I
The Kāmasūtra is generally understood to be ancient treatise on the science of the senses and as an old Sanskrit bible on sex. Its discovery, like most other ancient texts and sculptures (such as Ajanta and Ellora), was during the colonial period. The reception of Kāmasūtra within and outside India differs considerably from the views commonly held about Indian culture or history. In some sense, there is a disjunct between the experience of people and the way they relate to the Kāmasūtra. Why is this the case? This question will have to wait. To the British however, Kāmasūtra perhaps only confirmed the many beliefs about immorality that they held India with. Currently, the Kāmasūtra, it seems, is remembered for two things: the many positions it describes and the sexual promiscuity that it speaks about casually.
Kāmasūtra poses for us, the ‘postcolonials,’ uneasiness and lack of clarity regarding our past as well as colonialism. It has now been long since we realized that the history that the British wrote of India has its share of misrepresentations and prejudices. However, after this realization, the history of India that we ourselves would offer has remained obscure. Even with post colonialist readings amidst us, there are not many ways in which one could understand the contours of a text such as the Kāmasūtra. Further, the existence of both Kāmasūtra and Manusmṛti in the Hindu corpus appears somewhat contrary. Said’s Orientalism, as it is used in Indian scholarship, appears to have disabled the postcolonial in the task writing their own history! The injunctions towards self-control in the Manusmṛti have likely been more accentuated somehow by the needs of urgent nationalism perhaps, or as a response to the barbarism and low levels of morality that the British accused us of, rather than the four fold idea of dharma-artha-kama-moksha.
The existence of a text such as the Kāmasūtra has often been read literally as history. Those embarrassed and those liberally accepting of the text, both assume that the descriptions in the Kāmasūtra may have something to do with reality rather than a particular representation of reality. Danilou distances himself from both these when he says that it is: “more an exercise in logic for the student than true descriptions” (1994, 6). This is interesting because the development of logic is often attributed to the six darśanas and not to a text such as the Kāmasūtra.
The way in which Kāmasūtra in recent times is talked about can be argued as auto-orientalist in nature, as suggested by William Mazzarella (2003), although his argument is more to do with the marketing of the condom Kāmasūtra and its use of trademarked tradition. The brand name and quotations from Vatsyayana’s Kāmasūtra were used for this condom, and according to Mazzarella, it created a new erotic sophistication in public communications.’ Mazzarella argues that sexual representations or discourse (as in the Kāmasūtra condom ad) was always there, but the condom ad, however, became a huge controversy. Mazzarella’s interview with Jayant Bakshi, the executive in charge of Lintas, a condom manufacturing company, has this to reveal: “Men and Women copulated or had sex. They never really made love. It was more either a procreative necessity, or it was a diversion, or it was, you know, ‘I have to do this because what else:?’ or ‘I’m expected to do this…’” (Mazzarella, 2003, 70). That is, from the raw performance of the sexual act, we now have a more sexualized version that has emerged. The name Kāmasūtra in the condom ad is supposed to have satisfied three crucial requirements: maximum reach/intelligibility, an erotic connotation, and cultural legitimacy. This cultural legitimacy is precarious, however, since Indians have moved away from the somewhat blind logic-building exercises of the Kāmasūtra towards ethics. Although, in a grand show of sentimentality, it is sometimes claimed that Vatsyayana wrote several centuries earlier what Freud wrote much later!
II
Freud –counterpart of Vatsyayana?:
The question that this paper concerns itself with is related to the popular understanding of Freud as the western counterpart of Vatsyayana rather than that of recent use of Kāmasūtra in consumer cultures. This paper is an attempt to clarify three statements. One is about the ancient Indian text Kāmasūtra. The other two are attempts at discerning culture and history. Let me quote them.
On the one hand, the societies –and they are numerous: China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies –which endowed themselves with an ars erotica. In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul (Foucault, 1976, 57).
