The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra by James McConnachie

The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

(Metropolitan, $28)

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You can be forgiven if you’ve never read the home décor section of the Kamasutra, says travel writer James McConnachie. The popular paperback that many Westerners know as a window onto “the Hindu art of love” actually represents only about one-seventh of the author’s original treatise on sensual pleasures, and hat racks don’t make most translators’ cuts. If even the distilled version is mostly a rumor to you, you may also be surprised to learn that the real Kamasutra identifies nowhere near 64 sex positions. Nearly three dozen of its recommended methods for expressing love concern not intercourse but kissing, scratching, biting, and moaning. The third-century audience for the book did regard “play” as their only concern, says McConnachie. But their reputation as acrobats isn’t fully deserved.

McConnachie’s “elegant and stylish” history “paints an enticing picture” of the society that produced the Kamasutra, said John Barron in the Chicago Sun-Times. Intended in part as a conduct guide for the young playboys of a “cosmopolitan courtly class,” the Sanskrit classic “was in many ways an act of resistance against the growing tide of Hindu and Buddhist ascetic puritanism that was beginning to question the libertine courtly lifestyle.” Despite the intriguing back story, McConnachie is even “more concerned with the book’s reception in the West,” said Ian Pindar in the London Guardian. “His account really picks up pace” with the arrival of Richard Burton, the charismatic British explorer who first translated the Kamasutra into English and skirted obscenity laws to publish the choice parts in 1883. A 1958 obscenity decision in a U.S. court cleared the way for mass distribution.

Before Burton came along, the book “had been largely forgotten,” even in India, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Not until 2002 did the first complete English translation appear. Reviewing the decades in between, McConnachie never runs short of “entertaining pen portraits” and amusing anecdotes. Illustrated versions of the Kamasutra, we learn, are purely a post–World War I phenomenon. Whatever form the Kamasutra has taken, it has clearly shaped Westerners’ daydreams about both sex and ancient Indian culture. By detailing how, McConnachie has crafted “an altogether first-rate work of intellectual history.”