Chaitanya Vaishnava Eroticism and the Kama Sutra

Some months ago I had an inspi­ra­tion to study the Kama Sutra in rela­tion to Radha-Krishna’s pas­times. I pur­chased Anne Hooper’s edi­tion which “rein­ter­prets and updates the ancient erotic texts…distilling 2,000 years of sex­ual knowl­edge into an exhil­a­rat­ing mod­ern guide.” and com­pared that with The Com­plete Illus­trated Kama Sutra edited by Lance Dane. Hooper left much of the text out con­sid­er­ing it to be irrell­e­vant to today’s reader. Hooper says, “By putting the sex tips and sex­ual posi­tions into the con­text of the 21st cen­tury, I’ve tried to give his archaic advice mean­ing for all of us today.”

On the other hand, Dane presents a more com­plete edi­tion con­tain­ing much archaic advice. He also illus­trates it using tra­di­tional Indian art­work from his col­lec­tion, which includes beau­ti­ful paint­ings of Radha Krishna who look remark­ably like Kama and Rati and other nayakas and nayikas. The Kama Sutra pre­dates Sri­mad Bha­ga­vatam and all Radha-Krishna writ­tings. I con­tend that it serves as a model for their pas­times to a degree.

This is backed up by Charles S.J. White in his The Caurasi Pad of Sri Hit Hari­vams which I also hap­pened to get from the library recently. “To estab­lish fully a mode of analy­sis that takes into account both the reli­gious his­tory of the var­i­ous sects of Vaish­nava bhakti and the his­tory of Indian cre­ative lit­er­a­ture with its com­plex sys­tems of figures-of-speech, such mat­ters as emo­tions involv­ing the love of nayaka and nayika, the ori­gin of the Kamashas­tra lit­er­a­ture, and the influ­ence of that lit­er­a­ture upon Vaish­nava faith are per­ti­nent sub­jects for inves­ti­ga­tion.” (p 25)

“Although the details of the divine lovers’ behav­ior are pre­fig­ured in the dra­mas and poetry of an ear­lier period and in the Kama­su­tra, the erotic descrip­tion leads beyond such acci­den­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics to cause reflec­tion upon the nature of the cos­mos and the mean­ing of man’s life.” (p 30)

“’Sulky Lady’ and ‘Pas­sion­ate Lady’ are con­ven­tional epi­thets for the nayika, or hero­ine, in San­skrit dra­maturgy. They also refer to the emo­tional states of women in stages of sex­ual play and arousal, described in the Kama­su­tra. In other stan­zas of the poem, many dif­fer­ent epi­thets are used both for Radha and for Krishna.” (p 109) Hit Hari­vams says, “But the Pas­sion­ate Lady is con­tin­u­ally adverse and angry.” (p 60) White’s foot­note p 111, “A con­ven­tion men­tioned in the Kama­su­tra.”

I’m sure there is more, but this is just a pre­lim­i­nary sur­vey on my part.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 20:21 and is filed under Steve's Musings and tagged with erotic texts, Kama Sutra, Radha-Krishna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.