In fact, the Kāmasūtra has characteristics of both ‘procedures’, [scientia sexualis and ars erotica] thus posing a challenge to Foucault’s taxonomy (Doniger and Kakar, 2002, xv).
…what one recognizes in India (Asia) – when looking from the West – are fragments and pieces. Not of Indian (Asian) world views, note this well, but those which are part of a world view in the West (S N Balagangadhara, 1994, 480, emphasis mine).
I see numerous kinds of relationships between the three quotes. They all vary in their understanding, quite obviously, and hold different stances. Foucault’s distinction is about the two ways in which the truth of sex is produced. Doniger and Kakar use the same distinction to talk about Kāmasūtra and present an altogether different picture from that of Foucault. Balagangadhara’s statement reveals that parts of the west (when viewed from the west) may be found in India/Indian culture.
Foucault’s distinction, if it must be understood properly, (of the two ways in which the truth of sex seems to have been produced) cannot be looked at in isolation, of course, as not affecting other aspects of Indian culture. It is surely not as if the procedure for the production of the truth about sex was ars erotica, while other aspects of the culture were totally independent of this cultural aspect. Hence, one is to perhaps understand the Kāmasūtra as it exists in Indian culture (within the context of a certain culture with specific traits). Foucault identifies the culture (Indian/Asian) as ars erotica, opposing it with scientia sexualis, which he argues was the share of the west, even as according to him, the distinction between ars erotica and scientia sexualis became blurred in the 19th century. As Foucault puts it,
On the face of it at least, our civilization possesses no ars erotica. In return, it is undoubtedly the only civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret: I have in mind the confession (Foucault, 1976, 58)
Doniger and Kakar in the introduction to their translation of the Kāmasūtra follow Foucault’s distinction of ars erotica and scientia sexualis. According to them, however, the Kāmasūtra has within it both ars erotica and scientia sexualis. The reasons why it is ars erotica are because it needs elaboration, commentary and a guru, a sutra being only a short form of saying things. This places Kāmasūtra in the ars erotica camp because as Foucault says, ‘the art of initiations and the masterful secret’ is prominent in ars erotica. The prose and verse in the text apparently have different functions to follow, where the prose talks of what people do and the verse of what people should do. This difference seems to add to Doniger and Kakar’s understanding that the Kāmasūtra is both ars erotica and scientia sexualis. Kāmasūtra, it is argued, is scientia sexualis because of the use of “this is evident”, which is in the fashion of providing evidence (Doniger and Kakar, 2002, xvii).[2] The testimony of witnesses, learned methods of observation and demonstration and the science of numbers seem to make the Kāmasūtra scientia sexualis. Further the text is claimed to be a sastra and is therefore viewed as presenting facts rather than suggestions
According to the above picture, Kāmasūtra contains both scientia sexualis and ars erotica “thus posing a challenge to Foucault’s taxonomy” (ibid, xv). The larger question therefore of culture itself is not taken up Kakar and Doniger. To examine this situation systematically, I shall do three things. 1. Examine whether Doniger and Kakar applied Foucault’s taxonomy in justified integrity. 2. Examine Foucault’s understanding of Indian culture as possessing only ars erotica. 3. Consider the possibility that both ars erotica and scientia sexualis are part of Indian culture but qualify it (by taking up the statement by S N Balaganagdhara, quoted earlier). The “qualify” is necessary because even as Kakar and Doniger and S N Balagangadhara’s argument are similar in certain ways, there is a difference. There is also the problem of the method through which the difference between the two (ars erotica and scientia sexualis) can be preserved and explicated.
Let me start with the first kind of inquiry. Kakar and Doniger, on one level, seem to have understood scientia sexualis as science. Look at following quote,
It allows him (Vatsyayana) to cite observed evidence in each case and to cap it with the assertion: ‘This is evident.’ This is the procedure of the scientia sexualis, and places Vatsyayana, if not in the company of Newton and Einstein, at least closer to Freud and Kinsey than to D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller (Kakar and Doniger, 2002, xvi).
