Abstract
Until Alain Danielou’s 1995 translation, published in the United States, Sir Richard Burton’s 1883 version was the only widely known English version of the Kamasutra.1 Burton’s version is not only inadequate (it omits many sections, misreads others, and condenses most parts) but also skewed by his tendency to exoticize Asian sexuality as more “primitive” than European sexuality.2
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References
Madhavacharya does not exaggerate here. For an account of such policing in nineteenth-century campaigns in England against schoolboy masturbation, see Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman Lit-tlefield, 1977).
Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, History of Indian Erotic Literature (New Delhi: Munshi-ram Manoharlal, 1975), 28.
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© 2000 Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai
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Vanita, R. (2000). The Kamasutra in the Twentieth Century. In: Vanita, R., Kidwai, S. (eds) Same-Sex Love in India. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62183-5_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62183-5_31
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