In common parlance, people immediately associate Sanskrit with the Bhagwat Gita and the Vedas. The impression was formed that Sanskrit literature is very ancient, very important, very good quality, and its main focus is religion and philosophy. He says that even on Kama I am not the first one to write on it but I am merely trying to compress centuries of thought.ĭo you think the biases and prudery of the Victorian age also influenced what got translated from Sanskrit?ĭon't forget that Kama Sutra got translated for the first time in the Victorian Age by Richard Burton. Vatsyayana said different people have written on the first two subjects and now I prefer to write on the third subject. Dharma is the pursuit of righteousness, Artha is the pursuit of prosperity and material wellbeing and Kama is the pursuit of pleasure. In the first chapter of Kama Sutra, Vatsayayana describes the overall ends of human life: Dharma, Artha and Kama. So the Kama Sutra is essentially about human sexual behaviour? The rest is about different aspects of social life: courtship, mating, how men and women must behave with each other, discussions about polygamy, etc. Out of seven, only one is about sex and positions. I asked Penguin to respect that and publish it as a classic and not as a pictorial. It is a classical text deserving to be published as a classic.
After reading the original text, I found that these publications reflected only one portion of the text. I told them that Kama Sutra is identified in the popular mind with sex, and books on the Kama Sutra are identified with pornography, and there are number of illustrated and pictorial books on this in the market. While I was translating, I had a further correspondence with Penguin.
I got the original Sanskrit text published in Varanasi in 1964. Till then, I had not read the Kama Sutra.
#KARMA SUTRA AMAZON SERIES#
They said Penguin has a series called Penguin Classics and wanted a new translation. I told them that there are so many translations in the market. Penguin UK approached me in 2010 to translate the Kama Sutra. How did you become the author of one of the most definitive translations of the Kama Sutra? Sanskrit was not solely the language of scriptures or the court, but also possesses a wide corpus of literature reflecting the everyday concerns of ordinary men and women, he tells Jiby J Kattakayam. His major translations - Kama Sutra, Shuka Saptati, Madhav and Kama, Subhashitavali - have gone into multiple editions and been further translated into other foreign languages. Former diplomat A N D Haksar is one of the most prolific translators of Sanskrit literature to English.
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