Insight Editions · No. 188
Against Dharma
Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger compares the Arthashastra and Kamasutra with dharma texts, tracing how ancient Indian writings on political power and sexual desire contest and reinterpret moral duty.
A study guide to Against Dharma by Wendy Doniger. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Wendy Doniger's Against Dharma: Dissent in the ancient Indian sciences of law and politics. Doniger tracks how artha and kama texts talk back to dharma orthodoxy without simply rejecting it.
Argument map
| Ch | Title | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Scie | ~235w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 2 | Timeline: Relevant Events and Historical Developme | ~277w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 3 | One. The Three Human Aims | ~6,777w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 4 | Two. The Influence of the Arthashastra on the Kama | ~9,964w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 5 | Three. Dharma and Adharma in the Arthashastra | ~6,134w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 6 | Four. Adharma and Dharma in the Kamasutra | ~7,868w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 7 | Five. Glossing Adharma with Dharma | ~4,718w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 8 | Six. Skepticism and Materialism in Ancient India | ~10,299w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
| 9 | Seven. Epilogue: Dharma and the Subversion of Scie | ~6,836w source; keep claims, names, scenes |
Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics
THE DWIGHT HARRINGTON TERRY FOUNDATION LECTURES ON RELIGION IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY The deed of gift declares that "the object of this foundation is not the promotion of scientific investigation and discovery, but rather the assimilation and interpretation of that which has been or shall be hereafter discovered, and its application to human welfare, especially by the building of the truths of science and philosophy into the structure of a broadened and purified religion. The founder believes that such a religion will greatly stimulate intelligent effort for the improvement of human conditions and the advancement of the race in strength and excellence of character.
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Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics
THE DWIGHT HARRINGTON TERRY FOUNDATION LECTURES ON RELIGION IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY The deed of gift declares that "the object of this foundation is not the promotion of scientific investigation and discovery, but rather the assimilation and interpretation of that which has been or shall be hereafter discovered, and its application to human welfare, especially by the building of the truths of science and philosophy into the structure of a broadened and purified religion. The founder believes that such a religion will greatly stimulate intelligent effort for the improvement of human conditions and the advancement of the race in strength and excellence of character.
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To this end it is desired that a series of lectures be given by men eminent in their respective departments, on ethics, the history of civilization and religion, biblical research, all sciences and branches of knowledge which have an important bearing on the subject, all the great laws of nature, especially of evolution . also such interpretations of literature and sociology as are in accord with the spirit of this foundation, to the end that the Christian spirit may be nurtured in the fullest light of the world's knowledge and that mankind may be helped to attain its highest possible welfare and happiness upon this earth." The present work constitutes the latest volume published on this foundation.
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Timeline: Relevant Events and Historical Developments
c. 1500 BCE The Rig Veda is composed c.
Cycle 9
Relevant Events And Historical Developments
1500 BCE The Rig Veda is composed c. 600-400 BCE The Upanishads are composed c. 500 BCE The Shrauta-sutras are composed c.
486 BCE Gautama Shakyamuni, the Buddha, dies 327-325 BCE Alexander the Great invades northwest South Asia c. 324 BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynasty c. 300 BCE-300 CE Grihya-sutras, some dharma-shastras, and the Mahabharata are composed c.
265-232 BCE Ashoka reigns c. 250 BCE The Third Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputra c. 200 BCE-200 CE More dharma-shastras and the Ramayana are composed c.
185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty ends c. 185 BCE-73 BCE The Shunga dynasty is in power c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks, Scythians, Bactrians, and Parthians enter India c.
78-144 CE The Kushanas are in power c. 100 CE "Manu" composes his dharma-shastra c. 112-144 CE Kanishka rules c.
150 CE Rudradaman publishes the first Sanskrit inscription at Junagadh c. 200 CE Kautilya composes the Arthashastra c. 300 CE Vatsyayana Mallanaga composes the Kamasutra c.
