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Article: Reading the "Kamasutra": the strange & the familiar.
- Article from:
- Daedalus
- Article date:
- March 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love, and one of the oldest in the world. It is not, as most people think, a book about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of living--finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs--and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, probably sometime in the second half of the third century of the Common Era, in North India, perhaps in Pataliputra (near the present city of Patna, in Bihar).
Virtually nothing is known about the author, ...