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Naomi Wolf, again, has reported positively on the
Kamasutra'
s esteem for women, and it is undeniable that part of the book is expressly written for them, which would be admirable if women of the time had been taught to read, which they rarely were. The bulk of the text, Wolf argues, shows respect for women's sexuality ‘in ways that would be foreign to frat boy culture'. She quotes from Vatsyayana: ‘For a man to be successful with women he must pay them marked attention … Do not unite with a woman until you have excited her with playful caresses, and then the pleasure will be mutual.' Women, in other words, Vatsyayana was saying, are as sexual as men, and men should strive to provide their partners with erotic pleasure, orgasms included.

Imaginative lovemaking, Wolf further observes from the text, is important because it generates ‘love, friendship, and respect in the hearts of women'. Seduction of a virgin on a wedding night, ‘includes the man's gently shampooing the woman's limbs, one by one, as she gives him her consent to do, and it involves not just talking to her but asking her questions and listening to her'. Sex toys and sex while bathing are encouraged. Vatsyayana also warns men against pressing their advantage too strongly: ‘A girl forcibly enjoyed by one who does not understand the hearts of girls becomes nervous, uneasy and dejected, and suddenly begins to hate the man who has taken advantage of her.'

By Doniger and Kakar's account, the early Hindu sexual culture Vatsyayana describes was also surprisingly like our own. Young women of status are recognised as full, sensual participants in sex, free to date men and select their husbands. Vatsyayana deals with the skills required of mistresses, pragmatically suggesting they should look after their own future by a little harmless theft from their patrons. Married women, in his world, are also at liberty to take lovers. Vatsyayana tells
virgins how to attract husbands and insists that men learn ejaculatory control: ‘Women love the man whose sexual energy lasts a long time, but they resent a man whose energy ends quickly because he stops before they reach a climax.' He also instructs men to ensure women are treated by skilful use of foreplay in such a way, ‘that she achieves her sexual climax first'.

But Wolf, who was writing before Doniger's revised translation, seems to pass over some of the less female-friendly material in the
Kamasutra
. Part of the book contains tactics to seduce a maiden, so long as it is done graciously, and precautions to be observed when seducing another man's wife. There is instruction on how two or more men can share one woman – men should take turns, one inside her, the other fondling her. (There is also, as a balance, advice on how two women can share one man at the same time; to satisfy both, he must fondle one while having intercourse with the other.)

But then there is an awkward question in the
Kamasutra
of the apparent legitimisation of rape. If a virgin is unwilling to have sex, men are counselled to have a brother ply her with alcohol. ‘When the drink has made her unconscious, he takes her maidenhead.' Such rape is acceptable for other women, too: ‘A man may take widows, women who have no man to protect them, wandering women ascetics, and women beggars … for he knows they are vulnerable.'

On safer ground, but only just, the
Kamasutra
encourages rough sex. Slapping, spanking, scratching and biting are all recommended orgasmic aids, and all resultant shrieks and moans are measures of increased passion rather than pain. Hitting and hissing are explicit ways in which men and women show how they are progressing towards orgasm. Females in particular should hit their partners' hands, shoulders, chest, thighs and sides of the body with their fists, palms and fingers during foreplay, but not intercourse. ‘There are no keener means of increasing passion than acts inflicted by tooth and nail,' Vatsyayana says in Doniger's translation. ‘Passion and
respect arise in a man who sees from a distance a young girl with the marks of nails cut into her breasts.' He also advises that words spoken in the pre-orgasmic frenzy can mean the opposite of what they say: in this context, ‘stop' and ‘enough' mean ‘don't stop' and ‘more, please'.

Shaking of the woman's hands, according to Vatsyayana, is the first symptom of her reaching orgasm. He says she will feel a rush of profound love and will not want her partner to withdraw, even though he has ejaculated. After orgasm, both the partners should feel a joyful sense of fatigue and no sound other than heavy breathing should be heard. The partners should not immediately part. By the man staying in the woman and both feeling their partner's continuing presence proper intimacy is better achieved. Even after they separate, the partners should sit together, talk lovingly and eat.