320-550 CE The Gupta Empire is in power c. 750-1500 Medieval Puranas are composed c. 788-820 The philosopher Shankara lives 1021 The Ghaznavid (Turkish) Muslim Empire is established 1526 Babur founds the Mughal Empire 1556-1605 Akbar rules 1600 Queen Elizabeth I charters the British East India Company 1828 Rammohun Roy founds the Brahmo Samaj 1858 The British Viceroy officially replaces Mughal rule [and the East India Company] 1947 Indian Independence is achieved; Partition takes place 2014 The Bharatiya Janata Party and Narenda Modi are elected
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One. The Three Human Aims
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The Time and Place
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166 and 78 BCE and between 78 and 150 CE, respectively) were bluffing when they used the titles "King of Kings" and "Son of God," on the precedent of the Indo-Greeks. Small kingdoms now began to dominate the political scene and to have enough of a sense of themselves to be almost constantly at war with one another. The ancient Indian king was called "the one who wants to conquer" (vijigishu), which, together with the "circle" theory of politics, according to which the country on our border is our enemy, and our enemy's enemy is our ally, and so forth, made for relentless aggression.
Cycle 94
Kings killed for thrones; parricide was rampant. Some European historians have regarded this period as India's Dark Age, dark both because it lacked the security of a decently governed empire (the Kushanas very definitely did not rule the waves) and because the abundant but hard-to-date sources leave historians with very little available light to work with. Some Indian nationalist historians regarded it as the Age of Invasions, the decadent age of non-Indian dynasties when barbarians (mlecchas) continually slipped into India.
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The widespread public recognition of such women both as donors and as renouncers also had an impact on the role of women within Hinduism. The Kushana centers of Gandhara and Mathura produced Hindu images that served as paradigms for regional workshops for centuries to follow. Yet there were also religious challenges; the Kushana king Kanishka (c.
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127-50 CE) encouraged a new wave of Buddhist proselytizing, and the Fourth Buddhist Council was held under his patronage. The gloriously miscellaneous quality of the culture of the time is epitomized in the reliefs on the great Buddhist stupa (reliquary mound) at Amaravati, carved during this period in the western Deccan. It depicts scenes of everyday life that defy denomination: musicians, dancers, women leaning over balconies, horses cavorting in the street, elephants running amok, bullocks laboring to pull a heavy (but elegant) carriage, ships with sails and oars.
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In a nice moment of self-referentiality (or infinite regress), there is a carving depicting masons constructing the stupa that depicts a scene of masons constructing the stupa.5
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The Sciences and the Shastras
It also designates a text that contains such knowledge. So ashva-shastra in general means the science of breeding and training horses (ashva corresponds to the Latin equus), while the Ashva-shastra attributed to a particular author is a textbook about the breeding and training of horses. Ancient Indian sciences lived in the shastras.
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I would also contend that the textbooks of politics and erotics, the main subjects of this book, are proof that ancient India had psychology, anthropology, and sociology. As for the sort of science that produces useful tools that work-that is, technology-India had wonderful telescopes, which eventually did enable its astronomers to predict eclipses. These schools amassed truly encyclopedic knowledge, in a spirit well defined in a famous verse from the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic (with over 100,000 verses): "Whatever there is here .
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The formulation of encyclopedic knowledge recognized the diversity of opinion on many subjects; at the same time, some, but not all, of the shastras closed down many of the options that Buddhism had opened up for women and the lower castes. Both the diversity encompassed by the shastras and their authors' drive to control that diversity are best understood in the context of the turbulent period in which they were composed.
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The Three Aims
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(Artha can also designate gain versus loss; advantage; the meaning of a word; or a goal or aim, as in the three human aims.) Kama represents love, desire, and pleasure, not merely sexual pleasure but more broadly sensual pleasure-music, good food, perfume-the fine life. For assonance, one might call them piety, profit, and pleasure; society, success, and sex; or duty, domination, and desire. Or perhaps the superego, the ego, and the id.