The argument here is that the Kāmasūtra is scientia sexualis because the procedure of procuring evidence that is seen in it. But this is looped with the relation to specific scientists like Newton, Einstein, Freud and so on. Surely, scientia sexualis, has to do with the will to truth and its purported discovery, but not so much with science itself, literally. Doniger and Kakar’s reference to D H Lawrence and Henry Miller ignores Foucault’s attempt in the History of Sexuality Volume I, where the 19th century Christian outburst of discourse on sexuality in science and religion is reflected upon. Foucault, in fact, sees this period as blurring for us the division between ars erotica and scientia sexualis and relates knowledge and power as ‘Knowledge/Power’: “…since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis–under the guise of its decent positivism –has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica” (Foucault, 1979, 70).
The blurring of the division between scientia sexualis and ars erotica, in fact, occurs through a confusion of pornography and other kinds of inquiry in literature (embodied in the work of D H Lawrence and Henry Miller) and art about sexual pleasure with the pleasure derived from will to truth/knowledge.
We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing the truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open –the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure. (Foucault, 1976, 71).
Hence, there is no way in which Vatsyayana can be nearer to Freud or D H Lawrence. On the other hand, for Foucault, what constitutes the History of Sexuality is an analysis of the practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves and themselves in a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being (Foucault, 1985, 5).
There is an interesting connection between S N Balagangadhara’s statement and Doniger and Kakar’s following statement: “But if we set confession aside, the subsidiary criteria of the scientia sexualis, such as ‘the testimony of witnesses, and the learned methods of observation and demonstration,’ place the Kāmasūtra in this camp….” (2002, xv) (Emphasis mine). The “subsidiary criteria” that Kakar and Doniger talk about is not unlike the “fragments and pieces” that S N Balagangadhara references. Keeping in mind the possible similarity between the two positions, I will now move on to my second task.
My second task was to examine and assess Foucault’s understanding of Indian culture as possessing only ars erotica. To do this well, I will have to ensure there is no counter evidence to his theory, i.e., a text or practice that displays both scientia sexualis and ars erotica. I could, as perhaps Kakar and Doniger attempted, try to show this through the Kāmasūtra itself. However, the real challenge, I think, is to be able to show it through a practice that belongs to the realm of oral/lived culture, rather than a written one. For, as has been sufficiently emphasized now, Indian culture is better understood as a lived culture than a textual one (Lata Mani, 1994). However, some will argue that the written texts, even if not read at all by people as such, are learnt in a particular way so as to preserve in lifestyles the essence of the very same written texts. This is a dead-end debate and irresolvable, since evidence for both arguments only end up in the fallacy of circularity. In fact, it is probably time then to look for an alternative description of culture that can include the livedness of it. (This clarity and much more is what S N Balagangadhara’s notion of culture as a configuration of learning achieves). It might be advantageous to show my evidence through a story I recall from my childhood readings of Sri Ramakrishna; I cite it from memory. The story belongs to a group of stories that recall life in the gurukula (Hindu and Buddhist). Such stories are generally about other gurus and shisyas of the past where a particularly telling incident has taken place. It is narrated with a pedagogical purpose, to help other students learn from it. The Ramakrishna Ashrama publications never miss this story in their books and Ramakrishna is said to have narrated several such stories.
III
The Story:[3]
Two young monks under training, initiated recently into the rules of sanyasa are crossing a river. A young woman is about to drown in the same river; she calls for help. The two sanyāsis are in a conflict (dwandwa). To forego their dharma and violate their vows in sanyasa, (one of which prohibits touching women) or to save the life of the young woman, becomes the question. One of the sanyasis takes a decision: to save the woman. He carries her across the bridge, having rescued her. The two sanyasis restart their walk again, going through the forest. The other sanyasi now goes on for long after this, about the sin the friend has incurred, the degree of it, on what else could be done; considering the option that there actually was –not rescuing the woman but holding onto dharma intact. The sanyasi who had rescued the woman, turns to his friend. ‘I carried her, but left her off on the bank, you however, seem to be carrying her all along…in your mind.’
