharma and Artha. As for its dangers, we should
learn from them. We do not cease to cook food because there

77
 The Koka Shastra
are beggars, or to plant vegetables because there are wild
deer (sc.them before we can).
to eat
'A man
should accordingly study the textbooks of Love
without neglecting those devoted to Dharma and Artha:
a woman should study them before she attains puberty, or,
when married, at her husband's discretion. Some scholars
say that because a woman may not study the sastras there
is no point in giving her a textbook of Love. But women
excel in all practical matters, and since practice depends on
theory, they should study the textbook, says Vatsyayana.
There are few persons generally who are fit to study the
sastras, but all profit from practice, and practice is the
eventual source of all textbooks.' (Neither elephant-
drivers nor, for that matter, kings, learn their practice
from books, so much from experience and from watch-
as
ing others.) 'There are women fully grounded in the text-
books of love — professional hetairae, princesses and the
daughters of high officials. A woman should learn privately
from a reliable person of this kind the practice and the
theory, or part of the theory.'

He then widens the thesis into a plea for the general

education of women, if not in the sastras at least in a
formidable list from dancing
of Sixty-Four Arts, ranging
to metalwork, poetry, veterinary surgery and strategy.
The art of love is simply the most important part of a
liberal education directed, in our jargon, to 'the fuller
life'. This is an attitude from which our own time and our

own culture seems ripe to learn.

As about the object of the undertaking, I would like to

be franker than some past 'translators' of Sanskrit about the
scholarly claims of this version. My knowledge of the
language is confined to what little I have acquired in
studying this literature for its content, and without existing
translations into other languages I could not have made

78
 I

The Koka Shastra

much of the Ratirahasya. All work on Sanskrit erotica
owes more or less of its matter (in my case, more) to R.
Schmidt's great scholarly compendium of Sanskrit texts
with translations, partly into German and partly into
Latin (1911), and to his German edition of the Kama
Sutra and Jayamangala; I also had Leinhard's full and
authoritative German translation of the Ratirahasya,
Iyengar's translation of the Kama Sutra, the help of
Indian friends, and the various other English and Indian
versions of Sanskrit erotica already mentioned. On the
other hand I have not simply translated a translation —
have been through the original text and the translations,
not with any hope of poaching successfully on Sanskrit
scholarship, but to see how far I could make sense of them
in terms of what is now known of sexual behaviour in
other cultures, and of human biology generally. Sanskrit
scholars will probably be wise to ignore this version
altogether, as a paraphrase, and go to Lienhard, if not to
the original. For reasons I have given in the essay, it is the
scientific audience and the general public I really had in
mind.

79
 II

THE LATER TEXTS

My method of procedure in giving a view of this tradition is,

as already explained, to translate one work, the oldest after

the Kama Sutra, in full, and to fit the major divergences
and developments of the later works into parallel foot-
notes. Schmidt, with praiseworthy thoroughness, gives full
translations and the text of each work in a parallel collation,
but the differences of matter are mostly so small that it
would be hard to justify an English exercise of the same kind.
I have already mentioned most of the later and subsidiary

sources by name. Before going on to the annotated ex-

ample, it might be as well to survey them in rather greater
detail. The Kama Sutra belongs to ancient Indian literature,
the Ratirahasya to medieval, i.e. it already addresses a
different kind of society, and incorporates ideas not known
to Vatsyayana. The later texts run on through medieval
and early modern times, spanning the Moslem and eventu-
ally the Christian invasions and going on, in spite of the
prohibitive activities of these religions and of 'reformist'
Hindus themselves, up to the present day. Perhaps the
tradition has at last exhausted its vitality — it is interesting
that the most modern posture-book to have been widely
circulated in India was an English translation of the first
200 -odd prescriptions from the work of Weckerle already
cited (under the title 'Kinaesthesia of Love'). Already,
therefore, such writing has moved from being the fruit of
tradition to being the operational result of an individual's
study.The generation of Gandhi and his disciples distrusts
the tradition of erotology and would not be sorry if it
became a thing of the past. That, to my mind, would be a
pity.

80
 ;

The Koka Shastra

The course of Indian erotology after the Ratirahasya is

chiefly imitative. Some texts hark back to the Kama Sutra

directly —others addnew material. Nearly all the main
matter of later tradition is already present in Kokkoka,
with two exceptions: the number of stylized endearments
increases, massage, grasping, hairpulling and finger games
being added to kisses, nailmarks and bites; and material is
introduced from the rhetoricians, especially in describing
the categories of nayika or heroine. Acceptance of oral
practices also increases steadily with the passage of time.
(Some of these differences may well represent a shift in the
—
region where literary activity was greatest the late works
seem to have their origins South and East of the early texts.)
After Kokkoka, the astrological classification of women
(padminl, etc.) becomes paramount: it is the one quoted in
India today. Palmistry, recipes and spells become general
a few texts, like the Ratisastra-ratnavali, bring in eugenics
and the art of begetting children endowed with various
qualities, superstitions which have retained their popularity
and gradually ousted the more practical, and specifically
sexual, instruction of Kokkoka, often, one suspects, as a
consequence of the influence of prudery and censorship.
This pseudo-eugenic material, absent from Vatsyayana, is
actually very old, some of the instructions of the Ratisastra-
ratnavali being taken from the section on procreation in the
Brhadaranyaka Upanishad.

1. THE PANCASAYAKA OF JYOTIRl6 VARA

KAVISEKHARA
This treatise (The 'Five Arrows', after the flower-headed
weapons of Kamadeva, Cupid), next in age after the Koka
Shastra, belongs probably to the first half of the fourteenth
century. It is in elegant short-line verse, unlike the long
lines of the Ratirahasya; the exordium is very like Kokkoka's
however:

81
 The Koka Shastra
'Perfume of Love, Comrade in intercourse with the
whose service is Desire, hail to the
beloved, Giver of Joys,
bearer of the Makara (mythical beast of the Ganges)
banner, the sole fount of blind desire, Kama, whom living
nature serves! Lord of the earth, honoured for granting
us the means of daily slaking our devotion to him, Worship-
per of Srikantha on earth, treasurehouse of the sixty-four
Arts, pillar of instruction in music worshipper of the
. . .

lotus feet of Parvati. To set forth the instruction of Kama,

as given by the Lord Siva, by Vatsyayana; with the ad-
ditions ofGoniputraka and Muladeva; with a distillate of
the wisdom of Babhravya; with the teaching of the
experts NandisVara and Rantideva, and the science of
Ksemendra—is composed THE FIVE ARROWS, for the
satisfaction of all lovers/

The antagonism and reconciliation of Siva and Kama is

explained elsewhere (p. 101) —the majority of these old

erotic texts arestill Saiva in orientation, in contrast to the

later Vaisnava erotic cults of Radha and Krishna. Some

MSS give the name of the author as Jyotirisvara of the —
other sources, Goniputraka is probably the Gonikaputra of
the Kama Sutra, Ksemendra was the great Kashmiri
poet and dramatist: Muladeva according to Jain traditions,
is the attributive author of a treatise on thieving. From
this exordium, the 'Five Arrows', like Kokkoka's poem, sets
out to combine the old system of the Kama Sutra with the
newer Schmidt dates it from the eleventh
astrology.
century —which
would make it contemporary with the
great Hindu and sexual revival of the temple-builders.
MSS vary in completeness —Schmidt's text gives the
contents of the poem as follows:
First Arrow —the lover as city gentleman, the professional
conversationalist (following the Kama Sutra) ; the classifi-
cation of women, the astrological calendar of love.
Second Arrow —the physical classification of men and
82
 A 5

The Koka Shastra

women, by body size; the geography of love — local customs
the female genitalia; the philosophy of affection.
—
Third Arrow receipts for perfumes and attractants.
—
Fourth Arrow remedial and magical receipts, spells.
Fifth Arrow —
the female genitalia, reprise and continu-
ation; the coital positions; love-cries.

This looks disorganized, compared with the same material

in the Ratirahasya —
the section on caresses and extras is
missing, and two volumes of leechdoms have apparently
got into the middle of the text: however, Schmidt's MS
is one of the least complete. Others which are longer, but

have never been published, apparently include all the typical

caresses, as well as hair pulling and blows for the woman
te strike in coitus.
The Pancasayaka achieved nothing like Kokkoka's
popularity with later generations; the passages which
Schmidt quotes lack the Ratirahasya's verve.

2. THE KANDARPACUDAMANI OF VIRABHADRADEV

This poem ('The Tiara of the Love-God') is a technically-
skilful and very faithful transliteration of the Kama Sutra
(which is, of course, a prose work) into Arya verses
an —
exercise rather comparable to the composition of the
Scottish Metrical Psalter. It looks like the work of a court
poet, who must have been a ghost commissioned by 'god-
like King Virabhadra' to carry out the transformation. The
exordium is interesting in that it now genuflects to both
Saiva and Vaisnava cults
—
'Glory in the highest to Bhairav
[Siva] —as he looked in anger on Daksa, may he look in
compassion on his faithful believer, and may his Eye bring
salvation! Obeisance too,ye wise, to Krishna, Master of the
Arts of Love, who drank
secret joys from the cherry lips
of the gopls, sweeter than nectar! Obeisance to the Lord of
Five Arrows, Minister of Spring-time, whose country is the

83
 The Koka Shastra

lotus-eyed lady, and whose transport

the wind from
is

Malaya! Hail to the clan of the Vaghela, honorable to

Kings, and to the Enemy of Kansa [Krishna] compared
with whom all earthly princes are of small account. . .
.'

Follows a further panegyric of Krishna and of Rama, and of

their divine descendant Virabhadra, whose curiosity the
work is commissioned to appease. Evidently he was not the
author, though his name appears on the credit title. The
text is a word-for-word reproduction of the comparable
passages in Vatsyayana, diverging only to express, for
example, King Virabhadra \s dislike of the oral practices
which Vatsyayana cites (see p. 124 note).

3. THE SMARADIPIKA
This poem — or rather, these poems, for there appear to be
more than one of the same name, 'Light of Love' are a far —
more interesting proposition, for they appear to represent a
genuinely distinct flavour among schools of erotology, both
from that of Vatsyayana, and from that of Kokkoka. It is
interesting to speculate that the difference may have been
regional —
classical Indian erotics are supposed to have
originated in the Paficala country, home of the heroes of
the Mahabharata, while the various Smaradfpikas probably
come from further South. The author is given as Kadra
or Rudra or Garga; the exordium is very like Kokkoka's:
'Hail to Love, who, though scorched to a cinder by the eye
of Siva, yet made half his enemy's body to become feminine.
Through the gentle god of scented flowers, the shame-
fastness of the tenderest girl is healed. One Rudra, who
overcame every obstacle and kindled love in this way:
wrote the Smaradipika (Light of Love) to instruct the in-
experienced and give satisfaction to the hearts of women,
by collecting what was best in many treatises on the art.
Those who have technique in love are beloved by women;
those who lack instruction can only cover them like so

84
 The Koka Shastra
many cattle. The joy of love-play, manifested in so many
attractive forms, makes the human condition blessed, for
not even a bull surrounded by a hundred cows experiences
that joy as we do. How to handle their own women, and
attract other men's women, is the profit which students
may draw from this book, likewise a knowledge of the
different postures and actions. He who has lived one year
with the Love God's favour has lived for all time and
counts all else as nothing.

'We will first describe men, thereafter women; next the

penis and thereafter the queynt, then the sites of love and
the migrations proper to it then the sixteen frontal postures,
;

with the six postures from behind; the two postures with
the woman above, and the manner of oral coitus; the outer
modes of lovemaking and its regional variations —the
language of gestures, the use of go-betweens, the eight
types of nayika; spells, medicines, and how to get a male
heir.'

In fact, beside these matters, the text covers most of

what is in the Ratirahasya. The chief differences are in the
catalogues of postures, which have by now acquired different
names, and the addition of the nayikas and the control of
the child's sex at conception.
In the Smaradfpika we encounter the material taken
from the rhetoricians, namely the typological heroines. In
the rhetorical works these are endlessly subdivided; the
main and classical types, differing in name from source to
source, but identical in essence, are these: who by
'she
coquetry and charm keeps her lover under her thumb
(svadhinabhartrka); she who, full of impatience, waits for
her tardy lover (virahotkanthita); she who has sent for him
and waits, looking out of the door (vasakasajja); she who has
quarrelled with him, and sits in a huff, repenting of it

(kupita, kalahantarita); she who is jilted and left at a tryst

(vipralabdha); she whose lover comes back in the morning
85
 The Koka Shastra
tiredand covered with marks she did not make (khandita);
she who drunken with wine or love loses all shame and
goes to find her lover (abhisarika —
iconographically the
loveliest of the nayikas —her
blend of fear and daring
seems to appeal uniquely to the literary tradition: her
abandon is the type of the Brahmins' wives who crept out
to seek the Lord Krishna, as well as of secular forbidden
love); and she who sits unadorned and grieving while her
lover is on a journey (prositapatika)'. Alternatives, or
additions, to the canon in some texts are 'she whose husband
meditates a journey, and who tries to dissuade him with
tears and dishevellment' and 'she who tosses on her bed full
of unassuaged desire, while her husband practices austerities
—
and ignores her love' Parvati herself, as consort of the
Great Ascetic, figures sometimes in this role.

4. THE ANANGA RANGA OF KALYANAMALLA

The Ananga Ranga of Kalyanamalla is, after the Kama
Sutra and the Ratirahasya, the most celebrated and in-
fluential of Indian erotic texts, both inside India, and, still

more, outside, via the translations of Burton and Lamairesse.

It probably dates from the sixteenth century, though its
present form may be late. The name means 'The Stage of
the Love-God'. Its popularity in the Burton- Arbuthnot
version is perhaps unfortunate, for, as we have already said,
the pandits served Burton ill, and the original itself is a
poorer and more pedantic production than Kokkoka's.
The exordium is Saivaite. 'May you be purified by
Parvati, who tinted her nails, once clear as the Ganges
water, with lac after beholding the fire upon the Forehead
of the Self-Sufficient; who painted her eyes with kohl
after seeing the dark bruise upon the neck of the Self-
Sufficient; 1 whose body hairs stood on end with desire
1
Left on the occasion when He swallowed the poison that threatened to
depopulate heaven and earth.

86
 The Koka Shastra
after seeing in a mirror the ashes smeared upon the body
of the Self-Sufficient. Hail to Kama, Playmate, Wanton,
dweller in all created hearts, giver of courage in battle,
slayer of Sambhara the Asura and of the Rakshasas, who
suffices unto Rati, and to the loves and pleasures of the
world.' (The last phrase is Burton, and well worth keeping.)
The dedication is to Lad Khan, son of Ahmad Khan, of the
Lodi house (a.d. 1450-1526), 'by the great Princely Sage
and Archpoet Kalyanamalla, versed in all the arts' ; the
present text appears to be rather later than this. The
Burton version continues, Tt is true that no joy in the world
of mortals can compare with that derived from knowledge
of the Creator. Second, however, and subordinate only to
this, are the satisfaction and pleasure arising from the
possession of a beautiful woman. Men, it is true, marry for
the sake of undisturbed congress, as well as for love and
comfort, and often they obtain handsome and attractive
women. But they do not give them plenary contentment,
nor do they themselves thoroughly enjoy their charms. The
reason of which is that they are purely ignorant of the
Scripture of Cupid, the Kama Shastra and despising the
5

differencebetween the several kinds of women, they re-

gard them only in an animal point of view. Such men must
be looked on as foolish and unintelligent, and this book is
composed with the object of preventing lives and loves being
wasted in similar manner . .
.'

The scope of the Ananga Ranga covers the stock matter,

plus the Eight Nayikas, a longish section on palmistry, and
(in Burton at least, though not in the Sanskrit texts I have
seen) an extended account of the pompoir (vadavaka).
'She must ever strive to close and constrict the Yoni until
it holds the Lingam, as with a finger, opening and shutting

at her pleasure, and finally acting as the hand of the Gopala-

girl, who milks the cow. This can be learned only by long

practice, and especially by throwing the will into the part

affected. . . Her husband will then value her above all
.

87
 —

The Koka Shastra

women, nor would he exchange her for the most beautiful
Pan! (queen) in the Three Worlds. So lovely and pleasant
to the man is she-who-constricts.' Further to all this we
have a footnote: 'Such an artist is called by the Arabs
Kabbazah, literally "a holder" and it is not surprising that
the slave dealers pay large sums for her. All women have
more or less the power, but they wholly neglect it. .'
. .

All this, needless to say, is pure, but informative, Burton.

Of the astrological classes of women Burton says, or makes
the Ananga Ranga say, 'The same correspond with the
four different phases of Moksha, or Release from further
transmigration. The first, padmini, is Sayyujyata, or
absorption into the essence of the Deity. The second,
citrini, isSamipyata, nearness to the Deity: the third,
sankhini, is Sampata, or resemblance to the Deity in
limbs and material body, the last, hastini, is Salokata, or
residence in the Heaven of some especial god. .' Presum-
. .

ably this is out of a commentary —

from its tone a late one
but there is no sign of it in the Ananga Ranga itself.

5. THE RATIMANJARI OF JAYADEVA

By contrast with the pomposity of the Ananga Ranga, the
Ratimanjari of Jayadeva ('The Posy of Love') is a charming
little work of only 125 slokas: it has been published in

Sanskrit (see Pavolini, 1904) and in a parallel Hindi

version, but not, it seems, in English. There is room here
for the whole of it. The matter and the names of postures
run parallel with the Smaradipika, some lines being held
in common: the verse is elegant and compact —
it is not by

'the' Jayadeva, author of the Gita Govinda, but more

probably by one Jayadeva the Encyclopaedist; or by some
other Jayadeva, nobody can now say. It looks a lateish
work. The text runs:

In perpetual homage to theLord &va, Stealer of Hearts,

the Ratimanjari is composed by the sage Jayadeva. Wherein

88
 The Koka Shastra
isassembled by the said Jayadeva the pith of the ratisastras
and the kamasastras.

Padmini (lotus woman), citrini (picture or 'fancy'

woman), 1 sankhim (chank-shell woman) and hastini
(elephant woman) —such are the natures of women by
birth.
Sasa (hare), mrga (gazelle), vrsa (bullock) and asVa
(stallion) —such are the natures of men by birth.
Eyes like a lotus, with little nostrils, round breasts a
little apart, with fine hair, slender body:
Sweet-voiced,well-tempered, musical, beautifully
—
clothed throughout such is a padmini, and she smells of
lotus.
An expert in love, not too tall, not too short, with a
pretty nose like a til-flower, a jewel body and lotus eyes,
With hard breasts that meet each other, a beauty; of
pleasant nature and talented —such is the citrini, and she is

wayward.
A with slant eyes, an admirable beauty, devoted
tall girl,

to the pleasures of love, talented and of good character,

Whose neck is adorned with three folds such is a —
sankhini, and a pastmistress, they say, in love-play.
A girl with plump lips, plump buttocks and plump
queynt, plump-fingered and plump-breasted, kind, a greedy
one for love,
Who is strong, loves violent coition such is a karini —
(hastini) and she is hard to satisfy.
The lotus lady (padmini) is matched with the 'hare', the
picture-lady (citrini) loves the 'deer'.
The shell-lady (Sankhini) is matched with the 'ox', the
elephantess (hastini) with the 'stallion'.
The padmini smells of the lotus, the citrini of fish,
The Sankhini has a sharp smell, the hastini smells of
elephant musk.
1
The terms are explained on p. 103, footnote.

