INDIA

more than this and the image it is trying to paint of itself as a modern, advanced democracy powering into the big league is defiled by episodes that show how far it still has to go: an urban water riot; dreary death on remote and famished farmlands; medieval clashes between caste groups vying for jobs. India’s problems are manifold. Primary education and healthcare are still widely unavailable. Large swathes of this nuclear-power nation still have no access to water or electricity. Caste-based discrimination remains rampant enough for leaders to create militant political constituencies out of those that consider themselves victimised. One such party that champions the cause of Dalits (a catch-all term for communities considered to be untouchable) rode uproariously to power in Uttar Pradesh, politically India’s most important state, in May. To ignore any of India’s many new mutinies would be to court ugly surprises. The slow burn of Naxalism, or armed ultra-leftwing rebellion, along the country’s impoverished eastern flank, from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh, probably holds in store many more terrible lessons about the pitfalls of iniquitous growth. Inequality is the key problem. People are trying to discover ways of securing their rightful share in what they are being told is a prosperous place; they are impatient and their frustration will increasingly lead them to extra-democratic resorts. There has never been any dearth of bad news from India; of late, there has been an awful lot of good news too. The truth probably is that neither describes India well enough. India is what quietly happens in between – a country living and prospering in its few unbroken, and largely unnoticed, emancipated practices: universal adult suffrage; justiciable fundamental rights; uninterrupted democracy (barring the nineteen-month aberration of the Emergency which Indira Gandhi voluntarily corrected); smooth transfer of power based on what the ballot bears. Dictator Indira readily bowed to democracy in 1977. The Hindu rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party, which propounds an idea of India fundamentally different from the liberal, secular, democratic ethos enshrined in the country’s constitution, gave up power when beaten against the run of play by a coalition headed by an Italian-born Catholic in the summer of 2004. Fernandes falls back upon a predictable, if also utterly reasonable, truism – that India is destined to glory in her divides, that that’s what makes her a mosaic rather than a monolith. The country, time and again, has affirmed the larger faiths Indians have imbued her with; in many ineffable ways, the sum of their common benefits has far outweighed their cumulated contradictions. The late John Kenneth Galbraith, John Kennedy’s ambassador to India in the formative and critical early 1960s, was bemused enough by the contrary continuum he witnessed to call India a functioning anarchy. Ramachandra Guha’s work is an absorbing explanatory note to that description. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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THEBOOKOFLOVE: INSEARCHOF THEKAMASUTRA

★

By James McConnachie (Atlantic Books 272pp £17.99)

SURELYITIS self-evident that woodworking’s primary appeal for the man about town, that is to say, for the Kamasutra’s man about town, would be the fashioning of wooden dildoes? Yet James McConnachie, in his study of the history of Vatsyayana’s book on the art of love, finds this bizarre! Last year the University of Cambridge decided to stop the teaching of the Sanskrit tripos, begun in 1831. It is to a travel writer that we are indebted for this lively account of the most famous Sanskrit book in the modern world, indeed the only Sanskrit book known to the world at large – the Kamasutraof Vatsyayana, written probably around AD 300. This Rough Guide to an item of intellectual history is not without faults, but the idea in itself, to trace the life of the Kamasutra from ‘palm-leaf manuscript to coffee-table book’, is fine. McConnachie makes the important point that the Kamasutra is a book whose title alone can stand for the very thing it represents, putting it in a highly select group, joined by little more than the Bible and the Odyssey; and perhaps the Arabian Nights. He shows chutzpah in attempting to sum up the Sanskrit erotic tradition without knowing any Sanskrit. Inevitably the nineteenth-century translator, the notorious Sir Richard Burton, steals the show. It was Burton who thought up the Kama Shastra (Ars Amoris) Society, and recast the translation in lithe attractive prose. A cursory treatment of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex features in the last part, which quickly brings the coverage up to date. But although the author pays tribute to modern scholars Lee Siegel and Wendy Doniger, these two, along with the psychologist–novelist Sudhir Kakar, deserved a whole chapter to themselves. Siegel, with his witty work on street magicians and snake-charmers in

Straight from the Kamasutra: post-Mughal lovemaking

India, his studies of erotic poetry, and his novel about a translator of the Kamasutra, is no less than a Californian latter-day Burton. Wendy Doniger has inspired two or three generations of graduate students (‘Wendy’s children’, as Hindu fundamentalists who oppose her call them) with her joyous acclamation of erotic myth – a lifetime’s work that began over thirty years ago with her masterpiece on the mythology of Shiva in the Puranas, and continues as richly as ever, making her a major contributor to modernity’s understanding of India. Both she and Siegel are brilliant translators of Sanskrit poetry for the new ‘Loeb’, the Clay Sanskrit Library. McConnachie is accomplished, but his publisher has done him harm by denying him the framework and discipline of annotation. Books about books, about bibliography, need scholarly apparatus. Without references it is usually impossible to check McConnachie’s statements. Doniger and Kakar’s annotated translation of the Kamasutra (Oxford University Press, 2002) is a major source, and easy to check. As noted above, McConnachie criticises Yashodhara, the thirteenth-century commentator, for his explanation of Vatsyayana’s mention of woodworking; but when he rebukes him for ‘staggering pedantry’ in working out the maximum possible number of sexual conjunctions (729) – after all, a sum of more than geekish interest – he is merely rehashing Doniger’s remark that the commentator was in this arithmetic ‘being somewhat flatfooted’. Moreover, if McConnachie calls Yashodhara’s level of pedantry ‘staggering’ he plainly hasn’t seen much pedantry. McConnachie’s eager style, pulling you along by the arm, stumbles more than once. ‘Sexing up’ belongs to Alistair Campbell, not to Burton’s editorial role. Along with not knowing Sanskrit, McConnachie has another fault – he is too young! Burton and Doniger were in their sixties when they published their translations of the Kamasutra, Alain Daniéélou in his seventies. In the 1984 film Utsav, a recreation of the famous Sanskrit play The Little Clay Cart, we are shown the author of the Kamasutraas a heavily bearded figure in late middle age who peeps into brothel chambers to note down varieties of posture. Nevertheless, the zest and enthusiasm of James McConnachie’s study will lead many to look further at the riches of South Asian civilisation. To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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