The questions the story raises need to be checked now against Foucault’s distinctions of ars erotica and scientia sexualis. Here, the parallel that Foucault draws between ‘us’ and the Greeks in his History of Sexuality Volume II, Use of Pleasure and the similar distinction through which Bernard Williams draws his conclusions in Shame and Necessity are significant. As Foucault describes the chronological arrangement between the three volumes of the History of Sexuality, “The Use of Pleasure, is devoted to the manner in which sexual activity was problematized by philosophers and doctors in classical Greek culture of the fourth century B.C” (Foucault: 1985, 12).
Both Foucault and Bernard Williams do not adhere to the progressivist account of cultures. Here is how Williams describes the progressivist account.
According to the progressivist account, the Greeks had primitive ideas of action, responsibility, ethical motivation, and justice, which in the course of history have been replaced by more complex and refined set of conceptions that define a more mature form of ethical experience (Williams, 1993, 5).
Instead of passing judgements as would the progressivist account, Foucault seeks to analyze four factors as found in Greek thought (ars erotica) which “no doubt marked the Christian ethic and the morality of modern European societies” (scientia sexualis) (Foucault, 1985, 15). The four are: the expression of fear, a model of conduct, the image of a stigmatized attitude and an example of abstinence. That is, the ground of addressing commonalities or differences between ars erotica and scientia sexualis is something that Foucault has taken up at length. Foucault’s further thesis is, of course, that the continuity between Greek and Christian cultures is limited and that the Christian philosophy is markedly different from the Greek one, in that it is not scientia sexualis. The way the ancients problematized sexual activity is not as it was later done in Christian thought. The way in which this might be done in a different context is explicated by Williams. The tools with which we might look at our story to check for ars erotica or scientia sexualis is found in Williams’ Shame and Necessity (1993). Williams clearly demarcates these as Shame, Necessity, Agency, Self and Responsibility. Balagangadhara, in We shall not cease from Exploration (1985) has dealt similarly with Indian culture. He too takes up questions of self, morality and learning. Keeping in mind the insights and tools of all three, Foucault, Williams and Balagangadhara, we must be able to map ars erotica and scientia sexualis in the story.
In an obvious way, the story fits in with Foucault’s description of ars erotica (the initiation necessarily by a master, for instance. The concept of dharma also corresponds to ethics in the fourfold aspects that correspond to the puruśārthas that the Greeks followed). Unlike, in scientia sexualis, the person here is no subject. He is continuously defined by the action committed and has no other desire or identity as such. What are the loose ends then? The most important part of the story, the constant talking that the other sanyasi has to indulge in –talk about the woman, carry her in the mind. Is this a version of scientia sexualis? Of desire? A discourse on sexual pleasure that also produces pleasure (“pleasure of analyses” as Foucault puts it). The other sanyasi thinks nothing of it, he forbids his friend from harping on the woman and on the topic. How are we to understand the general Indian injunction then: ‘to be pure in mind, body and speech’? The purity of the mind, which one might have easily understood earlier, is now complicated, it is difficult to grasp. Is this what Foucault would describe as the case wherein, ‘If pleasure was turned towards itself, not giving forth to desire’?
Are ars erotica and scientia sexualis indistinguishable, then? The concern here is that the differences between ars erotica and scientia sexualis are important for us, because it allows for a theory of cultural difference which, in turn, explains to us far more things than we ever before could. Thus far, we may conclude that Foucault’s distinction of ars erotica and scientia sexualis as applying to Asia/India and the west respectively is not a truism. What Foucault aims to say is restricted to the mapping of differences (cultural) and the peculiar burst of discourses around sex. Davidson’s understanding of Foucault is useful here: “…Foucault’s invocation of the pleasure of analysis is intended to complicate the strict distinction between ars erotica and scientia sexualis, leading us to ask whether, “at least in certain of its dimensions,” scientia sexualis may not function as an ars erotica (Davidson: 2001, 213. Emphasis in bold mine).
