Shaking up Victorian Sexual Mores

By Dane Kennedy, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted February 25, 2009.

The Kama Sutra has become the urtext of sexual enlightenment. This classical Sanskrit work has been translated into most major languages, and in the United States alone there are over a hundred books currently in print that use the words Kama Sutra in their titles, ranging from scholarly editions of the original text to The Pop-up Kama Sutra and The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Kama Sutra.

Until the late nineteenth century, however, the Kama Sutra was virtually unknown, even in its native India. Much of the credit for bringing it to the attention of the public goes to Richard Francis Burton. Although Burton did not actually discover the text or translate it from Sanskrit, as is commonly supposed, he did shepherd the first English-language translation of the work into print in 1883. His motivation went beyond an antiquarian interest in ancient Indian culture; he wanted the Kama Sutra to be read as a practical guide to a more sensible and satisfying sexual life. It was one of several Sanskrit and Arabic-language guides to lovemaking that Burton introduced to English readers, the others being the Ananga-Ranga (1885) and The Perfumed Garden (1886). A similar purpose informed his frank and unexpurgated translation of the Arabian Nights, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (1885-86). These publications were intended to challenge Victorian censorship of sexually explicit literature and criminalization of deviant sexual behavior.

Burton's unconventional attitudes toward sexuality were informed by his equally unconventional career. Explorer and ethnographer, poet and polyglot, soldier, consul, and travel writer, this immensely talented man was born in England in 1820 but spent most of his life abroad. His duties and travels took him to South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, West Africa, North America, South America, and even Iceland. He encountered cultures that were far more open about sexuality than his own and he was introduced to exotic practices such as polygamy, concubinage, eunuchism, female circumcision, and male prostitution. He acquired a keen and enduring interest in the varieties of human sexual desire and expression. At the same time, he grew increasingly frustrated by the prudery and priggishness of his own society, which were personified in the prototypical moral scold, ‘Mrs. Grundy'. Progressive sexuality or pornography?

In the final decade of his life, Burton launched a direct assault on the forces of Mrs. Grundy, declaring his intention to cause her to "howl on her big bum." He began by collaborating with the Indian civil servant F. F. Arbuthnot to privately publish English translations of the Kama Sutra and Ananga-Ranga. The actual translation of these works, which were originally written in Sanskrit, was carried out by several Indian scholars hired by Arbuthnot, while Burton polished the English prose, supplied introductions and footnotes, and oversaw their printing and marketing. In order to avoid prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act, he sold the books by subscription and distributed them by mail, using a fictive organization, the Kama Shastra Society, and fictive place of publication, Cosmopoli, while keeping his and Arbuthnot's names off the title pages.

Burton employed the same stratagem with his subsequent translations of the Perfumed Garden, a medieval Arabic sex manual. His magnum opus, the ten-volume Book of a Thousand Nights (followed by the six-volume Supplemental Nights), was printed, marketed, and distributed in similar fashion, but in this instance Burton proudly placed his name on the title pages and appended to the final volume a "Terminal Essay" that openly expressed his views on sexuality. In so doing, he sparked a vigorous public debate about purity and pornography, desire and deviance, state regulation and personal freedom.

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