They have been known as a trio from at least the time of the Mahabharata. Near the very end of that long, long poem, the poet cries out: "Artha and kama come from dharma; why is it not practiced?" (12.123.1-19; 18.5.49). Earlier in that text, the god of Dharma incarnate, in disguise, posed a riddle: "Dharma, artha, and kama are opposed to one another; how can these perpetual opposites unite in one place?," to which the answer is "When dharma and a wife submit each to the other, then all three-dharma, artha, and kama-come together" (3.313.102-3).
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The Triad remained important through the centuries. Yashodhara, the thirteenth-century commentator on the textbook of sexuality, told the following story about it at the very start of his commentary: The three aims of a person are three divinities. And there is textual evidence that they are in fact divinities.
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For the historian tells us: "When King Pururavas went from earth to heaven to see Indra, the king of the gods, he saw Dharma, Artha, and Kama embodied. As he approached them, he ignored the other two but paid homage to Dharma, walking around him in a circle to the right. The other two, unable to put up with this slight, cursed him.
Because Kama had cursed him, Pururavas was separated from his wife, Urvashi, and longed for her in her absence. When he had managed to put that right, then, because Artha had cursed him, he became so excessively greedy that he stole from people of all classes. The Brahmin priests, who were upset because they could no longer perform the sacrifice or other rituals without the money he had stolen from them, took blades of sharp sacrificial grass in their hands and killed him.
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(1.1.2) There is a parallel to this story in the Greek myth of Paris, who, forced to choose among three goddesses, chose Aphrodite (= Kama) over Hera and Athene (roughly = Dharma and Artha), who cursed him. Dharma and Kama often appear as mythological characters, though not together in the same story;12 but Artha, to my knowledge, is seldom if ever personified. Yashodhara refers elsewhere, briefly, to the Pururavas story (which was well known in India as early as c.
Cycle 104
1500 BCE)13 when he remarks that "Artha, when it overrides all else, impedes dharma and kama-as it did for Pururavas" (1.2.41). Indeed, the story tells us how compelling and dangerous artha and kama can be, but also how dharma, especially when defended by Brahmin priests, is the most powerful of all. (It also tells us that Brahmins are capable of violently defending their right to be paid for performing rituals.) Not everyone, however, believed this story or the assumptions about the supremacy of dharma that underlie it.
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Many people-who included the authors of the oldest texts of the sciences of artha and kama-did not swallow the myth at all.
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The Three Texts
The Brahmin imaginary has no canon, but if it did, that canon would be the body of dharma-shastras, which, from the third or second century BCE, spelled out the dominant paradigm with regard to women, animals, castes, and much else, the mark at which all subsequent antinomian or resistant strains of Hinduism aimed. In the science of dharma, the dharma-shastra attributed to Manu is the most famous. Manu's text consists of 2,685 verses on topics as apparently varied-but actually intimately interrelated in Hindu thought-as the social obligations and duties of the four classes (Brahmins, the class from which priests are drawn, at the top; then the royal/warrior class; then merchants; and then servants) and hundreds of castes; the proper way for a just king to rule and to punish transgressors in his kingdom; the appropriate social relations between men and women of different classes and of husbands and wives in the privacy of the home; birth, death, and taxes; cosmogony, karma, and rebirth; ritual practices; and such details of everyday life as the penance for sexual improprieties with one's teacher's wife.
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There are many other dharma texts, with significantly different ideas on many of the subjects that concern us here; some are older, some later than Manu. (The Arthashastra and the Kamasutra cite predecessors whose works did not survive.) But Manu's text remains the gold standard that most later texts either accepted or rebelled against, and it provides a base against which we may measure the two other texts that are our main concern. Moreover, Manu is the only one of the three authors whose night job was as a mythological figure: Manu is recognized by many texts as the son of the Creator and was (by his own testimony in his dharma-shastra) present at the original creation; he is also the ancestor of all humans (who are called manava, after him).