An almost similar understanding is put across by Balagangadhara although it is not dimensions but patterns. Ars erotica and Scientia sexualis can perhaps be likened to the performative and theoretical respectively, in Balagangadhara. It is here that Foucault, Kakar and Doniger and Balagangadhara’s statements overlap, as it were. The methodological complexity lies in the different things all of them might be saying. Kakar and Doniger, for example, may not strictly believe in the idea of cultural differences. The specificity of each of their works perhaps throws more light, of course, but there seems to be more to this than I can take up now. So, let us look at Balagangadhara’s quote more fully than earlier.
In a culture, where the performative dominates the theoretical, world views may try to emerge, but the soil does not nourish them. Very soon any such attempt falls apart as a world view and gets subordinated to the dominant mode of learning. It survives only as a fragment of yet another partial speculation of a finite slice of the world, Consequently, what one recognizes in India (Asia) – when looking from the West – are fragments and pieces. Not of Indian (Asian) world views, note this well, but those which are part of a world view in the West. These pieces are part of a different pattern in India (Asia); they have entered into different relationships with other parts; and they have an entirely different hue as a result (1994, 480) (Emphasis in bold mine).
One could, at this point, say that to read Foucault simplistically as saying that ars erotica is what is found in the east is inadequate. However, Kakar and Doniger seem to have read Foucault as proposing the simple formula ars erotica=east, which is why their findings in Kāmasūtra produce inconsistent results. Whereas Balagangadhara although saying, “the performative dominates the theoretical” sees both as part of Indian culture while insisting on a pattern. Without the emphasis on the pattern, there would be no difference between what Kakar and Doniger and Balagangadhara are saying. The methodological problem however remains, what is this pattern? To even begin to answer this question, Balagangdhara’s book needs a careful reading, because there the “attempt has been one of characterizing religion as a structured and structuring unity, and of seeing cultural differences as differences in patterns of life” (1991, 480). To quote Balagangadhara or Foucault and arrive at a conclusion about whether the Kāmasūtra is ars erotica or scientia sexualis is beside the point. One could conclude I suppose from the story that Indians do know of the pleasure of analysis or talking about sex. And that it is nipped in the bud when sanyasis engage in it, which is exactly the opposite of what the west did in its burst of discourse on sex. In India, the focus is more on cutting the discourse short and keeping the ethics intact.
However, to arrive at the pattern in which ars erotica and scientia sexualis elements are found is crucial and that is likely dependent on an analysis of other concepts developed by Balagangadhara. Hence, what I will do in the next part of this essay is to choose the other approach that Balagangadhara chalks out, to: “(1) postulate a set of elements (‘the religious phenomena) and try to account for the differences among cultures by characterizing the different relationships as between the elements” (1991, 479).
IV
An element from both:
I want to postulate an element and look at it in relation to one other element. Enough discussions have perhaps been carried out about the category of women; however, I choose it as an element and look at it in relation to feminism, its emergence and practice i.e., I will briefly look at the way in which women are talked about in ars erotica (texts from India and Greece) and trace the differences in feminism in both the India and the west. I do not know if women in scientia sexualis and ars erotica are categories of the same kind, nevertheless I move on. Naturally, my observations are tentative, and my analysis is somewhat intuitive at this stage.
In the remaining part of the paper, I must ideally do the following:
- Trace the commonality in pattern in statements about women (and slaves) in Greek and Indian Texts (ars erotica).
- Contrast it to the birth of feminism in the west (scientia sexualis).
- Therefore, see if traces of the difference in legacy show in the practice, theory and reception of feminism in India today.