If they return to bed to have sex again, they should reverse roles, the woman taking the initiative by starting the touching, stroking and kissing and other foreplay and finally mounting the man. This provides relief to the tired male and helps him in the harder task of regaining his desire for orgasm. It can also be adopted at other times for a change of sexual experience.

What kind of sexual climate, then, did the
Kamasutra
create in India? Was there any equivalent to the cold wind of asceticism and abstinence that blew through the parts of the world that adopted Christianity in the early part of the first millennium AD?

A Swiss Sanskrit authority, Professor Johann Jakob Meyer, examined sexuality in the India of around 500 AD in a 1930 book,
Sexual Life in Ancient India
. He attempted, albeit in a curiously tendentious style for an academic work, to give an account of the lives of women in Ancient India, based on the information on the relationship between the sexes that he found in the two great Hindu epics, the
MahaBharata
of around 350 AD and the
Ramayana
, an older text but one whose popularity, which persists today, was at its height at around the same time.

Without the delights of love (according to Meyer), the woman pines. ‘The enjoyment of women is, countless times in Indian literature, praised as the most glorious thing in heaven and earth, as the one meaning and end of living, or anyhow of the years of youth,' Meyer observed. He quotes a proverb to the effect that: ‘The power of eating in the woman is twice as great as the man's, her cunning four times as great, her decision six times as great, and her impetuosity on love and her delight in love's pleasures, eight times as great.'

‘Eastern literature in general shows the woman as being resolute, full of fire, passionate in comparison with the often so slack and sinewless man,' Meyer writes. ‘The characteristic comes out first of all in love. The fire of the senses is here also in the Indian doctrine far stronger in the woman, and it is not for nothing that the tender, timid sex so often takes the leadership in the Indian love tales, especially when it is a case of the fair one bringing about the tryst for the delights of the sexual union that they desire as soon as possible.

‘The ascetic, too, often sees the love of many and lovely women, shining before him as the goal and reward in the world beyond, or in a future incarnation … For, to the woman, there is never anything higher than sexual union with the man; that is her highest reward. Driven on by love, women live after their own appetites.' Holy men, such as priests and kings, were accordingly allowed in some areas to relieve a young girl of her virginity.

Copulation, Meyer explains, was for the Indians one of the very highest things leading to perfection. ‘In the Indian view the woman has also a far stronger erotic disposition, and her delight in the sexual act is far greater than the man's.' However: ‘Means of heightening the sexual powers of the man, so much even that in one night he can satisfy a thousand women, are known in the old Indian literature in great abundance.'

Meyer includes many factual nuggets. ‘The women in Bengal are known for beginning with their mouth the business of the vulva to excite the man's desires, owing to their
excessive craving for the joys of love. Such a thing is, of course, strongly condemned by the law books, and punishable by death as “unnatural intercourse”.' Mainstream Hinduism regarded oral-genital contact as a sin that could not be expiated in fewer than a hundred reincarnations. Yet some other Indian religions, according to Meyer, tolerated fellatio, while others still actually incorporated oral-genital contact into their rituals. Fakirs or monks in some parts of India had devotees fellate them. One erotic manual of the period around which Meyer studied included an eight-step plan to be used by eunuchs when performing fellatio. Other eunuchs, in areas where men maintained harems, were required to perform cunnilingus.

Masturbation was not encouraged in Ancient India, however. Even involuntary shedding of seed – nocturnal emission – had to be atoned for. As for what to do when overwhelmed by sexual feeling, Meyer records that Brahmins were advised: ‘If passion arises in him, then let him undergo mortification. If he is in great erotic straits, then let him put himself in water. If he is overwhelmed in sleep, then let him whisper in his soul thrice the prayer that cleanses sin away.'