His authority is therefore of a very different nature from that of our other two authors. Artha-shastra as a generic term refers to the science of politics, government, and economics, while the Arthashastra attributed to Kautilya is a single text, a compendium of advice for a king, combining much technical information on the running of a kingdom with a good deal of thought on the subject of human psychology. (Amartya Sen suggests that its title can be translated as Economics,14 but of course Sen is an economist.) Kautilya's Arthashastra is even more outstanding for artha than Manu is for dharma, for where there are many dharma-shastras, the Arthashastra has no real rivals: there are only a very few other artha-shastras, all considerably later and nowhere near as comprehensive.
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In fact, the much-quoted Mahabharata verse about totality actually says, "Whatever there is here about dharma, artha, kama, and moksha is also found elsewhere; but what is not here is nowhere" (1.576.32; 18.5.38), regarding the Quadruple Set as the equivalent of the sum total of possible knowledge. But moksha does not concern us much, because the Kamasutra speaks of it only twice, once when it simply assimilates moksha to dharma and once when it describes the courtesan's success in achieving the release (moksha) of an unwanted lover (6.3.44), a strikingly profane use of the word.
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The Arthashastra, too, never mentions moksha in a religious context, but uses it only to designate the release from marriage-divorce (3.4.27, 30). The unusual use of this highly religious word to designate sexual separations in both texts is surely a bit of blasphemy that the Kamasutra picked up from the Arthashastra. In any case, moksha is not part of the worldly field of the shastras.
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But it is always there in the background, explicitly at considerable length in Manu (1.114; 2.243; 6.35-37, 40-44, 58, 74-81, 85; 12.83-104) and implicitly in the other two, as a final metaphysical option. In the broadest sense, the entire Triad is religious, since the Hindu view of the meaning of human life includes within its domain artha and kama as well as dharma. But only dharma (which is often translated as "religion") is truly concerned with religion in the narrower sense of morality, theology, and social ethics.
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Artha and kama are entirely this-worldly, while dharma, though also primarily this-worldly, always works within the shadow of the other world. (Moksha is entirely other-worldly.) And there is another significant distinction: dharma is communal, while kama and artha (and moksha, too, for that matter) are individual. Pleasure and desire (kama) are always personal.
As for artha, in the Kamasutra, artha primarily means the money that individuals (playboys, courtesans, wives and husbands) use for kama, while in the Arthashastra the king's concern is primarily with his own artha, his own individual survival and thriving, and only secondarily with the thriving of the community, insofar as that is essential to his own success. Yet dharma is what binds all three texts together.
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The History of the Three Texts
The history of the three texts is a labyrinth of mutual influences. The Arthashastra is generally attributed to Kautilya ("Crookedness"),18 also called Vishnugupta ("Protected by the god Vishnu") and Chanakya ("Chick-pea"), the brilliant chief counselor who helped the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta win and maintain a great empire, beginning in the fourth century BCE. And indeed, there may have been some sort of rudimentary Arthashastra at the time of the Mauryas, now lost to us.
But the actual text of our Arthashastra first began to be compiled in the middle of the first century CE,19 when someone who called himself Kautilya composed the text for a king and his principal advisors and ministers as a guide in the management of economic and military affairs. It was probably handed down and frequently recopied within court and government archives. The science of artha probably began as a subcategory of the science of dharma and broke away,20 as the shastras in general broke away from their religious base.
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Finally, right before the Gupta period (in the fourth century CE), more of the dharma materials, particularly pro-Brahmin materials, may have been added, together with verses at the end of each chapter. This is the Arthashastra text that we have, a palimpsest starting from a now lost Arthashastra, which fed into a dharma-shastra by Manu, which fed, in turn, into a revised Arthashastra. By this time, the Arthashastra was no longer in the hands of government administrators but rather under the control of Brahmin scholars.