Prima facie, the commonality between texts from India and that of Greek antiquity with reference to speaking about women is their contrariness. Let us briefly see what contradictory things texts from ars eroticas have to say about women. In Making sex: Body and Gender from Greeks to Freud (1992), Lacquer tells us that: “Patriarchy itself was predicated on the fact that when, “by the labour of testikles or stones”, blood is turned into sperm, the man’s would be “hote, white and thicke” while the woman’s would be “thinner, colder, and feeble” (1992, 100). While on the other hand, Sabina Lovibond tells us that, Socrates points out in his Republic that in a rational political order (sexual) anatomy – at least for some women – would not be destiny, since it is irrelevant to the ability to perform social functions other than that of producing children. Then again, Plato is said to have practiced a feminism of difference. However, we also know that Aristotle thought that Plato’s vision was flawed. Bartholin’s critique of Galen, differing from all of them may be considered important here. Laqueur puts it thus:
Bartholin, for example, understood Galenic sexual politics perfectly. ‘We must not,’ he argued, ‘think with Galen…and others, that these female genital parts differ from Men only in Situation,’ because to do so would be to fall prey to an ideological plot ‘hatched by those who accounted a Woman to be only an imperfect Man.’ Its perpetrators, in talking about how the woman’s ‘coldness of temper’ kept female organs inside, were simply articulating their prejudices in the language of science. (One would like to know how and why Bartholin developed so political and astute a critique) (1992, 92).
In India, the Manusmṛti has for now been quoted extensively and repetitively. However, recent studies differ and point to the contradictory statements in Manusmṛti that had earlier been ignored. Forever now, the Manusmṛti has been quoted to declare that India is a traditionally patriarchal society. Similarly, the Kāmasūtra, for which two kinds of readings are possible and exist, for e.g. one that celebrates its conferral of subject status upon women, and the other that mourns or is embarrassed by the denial of importance given to women. For example, Kumkum Roy in her article called “Unravelling the Kāmasūtra” is upset because women in Kāmasūtra were expected to treat their husbands as God. It is also unthinkable, for her, that childless women were expected to encourage their husbands to remarry. However, positive readings that are prevalent on the internet suggest that:
A significant aspect of the Kāmasūtra’s eroticism is the discovery of the woman as a subject and full participant in sexual life, very much a subject in the erotic realm, not a passive recipient of the man’s lust. Women are no longer “cooked rice.” The text both reflects and fosters the woman’s enjoyment of her sexuality (Internet source).
Doniger and Kakar too conclude women certainly have agency after observing Book Three of the Kāmasūtra wherein advice is given to virgins trying to get husbands (KS 3.4.36-47, Doniger and Kakar, 2002, xxix). Hence, both texts from Greek and Indian cultures make contradictory statements about women. Sometimes they are so very liberatory that feminism today can/perhaps has, claimed them as inspirational sources and as those that need to be appropriated. At other times, they are so derogatory that one can only walk away from them in frustration. This is a concrete and significant commonality between the two ars erotica cultures.
We have now come to examine the question of the birth of feminism in the west, which will help us establish the difference in pattern. Lovibond goes on to say the following about the relationship between rationality and feminism: “…that Platonism and by extension all ‘rationalist’ philosophy…possessed a gendered conceptual structure.” If this could be the ‘source’ of feminist thought, it is interesting that the battles in feminism today are also about “how best to organize our collective existence.” (Rationality, however in Lovibond’s usage seems to be a notion restricted to the western historical sense). In one sense, it seems that our questions have remained the same, only our approaches keep differing. One such approach to our collective existence is the scientia sexualis. It is yet to be inquired as to how Indians’ movement from ars erotica to scientia sexualis is structured or has occurred. For example, how are we to understand all the westernized Indians in India today? Or the present west? What does a transition take? Perhaps nothing? Perhaps everything? Is it the case then that feminism is still fighting with an enemy that belongs to a different age/society/time that has been left over now by mere accident and in a form incomprehensible to its own self? Whatever may be the case, intentional maneuvers in this regard, seem more likely and plausible in scientia sexualis than in ars erotica. There seems to be a particular incomprehensiveness in cultures of ars erotica when it comes to understanding intentionally suppressing women. They somehow grow ambiguous, become weak and do not sustain interrogation at all. The question that remains then for Indian feminists is, what are they fighting with? What is ‘patriarchy’? How do we deal with ambiguous statuses for women, where they may be worshipped on the one hand and feel harassed on the other? Not unlike the Manusmṛti which both reveres yet cautions against women. Since a consciously designed, devious scheme may not be at work in the ars erotica, is it any easier for us to be feminist here?