89
 The Koka Shastra
Young girl (bala), young woman (taruni), experienced
woman (praudha), and old woman (vrddha) are the women
one may take. And the properties of each when enjoyed
are these:

Until sixteen years, a young girl (bala) — until thirty she

is a young woman (taruni), until fifty-five an experienced
woman (praudha), and an old woman (vrddha) thereafter.
The young girl is a lover of flowers and sweet things, the
young woman is given to love-play,
The praudha to the give and take of love, the old woman
to hard knocks.
The young girl gives a man pleasure and the breath of
life (prana), the young woman draws out the breath of
life —the praudha brings old age, the old woman brings
death.

With the waxing moon in the first half of the month,

the 'trigger' of love lies in the toe, the foot, the lower back,
the two knees, the thighs,
The navel, the armpits and calves, the cheeks and throat,
the scalp, the lower lip
The eyes, the ears, the space between the breasts, and the
hairparting of the well-browed woman according to her
kind:

The lunar progression of each woman resides in the hair-

parting, the eye, the lip, the neck, the armpits and the
nipples, the navel, the waist, the queynt,
The round of the leg, the thighs, the knuckles, soles and
surface of the foot, and the toes — migrating thus in the dark
half of the month,
In the bright phase of the moon, love dwells in the left
little toe,

In the darker, it is in the ventral side of the same

finger.

90
 —

The Koka Shastra

In the bright phase of the moon, love resides in the right
half of man and the left half of woman,
But the case is reversed in the darker phase.
If a woman is strong, she should be loved then in the
inverse (purusayita) manner (i.e., astride on her partner,
like a man): as the site of love changes, so should the mistress
be enjoyed.
The expert kisses his mistress on the eye, the throat, the
cheek, the heart, and on her two thighs
On her face, calves, buttocks, brush, and the house of
love, and on her two breasts: upon these the expert at all

times kisses his mistress,

When she sucks in her breath ('makes the sound "sit"')
he embraces her with passion, kisses her cheeks and her
throat repeatedly and clasps her tightly,
Raising her pubis with his hands, himself crying 'sit',
and stooping to kiss her sweetly,
With a caress given to her breasts and his penis set to her
queynt the expert thus enjoys her.
With his nail-tips he makes three or five scratch-marks
on her back, her lower belly and her queynt and thus does
an expert make love to a woman.
Having made such nailmarks and pressing her lips with
his teeth he takes her strongly about the neck and strikes
her queynt with his penis.
Having made her thus provision of a penis he holds her
tight, presses her two thighs together and without hesita-
tion plies her (lit. beats her womb).
Embracing the woman, stroking both breasts, her queynt
and her navel by turns, striking continually with his penis.
He seizes her by the hair with violence while battering
her queynt, then setting a kiss on her mouth he strokes her
queynt with his hand. 1
1
The Hindi translation takes each of these slokas as a different technique of
approach: I have taken them as a short account of the classical mignardizes
(nailmarks, toothmarks, hairpulling and erotic blows) with the cues for each
in a single coition.

91
 The Koka Shastra
The padmini isbrought to pleasure by stroking her
breasts, pressing her lower lip strongly, and by coitus in
the lotus position (see below).
The citrini is brought to pleasure by the cry of 'sit', by
hard kisses on neck and hands, and by the hand on her
breast.
The sankhini brought to pleasure when man and
is

woman mutually kiss queynt and penis and by passionate

coition thereafter.
The hastini is brought to pleasure by seizing her forcibly
by her tether-rope of hair, and plying her queynt with the
hand.

Now the queynt of woman should be like the back of a

tortoise, the shoulder of an elephant, 1 lotus-scented, hairless
and well-spread: these five are accounted desirable.
One which is cold, deep, too high, or rough like a cow's
—
tongue these four are accounted undesirable by experts
in kama-sastra.
The penis of man is described by experts as being of two
kinds —the club, or the whistle: the first is stout, the
second is long and thin.

A man who is fond of women, a good singer, cheerful,

having a penis six fingerbreadths long, and clever such is a —
hare (sasaka).
One who is a paragon, virtuous, truthful, and courteous,
having an eight-finger penis, and handsome —such is a
gazelle (mrga).
One who is serviceable, uxorious, phlegmatic, with a
ten-finger —
member, and prudent such is a bullock (vrsa).
One who is tough, with a body of solid wood, insolent, of
deceitful habits, fearless, with a twelve-finger penis, and
no money —such is a stallion (a£va; haya).

1
or 'cassia blossom'.

92
 The Koka Shastra
When a woman does not wish to make love with her
husband or lover for lack of pleasure, he should make trial

of the various bandhas.

Padmasana (the lotus seat), nagapada (the elephant foot),

latavesta (the creeper cling), ardhasamputa (the half-
casket), kulisa (the thunderbolt), sundara (the beautiful),
and likewise kesara (the tress of hair), hillola (the wave),
narasimha (Vishnu's man-lion) and viparita (the reversed),
ksudgara (the petty?), dhenuka (the cow) and utkantha (the
throat trick), simhasana (the lion seat), ratinaga (the
pleasure snake) and vidhyadhara (the warlock), these are
the sixteen modes of carnal copulation.

If with the woman in padmasana (i.e., with each foot

laid —
on the opposite groin the meditative posture of
Hatha-yoga) he embraces her with his hands, and so
swyves her deeply, it is the lotus position (padmasana).
If throwing her legs on his two shoulders the adept
gently sets his penis in her queynt, this is called the
elephant foot (nagapada).
If he enwraps the woman with arms and legs and strikes
gently on her queynt it is the creeper cling (latavesta).
If he her two feet somewhat upward (skyward)
raises
sets his knees on the ground and forcibly massages her
breasts, it is the half casket (ardhasamputa).
If he violently splays her feet apart and batters her
queynt with his penis it is the thunderbolt (kulisa).
If he raises her two feet, lays hold on her breasts, and
drinks from her lips, it is the beautiful (ratisundara).
If pressing her calves and rubbing her breasts with his
arms he repeatedly strikes into her queynt, it is the tress of
hair (kesara).
If he puts the woman's feet to his heart, holds her hands
in his, and strikes into her queynt at pleasure, it is the
wave (hillola).

93
 The Koka Shastra

Ifhe presses her feet (together), violently penetrates her

and embraces her tightly with his hands it is known as
1 (narasimha).
the Man-lion
If he puts one of her feet to his thigh, and the other to his
groin, this is called the reverse (viparita).
he puts her feet up to (his ?) sides, beats on the queynt
If
with his penis, and strikes hard with his arms (?) it is the
petty? (ksudgara).
If a drowsy lover embraces his wife when she is drowsy,
thrusting his penis into her queynt, this the cow position
is

(dhenuka) [We seem to need 'face down', but the text has
'drowsy' (supta)].
If he puts the woman's feet to her throat with his hands,
embraces her forcefully (or another reading, handles her
breasts) and so takes her, it is known as the throat trick
(utkantha).
If he puts her feet to his arms and calves, holds her by the
breast and so takes her, it is the lion seat (simhasana).
If the adept presses (encircles) his mistress with both his
thighs, this is the love-snake (ratinaga), a device that steals
the hearts of women.
If seizing her thighs he strikes her with his hands and
takes her with extreme violence this is called the warlock

(vidhyadhara).

One who woman near him and then

brings a boldly
seizes her two feet may be known thereby as a sexual
athlete who has studied the sastras. All men should attend
carefully to the study of these, acquire knowledge of love-
skill, and make trial with women of the sixteen bandhas.
Thus is completed the summary made by Jayadeva, the

interpreter of sexual learning in the sastras.

The end of the Ratimafijari written by Jayadeva.

1
After the demon-slaying avatar of Visnu, shown always disembowelling an
enemy who lies face-up across his knees.

94
 The Koka Shastra

6. THE DINALAPANIKA SUKASAPTATI

The last major source quoted by Schmidt

(of uncertain date)
in his monograph of Indian erotology the Dinalapanika
is

£ukasaptati or Seventy Discourses of the Parrot, a version

of the enormously popular Oriental story of the young King
admonished, and kept in the straight and narrow, by an
erudite parrot inherited from his father. This is not an
erotic textbook, but in the course of the moral tale the
parrot, the King, and other personages deliver lectures on all
manner of topics, erotology included. Of those quoted by
Schmidt, one is a legend about the origin of menstruation
and the customs connected with it; another is a dissertation
on prostitutes. The most extensive is a spirited list of
coital eighty-five by name and fifty-three in
postures,
detail, which the King rehearses to himself on the way to
an assignation (frustrated, unfortunately, by the moral
parrot). This is an important source, which I have quoted a
good deal, for the more elaborate and acrobatic coital
techniques of late Indian erotology. We
can identify it,
not with the other major traditions, but with the list in a
so far untranslated erotic text, the Srngaradipika of
Harihara (The Lamp of Affection). Schmidt has elsewhere
printed the Sanskrit of this in full (ZDMG 57, 705: 1903).
Harihara gives the names of the postures only, stopping
short after the list, while the King's descriptions most re-
grettably lapse into unintelligibility and silence with only
just over half the names accounted for (a pity, as the rest
sound intriguing, and there is no other account of them
available). The names are many of them unique, as are the
postures they describe, but if anything the tradition is
closest to that of the various Smaradipikas rather than the
Ratirahasya. According to Upadhyaya the list recurs in the
Saugandhikaparinaya, with an account of regional variation
in the prevalence of the different postures. It would be
interesting to know if this list supplies details of the last

95
 The Koka Shastra
thirty or so, forwhich the king's, or the scribe's, memory
failedhim; the lapse is put down to the fact that the
omitted positions are those 'special to the woman', but we
know some of them from other sources, and this hardly fits
the facts.

'When the twenty-third day dawned, the King went

early to the house of the servant, meditating on the way as
follows
— "I will acquaint the servant's lovely-eyed wife
with the arts of coition, eighty-four in number, and enjoy
her at pleasure. Now the procedures concerned are as
follows: ... if the lady, in the battle of the God incarnate in
hearts, lies smiling, lotus-face upwards, legs laid naturally,
with half-closed eyes and the look of a shy gazelle, being
aroused to a moderate degree only, this is the position of
love which all the world uses, and comes first in love-making.
But if in privacy she rides upon the man, looking down on
him, and making all manner of affectionate sounds, this is
the reverse position. If so doing, she turns about, it is the
turn position (bhramana). If, lying on him, she rotates
wheel-fashion, turning to face away and then back,
laying her hands on him (walking on her hands?) and kissing
him all over, this is known to adepts as the wheel (cakra)
etc. . .
.".'

Dinalapanika Sukasaptati is also alone among the texts in

including a rhetorical classification of nayakas as well as
nayikas. Male lovers are usually classed as devoted,
courteously unfaithful ('Who still honours and loves his
first wife, though he has others'), slippery ('who says hard
things behind her back') and the right cad ('unruffled
when he is in the wrong, unashamed even when he is

struck, and lying even when he has been found out');

and ladies as good, medium ('sometimes angry without
cause') and bad ('always finding fault without cause, even
when her lover is devoted'). Dinalapanika classes men,
96
 —

The Koka Shastra

however, as good, medium and bad on quite another
system. 'He who bears a thousand insults because, singed
with the fire of love, he loves a woman who does not love
him, is the least worthy type of lover. He who is devotedly
loved, but does not love his humble admirer, is a medium-
value lover. He who loves a compliant lady and is loved
boundlessly in return, o Prabhavati, is the best kind of
lover.'
As for the lady:

'She who, though angry when she has cause, once her
anger has flown away is devoted to her lover skilled in —
the flavours of love, and in all activities, such is accounted
the best. She who becomes angry without cause, is hard to
smooth down, sometimes bashful, sometimes not
is

such is accounted middling. She who is demanding, fickle,

tactless in speech and clumsy in action, is reckoned as a
ungrateful bargain.'

Much more interesting is the fact that the author of the

Discourses shifts the timing of the 'monthly progression' of
erogenic zones (see pp. 107-1 10) from the lunar calendar to
the woman's own physiological clock, so that it follows her
own menstrual cycle, not an outside astrological influence.
'The lunar influence touches every woman at the time of
her purification, moving over limbs from site to site during
the next half-month. The thighs, genital, seat of pleasure,
navel, right flank, and therewith the armpits, between
the breasts, the nipples, the lower neck, the chin, lower
lip, ear lobes, forehead, the hair and the fontanelle'
—
(on top of the head through which the soul escapes at
—
death) 'these are the lunar stations of love.' This,
according to Schmidt, leads on to detailed practical in-
struction in playing the market according to schedule,
with dietary recommendations appropriate to each day.
One may reasonably be sceptical about the sequence, but

97
 The Koka Shastra
at least it stands a better chance of being linked to hormonal
influences than to the activities of the moon.

7. OTHER TEXTS
The Kamaprabodha of Vyasya Janardana, the Nagara-
sarvasva of Padmasri (said by some to be a woman and by
others a Buddhist monk) and the Ratiratnapradlpika of
Maharaja Devaraja also contain lists of coital techniques,
and have been partly translated: I have not managed to
get hold of them, but rely for quotation on Professor T. L.
Ray's paperback version of the Kokkoka and Ratirahasya,
which has some useful comparative tables of contents.
They appear, in their present form at least, to be not later
than the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The Nagara-
£arvasva or Townsman's Compendium is a work of another
kind from the treatises, more in the tradition of the
Kuttanimata (The Bawd's Breviary) or the Dhurta-vita-
samvada (Thv Cad and the Ponce) dialogue pieces —
between members of the Indian demi-monde which recall
the 'Dialogues des Courtisanes' of a later literature. They
partly fill the odd gap in
Indian erotology posterior to the
all

Kama Sutra left by the omission of any account of prosti-

tutes and their ways —
though the Nagara£arvasva has some
valuable comments on petting techniques generally, on the
nomenclature of some of the stylized mignardizes, and on
coital postures. I have included these in their places as
footnotes to the Ratirahasya.
The Nagarasarvasva is unique in combining kisses and
sounds under a single head, in a far more elaborate account
of tongue-kisses (maraichignage) than any of the other
writers, in listing the holds (grahana) used to control a
woman during intercourse, and in describing a magical
routine of stimulating the different nadis or 'veins' to
produce offspring with different qualities. The author also
has a section on jewels and the detection of faults in them,

98
 The Koka Shastra
which occurs nowhere else. This is the only erotic work we
have which is Mahayana Buddhist in orientation the —
invocation is to Manjusri and Tara instead of the Hindu
patron deities.

The Ratiratnapradipika apparently includes the most

complete extant account of oral techniques, eight modes
each for man and for woman, but I have not been able to
get hold either of the text or a translation.

There is a crop of popular little treatises called The

Ratisastra of Nagarjuna Siddha, dealing not with erotics but
with astrology, prenatal influences, and the like. They
contain the kind of magico-sexual and genetical mis-
information which was so popular in medieval Europe and is
still popular and influential in India today. There are

several English versions, and a rather different Sanskrit

text with the same title is printed by Schmidt (WZKM
23, 180; 1909). My copy describes itself as 'translated into
sweet English prose verse'. Unlike the other treatises, this is
clearly Brahmanical and pseudo-ancient, being in the form
of a discourse given by the Lord Siva Himself to His
consort. Some of the matter is ancient in fact, deriving from
the ritual and sexual sections of the Brhadaranyaka
Upanishad, but with an overlay of very much later astrology.
Part of its popularity is that being devoted almost wholly to
erroneous statements about prenatal influences and the like,
and very little to the actual mise a point of sexual enjoy-
ment, it has run into no trouble with the devout. It
dilates on such matters as the evil effects of coitus by day,
commending 'the second and third parts of the night; the
first and fourth are intended for the study of the sastras and

religious books, and other knowledge-increasing literary

works'. It classifies women astrologically, describing 'the
precious bed for the padmini, the beautiful bed for the
citrinl, the picturesque bed for the sankhini, the strong

99
 The Koka Shastra
and durable bed for the hastini' —the last of these in-
corporating a provision locker! In view of the continued
appetite of Indian readers for such home words, one wishes
that a new sage would re-write them in terms of modern
knowledge and incorporate accurate contraceptive in-
formation. Such forms of public health propaganda have
quite serious possibilities. According to Upadhyaya there is
one work of this sort, written by Pandit Mathura Prashad
in 1949, and called the Ratikelikutuhala —
how modern its
content is I have no idea, but Upadhyaya's summary
hints at the repetition of all the traditional matter. If it is in
Sanskrit its influence will hardly be wide. I have also seen a
modern (1957) Hindi re-write of the Kokkokam called
Kokasaravaidyaka, by Narayan Prashad Misra, which
gives about thirty-two bandhas (asanas) with modern
Hindi names.
Such then are the sources. Modern attitudes in Britain
owe more to them, and to Sir Richard Burton, than most of
us realize. Dare one hope that the next echelon of such
literature, with the advantages behind it of science,
biology, psychology, experience, and, most important of
all,a civilized and guilt-free view of sexuality as pleasure
and fulfilment, may come eventually from our own culture?
It seems quite possible, if the present weather holds.

100
 THE KOKA SHASTRA
(The Ratirahasya of Kokkoka)

THE INVOCATION

To him who by and his strength made even

his swiftness
the Lord diva, Victor of the Three Citadels, to become
part-male, part-female, though he blasted him with a
glance from his single Eye, 1
Friend of the World, Storehouse of Joys, the fair, the
divine, the God presiding over Joy in Existence $ the
—
Heart-born to the God of Love, Praise!
When he rises in the heart as a conquering hero, the
bees are his busy servants, the songbirds are his talented
poets, the moon is his white umbrella and the wind from
Malaya his rutting elephant.
The slender woman is his bow, the jungle creeper his
bow-string, and sidelong glances are his quiver. Hail to him!
This work was composed by one Kokkoka, poet, as a
Most Excellent Vainya-
light to satisfy the curiosity of the
datta concerning the art of love. It is a concentrate made
from the true milk of the most admirable Ancient Authori-
ties, rendered down by zealous research to a sweet, precious

1
Kama, or Kandarpa, the love-God, was commissioned by the other Gods
to fire his arrow at Siva, who had retired from the world to practise medita-
tion and austerities, and so recall him to mundane concerns. The arrow caused
Siva to fall in love with his own emanation, Parvati, and thus to combine the
Male Principle, immanence, (purusa) with the Female, activity or mani-
festation (prakrti); this union is celebrated symbolically in the maithuna
groups. Siva's first glance of anger blasted the manifest body of Kama, so
that he acquired the title of Ananga, the Bodiless God; the deficiency explains
his habit of possessing human beings without warning when he wishes to
become manifest.
The extra, cyclopic eye which Siva wears in his forehead, together with the
Trivall, or three folds, about his neck, are the sole vestiges his murti or
image retains of its original phallic character, though the name Linga re-
mains as its normal designation. Once in possession of a human body, Kama
can be eclipsed only by a discharge from the eye of Siva.