As for the legacy the Ancient Indian sexual mores have left for the modern-day populations of the subcontinent, there is much insight to be gained again from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's essay ‘Why East Beats West When it Comes to Sex'.

‘As a British Asian,' Alibhai-Brown writes, ‘I come from nations where the art of sexual pleasure was so central that for hundreds of years it was enshrined in religious iconography, in poetry, art and dance. Everything that the human imagination and body has ever craved or tried is represented in the ancient sculptures of India, delicate Indian miniature paintings and the
Kamasutra
of Vatsyayana, which was translated and published in Britain in the late-nineteenth-century by two members of a secret sex club known as the Karma Shastra Society. The translators, an ex-British Army officer and Arabist, Richard Burton, and a retired Indian civil servant,
Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, saw their treatise as an essential education for English men who had only ever learned “the rough exercise of a husband's rights” without understanding the need for a wife to feel passion too and to participate as a willing part of a coupling rather than a victim of it.'

Alibhai-Brown explains how Eastern garments are designed to be modest, yet easily removable. The
sari
and
shalwar khameez
, according to an Indian Muslim cultural historian, was supposed to enable young married couples to have sex in the fields during lunch breaks. An eighteenth-century Persian lacquer box Alibhai-Brown saw in a Sotheby's catalogue illustrates this tradition well: ‘Two apparently fully-clothed lovers are shown locked in a sexual embrace on a carpet in a wood. She appears to be the more energetic and determined partner and he is obviously enjoying his good luck. Two musicians play for them and a maid plies them with wine. Even as you spy upon this private act conducted in the open, their clothes lock you out and grab back the intimacy from your inquisitive eyes. It is this play between giving and withholding, between the explicit and the implicit that creates the excitement.'

Both Urdu poetry and Hindi songs, she writes, are obsessed with
ishq
(passion) and the devastation it can cause. ‘My mother's favourite song is a tease about the red mark on the
chunni
(scarf) of the bride and the way she is glowing after her first night of sex. These traditions have long influenced sexual relationships and fantasies in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.'

‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet'

St Augustine of Hippo

At the same time as Vatsyayana was busy denying himself by the Ganges to clear his head for writing the
Kamasutra
, St John the Divine was on the island of Patmos working on the
Book of Revelations
. The chasm between the two works' aims, preconceptions and their view on the desirability of sexual pleasure could not have been wider. After the decadent sexual free-for-all of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, India and China, the Christian church had spent the three centuries since Christ's death taking the Jewish codes and making them trebly harsh, with sex and orgasmic pleasure in particular always among the primary targets of the grave, new morally ‘cleansed' world.

The Christians did this in the name of modernity, setting in train a kind of perpetual revolution in sexual mores that intensified through the centuries. Jesus Christ himself seemed to have no views one way or the other on sexual pleasure. When he entered the temple looking for sins that would damn the soul of man, sex was not among them. According to Mark, he
spoke out against adultery and condemned divorce, characterising both it and remarriage as licentious actions. But this was virtually all. Yet after His early death, His followers tried to extrapolate what their master's thoughts
might
have been on the matter. Hedging their bets and possibly acting in error of Jesus's real beliefs, they led a large proportion of humanity forward into a brave new world of sexual repression, hypocrisy and guilt.

Nobody can say how sincere the new morality's originators were. St Paul, as an ethnic Jew of the sexually enthusiastic Hebraic tradition, may well privately have had a soft spot for sexual pleasure. But he made sure to develop, or at least to profess, a thoroughly modern fondness for celibacy. ‘To the unmarried and the widows,' he wrote in
Corinthians
, ‘I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.' Tertullian (second century) went a step further, calling sex shameful, while for Arnobius (third century) it was filthy and degrading, for St Jerome (fourth) unclean (he likened the human body to a darkened forest filled with roaring beasts only controllable by diet and avoidance of sexual attraction), St Ambrose (fourth) a defilement (he thought sexuality an ugly scar on the human condition), and St Methodius (nineth) unseemly.