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So the first version of the Arthashastra came first (middle of the first century CE); Manu (second half of the second century CE) borrowed from that version of the Arthashastra and then, in turn, influenced the second recension of the Arthashastra (early third century CE); and that compendium of Arthashastra and Manu influenced the Kamasutra (late third century CE).
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Ranking the Three Aims
The Three Aims are generally said to be mutually supportive, a unified whole, but this is a pious fiction. Artha and kama are in direct conflict with certain aspects of dharma from the very start. Hierarchical ranking is the most basic and pervasive form in which ancient Hindu texts make sense of the world,25 and the Three Aims are no exception.
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All three texts (Manu, the Arthashastra, and the Kamasutra) rank the Triad in the same way-on the surface, at least. All three texts say that all three aims should be present, and balanced, in a good life. That such a general outlook is not limited to ancient India becomes immediately apparent when we consider, for instance, a statement that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
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Artha at its best is kama implementing the demands of dharma. Dharma at its best is correcting everything that is against kama." It is therefore hardly surprising that the Indian texts, too, assert this general agreement among the three aims. More surprising is that, at first glance at least, all three texts rank dharma at the top of the Triad.
Cycle 114
This view is widespread in ancient India. The Mahabharata tells us that the good king held dharma supreme, above kama and artha (1.94.4). The other great Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana (c.
200 BCE-200 CE), assumes this ranking when Prince Rama criticizes his father for giving in to his young wife's sexual blackmail and putting her son on the throne, in violation of the dharma of royal succession: "When I reflect on the disaster and my father's change of heart, it seems to me that kama is a more potent force than either artha or dharma" (2.47.8-10). This reversal of the usual order is a powerful way of saying that his father's values were entirely upside down.
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Manu at first seems to be quite open-minded about the ranking: "Dharma and artha are said to be better, or kama and artha, or dharma alone, or artha alone here on earth; but the fixed rule is that the Triad is best" (2.224). (Even here, kama gets short shrift, never said to stand on its own.) And elsewhere Manu says, "[The householder] should renounce artha and kama if they should conflict with dharma, and even dharma when it results in future unhappiness or arouses peoples' indignation" (4.176).
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But at the end, Manu shows his true colors: "Kama is the mark of darkness, artha is said to be the mark of energy, and dharma the mark of lucidity, and each is better than the one before it" (12.38). Kautilya at first, and on several subsequent occasions, mentions only two aims, dharma and artha, as the goals of knowledge (1.2.9), logical thinking (1.2.11), and the aspirations desired in the crown prince (1.17.33). When he first mentions the Three Aims, he lists them in the usual order, dharma first and kama last (1.4.11).
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He insists that dharma is the root of artha and kama its fruit (9.7.81). And he seems to rank them in the pious order when he returns to the subject and expands upon it. First he cites the usual politically correct statement about the desirable balance between the aims: "[The king] should enjoy kama as long as it does not conflict with dharma or artha; he should not go without happiness.
Or he should enjoy the Three Aims equally, each enhancing the others. For if one, among dharma, artha, and kama, is enjoyed too much, it harms itself as well as the other two" (1.7.3-5). But then he stands up for what he really cares about: artha: "'Artha alone is supreme,' says Kautilya, 'for artha is the root of dharma and kama'" (1.7.6-7).
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This is an unusual divergence from the expected pattern, and the convergence of the two texts in these two passages strongly suggests that the Kamasutra has gotten it from the Arthashastra. The Kamasutra also echoes the conventional idea of the equality and mutuality of the Three Aims and, conventionally, gives dharma pride of place. Vatsyayana begins the whole book by invoking dharma, artha, and kama and asserting "the mutual agreement among the three" (1.1.3).
When he returns to the subject, at the start of the second chapter, he says: "A man's life span is said to be a full hundred years. By dividing his time, he cultivates the Three Aims in such a way that they enhance rather than interfere with each other" (1.2.1). But then the Kamasutra goes on to develop a rather idiosyncratic view of the Triad: "Childhood is the time to acquire knowledge and other kinds of artha, the prime of youth is for kama, and old age is for dharma and moksha.