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 —

The Koka Shastra

and youth-giving science, that which invites young girls
to the enjoyment of love, and is honoured, even among the
gods, before all other studies: let the knowledgeable there-
fore profit by it and act upon it.
The aim of such a book is to show how the woman who
seems unattainable can be won, how when she is won she
can be made to love, and how rightly to handle her in inti-
mate matters. For where shall a man find joy which is,—
after all, the sole substantial good in a world fugitive as
water in a basket, and the capital fulfilment of all desire,
equal to our thirst for the knowledge of Ultimate Truth
where shall a benighted man find such joy, other than by
being thoroughly grounded in the principles, arts and tech-
niques proper to the God of Love? A man may be young
and pleasing to women, but if he is not soundly based in the
study of bodily types, of habits, of preferences, of local
customs, of instincts, of situations and of gestures, he in-
variably disgraces himself: of what use, indeed, is a coconut
to amonkey?
In what follows I have added, I own, to the teaching of
Vatsyayana some matter which is not his. Now the repute
and the credit of Vatsyayana are worldwide yet where —
other authorities have made plain matters which he left
obscure, it is profitable for the slow-witted if their com-
ments are included, and such additions come fittingly
under the title of 'exposition'. I will give in the first place,

therefore, the system of NandikesVara and Gonikaputra,

then that of Vatsyayana after it.

102
 —

OF THE PHYSICAL TYPES

AND THEIR SEASONS
(The System of Nandikesvara and Gonikaputra)

There are four born types of women — the padmini, 1

first,

then the citrini: thereafter the s*ankhini, and finally the

hastini.
The lotus-woman (padmini) is delicate like a lotus bud, her
genital odour is of the lotus in flower, and her whole body
divinely fragrant. She has eyes like a scared gazelle's, a
red in the corners, and choice breasts 2 that put to
little

shame a pair of beautiful quince-fruits she has a little 5

nose like a til-flower. She is religious, paying honour to

brahmins, the gods, and her elders — her body is as attractive

1
padmini = 'lotus woman', sankhini = 'chank-shell woman', hastini =
'elephant woman': citrini is more difficult to render. The English word which
conveys most of the meanings of citra (varied, multi-coloured, special,
marvellous, whimsical) is 'fancy' — 'fancy woman' has, however, an unfortun-
—
ate connotation. Another nuance of citra is 'artistic, as of a picture, =
citraSala
'picture gallery'. Lienhard renders citrarata, citramohana, usually taken to
mean 'fancy' or special positions of intercourse, as picture-positions, i.e.
those figuring in temple art. This seems highly probable, since only certain
groups of bandhas, by no means the most complicated, are so described
the only objection is that the sthita or standing postures quoted by the erotic
textbooks do not conform in detail to the characteristic postures of the erotic
groups, and omit the most popular of them, at least at the three groups of
temples (Khajuraho, Konarak, Bhuvaneshwar) which can be studied in
photographic reproductions. I have discussed this further in the notes to
the chapter on bandhas (p. 133).
Vatsyayana knows nothing of this (astrological) classification into padmini,
etc. His own (into mrgi, vadava etc.) is given in the third chapter from—
which point the text follows the Kama Sutra in its choice of topics.
2
'Some say her breasts are the bosses on the forehead of Kama's elephant:
some say they are two golden waterpots: some, that they are two lotus-buds
floating on her pool. But I think that when the Love God had conquered the
—
Three Worlds he put his two drums upside down!' (Anon. from the Srngara-
tilaka?)

103
 The Koka Shastra
as the lotus-leaf, and yellow like gold: 1
her queynt like
open lotuses.She has the soft, coquettish voice of a king-
hamsa-bird. She is dainty; there are three creases in her
—
waist 2 she prefers bright clothes, her neck and her nose
are shapely. Such a woman is a padmini, and of the four
types she is reckoned the best.
The 'picture'-woman (citrini) moves well she is not too 5

tall nor too short —

she has a slender body, prominent breasts
and buttocks, the ankles of a crow, prominent lips, a
genital odour like honey, and three charming creases about
her neck. Her speech is staccato and her voice is like that of a
red partridge. She is a skilful dancer and singer. Her
queynt is round, plump, soft, quickly wet, and not over-
hairy. She has roving eyes —
she loves the 'outer' forms of
lovemaking, is fond of sweet food, and elaborate devices (in
coition). 3
The shell-woman (sankhim) may be slender or not so
slender —she is long, long-fingered and narrow-waisted.
She prefers red clothes and red flowers and she is hot-
tempered she does not hold her head erect. The house of the
5

love-God is long, deep-set, very hairy, and her genital odour

is acid. In intercourse she wets only when heavily nail-
marked, for her love-secretion is scanty. She should be
neither very short nor very tall, she is generally of a
bilious disposition —
her nature is lewd and treacherous,
and she has the voice of a wild ass.
The elephant-woman (hastini) does not move daintily.
She has stout feet with curling toes, a short, plump neck and
red-brown hair. She is apt to be spiteful, is rather corpulent,
and her whole body, and more especially her queynt, have
the odour of elephant-'tears'. (See p. 1 06, note.) She likes hot
and astringent food, and eats it by second helpings, she has
1
'like a kampaka (champa) flower' (Lienhard), —
a sweet-scented, ivory
gold flower, borne by a tree (Michelia champaka L.). Apparently some texts
read kanaka, Stramonium-flower.
2
trivali —the supreme Indian beauty-mark, and a sign of &iva.
a
or 'pictures' —
see note 1, p. 103.

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 —

The Koka Shastra

no modesty, her lips are big and pouting: in intercourse she
is inordinately difficult to satisfy. Her queynt is downy on
the outside and very wide within, and she speaks with a
stutter.
The days of the lunar cycle upon which the padminl
and the citrini desire coition are the second, fourth,
fifth, twelfth, tenth and eighth. For the karini
sixth,
(hastini) they are the ninth, fifteenth, fourteenth and
seventh: the remaining four (second, third, eleventh and
thirteenth) belong to the sankhini. The padminl should be
taken in the padmasana position, the citrini in the 'town-
style' (nagaraka: p. 135), the sankhini by the device
known as reed-splitting (venuvidarita), and the hastini
with her two feet on the man's shoulders. To obtain the
best results, the citrini should be enjoyed in the first
quarter of the night, the hastini in the second quarter, or
by day. The sankhini does not become passionate until the
third quarter of the night —
the padminl is most attractive
in the fourth and last. 1,2

1
—
'The padminl never gets real satisfaction if enjoyed by night by daylight
she opens like a lotus when the sun falls on it, even in converse with a child.'
(Ananga Ranga.)
According to the Srngaradipika the locale should also be adjusted to the lady
— mountain scenery for the hastini, greenwood for the citrini and sankhini,
flowerbeds for the padminl. (Srngaradipika st. 40.)
2
The later (xvi cent.?) writer of a pocket- version, Jayadeva, is more
chivalrous to the last two types and has different prescriptions for them
'Eyes like a lotus, with little nostrils, round breasts a little apart, with
fine hair, slender body,
Sweet-voiced, sweet-tempered, musical, always beautifully dressed such—
is the padmini, and she smells of lotus.

An expert in love, not too tall, not too short, with a pretty nose like a til-
flower, a jewel body and lotus eyes.
With hard breasts that meet each other, a beauty; of pleasant nature and
talented — such is the citrini, and she is wayward. (Citravaktra: 'change-
able, volatile' or perhaps 'pretty as a picture'.)
A tall girl with slant eyes, an admirable beauty, devoted to lovemaking,
talented and of good character,
—
Whose neck is adorned with three folds such is a Sankhini; a pastmistress,
they say, in love-play.
—
A plump girl plump lips, plump buttocks, plump queynt, plump-fingered
and plump-breasted, kind, a greedy one for love,

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The Koka Shastra

Spells for the subduing of women
A nutmeg with the juice of plantain subdues the citrini;
the two wings of a turtledove reduced to ash and mixed
—
with honey, the hastini Indian quince with sweet in-
cense and tagari-root subdue the sankhini in a short while,
when administered with betel, the following spells being
muttered over it for the three types respectively
Om! paca paca vihamgama vihamgama Kamadevaya
svaha (mantra for the citrini)
Om! dhari dhari vasam kari vasam kari Kamadevaya
svaha (mantra for the hastini)
Om! hara hara paca paca Kamadevaya svaha (mantra for
the sankhini) 1

Who is strong and loves violent coition such — is a karini (hastini) and she is

hard to satisfy.
The padmini smells of lotus, the citrini offish,
The sankhini smells sour (ksara), the hastini of wine (or, elephant-tears)
The padmini comes to pleasure by stroking the breasts, pressing hard her
lower and coition in padmasana,
lip,
The comes to pleasure by the cry of 'sit', hard kisses on neck and
citrini
hands and by handling her breasts,
The Sankhini comes to pleasure when man and woman mutually kiss
queynt and penis and by passionate coition thereafter,
The hastini comes to pleasure if one seizes her forcibly by her tether-rope
of hair and rubs hard on her queynt with the hand.
(Ratimarljari)
In the theory of dispositions (sattvas) (see below p. 76) padmini is the type
of the goddess, citrini of the apsaras, or divine nymph —
sankhini of the yaksi
(nature -spirit) and hastini of the raksasa or demon. The 'wine' of which the
hastini smells is almost certainly not wine but the elephant-musk which
runs down the face of a rutting elephant. 'Smells like an excited elephant' is
hard to English decorously, but 'elephant' as a title for a sister of Boule de
Suif is a kavi-samaya (poetic convention) not uncomplimentary in Indian
literature. The sankhini's odour is 'sharp' or 'salt' (ksara) in some authorities
and 'of milk' (ksira) in others.
1
The last two appendicular books of the Ratirahasya, which I have not
translated here, contains pages more of this type of prescription of little —
interest to the most determined student of folk-medicine, however, for where the
recipes are not straightforwardly magical the ingredients cannot now be
identified with certainty. The padmini is apparently unensorcellable in Kok-
koka's opinion — at least no spell is given here to subdue her.

106
 II

OF THE LUNAR CALENDAR

(Candrakala)

In the light and in the dark halves of the month, 1 the God of
Love adopts successive stations in the body of woman in a
progression which begins from the left foot and travels
first up, then down. So, in your lady of the Gazelle Eyes,
he moves from the toe to the foot, the foot to ankle joints,
the ankle to the knee, thence to queynt and pubis, the
navel, the breastbone, the armpit, the neck, the cheek,
the parts about the teeth, the eye, the face and the head,
and so back in reverse order.
For the head, then, lay hold on her hair: upon the eyes
and the forehead, kiss her: press her mouth with the lips
and teeth: upon the cheeks, kiss her in many ways: on
armpits and neck, mark her with the nails: lay hold on her
two breasts with the whole hand: between the breasts,
strike her: on the navel, slap her lightly with the flat
hand: play in her queynt with the finger, the 'elephant-
trunk game', and strike on her knees, shins, ankle joints,
feet and toes with your own. By following the candrakala
(lunar calendar) and varying the site of your caresses with
it, you will see her light up in successive places like a
figure cut in moonstone when the moon strikes on it.
The five arrows of the Love-God are supposed to bear
the sounds e (for Vishnu) and o (for Brahma), and their
targets are heart, breasts, eyes, head and genital. When
these burning fiery arrows are shot from another's eyes

1
This is the usual story: Dinalapanika-Sukasaptati more reasonably starts
the progression not from the new moon but the end of a menstrual period.

107
 5

The Koka Shastra

and rain down thickly upon these places, then the love-
juice of woman begins to flow.
Such is an abbreviation of the 'calendar' theory as
taught by Nandikesvara. The matter is stated by Gonika-
—
putra more fully, thus the resting-places of love are the
head, breastbone, left and right hands, the two breasts, the
two thighs, the navel, the genital region, forehead, belly,
buttocks and back, then in the armpits, lower back and
arms.
Starting on the first day of the dark half of the month,
the God begins at the lowest point and moves upward
leaving the head on the first day of the light half of the
month he comes down again.
The experts of love denote sixteen daily stations in the
body of your gazelle-eyed lady, like so many sparks of fire.

On the first day, the lover brings his girl to orgasm by

embracing her neck, pressing kisses on her head, pressing
both her lips with his tooth-tips, kissing her cheeks,
ruffling up her hair, making gentle nailmarks on her back
and sides, plucking softly at her buttocks with his nail-
tips and softly making the sound sit.
On the second day, she comes to orgasm if, lovesick
from handling her breasts, you kiss the edges of her cheeks
and her eyes, pull on her two breasts with your nailtips,
suck her lips, tickle her armpits with your nails and em-
brace her closely.
On the third, you will have her in season by holding her
fast, ruffling the hair in her armpits, lightly nailprinting
her sides, putting your arms round her neck and savouring
her mouth and teeth, and giving the 'click' 1 nailmarks in
the region of the breasts.
On the fourth day, lovers reckon to hold a woman
tighter still, pull the two breasts hard together, bite the
lower lip, mark the left thigh with the nails, make the
1
acchurita —described later.

108
 The Koka Shastra

'click' several times in the armpits and polish the body of

Lady Lotus-Eyes with the water that comes from the
spring of her own love-juice.
On the fifth day, hold her by the hair with the
left hand,

bite her two lips, her hairs on end with a sinuous

and set
nail stroke starting at the nipple —
then passionately kiss
both breasts.
—
On the sixth day, bite her lips when she will begin to
tremble all over; start with the 'click' at the navel, then as
if drunk with love mark the rounds of both thighs with your

nails.
On the seventh day, bring her gently into condition by
rubbing the house of the Love-God with the hand, kissing
inside her mouth, running the nails around neck, breasts
and cheeks, and so preparing the theatre of the Deity for the
performance.
On the eighth day, embrace her with an arm round the
neck, nailmark her navel, bite her lips, make gooseflesh on
the rounds of her breasts and kiss them: press her hard in so
doing.
On the ninth day let your hand play with the cup of her
navel, bite her lips, pull on her breasts, set a finger in the
Love-God's house, and mark her sides with your nails.
On the tenth day, you can wake love by kissing her brow,
nailprinting her neck, and running your left hand round
her buttocks, breasts, thighs, ears and back.
On the eleventh day, she will come for nailmarks about
the neck, tight holding, kisses within her mouth, a sucking
kiss on the brow, a few blows over the heart given in jest,
and a hand that plays with the lock of the Love-God's
prison.
On the twelfth day, with an arm round her neck kiss
both cheeks and open her eyes with your fingers, give the
sound sit, and bite her within the mouth.
On the day of the Love-God (the thirteenth) she will
come quickly to orgasm by kissing her cheeks, pulling upon
109
 The Koka Shastra
her left breast, and slowly scratching her neck with the
fingernails.
On the day of the Love-God's Enemy (Siva) kiss her eyes,
play with your nails in her armpits, thrust your hand
elephant-trunk-wise into the strong-room of the Love-God,
and over her whole body.
At the New Moon and at the Full Moon, woman becomes
passionate you run your nails over the flat of her shoulders
if

and handle her queynt and her nipples.

110
 Ill

OF THE PHYSICAL TYPES

BY THEIR GENITAL CHARACTERS
(The system according to Vatsyayana)

According as their sexual member

nine or twelve
is six,

finger-breadths in length and circumference, or in depth

and diameter, men are divided into hares (£asa), bullocks
(vrsa), stallions (asva), and women into gazelles (mrgi),
mares (vadava) and elephants (hastini).
There are three 'even' combinations in sexual intercourse
— Gazelle/hare, mare/bullock, and elephant/stallion.
Gazelle/bullock and mare/stallion are termed 'high'
combinations (uccarata), mare/hare and elephant /bullock
are 'low' combinations (mcarata). The two extremes,
'very high' and 'very low', are gazelle/stallion and hare/
elephant. There are accordingly nine categories of coital
pair by size. Of these, the even combinations are con-
sidered the best; the high and low combinations are
moderately satisfactory, the very high and very low are a
misfortune. In the 'low' combinations the woman never
takes light and fails to get pleasure for lack of sufficient
friction between penis and queynt. In the 'high' forms she
is frigid and unsatisfied because continual pain and the

tenderness of her queynt afflict her heart, and the heart is

the essential seat of love.

Desire and its satisfaction in woman

Animalcules generated in the blood set up in the private
parts of women an irritation of desire which is little,
middling, or great according to the size of the animalcules.
From allaying of this itch by the vigorous thrusting of the
111
 The Koka Shastra
penis and the flowing of their love-juice, women experience
the need for visrsti, which is the female counterpart of
ejaculation. At the outset this sensation is unpleasant and
brings them little satisfaction, but at the climax they
experience a discharge like that of the man, which renders
them practically senseless with pleasure. One moment the
woman screams, moans, throws herself about and is dis-
tressed —the next she lies motionless and closes her eyes.
The speed of reaching orgasm in man and in woman
may be quick, medium or slow: there are therefore nine
possible combinations on the basis of time. Both sexes can
also be cold, moderately hot, or very hot by temperament,
and it is important at the outset for the connoisseur of love
to ascertain which —
there are nine possible combinations on
this basis too. A woman who is strong as a man, who can
take plenty of blows and scratches and who actively desires
intercourse is likely to be passionate —
in a woman of cold
temper the reverse is the case, and intermediate character-
istics suggest an intermediate disposition.

An even match in all these three characters offers the

best of coition — a mismatch in all three the worst of coition,
no better than that of beasts. Other combinations give
intermediate degrees of pleasure. The very high and very
low combinations should be wholly avoided. With these
rules I have put the whole matter in brief.
I will now describe the various types (mrgi etc.) and their
attributes according to the system of Vatsyayana.

The physical types of woman

The gazelle (mrgi) has a shapely head, thick curling hair, a
slender body with plump buttocks; little nostrils, flashing
teeth, beautiful red lips, rosy hands and feet,
lashes,
delicate well-proportioned arms, oval ears, cheeks and
throat; hips and thighs not overgrown, neat ankles, the
swaying gait of a mighty elephant. She is full of desire:
—
her breasts are high she is tender and easily moved as a

112
 The Koka Shastra
stalk of bamboo: of moderately hot temper, greedy for love-
making, eats little, has a love- juice that smells of flowers;
her fingers are even, her speech slow and tender, her queynt
is deep-set and six fingers in breadth and in depth. She is

straight-grown and amorous.

The mare (vadava) holds her head half-bent. She has
strong, smooth, supple hair, mobile as a lotus leaf, oval ears,
neck and face: prominent teeth, long lips, tight well-
filled breasts, very charming plump arms, a slender body
and hands soft as lotuses. Her breastbone is broad, she has an
attractive staccato speech, is restless with desire her navel is
$

—
deep and quite round she has fine hips, even, smooth
thighs, powerful buttocks, a deep-waisted figure, a lazy,

—
rocking gait pink, well proportioned feet, and a fickle
heart. She loves sleep and eating, she is affectionate, her
love-juice, which flows readily in intercourse from start
to finish, has a pleasant odour like sesame meal and is
yellow. She is fit at any moment for the love-struggle, and
has a nine-finger queynt.
The elephant (hastini) has a broad brow, broad cheeks,
ears and nostrils, short plump fingers, feet, arms and
thighs, a short, strong, and slightly bent neck, teeth which
show, and strong black hair. She is perpetually sick for
—
love-making her voice is in her throat and deep as an
elephant's —
her body is strong, she has a broad pendant
belly and lips. Her love-juice is abundant; she is red-eyed,
quarrelsome, with a genital odour like the 'tears' of a
rutting elephant. She commonly has many secret vices, is
unusually full of faults, can be won by brute force, and has a
twelve-finger queynt, which is the number ascribed to the
Sun.