The question that most feminisms ask themselves, often with no answer is this: why was feminism not born, say in India? Why is there an incomplete revolution here always? The ‘patriarchal’ biases in ars erotica or performative cultures, can they be carried forward into our modern societies? If yes, how do we understand and deal with this. The clues that the history of the women’s movement in India provide are few. But there are some things that demand analysis. They are the resistances to ‘feminism’ as such, despite a somewhat easy adoption of feminist values commonsensically. (This I do not see as negating the achievements of women’s movement or of individual feminists). Then, there is the stance towards the word, ‘feminist’ –which is seen as embodying western culture. Perhaps the most interesting point about this is that the resistance to feminism is part of an accusation that it is a discourse instead of action! The question of how feminism was/is received in India becomes important in the sense in which Balagangadhara talks of cultures as configurations of learning, the question then being, how is feminism learnt in India. The differences between feminism in its theory and practice are also markedly different from each other, in there is yawning gap between the book and field. This may be attributed to the specific patterns of scientia sexualis (or religion and science –to add to the list of differences).
To conclude, the clarification that the paper achieves is about the possibility that performative and theoretical knowledge is different across cultures, broad defined as ars erotica and scientia sexualis, and that it is possible that it happens to be part of one single culture, however different the pattern may be. The difference in pattern between cultures and their implications therefore on many aspects of a culture perhaps needs to be understood more than ever now. Kāmasūtra thus is more about the pattern in which its performative and theoretical knowledge is based, and less about one or another stance on one or another topic.
Notes and References:
[1] This essay was written in December 2003, as part of my PhD Coursework at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS). It has been lightly edited now for better readability.
[2] The following verses from Yashodara’s commentary and the Kamasutra, that stress on knowledge and method appear to have inspired its classification under scientia sexualis. “A man should not be congratulated if he happens to succeed at something without knowing its science, for it is pure chance, like a bookworm eating a hole in the shape of a letter of the alphabet” (Yashodara’s commentary). Vatsyayana too echoes this sentiment, of course:
Because a man and a woman depend upon one another in sex, it requires a method, and this method is learnt from the Kamasutra. The mating of animals, by contrast, is not based upon any method, because they are not fenced in, they mate only when the females are in their fertile season and until they achieve their goal, and they act without thinking about it first (Kamasutra 1.2.18, Trans. Doniger and Kakar, 2002, 9).
[3] Another relevant story is one where a sex worker and a sanyasi live opposite each other’s houses. The sex worker’s bungalow is right opposite the sanyasi’s hut. The many visitors to the sex worker’s place, disturb the sanyasi and he decides to insult her and teach her a lesson. He counts the number of men who have visited her through pebbles. The sex worker is a humble woman who always thinks of God and regrets her fate. She performs her karma but detachedly. The sanyasi shows her a huge pile of pebbles and insults her, whereas she expresses her helplessness. Coincidentally, both the sanyasi and sex worker die at the same time. While the sanyasi’s body is cremated with lots of fanfare, the sex worker’s disease-stricken body is uncared for. But the messenger of death or Yamadootas who come to take away life, take the spirit of woman to heaven and drag the sanyasi to hell. Irrate, the sanyasi cries injustice, but the dootas tell him that while he counted the sins of the sex worker, she always thought of God in whatever she did and did her work detachedly.
Bibliography:
Balagangadhara, S N. 1985. “We shall not cease from Exploration”: An invitation disguised as a position paper composed at the behest of Arena for the theme “Decolonizing Social Sciences.” Unpublished paper.
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