The Kama Sutra has a long biography. It was written in Sanskrit in classical India, kept alive in a modest scholarly tradition for well over a thousand years, translated into English in the late Victorian era, and reissued, reinterpreted and misunderstood ever since. Understanding that history helps a modern reader see the book as it is, rather than as its reputation suggests.
Origins in classical India
Scholars generally date the surviving text to some point between the second and fifth century of the common era. That range covers a period of extraordinary cultural achievement in northern India. Sanskrit poetry was flourishing under authors like Kalidasa. Indian mathematics and astronomy were entering a golden age. The great southern temples were beginning their long history of construction. Into this cultural setting, Vatsyayana produced his summary of a tradition of erotological writing that was, by his own admission, already old.
The lineage Vatsyayana inherited
Vatsyayana opens the book by naming its predecessors. Vatsyayana credits the earlier compendium of a sage called Nandin, and mentions successive scholars who trimmed or expanded that original. His own book, he says, is a distillation of the tradition rather than an original creation.
None of those earlier compendiums survives independently. What we have is Vatsyayana's synthesis and the layers of commentary that later scholars added to it.
Medieval commentators
The most influential commentary on the Kama Sutra is the Jayamangala by Yashodhara, written probably in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Yashodhara reads Vatsyayana closely, explains difficult passages and provides much of what we now understand as the "standard" reading of the text. Later medieval Indian writers, the author of the Ratirahasya (Kokoka), the author of the Ananga Ranga (Kalyana Malla), continued the same tradition of erotological writing, sometimes elaborating on Vatsyayana and sometimes disagreeing with him.
The Islamic and colonial periods
During the long centuries of Islamic and then British rule in India, the Kama Sutra was not a widely read book among the general public. It survived in manuscript, copied and preserved in scholarly libraries. Its subject matter and its Sanskrit medium put it outside the reach of most readers.
The 1883 English translation
In 1883, Sir Richard Francis Burton — soldier, explorer, prolific translator, published, together with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, an English translation of the Kama Sutra. They worked with two Indian scholars, Bhagavanlal Indrajit and Shivaram Parashuram Bhide. Because British obscenity law of the period would have made public sale impossible, the book was issued through a private society of subscribers called the Kama Shastra Society.
The Burton translation was, by modern standards, uneven. Burton was not a native Sanskrit reader and depended heavily on his Indian collaborators. He also imported some of the mannerisms of Victorian English into the text. But his edition changed everything. For the first time, Vatsyayana had a wide English-speaking readership.
The twentieth century
Through the twentieth century, the Kama Sutra became a fixed point in popular culture, referenced in film, music, comedy and countless magazine articles. Its actual text, however, remained comparatively little read. In 1994 Alain Daniélou published a careful French translation. In 2002, the Oxford World's Classics edition by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar produced a rigorous new English version, correcting many of Burton's errors and giving general readers, for the first time, a scholarly but readable modern text.
The Kama Sutra today
Today the book exists in an unusual double life. it is an academic object: taught in courses on comparative literature, history of religion and gender studies. Meanwhile, it is a popular icon: printed in glossy editions, referenced in wellness magazines, cited in relationship guides. Tesro's editorial view is that both lives are legitimate, and that a modern reader is well served by holding them both in mind.
A short timeline
c. 200–400 CE. Vatsyayana composes the Kama Sutra in Sanskrit, working from earlier compendiums.
12th–13th c. Yashodhara writes the Jayamangala commentary.
13th–16th c. Later medieval Indian erotological literature. Ratirahasya, Ananga Ranga, draws on the Kama Sutra tradition.
1883. Burton and Arbuthnot publish the first widely circulated English translation.
1963. The Burton translation enters mainstream Anglo-American publication.
1994. Alain Daniélou publishes a modern French translation.
2002. Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar publish the Oxford World's Classics translation.
Today. The Kama Sutra is in continuous print in dozens of languages.
Related pages
If you want the wider picture, go back to the main resource. Close neighbours in the same resource are Meaning and Origin. Behind the writing stand our About page, the our editorial pages introduction, the Editorial Standards, our Regulation & Compliance page and the Publishers & Operators declaration.