The physical types of man

The hare (£a£a) has big, red eyes, small even teeth, a round
face;he dresses well, has well-shaped, soft, pink hands with
narrow fingers, is well-spoken, volatile in mood, soft-
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 —

The Koka Shastra

haired. His neck is not too long he $ is lean about the knees,
thighs, hands, genitals and feet. His appetite is small, his
manner unassuming, and he is not much given to copula-
tion. He shines with cleanliness, he makes money easily,
success inflates him; his seminal fluid has a pleasant odour
he is attractive to women and affectionate.
The bullock (vrsa) has a strong, erect head, a very broad
face and brow, a stout neck, fleshy ears, a rounded tortoise-
shaped body he is stout, with deep armpits, long dangling
$

—
arms, red hands and lips eyes like a lotus-leaf, red in the
corners, which have fine long lashes and stare straight at
you. He is spirited, with a swinging free gait, soft-spoken,
tough, generous, inclined to sleep long, broadminded; tall
but gangling, passionate in coition, capable of repeated
orgasm, phlegmatic, well-preserved in middle age, in-
clined to be over-corpulent, happy with any woman, and
having a penis nine fingers long or less.
Stallion (asva) is the name given to those who have very
long, but not lean, faces, ears, neck, lips and feet, fatty
armpits, fleshy arms and strong, soft, thick hair. They are
violently jealous —they have arched
feet, bowed knees, good
fingernails, long fingers,mobile eyes they are
large —
powerfully built but lazy. Their voice is deep and pleasant;
—
they walk fast; their thighs are plump they are fond of
women, talk loudly, are over-endowed with both bony and
seminal matter and tormented by lust. Their semen is salt,
yellow like fresh butter and very abundant they have a —
twelve-finger penis and a bulging breastbone of the same
length.
We may also encounter individuals, where the size of the
sexual organs diverges from these standards. These represent
very extreme or very poor examples of their type. Mixed
types are also encountered, with intermediate attributes. In
dealing with these the expert will go by the sum total of
characters present.

114
 —

IV

OF WOMEN BY THEIR AGES,

TEMPERAMENTS AND DISPOSITIONS

Of Ages
Until her sixteenth year is called bala. From sixteen
a girl
to thirty she is young woman), from thirty to
taruni (a
fifty she is —
praudha (experienced) from then on she is
1
vrddha (old).
(A woman who has long been away from her husband is

thin, dark, fragile, and lethargic, with deep armpits. A

woman who is enjoying regular intercourse is strong, golden-
skinned, and shining, with shallow armpits. Admixtures of
these characters give an intermediate type. 2 )
Now these are the characteristics of each:

A young who
is not yet mature must be approached
girl
by way of the forms of lovemaking a grown woman
'outer' —
who is fully relaxed sets her heart on the 'inner' forms.
The girl (bala) can be won by giving her betel-fruit,
promising her elaborate meals, by recounting all manner of
wonders to her, by the arts, and by games. The young
woman (taruni) responds to presents of alluring jewellery
the grown woman
(praudha) loves nothing more than long-
lasting love-play; the old woman is won by courteous
speeches and by stuffing her with promises of marriage.

Of Temperaments
The phlegmatic woman has knees, joints and knuckles
1
Commerce with each its effects on the man: 'Sleep with the
age has
bala and get the breath of life; sleep with the taruni and spend the breath of
life: sleep with the praudha and hasten old age: sleep with the vrddha and
hasten death.' (Ratimafijari.)
2
Schmidt's translation continues 'als Eigentumlichkeit jener kennt man
folgend' usw. But this seems to belong to the next paragraph and to deal with a
new topic, the tastes of experience and inexperience. The bracketed passage is
in any evenl out of place.

115
 —

The Koka Shastra

which are not prominent, gentle, quiet speech, and is soft
as a lotus. A woman
with hot limbs and prominent joints is
of the bilious temperament: the woman of aerial tempera-
—
ment is barren her limbs are part-cold, part-hot. The
phlegmatic woman is hot, but the bilious has a body as
cool as new butter—she is also proud.
The rules for intercourse with these three types (aerial,
bilious, phlegmatic) are these: in passion and speed of
orgasm they are respectively slow, medium and fast;
moist, hot, and deep-queynted; and most ready for coition
in the cold of winter, in the rainy season, and in the
month Madhu.
The diagnostic signs of these types to be observed in
practice are given by the Gunapataka 1 more fully as
follows:

The phlegmatic woman has fine nails, eyes and teeth,

is easy-tempered, proud, faithful, and has a cool, plump
queynt that is agreeable to the touch.
The bilious woman
is by nature flighty, and is inter-

mediate in characters between the other two types. She is

light-skinned, with hard breasts and rosy nails and eyes
her sweat is strong-smelling, she is alternately angry and
devoted, she loves cool and hates hot weather, she is hot
herself, she has a soft queynt, she is wily, competent, and
always most tender in intercourse.
The aerial woman is worth least of the three she is —
coarse, gadabout, and extremely talkative. Her hair is the
colour of slightly-singed wood —she eats a great deal, has a
cool body, and hard hairs with them
definite points to
she is strong, her nails and eyes are dark-coloured, and her
queynt is of the texture of a cow's tongue, rough to the
touch.
Intermediates between these types can be recognized
by a combination of characters.
1
A noted medical treatise, now apparently lost.

116
 The Koka Shastra

Of the sattvds {dispositions)

The goddess type (devasattva) has a clean, fragrant body,
and a serene face. She is rich in money and servants, and
very beautiful.
The human type (narasattva) is of even disposition,
versatile, loves entertaining and company, and can fast
without losing strength.
The snake-spirit type (nagasattva) sighs and yawns a
great deal, loves to trail about, is always falling asleep and
suddenly becoming active again.
The nature-spirit type (yaksasattva) has absolutely no
respect for dignified persons, likes public gardens and
taverns, delights in coition, and is liable to tantrums.
The gandharva (angel)-type (gandharvasattva) is the
title given to a woman
with no angry emotions, who wears
divine and dazzling clothes, loves garlands, perfumes and
incense, is a trained singer and player, and is educated in
the sixty-four Arts.
The is puffed up with pride,
devil-type (pi£acasattva)
eats far too much, has a body which is hot to the touch,
and loves red meat and strong drink.
The crow type (kakasattva) lets her eyes roll in all
directions, overeats until she is sick, and is full of un-
profitable activity.
A woman with a wandering eye, who loves to use nails
and teeth in the love-battle, and is of a fickle disposition, is
said to be monkey-minded (vanaraprakrtl); while one who
gives saucy and rude answers, and loves to run loose with
men, 1 is the donkey type (kharasattvika). 2

Summary concerning the Types of Woman

—
Of these various typologies by size of organs, by age, by
1
Lienhard's text reads, 'to beat her lover'.
2
This Thurberesque list by no means exhausts the sattvas; as with the
rasas, raginis and other typologies the rhetoricians delighted in multiplying
them indefinitely. The BharatiyanatyaSastra gives twenty-two sattvas, dis-
positions which are supposed to reflect the residues of a past, animal or other,
incarnation — applied to acquaintances they make an admirable party game.

117
 The Koka Shastra
constitution, by disposition —that by constitution is sover-
eign.Karnisuta and other authors have laid down the
manner of love-making proper to each. This summary of
the matter should be noted:

A pretty girl, of the phlegmatic constitution 5 a mare-

or gazelle-woman 5 an angel, yaksi, human or goddess-
type a young girl or one in the freshness of youth
; — this is

the ideal for those who desire pleasure in this world.

Of Things by which a Woman may be depraved

(strinasahetu)
Independence, living too long with parents, taking part in
public festivals, over-free behaviour in masculine company:
living abroad, having too many man-crazy friends, the
collapse of her own love affair, having an old husband,
jealousy, and travel —
these are the things by which a
woman may be ruined.

Of Aversion and its causes {Vairagyahetu)

Cowardice, lack of stamina, uncleanliness, avarice, ignor-
ance of the right times for love making, grossness, excessive
cruelty in love making, refusal to give them ornaments,
unjust railing at faults, oppressive sexual tastes, neglect, and
meanness inspire in the greatest aversion. A
women
woman will neither take note of such a man nor honour his
friends and acquaintances. She will resist him, become
weary in his company, and be pleased to part from him.
If he kisses her she will turn her face away she will have5

no wish to receive favours from him, be jealous, refuse to

answer when he speaks, resent it when he touches her, and
feign sleep when he comes to bed. These are the signs of
aversion.

Of Desire
The signs of desire, according to the Gunapataka, are

118
 —

The Koka Shastra

identical both in women who have already tasted coition
and in those who have not.
A girl in love sucks at her lips, her eyes stray about like
fish in a river pool, she wears flowers in her hair, binds it
up and then lets it down again her breasts show through
5

her clothes, her buttocks likewise —her girdle keeps slipping 1

however tightly she ties it. All these things serve in a woman
to make known that she is in love. If she longs for a man as
often as his face, his good looks, his conversation, his
virtues and his affection are praised ; and if, when he is not
present, she delights in hearing news of his acquaintances
and his friends — this too is a sign that she is in love.

The best times for intercourse

Desire for coition is strong in women when they are tired
from travel, convalescent from a fever, or weary with
dancing; about a month after delivery, and in the sixth
month of pregnancy. The most pleasing occasions for inter-
course are said to be at reunion after a long parting,
reconciliation after a quarrel, the first intercourse after
menstrual purification, and when the lady has been drink-
ing.
At the first love-battle 2 women commonly show only
moderate passion and take a long time to reach orgasm
at the second they are more passionate and come more
quickly. In men, the reverse is true.

Of the Orgasm, and its Restraint

Men normally attain orgasm more quickly than women.
Knowing this, the man must so handle the woman that she
is thoroughly moist beforehand.
1
No garment more fully an extension of its wearer, state of mind and all,
is

than the sari. It —

can be like sheet metal or it can simply dissolve. 'When he
came to my bed,' writes the poetess Vikatanitamba, 'the knot of my dress
untied itself and fell to my hips; checked by my girdle until that too dissolved.
—
So far I clearly remember but when he put his hand to me, o friend, may I
die if I remember any more
2
—
of myself, of him, of what he did to me!'
sc. the first of a series of unions: not defloration.

119
 The Koka Shastra
By knowing the influence of regional preferences, of
seasons, and and by regulating the use of the
of type,
'outer' embraces accordingly, he can make sure that, being
thoroughly aroused and deeply in love, she will wet quickly
and be quickly satisfied.
However passionate he may be, a man can remain in-
definitely potent if during intercourse he directs his thoughts
to rivers, woods, caves, mountains or other pleasant places,
and proceeds gently and slowly. If he imagines a particularly
nimble monkey swinging on the branch of a tree, he will
not ejaculate even though his semen is already at the tip of
his penis.

Of the forms of priti {desire)

A love which arises from an activity, 1 such as hunting,
painting, dancing, or vma-playing, is called by the learned

conditioned love (abhyasiki priti). That which comes neither

from an from circumstances, but arises spontane-
activity nor
ously in the heart, like the desire of eunuchs for oral
intercourse, or of men and women for kissing and embracing,
is called spontaneous (abhimanaja). Love that arises from

like-mindedness between lovers is called spiritual (vaisay-

iki) —
it arises from the soul and is accounted the deepest

of all.

What we have so far said of personal differences, of

bodily type, of age, and of other matters, and what we
shallnext say of local usages and tastes all this should be —
born in mind by the lover when he approaches a girl.

1
The sense might be 'from a shared activity' — i.e. when two music-
lovers fall in love, but the original sense is 'love of an. activity, and desire for it,

acquired by repeated enjoyment of it'.

120
 OF WOMEN BY CUSTOM AND PLACE
( Desasatmy am) 1

The women have fine manners,

of the Central Provinces
and and tooth-marking and kisses the women
dislike nail ;

of Avanti and Balh also: they like the more advanced

kinds of coition.
The woman of Abhira likes embraces but not nail and
tooth-marks; she enjoys erotic blows and her heart can be
won by kisses. The Malava woman has similar tastes.
The woman of Gujarat is a veritable abode of fun, a
treasure-house of love —she is kindly-spoken, experienced
in intimate devices of all kinds; she has beautiful hair, a
slim delicate figure —in love she quivers with excitement,
and is world-famous for her wantonness.
(The woman of Gujarat has flowing curls, slim figure,
luxuriant breasts, fine eyes, and pleasant speech, loves all
inner and outer forms of lovemaking, but not rough
handling, and is famous for love.) 2
The women who come from the district of the rivers
Iravati, Indus and Satadru, between the Vipas and the
1
Every textbook has a slightly different version of this gazetteer. For example:
'The women of Central India dislike wounds from nails or teeth, but enjoy
kisses and love -blows. The women of the Indus region like intercourse from
behind and hairpulling, those of Simhala like varied coital postures. The
beauties of Maharashtra, Strirajya and Ko^ala like kisses and embraces, and are
specially fond of artificial penile aids. The ladies of the Carnatic love bites and
scratches, blows, intercourse stark naked, and penile devices, and are greedy
for a man's sexual parts. The Dravidian girls like kisses, hairpulling, tongue-
and breast-pressing, testes (?), and blows on the body. The ladies of Bengal
are particularly fond of varied coital poses, kisses and embraces, love long
kisses, have very tender bodies, and are devoted to pilgrimages and processions.
The girls of Nepal won't stand blows or rough embraces. .
.' (Smaradipika.)
.

How simple, to be able to proceed upon such clear-cut assumptions!

2
The bracketed passages, taken from Schmidt, are alternative versions.

121
 The Koka Shastra
Vitasta, and from the Candrabhaga can only be won (or
'brought to orgasm'?) by genital kisses. 1
The woman becomes intensely passionate with
of Lata
gentle love-blows, and the use of nails and teeth she —
loves embraces, is very fiery, has very delicate limbs, and
dances at the prospect of the pleasure.
The Andhra woman oversteps the bounds of decent
—
behaviour and loves coarse manners she becomes sick with
passion, is an adept at the 'mare's coitus' (vadavaka, le
pompoir) and is very gentle.
The women of Strirastra and Kosala can be aroused by
the use of an artificial penis. They like to be struck hard,
and their queynt gives vigorous twitches.
The women of Maharastra talk rudely, like peasants, are
shameless, and find occasion for all the sixty-four arts of
lovemaking. This is equally true of Pataliputra women:
but they are more secretive about it.
The women of Dravida can be excited by persistently
stroking them, within and without, in the different forms
of 'outer' embrace, but respond slowly. They have a very
abundant love-juice and reach complete orgasm in the
very first coital embrace.
The Vanivasa (North of Kerala) women make great fun
of physical defects in others, but take pleasure in con-
cealing their own, are of moderate passion, and stand any
kind of treatment.
The Lady-of-the-Buttocks from Gauda and Vanga (West
Bengal) has a dainty, slim body, sweet voice, medium
passion, a rapid walk, and no taste for love-battles.
The woman of Kamarupa (Assam, Manipur) is as delicate

1
Lienhard reads 'by intercourse in the inverse position'. Schmidt's MS
has unequivocally auparistena. Auparistaka in Vatsyayana is the genital kiss
given to either sex ——a gloss in the Ratirahasyadipika has 'auparistakam
nama bhagacusanam' *au.: that is, kissing the queynt'. Some authorities,
e.g.Smaradipika, give to the women of Sindh a taste instead for adhomukharata,
coition from behind. Confusion is possible here with mukharata, soixante-
neuf. For the general subject of oral practices see note to p. 124.

122
 The Koka Shastra

ANCIENT
INDIA
IN CIRCA IOOOA.D.

as a mimosa, becomes very passionate, can be excited simply

by running the fingers over her, but responds fully only to
the Theatre of the Love-God (i.e. to her vulva); she has
very pleasant speech.
The woman of Utkala (Orissa) has a powerfully passionate
nature, loves tooth and nail-play, and is specially delighted
by genital kisses —the girls of Kalinga likewise.
The woman of Kuntala gets the greatest pleasure from
123
 The Koka Shastra
allthe types of nail-marking, from hard blows, and for the
different techniques of genital kiss —
she longs for un-
exampled love-battles, has no inhibitions, and much passion.
(The woman of Andhra is skilled only in the bonds of
love, 1 the Cola woman is refined: the Carnatic woman is

clever inmanaging coitus; the woman of Lata likes the far-

fetched: the Malava woman is spiteful, the woman of
Maharastra knows the Arts thoroughly the woman of —
Surastra has gazelle-eyes, the woman of Gujarat speaks
nicely and loves artificial devices. 2 ) 3

1
premanibandhanaikanipuna: Probably 'skilled only in the bandhas': it
could conceivably mean 'skilled in erotic bondage' i.e. ligotage, mekhala-
bandha, binding her lover with her girdle and administering a forced orgasm
—
when he is helpless, as a mock-punishment as in Raghuvamsa xix, 17, and a
terracotta from Chandraketugarh (Ind. Archaeol. 1957-8 pi. 73 b, c). This is
another universal ingredient of European and American 'albums' which, like
flagellation, is missing from Vatsyayana. In India, as in Italy, it is the per-
quisite of the woman to be the fiercer in applying it — the Italian tag runs
'In the battle of Love
You bind her like flowers
But she binds you like a traitor':
in Chinese and Islamic erotology the aggressor is usually the man. One Indian
version has 'clever at tying love-spells'.
2
penile devices, apadravyas, are presumably meant. See p. 142, note.
3
—
This account is obviously composite and sometimes inconsistent possibly
the different versions reflect tastes in different periods: owing to the sanctity of
tradition, addition is the only kind of correction which a pandit would permit
himself. The attribution of regional taste for orogenital contacts is incon-
sistent, as in most Indian erotic texts. Under cusana, genital kisses given by
man to woman are attributed along with axillary kisses to the inhabitants of
Lata, from the Kama-Sutra on. Vatsyayana devotes a section to orogenital
intercourse (auparistaka) — fellation is a technique practised by feminized
—
eunuchs, prostitutes and homosexual friends some pandits condemn it,
while others hold that 'three mouths are pure, the calf's while it suckles, the
dog's when he hunts, and the woman's when she makes love'. Of the converse,
from man to woman, and the mutual genital kiss (kakila, mukharata) he says,
'for love of this, certain whores will abandon the company of upright, virtuous
and noble men of munificence, and take up with servants, base-born indi-
viduals, elephant -drivers and the like'. The Kandarpacudamani, the rhymed-up
version of Vatsyayana, expresses King Virabhadra's disapproval of the practice,
and includes it only out of fidelity to the Master: 'for in editing another man's
book one is bound, though in writing one's own book, one may do as one
wishes'. Kokkoka, as we shall see, neatly side-steps the question. The late
erotic writers are less condemnatory; Smaradipika including mukharata as a
bandha, and Ratimafljari giving it as the normal preparatory technique for a
Sankhini. The general ambivalence, regional attribution, upper-class and

124
 —

The Koka Shastra

This the teaching of the Sage (Vatsyayana) concerning
is

local usages. A young girl from a strange part of the

country should be studied accordingly: her inborn in-
clinations can be found only from experience where the —
two conflict, personal taste is more important than local
custom. 1
When you have considered this discrepancy between
individual preference and local custom, and also somato-
type, speed of reaching orgasm, degree of response, age-
group, and constitutional type, you can proceed accordingly
— first to the appropriate 'outer' and then to the 'inner'

forms of lovemaking. Begin with the 'outer' forms the —

first of these is the embrace (alingana). Here it is necessary

to distinguish two types —

one for use before love-play has
begun, and the other for use when it is established. There
are twelve manners of embracing, which we will next
describe.

