A modern reader, opening the Kama Sutra for the first time, often wants to know exactly where the book came from. In this the historical record is less generous than we might wish, but it is not silent. We can date the book to a rough era, place it in a rough region, and describe with some confidence the intellectual environment that produced it.
When
The most widely accepted scholarly dating puts the composition of the Kama Sutra somewhere between the second and fifth centuries CE, with many modern historians favouring a date around the third century. The evidence is internal, cross-references, linguistic features, references to institutions of a particular period, rather than external. There is no dated colophon, no letter from a contemporary, no independent record of the book's release.
Where
Vatsyayana appears to have written in northern India, probably in an urban centre with an established Sanskrit literary culture. The book describes the daily life of the nāgaraka — literally the "man of the town", and its urban setting is unmistakable. It refers to marketplaces, entertainments, salons, gardens and the courtesies of city life. Whether the specific city was Pataliputra (modern Patna), Ujjain or somewhere else, we cannot say with certainty.
The author
The author's traditional name is Mallanaga Vatsyayana. Almost nothing personal is known about him. He does not include autobiography in his book, and no independent life of him survives from anywhere near his own time. He identifies himself only as a compiler, drawing on a much older tradition of erotological writing whose earlier compendiums he explicitly names.
Some scholars believe that "Vatsyayana" may be a lineage or school name rather than an individual, but the more common view is that a single editor stands behind the surviving text.
The tradition Vatsyayana drew on
Vatsyayana's work was not the first Indian book on desire. Vatsyayana names several predecessors. Nandin, Shvetaketu, Babhravya, and others, whose treatments of the same subject he compresses, updates and organises. His stated aim is to make a workable summary of an existing scholarly tradition, not to invent a new one.
The intellectual atmosphere
The years surrounding the Kama Sutra's composition are sometimes called a golden age of Sanskrit letters. Kalidasa, one of the greatest of all Sanskrit poets, was writing in roughly the same era. Mathematicians were laying the ground for the discovery of zero. Ayurvedic medicine, Buddhist philosophy, and the great Hindu epic traditions were all reaching new levels of refinement. The Kama Sutra should be read as one book among many produced by an unusually vigorous intellectual culture.
Why the book was written
Vatsyayana himself gives two reasons in his opening chapter. First, the tradition needed a workable summary: too many overlapping compendiums, each too long, meant that a busy adult reader had no single accessible text. Second, the subject deserved a serious treatment. He resists the view that desire is unworthy of scholarly attention, and argues that the goal of intimate life — like the goals of moral life and worldly life, is best pursued with care and study.
Why the book survived
Many Sanskrit books did not survive. The Kama Sutra did, for the reason that most surviving Sanskrit works survived: it was copied and re-copied by generations of scholars who found it useful, and it accumulated a commentary tradition that gave it institutional weight. When Burton and his collaborators came to it in the 1870s, they were reading a text that had already been through many hands.
The origin of the reputation
The Kama Sutra's popular reputation, as opposed to its historical origin, is much younger, barely a century and a half old. It was largely created by the Burton translation of 1883 and its Victorian and post-Victorian reception. The book itself is nearly two thousand years older than the reputation that now precedes it into every conversation.
Where to go from here
The natural next click is the main Tesro resource, which sets each of these individual pages in its wider context. On either side of this one you will find History and The Book. If you have questions about the site itself rather than the text, look at About, Editorial Standards, Regulation & Compliance or Publishers & Operators.