Kamasutra Manual

When Vatsyayana first penned the text that we today know as the Kama Sutra, he could have had no idea of the economic impact he was creating. A manuscript brought to life by a man who history has all but lost has created such legal issues through the course of history as to make it one of the most highly debated and vilified texts in publication. Let’s take a few moments to reflect on the social ramifications of the Kama Sutra on Victorian culture in Great Britain.

From A Publishing Standpoint

From the publishers standpoint, the ancient Sanskrit text has been a glowing success. This is easily evidenced by the many translators who have took upon themselves, the task of rewriting and compiling the manuscript for the masses to enjoy. The first such translator for the English language was Sir Richard F. Burton, a British explorer who spoke no less than twenty-five languages fluently. When he discovered the text upon one of his journeys of exploration through India in 1842, he became enamored by the book and decided he must translate the text into the language of his peers back in Great Britain so that they too could enjoy the material he was now so fond of. Thirty-four years later, in 1876, Sir Richard Burton had finally finished the work of translating the Kama Sutra with the assistance of his collaborator, Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, since Sir Burton could not read ancient Sanskrit himself. The first published tomes were still a long way off however.

The Kama Shastra Society

Seven years later, in 1883, the first English copies of the Kama Sutra were published. That first edition consisted of 250 privately published copies of the great manuscript. These copies were published by The Kama Shastra Society, of which Burton himself was a founder. The Kama Shastra Society was created to keep Burton and his peers from being prosecuted and imprisoned by the Society for the Suppression of Vice under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and was used by Burton as a method of publishing much of his work over the years. If the society had not been founded, his many endeavors in the field of writing and translation would have been set to the wayside by popular Victorian society of the time, as Burton, himself, was considered to be less than savory by his peers. His translation and writing often dealt with subjects of a erotic or highly sexual nature which was very counter-culture to the Victorian society of the day.

Some of his works that would otherwise be lost to the world today included a translation of The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night ( Most commonly referred to as The Arabian Nights and considered to be pornography at the time due to sexual content.)and a translation of the Arabic guide called The Perfumed Garden. Sir Richard Burton had written a second translation of the same work which he titled The Scented Garden but this was tragically lost along with several other papers when his widowed wife, Isabel, burned them after his death in October of 1890 from a heart attack. The irony of her destructive action is that Sir Burton had intended this translation to be published after his death as a way of providing for his widow through the proceeds.

The Kama Shastra Society provided for a private publication and distribution of the Kama Sutra to its own member thus circumventing the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 because they could not be prosecuted for sharing a private Society publication amongst its own members. It is interesting to note that Sir Burton’s work did not become legal in Great Britain until the year 1963, eighty years after its first publication and seventy- three years after Burton’s death. What is even more interesting is that a text with absolutely no illustrations was considered so offensive to the British censors.