Brahminic disapproval but widespread practice, closely resemble the conflict

of attitudes in European 'overt' and folk- cultures. All forms of orogenital
contact are meanwhile celebrated with enthusiasm in temple sculptures,
especially those thought to represent temple prostitutes, as at Konarak
often in a peculiar suspended position, with the man standing and the woman
inverted. This emphasis almost certainly reflects the Taoist-Tantric theory of
the absorption of virtue from Woman, the 'medicine of the Three Mountains',
(tongue, breast and vulva), of Chinese alchemy (van Gulik, 1961. This whole
theory might, indeed, be taken as a manifestation of regressive orality). The
reason that this idea does not figure in the erotic texts is that their matter
probably antedates its appearance in India. Vatsyayana's own final word
exhibits a rational tolerance unlike anything in Western literature before the
—
advent of modern sexual psychology he concludes that the matter is ana-
logous to the eating of dog-meat; not a vice, but not everyone's choice
'accordingly, when you have taken the regional custom, the age, the general
usage, the literature and yourself into account, you will decide which of these
opinions you will obey, and which not. Since tastes differ and the matter is
private, who can lay down who shall do which, and with what, and to whom?'
—
The late authors take these techniques as a matter of course the Kokkokam
reinstates seven modes of auparistaka by the woman from Vatsyayana, with the
recommendation that the member 'should be shaven, perfumed and neighbour
to a seemly pouch', the Ratiratnapradipika (vi, 39-53) gives several modes of
kiss to be given by the man to the woman.
1
This is in fact Vatsyayana's teaching. Some texts of the Ratirahasya reverse
the priorities (custom overrides personal inclination). Lienhard's version gives
both opinions consecutively.

125
 VI

OF EMBRACES
(Alingana)

It is time now to describe the 'outer' modes of lovemaking,

beginning with embraces, of which we recognize two classes
— depending upon whether the game of love has already
—
begun or no and in all twelve manners.
When a man meets a woman on some other errand, and
contrives in so doing to touch her body, this is the embrace
by touching (sprstaka).
If they walk together at a procession, or in the dark, and
their bodies touch for a considerable time, this is the embrace
by rubbing (udghrstaka). If one presses the other against a
wall, it becomes the embrace by pressing (piditaka).
If She-of-the-Buttocks 1 contrives to cling to, or en-
compass, the man with her two breasts, while he sits or
stands, so that their eyes meet, and he takes hold of her,
it is the clinging 2 embrace (viddhakajya).

For two that have not yet declared their love, there are
thus four embraces by which they can make known their
mind for those who have shared love-pleasure already, the
5

ancients have recognized eight embraces by which desire

may be quickened.
When the slender woman mimics
the wanton tendril of
a climbing plant and lassoos her lover, as a liana entangles a
tree, making softly the sound 'sit', giving little cries of
love,and pulling down his face for a kiss, this is the liana
embrace (latavestitaka). 3
1
nitambini, a kavl-samaya or Homeric epithet: the nayika is callipygic, as
Athene was owl-eyed, ex officio.
3
Most authorities have 'piercing, boring', 'Clinging' is Lienhard's sug-
gestion — it makes better sense if his alternative derivation holds.
3
The Ratimafijari gives this as a bandha, but makes the man enlace the
woman, presumably lying down. The standing embrace appears as a bandha in
the Khajuraho friezes.

126
 The Koka Shastra
Ifwith sighs she stands with one foot on her lover's foot,
puts the other on his hip, one arm round his waist and the
other round his shoulder, so that when he kisses her she
climbs as if climbing into a tree, the Founder of our subject
called this the tree-climbing embrace (vrksadhirudha). 1
These two manners are for use when standing the —
following embraces are for lovers lying together. When
the couple embrace crossing arms and thighs as if in an
equal struggle, the game leads on to the 'inner' forms of
lovemaking, and they lie together motionless, body to body,
the Founder of our subject called this the 'sesame-and-rice'
embrace (tilandulaka).
When the woman lies in her lover's lap or on the bed,
with her face turned to his, giving him sweet and close
embraces and both press body to body heedlessly, in a
5

storm of passion, this is the embrace known as 'milk-and-

water' (ksiranira).
When the husband has well set the stage of the love
God and tightly clasps the thighs of his aroused wife
between his own thighs, this is called by experts the thigh
embrace (urupaghuhana).
When the woman her hair and her clothes,
let fly
presses her genital to his thighs and climbs over him to
give him kisses, nail and toothmarks, this the Founder of
the subject called the pubic embrace (jaghanopaguhana).
If in her passion she presses hard into the breast of her
lover, letting him feel the weight of her own breasts, it is
the breast embrace (stanalingana).
When the couple set mouth to mouth, eye to eye, so
that their breastbones strike together, this is the sternal
embrace (lalatikS).

1 'Lovers
risen from bed seek to have their mistress' soft arms round their
—
neck, and the soles of her feet placed on top of their own feet this is a special
kind of kissing at dawn.' (Vasanta Vilasa.)

127
 VII

OF KISSES
(Cusana)

The sites prescribed for kisses are the eyes, the neck and
cheeks, the gums and within the mouth, the breasts and
the space between the breasts. In Lata the people also have
the habit, according to their custom, of giving passionate
kisses on the genitals, the region below the navel, and the
armpits.
The formal kiss (nimitaka) is that given when a woman is
made by force to set her lips to a man's, but remains
looking straight in front of her.
The suction kiss (sphuritaka) is that in which she makes a
bud would take hold of her
of her lower lip as if she
husband's lower lip and pull it, but does not pull it.
The thrusting kiss (ghattitaka) is when she takes her
husband's lips and holds them gently with hers, covers his
eyes with her hand, and thrusts her tongue a little way
into his mouth.
When the man, from below, takes her chin and shakes
her face a little from side to side while each sucks upon the
lower lip of the other, it is the wandering kiss (bhranta).
The crosswise kiss (tiryak) is a form of this, in which she
is kissed in profile from the side. Both the foregoing are
called pressure kisses (piditaka) when the lower lip is held
—
with pressure the man opens her lips with his tongue,
holds her lower lip with two fingers and presses it with his
teeth only so hard as to give her pleasure.
When in kissing the man bites the upper lips, this is the
upper lip kiss (uttarostha). When in a kiss given by husband
to \vife, or wife to husband if he be cleanshaven, both lips
i

128
 The Koka Shastra
ofone are taken and pressed between both lips of the other,
it is the closed kiss (samputa). This becomes tongue-

—
wrestling (jihvayuddha maraichignage) 1 when their two
tongues meet and struggle with each other.
(As for kisses other than on the mouth), upon any of the
prescribed places they can be light, medium, pressing, or
heavy.
When the husband comes home late and kisses the
woman sleeping, or pretending to sleep, these are the two
varieties of the awakening kiss.
Another manner of kiss is the picture-kiss, given by
proxy to a portrait, a mirror, etc. This is proper to man or
woman, and is used to declare a new love.
Embracing a child or a statue as indications of desire are
examples of the transferred kiss (samkranta).

1
PadmaSri (NagaraSarvasva) gives also three special tongue kisses —the
needle (suci) when it is inserted pointwise in the woman's mouth, pratata
when it is broadened inside like a leaf, and kari, when it is made to quiver.
Unlike any of the other writers he classes kisses as voiced and unvoiced, the
voiced variety corresponding to the sitkrta (love cries) of other writers.

129
 VIII

OF LOVE-MARKS 1

(Nakhacchedya)

On the armpits, the arms, the thighs, the pubic region, the
breasts and neck, a couple of fiery disposition will make nail-
marks. Nailmarks are also made by less passionate couples,
especially at first coitus, when making up a quarrel, after
menstruation, when they have been drinking, or when they
are about to be separated (by a journey or some other
cause). The have large,
nails of passionate lovers should
strong tipsthey should be allowed to grow but not to
5

—
become dirty they are pliant, shining, and free from
ridges or cracks. 2
A on the cheek or between the breasts,
light touch
given with all five nails, enough to leave a faint line and set
the hairs on end, is called acchurita (the click) from the
sound cata-cata produced as the fingernails strike the
thumbnail.
A curved line (ardhacandra, ardhendu)
the half- is

moon two 5 of these drawn face to face were

by the called
chief authority (Vatsyayana) the circle (mandalaka), and
he prescribes its use on the upper pubic region, the hollows
and the thighs. A definite scratch two or three
of the loins,
thumb-breadths long is the line (rekha).
The peacock-foot (mayurapadaka) is made by putting the

1
'The "dot" on your lip, the "necklace" on your neck, the "hare-jump"
—
on your breast one may see, O beauty, that your lover knows the literature of
the flower-arrowed God!' (Ksemendra.)
8
'The finest such nails are found among the Gauda people (Bengali), who
do not scratch, but only touch with them. The southerners, who scratch really
hard, have short, strong nails which will stand up to such use' (YaSodhara).

130
 The Koka Shastra
thumbnail below the nipple, the fingers above, and drawing
them together to meet at the areola. The hare-jump
(sasaplutaka) is made by catching the breast around the
nipple with all five nails together. A scratch on the breast or
the girdle-path (strip which the girdle covers) is called
from its shape the lotus-leaf (utpalapattraka). Three or four
deep scratches on the pubic region or the breasts are
prescribed by the experts before parting on foreign travel,
as a keepsake. 1

Of Tooth-marking {Dasanacchedya)
Teeth should be polished, sharp-edged, neither too large
nor too small, or good colour, even, and without gaps
between them. They may be applied to all the sites pre-
scribed for kisses, except the inside of the mouth and the
eye.
The hidden bite (gudhaka) is a small red mark, especially
on the lower lip. The swollen bite (ucchunaka) is made by
pressure, on the lip or the left cheek. A longer pressure in
these places produces what is called 'stone against coral'
(pravalamani).
The dot (bindu) is a small round wound, the size of a
sesame grain, made on the lip with two teeth only. When
a mark is made by all the teeth it is called the necklace, or
row of dots, and is an ornament for the armpit, between
the breasts, the neck, or the groins (bindumala).
A mark like a irregular circle made on the soft part of
the breasts with all the teeth is called the broken cloud

1
'When a woman sees such a mark on an intimate part of her body, an old
love suddenly becomes new. Such marks must never be made on another
. . .

man's betrothed, however. Special marks as keepsakes or to heighten passion

should only be made on covered parts of the body' (Vatsyayana) usually the —
'girdle-path' or under the arm, in Temple sculpture. On the visible parts
'the sight of such marks worn by a beautiful young girl make even a complete
stranger wishful' (Kandarpacudamani). Nail and toothmarks play a large part
in the denoument of Indian stories —
often made on a leaf, a flower, or a
letter and sent as aphrodisiacs by proxy.

131
 The Koka Shastra
(khandabhraka). A long deep double-row of prints with a
dark-red bruise between them, proper to the convexity of
the breasts, is the boar-mark (varahacarvitaka). 1

1
'If, when he cannot get his own way, the man bites or scratches her, she

—
should not suffer it, but should pay him back double for the Dot a proper
reply is the Necklace, for the Necklace the Broken Cloud. She should fight
back, and pretend to be enraged. If he takes her by the hair she should fix her
mouth to his when he offers it, hold him tightly, and as if drunken with love
bite him here and there. If he rests his head on her breasts and offers his neck,
she should give him the Necklace, and the other marks she knows.
'Next day she will smile in secret when she sees her lover publicly wearing
the marks which she has made, but she will frown and scold him when he
makes her show the marks upon herself.
'Two people who are so embarrassed by their mutual passion will not see
their love decay, even in a hundred years!' Vatsyayana, Kama Sutra 5, 12.

132
 —

IX

OF COITION AND THE VARIOUS

COITAL POSTURES

(Bandhas)

The Preparation
The proficient lover receives in a brightly-lit room filled
with flowers incense is burning; he wears his most hand-
;

some clothes, and has all his retinue present. He sets his
lady, adorned with all her jewels, on his left, and begins a
lively conversation with her. Presently he puts his left
—
arm gently round her he keeps contriving to touch the
edge of her dress, her hands, her breasts and her girdle;
he starts singing her cheerful songs. When he sees that
her desire is awakening, he sends the rest of the company
away. He begins to kiss her repeatedly on the forehead,
chin, cheeks and the tip of her nose — he presses her gums
and tongue with his own, making the sound 'sit' continually,
and implants the 'click' (acchurita) nailmark on the area
just below the navel, on her breasts, and on her thighs,
and loosens her girdle as soon as she gains confidence,
taking care that she has no chance to lose the boldness she
has gained. If she shows displeasure, he kisses the lobes of
her ears, presses the tip of his penis against the house of the
Love God, puts his mouth to hers, holds her tightly round
the body with both his arms, and finally plays the game of
groping in her queynt with his hands.

Description of the Queynt

In woman the house of the Love God is of four kinds
smooth within like a lotus: covered with small knots: or

133
 The Koka Shastra
rugose: or rough like a cow's tongue. Each of these is
softer and responds more quickly than the next.
The vulva contains a tube shaped to the penis, which is
the swing in which the Love-God rides. Opened with two
fingers, it causes the love-juice to flow this tube and the —
sunshade of the Love God (vagina and clitoris) are the two
organs characteristic of Woman. The Sunshade of the
Love God is a nose-shaped organ placed just above the
entrance of the God's dwelling, and full of the veins which
secrete the juice of love. Not far from it, within the vulva, is
a duct purnacandra (full moon), which is filled with this
juice (Bartholin's duct?). There is also another vascular
area (the vestibule?): when these three zones are rubbed
with the finger, the woman is brought into condition.
From among various names varieties of such finger-
play, 1 I will mention only the following: that of the
Elephant's Trunk, that of the Snake-coil, the half-moon
(ardhendu 2 ) and the goad of Kama (Madanankhusa).

The conduct of intercourse

A can be roused by strongly stimulating the
difficult girl
anterior blood-vessel 3 with the thumb and finger for as

1
According to the Kokkokam, these are:
—
karikara with the second, third and fourth fingers, keeping the thumb
and index closed
—
kamayudha with the middle and little fingers joined to the thumb
—
kamausadha with the middle and little, joined in the shape of a crescent
moon
madanankhusa — with ring and middle fingers
manmathapataka—with middle and little fingers
—
stotra little finger only.
Avoidance of the index finger as too heavy is a piece of advice which no
Western text on marriage counselling seems to have discovered. The Indian
lover normally uses more than one finger at a time, keeping the tips together.
Padma6ri gives a different series: karana (index finger only), kanaka (index
behind middle finger), vikana (middle behind index), pataka (both together,
extended), trisula (index, middle and ring, trident- wise). These are apparently
for vaginal rather than external stimulation.
* With the curved finger, 'insertion, in a fully-experienced woman, of a

finger in the vulva' (atipraudhastriyonyanguliyojanam) Sabdakalpadruma.

3
The vestibule, not the clitoris.

134
 The Koka Shastra
long as is necessary. When the kingdom of the Love God
has been fully prepared by the help of nail and tooth-
marks, kisses, embraces and fingerplay, one can proceed
to the use of the penis.

The methods of sexual intercourse

When he has given the 'outer' embraces in the approved
manner and sees that his wife is inflamed, the husband will
penetrate her with a weapon which should be commen-
surate to her parts.
By lying with the thighs together, a wide queynt can be
—
made tighter if it is too tight, by lying with her thighs
wide apart she can open it. For a 'low' connection (nicarata)
she must in taking her pleasure close a queynt that is too
large —
for the 'high' form (uccarata) she needs to widen it,
and for an even connection (samarata) she will let it be.
The sage Vatsyayana has designated five manners of
carnal copulation, namely supine (uttanaka), lateral (tiryak),
seated (asitaka), standing (sthita) and prone (anata). I will

now recount in full the various forms of these. Of the many

uttanaka-bandhas two are prescribed for samarata, three for
uccarata, and four for nicarata but for these the Sage made
5

no rule.
If the woman lies on her back with the man upon her,
both her legs being between his thighs, it is the country
manner (gramya), and the town manner (nagaraka) if her
legs are outside his. 1 (Werkerle, I, variants.)

1
'If woman locks her thighs around her lover, this is ratipasa (the noose
the
of Rati), much loved by passionate women.' (Smaradipika.) (Weckerle 1, VI.)
In Weckerle's system, all the different postures derived from the 'usual'
face to face position by leg raising, leg crossing, etc., are treated as variants.
These distinctions make up a large number of the Indian bandhas in view —
of the striking differences in sensation between them, the Indian view here
appears the more practical. Flanquette and cuissade positions (half-front and
half-back postures with one partner astride a single leg of the other) do not
seem to figure in the classical Sanskrit canon at all, though they are common
in Orissan picture-books, and must surely have been as much used in India
as by European lovers today.

135
 The Koka Shastra
If she rests her buttocks on her hands, raising her
queynt, and puts her heels outside her hips, while her
lover holds her by the two breasts, it is utphullaka (the open
flower).
If she raisesboth legs obliquely, spreading her queynt
wide to let him in, it is called jrmbhitaka (gaping).
If she sets his legs equally to her sides, while grasping his
sides with her knees, this device, to be learned only by
practice, is called Indra's wife 1 (Indranika). (Weckerle 5.)
If both in coition keep their legs extended, it is sampu-
taka 2 (the box), of which there are two forms according as
the woman lies on her back or on her side.
If further she presses her extended thighs tightly to-
gether it is piditaka (the squeeze) and if she crosses them,
vestitaka (the clasp), 3
If the man remains still, and she 'swallows* the penis
with the lips of her queynt, it is the mare's coitus
(vadavaka).
If she presses her thighs tightly together, raises them and
embraces them firmly, it is bhugnaka (the curved), and
if she places her two soles to his chest it becomes urahs-

—
pnutana (chest-splitting) if one foot is extended, it is
termed 'the half-squeeze' (ardhanapidita). (Weckerle, I,

variants.)
both the woman's legs are laid on the man's shoulders,
If
it isthe jrmbhitaka manner. 4 (Weckerle I, XII). If one leg is
kept down and extended it is the outstretched manner
(sarita) (Weckerle I, XI) this, if carried out with frequent
;

alternation of the legs, becomes the celebrated 'reed-

splitting' (venuvidarita) (venudaritaka). If one leg is kept

1
Or 'the lock' —according to Ya^odhara, Indrais the god of locks and

puzzles: Indranika = Her culeus

nodus.
2 In
the version given by the Smaradipika the man kneels.
3
Lienhard has 'alternately crosses and opens'.
4
In other textbooks, this form of it is called samapada, kakapada (crow-
foot) or nagapada (elephant- foot). 'It is to be used with a taruni' (Paflcasayaka).

