The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra by James McConnachie

Author:James McConnachie [McConnachie, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805090192
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2008-05-26T22:00:00+00:00

Scattered about this apartment place musical instruments, especially the pipe and the lute; with refreshments, as cocoanut, betel-leaf and milk, which is so useful for retaining and restoring vigour; bottles of rose water and various essences, fans and chauris for cooling the air, and books containing amorous songs, and gladdening the glance with illustrations of love-postures. Splendid divalgiri, or wall lights, should gleam around the wall, reflected by a hundred mirrors.

The anachronistic addition of books ‘with illustrations of love-postures’ gives away the game, as does the wishful, Victorian recommendation that follows, namely that ‘both man and woman should contend against any reserve, or false shame, giving themselves up in complete nakedness to unrestrained voluptuousness’. Burton also gave some narrative flow to the Ananga Ranga’s rather po-faced enumeration of sexual positions. At one point he makes ‘the poet’ interrupt his own text in order to address his audience – a king whose attention, one may infer, is flagging. ‘O, Rajah,’ he has the poet say,

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