7. Positioning Kāmaśāstra in the Festive Scenario of Early Urban India

The social situation which reflects in the Kāmaśāstra and its cultural scenario point to an alternative material way of life in the society. Human life with its empirical experiences is depicted as the pivotal point in Kāmaśāstra. What type of material culture and social environment is depicted in the text of Kāmasūtra is the curious question to be analyzed. Undoubtedly, in an urban society it is the surplus that is the cause for the development of cultural progress. Only the surplus in social production can nurture intelligentsia who spend their time in material and sexual pleasures. A rich urban society can provide for the promotion of cultural and artistic life.

D. D. Kosambi points out:

“Kāmasūtra was apparently the first in the world to treat scientifically of erotics, not only for the individual but as a social science as well. This is thus a complement to the monastic tradition that was sweeping the countryside as a civilizing influence. Naturally, it was meant for the new elite, the nāgaraka or “man-about town” whose existence implied some source of income, ample leisure, and the existence of many towns where this new class could develop its tastes. Their pastimes did imply taste for all cultured pursuits, among which refined sexual enjoyment took its place frank and unashamed. The treatment is materialistic throughout, but never gross. The samāja (1. 4. 27) had become a rather tame meeting in the temple of the goddess of learning. A new club-like association with the highly accomplished and cultured hetaerae had come into fashion, the goṣṭhi (1. 4. 34); the word would later mean more general associations. There were numerous festival occasions for the enjoyment of group life, by this new class, independently of caste and religious occasions (1. 4. 82).

Some of these hark back to the semi-ritual civic nakkahatta-kīla of the Jātakas (118. 147) to be celebrated by every couple. The cultured citizen, on a visit to the village, was to display and describe the tasteful accomplishments of city life in a way that the more intelligent of the country-dwellers could appreciate not conversing wholly in Sanskrit nor wholly in the rural idiom. In all this, the proper choice of a bride is not neglected, while detailed intricacies of the sexual act have given the work a faithful reading public (and some interpolations) lost by the Artha” (Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi. 1975: 242-243).

The urban milieu enumerated in Kāmasūtra cannot be there before third century BCE. But a material background for the formation of such literary productions can be traced in the time of Buddha. On various occasions, Vātsyāyana has quoted several earlier exponents of Kāmaśāstra in his work Kāmasūtra. He codifies the legitimate systems and concepts in the field. The analytical observations done by the predecessors in this subject have been codified by Vātsyāyana. He has furnished them after his own interpretation with a theoretical framework. In this way, it is to be understood that the social and cultural backdrop was conducive for the formation of the Kāmasūtra.