136
 The Koka Shastra
down and the other foot placed on the man's head it is the
spearthrust 1 (£ulacitaka).
If putting her soles together the woman lays both feet to
the man's navel it is the crab (karkataka).
If in the same position she thrusts violently with her
feet it is the swing (prenkha).
If she lays each foot on the opposite thigh, it is padmasana
(the lotus seat) or the half-lotus (ardhapadmasana) if only
one foot is crossed.
If she passes her arms under her knees and round her
neck, and her lover then holds her tightly about the neck,
passing his arms between hers, it is known to experts as the
cobra-noose (phanipasa).
If the girl lays her fingers to her big toes and the man,
slipping his arms under her knees, clasps her round the
neck, it is the trussed position (samyamana).
If he then takes her setting mouth to mouth, arm to
arm and leg to leg it is the tortoise (Kaurma).
If finally she raises her thighs, keeping them tightly

1
He is 'impaled', as seen from behind, her extended leg being the spearhaft,
and the point, her other foot, coming out at the top of his head.
There are several more of these closely-similar semi -lateral or foot-raising
positions; another name for the ardhanapiditabandha is venika ('the man puts
—
one of the woman's feet to his breast, the other on the bed this position
should be used with a praudha' Ananga Ranga) it is also called upavitaka
(Paflcasayaka): other related positions are viparitaka (one foot held by the
—
man, the other on his shoulder Smaradipika) and ekapada (one foot held by
the man, the other on the ground, while she holds him around the neck).
In Smaradipika this is to be performed lying down in Dinalapanika- —
Sukasaptati it is a standing position. 'If the man stands on his own feet, and
holds up both the woman's feet, it is Kulisa (the thunderbolt)' Smaradipika.
Traivikrama (the tripod) is given in Ananga Ranga as another name for
sulacitaka: in the Paflcasayaka it is a different, semi-standing position 'the
—
man stands on his own feet, places one foot of the woman on the ground, and
raises the other in his hand, while she rests her hands on the ground', i.e.
in a backward-bent hand-stand on one foot and two hands, a much more
difficult matter (Weckerle 238). The NagaraSarvasva has a hanupadabandha
in which the woman's feet are raised to her chin —
in Ratimanjari this is
called utkantha, the throat position.

137
 The Koka Shastra
together, and he presses them with (between) his feet, it is

(a form of) piditaka. 1

These are the frontal positions (uttanaratas). I now
proceed to the tiryak (lateral) positions.
If the man's thighs are placed between the woman's,
this was called by the sages samudga (the chest) (Weckerle
8), and if in the course of it either partner turns away from

1
The eight 'advanced' positions in this section appear to be based on hatha-
yoga gymnastics. The account of the tortoise (kaurma) position presents some
difficulties: these more complicated bandhas do not figure in Vatsyayana.
—
Kaurma is here given as a lying (uttana) bandha in all other textbooks it is
classed as upavista (seated). The simplest interpretation is that (Ar. El modak-
hali) shown in some Indian pictures on the Konarak wheels, and in Temple
reliefs, which accords with the definition, 'mouth to mouth, arm on arm, leg
on leg' (Weckerle 99). But the basic position for the phanipaSaka bandha is the
quite different hatha -yoga posture known as the tortoise (uttana- kaurmaka-
sana): in this, the arms are passed through the knees and round the neck, but
with the legs crossed in padmasana.
Ananga Ranga and Kamaprabodha give three related postures, all upavista:
(1) bhandurita ('bound'); in which both partners pass arms through knees
and around their own necks.
(2) phanipasa — unclear, but they apparently pass arms round each others'
necks. Lienhard's text of the Ratirahasya gives this version as the phanipasa (ka);
the Smaradipika has a nagapasaka-bandha in which 'the man (only) passes his
arms through his knees and round the girl's neck'.
(3) kaurmaka — described as 'mouth to mouth, arm on arm, leg on leg:
this becomes parivartita if the woman raises her legs erect'.
Dinalapanika-^ukasaptati, to simplify matters yet further, has another
kurma (ghanakurmabandha) or 'close' tortoise-position 'when the man puts
both feet to the girl's breasts and both her feet on his shoulders, and they hold
hands' — in effect a 'closed' and sitting version of the more familiar European
position in which, starting with the woman sitting astride, both partners lie
back until they are flat, pubis to pubis, with the man's feet to the woman's
breasts and her feet on his shoulders (Weckerle 6, 12). This in turn is closer
to what D.-S. terms devabandha (the god's position), where each places feet
to the other's breast and they lean apart holding hands, but is also related to the
Ratirahasya's kaurma.
The names of bandhas, beside being inconsistent, do not always indicate any
connection with yogic asanas of the same name. In Din.-S. there is a kukku-
tabandha involving the difficult asana of that name (the man lies on his back,
the woman sits upon him in padmasana, then supports herself on her two
hands, passed through her folded thighs, like the feet of a cock — and the
hamsalilakabandha requires the woman to lie in dhanurasana, but the mayura
(peacock) and matsya- (fish) bandhas have no connection with similarly -
named yogic asanas, the first being the name of a dance step and the second
describing the look of the bandha.

138
 —

The Koka Shastra

the other (a trick which requires practice) it is parivartanaka
(the turn-away). 1 (Weckerle, 10?)
Seated positions (asitaka-bandhas). If man and woman
sit facing each other, each with one leg extended and the

other drawn up, it is the two-footed position (yugmapada). 2

If the man sits between the forearms 3 of a beautiful
woman and takes her by repeatedly shaking his thighs, it

is the friction (vimarditaka) position (Weckerle, 108),

which becomes markatika (the monkey position) if she
faces the opposite way. 4 (Weckerle, 118.)
These are the regular forms of copulation. I will now
deal separately with the 'picture' positions (citramohana).
When a couple stand up, leaning for support against
a wall, a pillar or a tree (sthita —standing— positions) there
are four modes of proceeding. If the man passes his arms
under the girl's knees and raises her for penetration, while
she puts her arms round his neck, it is the knee-elbow
position (janukurpura) the name being compounded of
'knee' and 'elbow'. (Weckerle, 235, 212.)
If (only) one leg 5 is raised it is Hari's step (harivikrama).

1
The commentary to the Kama Sutra has 'if she embraces his back while
he turns the upper part of his body away' after intromission in the preceding
position.
2
Each extends the same (R or L) leg, and locks the other behind the
partner's back (Ratirahasyapidika).
8
'Forearms' Schmidt —
'knees' Lienhard's text. The sense is almost un-
affected —
see next note.
4
—
She sits or kneels astride his lap he leans back on his hands with his
legs extended and raises himself off the ground (Weckerle 118). The most
popular sitting position (with the woman astride, legs about the waist), the
sitting-form of the avalambitaka-bandha which follows, called in Ananga
Ranga kirti, the glory (Ar. Dok El-arz) is missing here, but occurs in the
Konarak wheel-decorations, and in Nagarasarvasva, where it is called lalita-
bandha. Far more remarkable than the inclusion of unusual positions is the
exclusion of such common ones. The absence of all the flanquette and cuissade
positions has already been noted. Sedentary averse positions occur in sculpture
and pictures but, among texts, only in the Din.-Sukasaptati.
6
Or possibly 'if (from the last position) she raises one leg vertically'
i.e. one leg over his arm, the other pointing straight up. It is to be preferred

for a taruni says Ananga Ranga. The reference is to the Strides of Vishnu

139
 —

The Koka Shastra

If she places her two soles in his two hands, while he
leans back for support against the wall, it is the two-sole

position (dvitala). (Weckerle, 234.)

If she sits in his hands with her arms round his neck and
her legs round his waist, moving herself by putting the
toes of one foot against the wall, throwing herself about,
crying out and gasping continually, this is the suspended
position (avalambitaka). 1 (Weckerle, 211.)
In the vyanata positions, the woman goes down on all

(Hari) when He encompassed the Universe. He is usually shown standing on

one foot and raising the other above his head.
1
Ar. Dok El-outed. Sthita-bandhas, probably for reasons of design, are by far
the commonest citrarata or 'picture -positions' in Temple art. Most coital
representations of true maithunas are of this kind in Indian (though not in
Nepalese) temples, the exceptions being semi-standing vyanata positions
other postures occur chiefly in the orgiastic friezes of Kaula-inspired temples,
which are not strictly maithunas, or square panels like those of Konarak and
the Brahmesvara temple at Bhubaneswar, as well as the Konarak wheel
bosses. These include both asitaka and averse positions not described in the
erotic texts.
It is odd, nevertheless, that the detailed accounts of citrarata in the erotic
textbooks miss out a great many of the commonest sculptural bandhas.
The divergences cannot be arbitrary, because the omitted postures recur
perpetually in different temples. It is not possible from the textbooks to name
the common bandhas in iconography as one can name mudras or asanas. In
fact the postures in the orgiastic friezes (if we exclude oral activities, about
which all the books are reticent, and static tours -de -force like the mystical
bandha which has displaced the Deity from the centrepiece of the Khajuraho
friezes) are much easier to identify in the erotic Masters than those of the
—
maithunas proper. Possibly this is a matter of date or the textbooks may have
been influenced and modified by being used as guides to secular coital practice.
The differences would be unremarkable if it were not for the zeal with which
Hindu art usually adheres to specification: secular poets were heavily censured
by commentators for describing lovers' embraces which did not square with the
rules of Classical erotology. One favourite maithuna position (a sthita-
—
yugmapada-bandha it does not appear to have a name) is difficult, but
neither this nor the other variants can have been excluded from the textbooks
on practical grounds, in view of what is already included. The most likely reason
that the matter of the textbooks predates both Mahayana and Tantrik sexual
—
mysticism they contain no reference either to spiritual virtues obtained
from coition, or to the principal tenet of these mystics, the conservation of the
semen and the absorption of virtue from the woman. The Tantrik picture
positions may well be part of the armamentarium of avoiding ejaculation, and
many are apparently, like film kisses, designed to be seen rather than felt.

140
 .

The Koka Shastra

four, like an animal, and her lover entering from behind
puts his weight on her like a bull.
If she puts her palms on the ground, tucks in her head
and moves slowly forward when he has mounted her,
while he remains upright, bull-fashion, it is called the cow
(dhenuka). [Arabic: el houri] (Weckerle, 111.)
In the elephant position (aibha) he holds his penis in his
hand and leaps her, like a bull elephant, while she lays
her brow, face and breasts to the ground and raises her
buttocks. 1 (Weckerle, 110.)
There are other modes of copulation described which
imitate the dog, the gazelle, and the camel. 2

Plural intercourse [samghdtakd)

If one man has connection at once with two women, whose
thighs are laid opposite ways, 3 or a passionate girl enjoys
two lovers at once, this is called plural intercourse.
There is yet another manner of it by which one woman
may enjoy four men, 4 or one man four women. This is
accomplished by giving nail and toothmarks and by
genital contact, using hands, feet, mouth, and linga
simultaneously.
These are the rules, then, for managing the 'picture'
positions.
Some books 5 have given special names to the different

She should also alternately draw up and extend her legs, according to
1

Dinalapanika-Sukasaptati, which gives all the other (little -differing) animal-

bandhas in full.
2 —
NagaraSarvasvra has vyaghravaskanda, the tiger-spring the woman lies
on her face holding her ankles behind her (dhanurasana) and the man kneels,
raising her thighs on to his knees and holding her waist. The name is due to
the 'broken-backed appearance of a quadruped seized in mid-spine by a tiger'.
3 'One with
the linga, the other with the finger or tongue' (Kaficinatha)
Chinese texts give postures of this kind for alternate vaginal penetration of
four women.
4
Vatsyayana explains that this is 'the custom in Strirajya, Gramanari and
and Balh, where several young men have a single wife in common'.
6
These 'other books' include the Kama Sutra itself. Vatsyayna has a section
devoted to male movements (purusopasrptaka) as follows (so also Rati-ratna-
pradipika):

141
 — ..

The Koka Shastra

manners of moving the penis in the vagina (churning,
pressing, the boar-thrust, and so on) but these I have
omitted as unprofitable. The pressing, striking or rubbing
of the queynt can be conducted in three ways from above,—
centrally, or from below. If the Lady-of-the-Buttocks proves
insatiable, then her lover may hold a lingaminhishand. 1

The signs of satisfaction in woman

When the girl begins to close her eyes, her lover should
clasp her more tightly. Limpness, eye-closing and swoon-

1
Straightforward penetration is called upasrptaka. If the man takes his
penis in his hand and gives it a rotary movement, this is mundhana (churning)
If he lowers his pubis and strikes upward, it is the stab (hula) — the reverse
stroke from above downward, to be given very forcibly, is the rub (avamardana)
If he penetrates deeply and maintains a long, steady, forward pressure it is
piditaka (the pressure stroke) If he withdraws a long way and then returns with
.

a sharp thrust it is nirghata (the gust). A powerful stroke given to one side is
—
vaharaghata (the boar-stroke) the same on each side successively is the ox
stroke (vrsaghata). (i.e. with two horns.) Three or four sharp strokes with no
withdrawal between them is the sparrow game (chatakavilasita) Finally the
.

'box' (samputa) is the action which is called "the end of lust'".

Samputa as a bhanda has already been explained. YaSodhara says that 'the
end of lust' means 'a way of holding back orgasm', but as it is soon to be
quoted here as the best way for the man to finish intercourse after the woman
has achieved orgasm in purusayita, Kokkoka seems to be interpreting it as
'the finishing position'.
In these movements the man leads and the woman follows. Movements in
—
which she leads (stripasrptaka) are used in the purusayita mode bhramara,
prenkolita, described in the next paragraph — to which Vatsyayana adds
samdamsa ('the clamp'), which is a version of what Kokkoka calls vadavaka,
le pompoir or mare's coitus, carried out with the internal muscles and without
moving the thighs.
1 artificial phallus (apadravya). YaSodhara drily explains the
Presumably an
inclusion of metal-work and lathe-turning among the subsidiary arts pre-
scribed in the Kama Sutra for a liberal feminine education by the need to
manufacture these. The devices described by Vatsyayana include both dildoes
and penile prostheses (rings, sheaths and erection-maintainers similar to the
modern Japanese kabutogata). They were to be used in satisfying very demand-
ing women, in the 'high' mode of coitus to remedy disproportion, and by
kings with obligations to a numerous harem in excess of their physical powers
they were also locally popular in certain districts. Under the same head
Vatsyayana mentions the various forms of ampallang and the piercing of the
glans to accommodate them, a custom now practically confined to Malays and
Kayans.

142
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The Koka Shastra

ing are the signs of enjoyment. 1 She will move her queynt
repeatedly, give the sound sit, lose all shyness and be
—
beside herself with love this is the point at which her
feeling is most intense.
The by contrast are these she
signs of dissatisfaction —
threshes her arms about, strikes out, will not let go of the
man, and suddenly throws herself upon him.

Inverse position {purusayita) 2

When the whim takes her, or when her lover is tired, the
woman can carry out intercourse after the male fashion.
She man's part, either from the start of inter-
will act the
course or by turning him over after intromission has taken
place. 3

1
'Listen, friend, to a story about my fool of a lover. When I shut my eyes in
the final ecstasy, he thought I was dead, took fright, and let go of me!'
(Kuttani-mata.)
'With horripilation on her breasts, crushed now in a strong embrace; with
the cloth on her fair buttocks wet with her glutinous love-juice, babbling
piteously "No, no, darling —
that's enough!" is she asleep, or dead, or has she
vanished into my heart?' (Vasanta Vilasa.)
2
literally, 'masculine'.
8
Thevariants here are not bandhas but rather movements. The correspond-
ing obverse position, depicted at Konarak and in a terracotta from Chandra-
ketugarh (Ind. Archael. 1957-8, pi. 73c), with the woman astride facing the
man's feet, seems to be missing from Indian literary erotology, though the
markatika (given above) is similar. Dinalapanika Sukasaptati gives other
purusayita positions; kukkuta (see note, p. 138) matsya (fish) ('the man lies
—
outspread the woman lies on him closely with her feet on his two legs and
her breasts pressed to his chest'), hamsa (in which the man sits half- erect on
the woman's joined feet, dolita (swing) in which he draws his feet up to his
chest, and she lies with her belly on his soles, being lifted and swung on them,
'while they both hold hands and she pretends to be frightened'. The other
positions are obscure, but in one (jvalamukha) he lies on the ground, his feet
raised by placing them on the edge of the bed, while she stands astride him
he then uses a flower (the 'sportive lotus', lilakamala) to caress her in the sites
normally reserved for kisses. If in the normal purusayita position 'he sits up
and kisses the tips of her breasts it is ghattita (the closure) and if he lies back
while she raises his heels in her hands it is udghattita (the opening)'.
Smaradipika gives two positions only: 'If the woman lies flat on the man's
two thighs, holds her feet (behind her back) with both hands, and vigorously
moves her hips, this is hamsalllaka (the duck or swan game). If she sits astride
the penis with both soles on the ground and her hands over her breasts, it is
the play-seat (lilasana).'

143
 —

The Koka Shastra

Ifwhen astride him she bends her legs and makes a
rotary movement it is bhramara 1 (the wheel) —
if she moves

from side to side it is prenkholita (the swing) made up from

prenkha and ulita. She strikes 2 him and cries sit she laughs 5

and says boldly, 'Now, you coward, I've got you down and it
is I who will make you die. Hide yourself, haven't I

shamed your pride?' So striking him continually, her

bracelets jingling, her hair falling on his lips, and her
thighs shuttling back and forth in an ecstasy, she will cease
only with her climax. When the man sees that she is
tiring, he will turn her over and finish in the 'box'
(samputa) position. If she is still not satisfied, he should
perform angulirata, finger-intercourse. A woman who has
just finished a menstrual period, 3 or who has lately borne
her first child, should not use the viparita (purusayita)
position, and it is said that a pregnant woman, a harini
(mrgi) and one who is fat, or very slim, or a young girl,
should avoid it.

1
—
Probably she moves her pelvis only Ar. El loulabi, the Archimedean
screw; Dinalapanika-Sukasaptati has a more energetic 'wheel' position
(Cakrabandha) in which she turns on the penis as an axle, lying face down on
the supine man, and working round with her hands. Rotary positions of this
sort figure in both Chinese and European erotic gymnastics —
for several
others see Weckerle 52, 150, 182, 199, 206, 333, 372, 386, 413, 453, 490—
they are rewarding and not very difficult.
2 'strikes' 'striking' —
tadanam: this probably refers to prahanana since it is
linked with sitkrta, but the word is usual for the movements of intercourse
'tups', 'knocks'.
—
Ananga Kanga gives four strokes to be used by the woman with the fist on
the chest (santanita) with the flat of the hand (pataka), with the thumb only
(bindumala), and with the angle of the thumb and forefinger (kundala), the
last being especially excitant.
8
The risk is that she will conceive in this position and the fetus will not
know whether to adopt a male or a female role (YaSodhara). The mrgi may
injure the man —
the others run the risk of injuring themselves.

144
 X

OF LOVE-BLOWS AND LOVE-CRIES

(Prahanana and Sitkrta)

The Striking of Blows {Prahanana)

It has been said that 'love is a tussle, in which both are
blinded by passion': it is not surprising then that the
striking of blows has a part to play in it, as does the uttering
of cries.
Love-blows (prahanana) are struck with the palm, the
back of the hand, the clenched hand, or the whole hand
—
outspread on the back, the sides, the pubic region, between
the breasts, and on the head, which are the stations of love.

Love-cries (Sitkrta) 1
The sound Him, a sound like thunder, the sounds sut,
dut, phut ;
moans and cries of 'Stop!', 'Harder!',
gasps,
'Go on!', 'Don't me!' and 'No!', have the generic
kill
name of sitkrta. Little shrieks which variously resemble
the cry of the heron, dove, (Indian) 2 cuckoo, hamsa, and
peacock can be evoked by love-blows, but are described by
the experts of carnal copulation as being heard at other

1
'Sit' -crying: this sound is the most characteristic response to an erotic
touch, a gasp in through nearly-closed teeth. The 'thunder' sound is a shudder-
ing expiratory gasp. The others speak for themselves. Ratiratnapradipika
classes these sounds by the affect they indicate, a highly important practical
point, as showing 'pain, helplessness or submission, desire, aggression'.
—
Some ladies cry 'Mother!', as Vatsyayana reminds us the wife of 'The
Leopard' in di Lampedusa's novel used to disconcert him by screaming,
'Gesumaria!' at the critical moment. This is a subject to be pursued, now
that the tape-recorder permits emotion to be recollected in tranquillity.
* kokila — the koel, Eudynamys scolopacea. The voice is a series of bubbling
feminine whoops, rising in pitch as the song continues.

145
 . —

The Koka Shastra

times too. 1 The sound Him represents a sudden expulsion
of breath from the nose and throat. The thundering
(shuddering) sound is made in the same way, and re-
sembles the collision of stormclouds. The sound dut is like
—
the snapping of a hollow stalk the sound phut is like a
berry dropping into a jar of water.

The usage of love-blows and love-cries

According to the teaching, striking with the back of the

hand between the breasts evokes the moaning sound;
the back should be struck with the knuckles, and the head
with the hand bent into the shape of a cobra's hood, while
blows on the sides and genital are given with the flat of the
hand. 2 'The shears', and other types of striking which
are used in the South are reprobated by the Masters. 3

1
'Sitkrta is perfectly in order even when no blows are struck' (Ratirahasya

dipika). In America, one can now buy a long-playing record of these attractive
sounds — they appear to have changed very little. Indian literature often
refers to them, and to the competence with which birds, especially parrots
—
and mynahs, which learn best in the dark, can imitate them thus obtaining
an embarrassing party piece.
2
'Striking is of four kinds — with the hollow hand, the back of the hand,
the fist, and the flat of the hand, four manners. The sites for it are as follows
with the flat on sides and genital, with the fist on the back, further on the
head and face with the hollowed hand held like a snake-hood, and over the
heart with the back of the hand. If the woman is hurt and hits her man with
the fist on his chest, this is termed by the adepts samtanika; if in intercourse
she slaps him with the flat palm it is pataka; a blow with the thumb only is
bindu (the dot). If the woman in excessive passion strikes slowly with thumb
and middle finger together (? pinching) it is kundala (the ornament)' (Ananga
Ranga)
3
The 'shears', 'wedge', 'needle' etc. are mudras or hand-positions used in
striking. They are described by YaSodhara, being quoted for condemnation by
Vatsyayana, together with a number of accidents due to their use: 'In Southern
girls one can see the mark left on the breast by the "wedge" . . this is a
.

barbarous practice, however, and should be abandoned, says Vatsyayana. It

is also dangerous. With the "wedge" the King of Kola accidentally killed the

hetaira Citrasena during love-play. The Kuntala Satakarni killed Queen

MalayavatI in the same way, with the "shears", while Naradeva, who had a
paralysed hand, put out the eye of a dancing-girl by misaiming a blow with the
"needle".' (Kama Sutra.)
An odd is that the Burton-Arbuthnot translation, on
result of this passage
the ground that such dangerous results could hardly follow finger-blows,

146
 The Koka Shastra
With the girl sitting on his knee, the lover should strike
her on the back with one fist. She will pretend to be angry
and retaliate, screaming, gasping, and becoming drunken
with love. Towards the end of intercourse he will strike
very gently and continuously over the heart of the girl
while she is still penetrated, and at each stroke she will
give the cry of sit. If she tussles with him he will strike on
her head with the curved hand, and in response she will
give the sounds of kat and phut and will gasp or moan.
Just before orgasm he will strike quickly-repeated blows
with the flat of the hand on her genital and her sides. If
her passion begins to wane the Lady-of-the-Buttocks will
utter cries like those of the quail or the hamsa. After her
climax she may again scream or gasp repeatedly. At other
times, too, a woman will utter love cries that make her in-
finitely desirable, without being either in pain or weary of
intercourse.
Passion and roughness in copulation, combined with
tenderness, usually make only the man attractive, but
according to local and other customs a short exchange of
roles, from passion, can be delightful.
When a spirited horse reaches a full gallop it takes no
heed of obstacles: so two lovers in the struggle of love take

assumed that the names must refer to carpenters' tools, and heads the passage,
'Striking with Instruments'. Yasodhara makes the matter quite clear. 'At the
start of intercourse, the King of Cola embraced Citrasena so violently that,
being most tender and delicate of body, she was crushed. Knowing this, he
nonetheless, in the blindness of passion, struck the fragile one a violent blow
with the "wedge" on her breast, without knowing how hard he struck, and so
killed her.' Satakarni was so inflamed by the sight of the Queen in her holiday
dress when she went to her first festival after a long illness that he forgot her
dangerous state of health. Sudden death after violent blows on the chest,
even if given with the joined tips of the thumb and two fingers, seems perfectly
plausible in these two cases. The reputedly immoderate and sadistic tastes of
Southerners are a general topic of condemnation in Sanskrit erotics, but the
idea of 'instruments' being used to strike love-blows appears to be a straight-
forward blunder. The Kokkokam, as might be expected, omits this aspersion
for Tamil readers, and reads instead 'but the oversexed women of Pandya
are hard nuts to crack — one can pound on their breasts with stone balls and
still get nowhere'.

147
 ——

The Koka Shastra

no heed for blows, knocks or Death itself. But it is the duty
of the man to consider the tastes of women, and to be tough
or tender entirely in conformity to his beloved's wishes. 1

Oral intercourse
The Sage (Vatsyayana) has dealt fully with this matter.
To his account who would be so rash as to add anything? 2

1 Vatsyayana has a section on the end of intercourse which is worth in-

cluding for its own sake, as a tailpiece to this section:
'When both are satisfied, they will suddenly become embarrassed they —
will go separately to wash without looking at each other, as if they were
strangers. When they come back, they will have lost their embarrassment
they will sit down again as before, side by side, and take betel, and he will
rub sandalwood or sweet oil on her Putting his left arm round her he
skin.
should hold the cup for her to drink, while they converse pleasantly together.
They will take water, sherbet, or whatever else their fancy and habit chooses
fruit-juice, soups, sour-rice broth; roast meats, mango, dried meat, and
lemon juice with sugar, according to the custom of the district: he will taste
the dishes and tell her which are sweet, which are mild, and which are plain.
Or they will go and sit on the roof in the moonlight, and he will hold a suitable
discourse with her. If she lies in his lap looking up at the moon, he will tell
her names of the constellations and show her the Southern Cross, the Pole
Star, and the crown of seven stars in the Great Bear. This is the manner of
concluding sexual intercourse.' (Kama Sutra.)
2
For the contentious matter so expertly avoided here, see note to p. 124.
To the stylized mignrardizes given by Kokkoka (nailmarks, toothmarks, blows
and cries) the Ananga-Ranga adds hair-pulling (kesagraha) 'to be done very
slowly', to heighten passion and draw the beloved's face to the lover for
kissing. So also Pancasayaka. The Smaradipika. adds mardana (which includes
both pressing and the tickling erotic massage known in France as 'les pattes
d'araignee') 'on both arms, both breasts, vulva and navel, six sites in all' and
nectar- drinking (rasapana) 'at breasts, lips, mouth, tongue and nipples, five
sites in all'. Outside erotic textbooks we also find madhupala, drinking from
the same cup.
According to the NagaraSarvasva, the varieties of pressure (mardanam)
are adipitam (squeezing with the whole hand), sprstakam (touching with the
palms), kampitakam (repeated quick pressure in the same place), and sama-
krama (repeated squeezing of different places). The varieties of holds (grahama)
are baddha-musti (in the closed fist), vestitakam (twining the hair), krta-
granthika (interknotting the fingers), and samakrsti (pinching).
To these manipulations some of the poets add shampooing or massage of
the woman's body to prevent stiffness after acrobatic intercourse.
'Five things require kneading (mardana) to bring out the goodness
curds, betel, cotton-fibre, sugarcane, woman's breasts.' (Proverb.)

148
 XI

THE WOOING OF A BRIDE

(Kanyavisrambhanam)

Choosing a Bride
Respectable men, who follow the Threefold Aim in life,

should marry, say the sastras, a woman of their own social

standing who has never been previously betrothed.
Honourable persons will always avoid marriage, association,
games, friendship and the like with persons of higher or
lower position.
The rules for wooing are these: the ideal bride, to be
preferred above all others, is one with a skin like a lotus-
petal, or yellowish-tinted like gold, with a delicate flush to
her hands, feet, nails, and eyes, well-proportioned soft
feet —who on her hands the
eats little, sleeps little, has
marks of the Lotus, the Pitcher, and the Discus (attributes
of Vishnu). She must not be red-haired, or have a pendulous
belly or a hanging lip.

Wily men who know the rules will avoid any girl they
find out of her house, weeping or yawning, or asleep. A girl
called after amountain, a tree, a river, or a bird: one who
is is bent or bony, has a hanging lip,
over- or undersized,
hollow or red eyes, hands and feet which are rough to the
touch; one who sighs, laughs or cries at meals; one who has
inverted nipples, or a beard, or unequal breasts; who is
dwarfish, who has flap-ears like winnowing fans, bad teeth,
a harsh voice, spindle legs, or is scrawny; one who likes
going about with male hangers-on; one who has hair on her
hands, sides, chest, back, legs or upper lip; who makes
the ground shake when she passes, or gets a crease on her
cheeks when she laughs; one whose great toe is too small in

149
 The Koka Shastra
proportion to the other toes, whose middle toe touches the
great toe, or whose two smallest toes fail to touch the
ground — all these are to be avoided in choosing a bride.

Of the Wedding Night

The bridegroom should not approach his bride on the
wedding night —otherwise she will become bored during
the next three nights when
she has to sit and keep watch.
For three days he preserves continence, and does not
attempt anything presumptuously until he has first won
her heart. Women's bodies are as soft as flowers they dis- —
like embraces which are inflicted on them by people who
have not yet won their intimate regard. The wooer will
first show his love for his bride through the offices of her

friends, and progress slowly with her as he wins her

confidence. If she is a virgin and has never been alone with
him, he should operate, say the rules, in complete darkness.
When the girl is at ease with him, he will very briefly
embrace her with the upper half of his body. He will pass
some betel from his mouth to hers, tell her he loves her,
speak kindly to her, kneel to her, and adopt other such
measures to please her. He can then give her a pure,
tender kiss, and play gentle games with her. As if un-
intentionally he asks her some simple question —
if she

does not answer, he asks, 'Do I please you, sweetheart?'

She will motion with her head, not answer with words. As
her confidence increases little by little, she will hide her face
and smile while the bridesmaid whispers in her ear what the
—
bridegroom told her in private 'He said such and such,
and this is what he said of the joy that he has in you .'
. .

she will say, including a good manv lies of her own. If the
bridesmaid is waggish and overplays her hand, the groom
should say playfully and not over-distinctly, T never said
anything of the kind!' When she gains confidence further
the bride will ask for betel or flowers, and he will give them

150
 The Koka Shastra
to her, or lay them in her lap. Then he should touch the
buds of her nipples with the tips of his fingers, slide his hand
down to her pubis and take it away again. If she stops him,
he takes his hand away and says, 'I won't do it again if
you'll put your arms round me.' 1 Once he has contrived
by treating her very gently to get her sitting on his knee,
he will frighten her out of her wits by saying, Til bite and
scratch your pretty face, and I'll mark myself all over and
say you did it, and make you ashamed before all vour
friends.' Then he kisses her all over, and as her bashfulness
is conquered by dandling and handling he unties her

girdle. Having introduced his penis in the approved

manner he amuses her until the last dark traces of fear are
removed by his gentle exertions. This road to the deep and
lasting affection of young maidens I have learned from my
studies of the Kama Sutra, and I tell it to you.

The art of winning

Neither too much compliance, nor too little with girls, a—
middle way brings the best result. The man who knows
how best to foster woman's passion in his own beloved and
how to win her heart will be her choice. A girl who is
courted by a man she does not care for will be anxious,
frightened and tetchy, and will hate him forthwith. If she
isnot brought to experience true love, through this state of
anxiety shemay come to hate men in general, or be hated
by them, and her suitor will turn elsewhere. 2

1
Leinhard reads, 'if I hurt you'.
Vatsvavana describes also the way in which a girl who has no relatives to
3

act for her should conduct her own wooing and find herself a husband.

151
 XII

CONCERNING WIVES
(Bharyadikarikam)

Of Wifely dudes 1
A young woman should be wholly subject to her husband
and honour him with word, heart and body, as a god. Under
his instruction she should carry out the duties of the house
and make it clean and neat day by day.
She should treat elder relatives, friends, servants, and the
circle of her husband's acquaintances, according to the
dignity of each, without arrogance or deceit. She should
wear a white, simple dress for her own recreation, and when
entertaining, and a red and costly one for her husband's
pleasure.
In the garden she should plant marjoram, three species
of jasmine, and flowering and sweet-scented
patchouli
herbs — and so on.
fruit trees, radishes, kala, gourds, acacia
She should not converse with whores, witches, begging
nuns, women who follow actors or gallants, nor with
herb and potion-sellers. She should give her husband every
day the meals he desires, according to what she knows he
likes, and what is good for him.
If she hears the voice of a visitor she should stand ready
to receive him, and wash both his feet. If her husband is

1
Karyesu dasi karnesu mantri
rupe ka Laksmi ksamaya dharitri
sneha ka mata 3ayanesu ve£ya
sadkarma yukta kila dharma patni
In work a servant, in conversation a sage, in beauty as Lakshmi, in endurance
as the Earth,
In care a mother, in bed a harlot —these six, they say, are the duties of a wife.
Sanskrit proverb.

152
 The Koka Shastra
inclined to squander his wealth she should save it on the
quiet.
She should go out only by his permission, and attended.
She should go to bed after him and rise before him. She
should never leave him asleep, nor interrupt him at his
devotions, but share in his religious observances and his
vows.
She will not loiter in corners, or at the door, nor scold.
She will avoid lonely spots and huts, and not converse
needlessly with any man.
In making purchases she will take proper account of
prices, and what is in season. She will make provision of
utensils of wood, clay, leather and metal in suitable numbers
and qualities. She will keep a stock of scarce medicaments.
She will keep proper accounts and regulate her spending
according to income.
She will keep a sharp supervision over the use of hay,
chaff, corn, wood, charcoal and ash, the employment of
servants, the rota of duties and the reconditioning of her
husband's cast-off clothes, which she will clean and issue
to the servants. She will attend to the maintenance of his
retinue, carts and oxen, and the inspection of monkeys,
cuckoos, parrots, mynahs, cranes and the like.
She will obey her husband's elder relatives, control her
language in dealing with them, avoid laughing at them
openly, and behave with modesty,
She will treat a second wife as her sister, and a second
wife's children as her own.

The Husband's absence

When her husband is away, she should wear only her
lucky ornaments, 1 and live in the precepts of the gurus and
Brahmins. She will have her bed at the foot of her elders', 2
1
To show she is not a widow.
* —
upaguru sayanam more probably 'lie chastely'.

153
 The Koka Shastra
spend little, enquire continually for news of her husband,
take pains to forward any work he has left unfinished, and
offer prayers and sacrifices for his luck and safety. If she
visits relatives she must not go alone nor stay too long.
When her husband comes back safe and sound, she can go
once more to a festival and offer a sacrifice. 1

Of polygamy
If a man has more than one wife, he must be kind and
tactful,without overlooking any misconduct. He must never
discuss one wife's ailments, or the intimacies between them,
with another wife, or repeat any jealous remarks she may
make. He will not interfere in the proper sphere of the
junior wives. 2 If one of them talks of the faults of another
he will tactfully reprove her. He must give pleasure to all
his beloveds, so long as they live, with walks in pleasure-
gardens, love, care, and gifts.

1
Vatsyayana gives one of the duties of a neglected wife (durbhaga) to
it as
find out privately if her is in love with another woman, and, if so,
husband
tactfully bring them together. We might consider this equally the duty of the
—
husband of a virakta wife who does not care for him.
a
To take sides between them.

154
 ——

XIII

CONCERNING RELATIONS WITH

STRANGE WOMEN
(Paradarikam)

The completes in brief the subject of wives. I

last section
will now women. 1 This is
deal with the pursuit of strange
the enemy of life and of reputation and the ally of godless-
ness, and it should be undertaken only under the com-
pulsion of the ten stages of love, not simply upon impulse.
Love-at-sight first, then brooding, then scheming
loss of sleep, loss of weight, inability to concentrate, the
destruction of one's sense of shame, frenzy, collapse, and
finally death —these are the ten stages of love. When a
man finds himself launched on this course, he is obliged
to follow a strange woman to preserve his life. One can,
after all, find new wives, goods, and land, beget new sons,
and rebuild one's happy estate, but life is irreplaceable,
and health once lost cannot be renewed.

Forbidden women
Seduction of a betrothed girl or the daughter of a Brahmin

1
Strange in the Biblical sense, i.e. who is not one's own (svakiya). She may be
someone else's wife (parakiya) or public property (sadharani). At this point the
prospective co-respondent must reach for a fresh set of punch-cards the
adulteress can be of six kinds, 'sly', 'reckless', 'conscience-stricken', 'scared',
'well-guarded' or 'sluttish' (vidagha, mudita, anusayana, laksita, gupta,
kulata) and there are at least nine named varieties of whore. After further
subdivision by age and situation, Schmidt has calculated that there were
—
384 possible categories of nayika, own wives included without counting the
somatotypes (mrgi, padminl, etc.) or the sattvas, which overlap. The American
sociologists who have attempted to programme marital compatibility for
predictive analysis on a computer might find a modern application of this
system which its authors did not foresee.

155
 .

The Koka Shastra

incurs lasting pollution and a daily guilt equal to that of
Brahmin-murder.
The wife of a Brahmin is not to be approached: she is not,
however, absolutely to be excluded, if she has had to do
with at least five men previously. This does not apply to the
wives of sages, 1 friends, relations, and rulers (videlicet,
they should never be seduced, however promiscuous). A
woman who has been put out of her caste, a personal friend,
a child, a friaress, an invalid, a woman who makes love in
public, a lunatic, or one who is ill-smelling, aged, unable
to keep intimate secrets, red-haired, 2 very dark, or a ward of
someone else, are always to be avoided as a matter of
practice 3 —
but the Doctors name them particularly as un-
suitable for illicit affairs.

Other cases in which it may be necessary to seek strange

women
1 'Her husband is my enemy's friend. She may contrive a
split between them.' Or: 'if she falls in love with me, she
may be able to influence my enemy, who now plans to kill
me.'
2. 'If I be out of danger.' Or: 'she is now a
go to her, I shall
condition of my existence, miserable man that I am.' Or:
'she knows all my faults and still loves me but if I drop —
her she may ruin me, for she may go round railing at me

1
man may sire a child on his guru's wife by the guru's request; in
But a
fact, in ancient times he must as a duty —
thus Uddalaka requested a pupil to
sire him a son and got &vetaketu. (Mahabharata XII, 34.) As for kings, Galava,
wishing to give his guru a present borrowed a handsome princess and put
her to stud to a number of heirless kings; then presented her, with the accrued
stud fees, to his instructor Visvamitra. He got a rebuke for his pains
—'Why
did you not bring her first to me? I would have sired all four sons!' Eventually
the lady was returned to her husband, who by lending her had acquired
salvation. This, needless to say, was a long time before Vatsyayana. (Mahab-
harata V. 114-9.)
2
—
Not only for aesthetic reasons she is very likely to prove a witch (yogini)
and kill her lover.
8
i.e. in legitimate courtship.

156
 The Koka Shastra
and saying "this is the sort of man he is, this lover of mine!"'
Or: 'If I have intercourse with her, I shall be doing a
friendly service to her.'
A man should not pursue a woman so from simple
desire, but only for solid reasons of this kind, unless he
feels himself about to go out of his mind with love, and
cannot trouble further to ask for sound reasons.
Before embarking on an affair with a strange woman, one
ought seriously to weigh the possible loss of position, in-
come and existing love-arrangements: it is very hard to
stop the march of love once it is in motion! Love for an
object which can only be enjoyed at great expense, which
will be hard to get rid of, and which is forbidden in any
case, is bound by its nature to progress uncontrollably to
some mischief or other.

Love and loving in Man and Woman

A woman becomes enamoured on seeing a handsome man,
likewise a man when he sees a handsome woman. But there
is this important difference between them, that woman,

once she is in love, loves regardless of convention. She will

not give herself immediately to a wooer, for when she gives
she does so with her whole being a man, by contrast, —
conducts his love affairs with some regard to ethics, time,
place, etcetera, whether to do or not to do. He is suspicious
of a woman easily won, loves one who is hard to get, and is
willing to risk taking pains over her in vain. So much for the
difference between Man and Woman.

Reasons which may make a woman hold back 1

I will now detail some considerations which may make a
woman resist seduction —love of her husband: love of her
children: fear of the consequences: in a few cases, moral
scruple: constant presence of her husband: inability to bear
1
sc. from an illicit love affair.

157
 The Koka Shastra
the knowledge of her own fault: because, although she
wants to keep her wooer deeply in love, she is for the
moment enjoying someone else: because she does not want
to see him suffer on her account: excessive respect for him,
if he is a nayaka, or friend, or an associate of her husband;

contempt for him, if he fails to notice her advances, is

elderly, or her social inferior, is easily fobbed off by cunning,
or has no regard to times and places: dejection at the idea
that he probably makes similar advances to all his women
friends, or that he does not know her heart: anxiety, if he
is a public figure, or notoriously fickle: or for fear that her

relatives may find out and repudiate her.

These are the commonly-cited reasons which make a
woman hold back even though enamoured.

Countering these
The first five mentioned are best quieted by
scruples above
stepping up the level of desire. The group of objections
beginning, 'I could never bear .'
. can be dispelled by
.

showing the woman an escape route appropriate to the case.

According to the Masters, over-esteem can be met by
familiarity, contempt by spreading a reputation for subtletly
and sexual skill, depression by polite attention, and
anxiety by getting her to trust you.

Of successful seducers
Heroes: men who can tell the tale: experts in love making:
the affectionate: men who can give a public performance:
the robust: the cultured: those who have youth and looks:
childhood playmates: partners at games or dancing: experts
in story-telling and the arts: those who have previously
acted as go-betweens: one who knows a woman's intimate
weaknesses, even he has no other qualities to commend
if

him: one who has reconciled her to a friend: one who has
previously possessed a woman of qualities: one who is

158
 The Koka Shastra
lovable, or of good family: a brother-in-law: 1 a favourite
servant: a likeminded neighbour: a step-sister's husband:
onewho is lavish or generous: a lover of theatre: a man
known to be of the 'ox' type: a man who has divorced his
wife for good reasons: a man whose clothes and style look
grand and expensive. These are the most successful
seducers.

Of seducees
A woman who is always standing at the door, one who looks
back at you sideways when you stare at her, one who has
been thrown over and has lost her pleasures one who ;

is childless, and despised for lack of progeny one who is 5

shameless, or neglected, or who

company; whose
loves
children have died, who has been deserted through
all

barrenness, or who is unjustly slighted by co-wives; a

young widow, a woman who has had too many pleasures, a
woman who is poor; an estimable woman who has married
beneath her; an educated women who scorns her husband;
an eldest daughter with many brothers-in-law; one whose
husband is travelling and who helps in her relatives'
house; one who is perpetually visiting relations; one who is
sociable, and has a jealous husband; one who has no sons,
only daughters; a handsome woman who is wronged for
some reason; a young woman who is rebuked; a woman of
affectionate nature —beside these, the wife of a strolling
bumpkin or an
entertainer, a cripple, a dwarf, a stinkard, a
one married to a poltroon, an old man, an im-
invalid, or
—
potent man or a waster these women can be had for the
asking.

1
In some parts of India a sexual and jesting relationship between sister-in-
law (bhauji) and her husband's younger brother (dewar) is socially acceptable.
It plays a large part in folk-tradition. See Hival, S. (1943) Man in India, 23,
159-167. This is presumably the last vestige of the fraternal polyandry of the
Mahabharata. By contrast, however, the elder brother-in-law is strictly tabu.

159
 —

The Koka Shastra

Other observations
A woman who has the second toe of her left foot longer than
the big toe or shorter than the middle toe, or whose little
toes do not touch the ground or the toe next to them, who
squints, has yellow-gold eyes and who smiles when she
has no reason —such a one the hand-readers call pumScali 1 —
she who runs after men.
A man can be successful with women
if he studies form,

is familiar with their and can quiet their

attributes,
scruples. Concupiscence springs from the natural dis-
position. Strengthened by experience, and stimulated by
intelligence, it becomes irresistible and unquenchable.

On making contacts
Women who speak frankly and who openly show their
willingness from the outset can be wooed personally
contrary women should be approached through a go-
between.
In the personal approach, one should start by getting
the woman's friendship without betraying other intentions.
Next, use your glance as a go-between and a love-
letter, and send it often in her direction. Keep adjusting
your hair, tap with your fingernails, rattle your ornaments,
press your lips together.
When you sit on a companion's knee, yawn, rub your
limbs, speak stammeringly and keep twitching an eye-
brow.
Make remarks, nominally about other matters, which
—
could also refer to her listen intently to her when she
speaks, and express your desire in hints.
Embrace a friend or a child over-affectionately. Pretend
to fondle her children on her knee and in doing so con-
trive to touch her body. Give toys to these same children,

1
pumScali. She is mentioned first in the White Yajur-Veda (xxx 5-6, 22).

160
 The Koka Shastra
and having so made contact with their mother, strike up an
acquaintance.
Keep dropping in upon her, so that the people of her
house get to know and like you. Tell her equivocal and
significant love-stories, to which she will probably listen un-
suspecting.
Once you have quickened her her a clear token
love, give
— in this frequent, or even daily, intimacy, take an oppor-
tunity to put an arm round her.
Set her on a basis of intimacy with your own wife.
When she has something to buy or sell, assist her to
—
arrange it throw dust in the eyes of the other party, and
so establish an obligation between you.
Stage a dispute with her or her folk over some question of
history or fact, make a wager on it, then call to ask her the
result.
Having won her friendship by these means, you watch
for her signal to you.When you get it, you can conclude
that for a while she has said goodbye to her scruples. 1

Concerning come-hither signs

A woman in love does not look you straight in the eye,
but becomes confused after a moment and looks away.
She manages on various pretexts to let you see her body for
a moment. She draws on the ground with her toes. She
looks at you surreptitiously and smiles —
either from time
to time, or all the time. If a child is on her knee she kisses
it and talks to it with conspicuous affection. If asked a

question she looks down, says something unintelligible and

confused, and smiles. On one pretext or another she hangs
about where her man is, talking loudly, in the hope that he
1
There seems to be a certain discrepancy between the urgent infatuation,
which, according to Kokkoka, alone justifies the exercise, and this calculating
and patient operational approach to seduction: Could one of the two, moral
precept and practical instruction, possibly be ironic? If so, it is likely to be the
moral precept.

161
 The Koka Shastra
will notice her:when she knows he is looking she carries on
an animated conversation as cover. When he appears, she
smiles in his direction. She sits on a girl-friend's lap and
plays all manner of jokes. She strikes up acquaintances with
her servants, plays games and chats with them she then —
asks for news of him. She confides in her friends and talks
to them about love. She will not let him see her un-
—
adorned if a friend asks her to make her a garland she
hands it over as if reluctantly. She sighs, looks sideways,
beats her breasts with her hand, stifles when talking, taps
with her fingers, says ambiguous things and then is em-
barrassed, yawns, beats the man she loves with flowers;
draws an elaborate brow-mark for her friends, touches her
hips, opens her eyes wide, lets her hair down, visits the
man's house on one pretext after another, sweats from her
hands and feet, and wipes her brow with her arm 'how
—
many girls has he? how many beauties? which does he like
—
most among them?' so she questions her intimates
privately with deep concern.

Of seduction —-final stages

Once she has given you your sign, you can proceed at once
to the touching-embrace (sprstaka), and the others in order.
When you bathe together, covertly touch her breasts and
buttocks. Give out that you are sick —
if she comes to in-

quire how you fare, seize her hand, ask her to smooth your
brow and eyelids, and say to her tenderly, but ambiguously, 1
'comfort my pain, my lovely —remember it is you who
cause it. Surely with all your qualities, O slender one, you
won't refuse me this?' Then ask her to undertake some
service, such as the pounding of herbs for your medicine.
When you give each other betel, flowers and so forth,

1
So that in the event of trouble you could mean only 'Please tend my sick-
ness, for theexcitement of your visit has made me worse.' The Indian lover is
hardly rash in his avowals.

162
 The Koka Shastra
touch her lightly with your nails ; offer her leaves with
significant nail and toothprints on them.
Finally, get her in a private spot, and there, little by
little, enjoy the pleasures of passionate embraces and the

rest, and you will pour to the Teacher of Love-Science the

repeated libations which your long-nourished desires have
stored up.
Women are most inclined to love, and most easily
conquered, at night and in pitch darkness approached—
under these conditions there is whom they
hardly a man to
can say No. Lastly, for seduction avoid any place inhabited
by an old lady who has enjoyed carnal copulation in her
time, for where one person has been successfully wooed, it
is unlucky to woo a second.
1

Testing her mind {Bhavapariksa)

In the course of soliciting a woman, you must try her mind
carefully, to see whether she is responding or not. If not,
then the teaching is that she will need to be softened by a
go-between. If she is responding but is still in two minds,
she will come to hand little by little. If she does not openly
accept your advances, but nevertheless loiters conspicuously
in lonely places, wearing all her ornaments, she is asking
to be taken by force. If she accepts an assignation and lets
you woo her, she is in love, and can be taken of her own
free will. If she shrinks from your advances because she is
frightened for her own safety but not for yours, you can
win her by great gentleness. If she is unwilling but still
betrays her love, she will be easily won. If when invited to
love she gives a clear answer, she is already conquered, and
if she herself makes the advances she was conquered before

you began.

1 —
But lucky to build a temple one function of the maithuna group pre-
scribed by the Acharyas for temple gateways is to ensure the presence of this
Mana of successfully-accomplished wooing.

163
 '

The Koka Shastra

have given here the detailed rules which apply to
I

women of firm, but not over-bold or forward disposition.

I have also made plain how one can tell when a woman has
been won.

Of Go-betweens (Dutikarma)
I will now give a short account of the use of go-betweens. 1
A go-between obtains the ear of the woman by her good
character, by offering her magical recipes as a storyteller,
and so on. She acquaints the woman with lucky charms and
beauty-spells from the Veda, medicinal herbs, poetry, and
new ways of love-making. When she has gained her confi-
dence, the go-between will say to her, 'You know, my dear,
with your looks, your skill, your intelligence and your
character, you are wasted on such a husband as yours. Oh,
how fate has cheated your youthful beauty, which is so
averse to everything vulgar and cheap! That jealous, un-
grateful, bloodless, double-dealing and none-too-brainy
husband of yours isn't fit to be your footman. What a crying
shame!
By constantly decrying him in these terms she will
implant in the woman seeds of aversion against her husband.
Any faults his wife sees in him will automatically be magni-
fied.
When the occasion comes, the go-between will next
enlarge on the qualities of the suitor. Once she has awakened
interest, she will say, 'listen, my dear I think you ought to—
be told. That poor, lovely young fellow is sick. They're
afraid for his life. Ever since you looked at him, he has
—
pined you might as well have been a snake and bitten
him: sighing, sweating, falling into a decline and he —
never could stand a great deal of sorrow. He says that as
the Gods drink nectar from the Moon, so he must drink

1
There no one word for duti: I have kept 'go-between' though she is not
is

always one in fact — 'bawd' implies prostitution

— 'seductrix' is as close as one can
get.

164
 The Koka Shastra
from your beauty, or he will die. My dear, never, even in a
dream, has he been so ill!' If this does not seem to disturb the
lady, she will at her next visit begin telling her stories of
Ahalya 1 and others, then about women whose dealings with
lovers were accounted virtue in them. Proceeding in this
way she gradually makes her object clear.
By now, your Lady jokes with the go-between when
she sees her; lets her sit next to her, asks if she has eaten
and how she slept, inquires her news and generally treats
her as an intimate. She sighs, yawns, gives her extra
money, asks, when the go-between rises to go, 'When
will you come again?' she relishes her stories, saying,
;

'How can you tell such scandalous tales when your con-
versation is so proper? I won't do what you say. I think the
fellow is a dissembling rogue.' She laughs about his ill-
ness, and mocks him all the more. If at this stage the go-
between has actually conveyed his proposal, the suitor
should give her a bonus.
The go-between will continue to ply the lady with gifts of
betel, flowers, and perfume. Once she has made her
thoroughly enamoured, she will arrange for the pair to
meet accidentally, taking advantage of a family disaster, a
wedding, or a festival 5 or else in a park, at a drinking-party,
at a procession, when bathing, when a fire breaks out, when
some emergency threatens, or in the go-between's own
house.

Varieties of go-betweens (duti)

A go-between who understands her principal's intention,

manages the whole affairand sees it to completion is known
as nisrstartha (a 'chargee d'affaires').
Ago-between who only takes the matter to the point of
getting some response, but does not finish the business, is
parimitartha (a limited negotiator).
1
Wife of Gautama, seduced by the God Indra.

165
 The Koka Shastra
One who merely carries messages between lovers is

patraharl (a letter carrier).

One who ostensibly acts as agent of a lover, but is

actually in business on her own account and promoting

schemes of her own, is called svayamduti (a private
operator). 1 She may pose as an innocent, gain the confi-
dence of a man's wife, but secretly learn from her all her
husband's secrets and seduce him for herself. Such is a
'naive' (mugdha) 2 duti.
A lover can employ his own wife as an unwitting go-
between, if he introduces her to his mistress, knowing she
will boast of his sexual skill. Such a wife-go-between is
called bharyaduti.
One can send a young girl, or a nun, who knows none of
the tricks of the trade, to smuggle a love-letter in a garland
or an ear ornament. A young girl who has no idea what is
afoot and who carries letters hidden in jewellery, or leaves
with nail and toothmarks on them is called a 'dumb' go-
between (mukaduti).
A 'dumb' go-between who carries messages with a
double meaning, previously agreed signs, or private
allusions not generally comprehensible, is called a wind-
go-between (vataduti): in this case the lady can send a
reply without fear of detection.
Reliable go-betweens are: slave-girls, friends of the lady,
young widows, wise-women, artists, garland-sellers,
girls,
perfumers, wives of laundrymen, begging nuns, pedlar-
1
Either she will seduce the seducer for herself, or she will be a procuress
acting as a two-way go-between, first upsetting a married woman, then finding
her a lover.
a
mugdha ('trembling'); a young girl with no sex experience, as opposed to
praudha, pragalbha, a mature woman; here a separate category of duti.
According to Vatsyayana, she sows every sort of dissension between husband
and wife, making ostentatious nail-marks on herself and for the wife to see.
This type of duti is perhaps the only one commonly extant in our own culture.
—
One Indian translation I have seen makes her a double agent employed
by the seducer to get round his mistress, but squared by the seducer's wife to
drop hints, behave tactlessly, and betray the whole plot to the aggrieved
husband.

166
 The Koka Shastra
women, and neighbours. 1 Men of the world also
nurses,
use parrots and mynahs, as well as pictures, 2 for purposes of
seduction.
Some lovers,who have employed slave-girls to recon-
noitre for them, actually force their way into other men's
harems. This practice brings reprobation both in this world
and the next, and I will pass over it in silence.

1 All of them feminine. For 'artists' Schmidt reads, 'professional jesters'.

or 'to mirror their wishes' —as tape-recorded indoctrination.

167
 Books XIV and XV

CONCERNING LOVE-SPELLS
CONCERNING RECIPES

I have not translated these two books of the Ratirahasya,

for the following reasons: they are appendices to the main
work, differing a good deal in contents from MS to MS:
they are of little contemporary interest: and owing to the
fact that all the plants, etc., used in the recipe sections are
Indian, and their identity is often doubtful, they are largely
unintelligible in any case.
Their contents are as follows:

Book XIV
Spells
The Kamesvara spell
The Kundalini spell
The sacred syllable Om
The Hrllekha spell
The heptasyllabic spell
The Camunda invocations
Other magical means
(Of the last we may perhaps quote this one. 'A woman
wets immediately if she is sprinkled with powder made from
two teeth of a King, mixed with the two wings of a bee,
powdered, and a petal blown by the wind from a funeral
wreath.')

Book XV
Medicamenta
Against fluor seminis
To heighten potency
To slow ejaculation
168
 The Koka Shastra
('One may delay ejaculation if at the time of congress
one presses hard at the root of the vas deferens, thinks of
other matters, and controls the breathing by the kumbha-
exercise: ... or by firmly closing the anus and signing
oneself from head to foot with the syllable Om, and with
the dark-bodied, tortoise-throned Vishnu likewise by
. . .

tying on the buttock a bone from the right side of a black

cat and taking a saptacchadda seed in the lips.')
To enlarge the penis
To better genital faults (in woman)
To adstrict or widen the queynt
To depilate
Abortefacients
Conceptuants
To ward off congenital defects
To ease labour
To cure pains in childbirth
To beautify the belly and breasts
To mend ill-odours
Cosmetics
To raise and harden the breasts
Spells
('If a man woman, having first
has commerce with a
rubbed his member with dung dropped by a valguli-
bird on the wing, she will never have to do with any other
man.')
To make impotent
To raise hatred
Se duct ants
Various additional receipts.

There is a full version of these medicaments, with a list

of the Latin names of plants, etc., in Lienhard's edition.

169
 The Koka Shastra

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—
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* Now available in English with minor excisions, in Burton's translation,

The Perfumed Garden (1963), London: Spearman.

171
 The Koka Shastra

COLOPHON
With zealwas this book written by Kokkoka, son of
Paribhadra, whose praise the beloved of Gods, Men and
Serpents celebrate the grandson of Tejoka, honoured in
$

the college of learned Poets, son of the poet Srigadya

Vidyadhara—named THE SECRET OF THE GAME OF
LOVE, for the greater enjoyment of all lovers.

THE END
(from front flap)

the signs of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in a

woman, the forms of desire, the varieties in
which satisfaction can be achieved —have an
immediate relevance for any persons who want
to heighten the ways as well as the sense of

joy in their own lives.

In the light of this relevance, W. G. Archer

is quite right when he points out in his preface
that there is something "ironic in the fact that

Jhe Xoka Shastra has had to wait until now

for an English translation, and that it is an
English poet and doctor who has had the initia-

tive to produce it."

Dr. Alex Comfort is a Nuffield Research

Fellow at the University College, London. He
is the author of Darwin and the Naked Lady
and Jbe Biology of Aging.

Jacket design by John Tslorning

& Stein

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and Day/Publishers
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