Or, because the life span is uncertain, a man pursues these aims as the opportunity arises, but he should remain celibate until he has acquired knowledge. When these Three Aims-dharma, artha, and kama-compete, each is more important than the one before it. But artha, in the form of wealth, is the most important aim for a king-because it is the basis of social life-and for a courtesan" (1.2.2-6, 14-15).
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The attempt to correlate the Three Aims with three ages is awkward: what does childhood have to do with the serious business of artha? (Yashodhara here lamely suggests, "There is no rule against acquiring something such as land during this period.") And moksha is squeezed in, in the slot allotted to the third aim, dharma, though Vatsyayana has explicitly said that there are only three aims and never discusses moksha as an aim again. It is striking that the Kamasutra here gives pride of place not to its own subject, kama, but to artha, the subject of the Arthashastra, a clear carryover from the parent text.
And it lists artha first and dharma last in the first of the three verses at the end of the second chapter: A man who serves artha, kama, and dharma in this way wins endless happiness that has no thorns, in this world and the next. (1.2.39) But then it goes on to invoke the obligatory balance among all three: Knowledgeable people undertake a project that does not make them worry, "What will happen in the next world?" Or "Is this a pleasure that will not erode my power?" Undertake any project that might achieve the three aims of life, or two, or even just one, but not one that achieves one at the cost of the other two.
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(1.2.40-41) And, like the Arthashastra, the Kamasutra returns to the Three Aims at the very end of the book: A man who knows its real meaning sees dharma, artha, and kama, his own convictions, and the ways of the world for what they are, and he is not driven by passion. A man who knows the real meaning of this text guards the state of his own dharma, artha, and kama as it operates in the world, and he becomes a man who has truly conquered his senses.
(7.2.53, 58) Again Vatsyayana privileges over kama both dharma-which, as we will see, he has relentlessly ignored throughout his book-and artha, the subject of the text on which he has based his own text. But this is just window dressing. Intertextuality The Arthashastra and Manu quote one another, and the Kamasutra quotes the Arthashastra.
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We have seen that someone added bits of Manu to the Arthashastra (and vice versa) and will soon see that the Kamasutra borrowed heavily from the Arthashastra. This sort of historical conflation is a common phenomenon among ancient Indian texts. These texts grew up side by side, and they exist together in one world.
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Manu devotes most of an entire book (6) to telling us how to be an ascetic, how ascetics should behave, and how they should be treated; Kautilya tells a spy how to pretend to be an ascetic; and Vatsyayana tells us to employ an ascetic as a go-between. The three texts are manipulating the same cultural conventions in different ways. This is intertextuality with a vengeance.
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And the commentator spells this out: "If he is a Brahmin, he gets his money from gifts; a king or warrior, from conquest; a commoner, from trade; and a servant, from wages earned by working as an artisan, a traveling bard, or something of that sort." But it is not the case that only a puritanical Brahmin knew the dharma texts and only a libertine merchant knew the Kamasutra. That might well be the case, but it is equally possible that the same man, of either class, might study dharma with learned men by day and the Kamasutra with his mistress by night.
The knowledge of Sanskrit was limited to a very small, highly elite group, consisting primarily of men and among them primarily Brahmins, with a sprinkling of royalty and powerful and wealthy merchants, and they alone would have been able to read these texts in the original. Sanskrit texts therefore had a very limited direct effect on the actual lives of most people in ancient India, but the ideas in the texts were diffused far beyond this elite male group. The Kamasutra explains this in justifying its assertion that women should become familiar with its contents (against unnamed "scholars" who insist, "Since females cannot grasp texts, it is useless to teach women this text" [1.3.3]): Throughout the world, in all subjects, there are only a few people who know the text, but the practice is within the range of everyone.
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And a text, however far removed, is the ultimate source of the practice. "Grammar is a science," people say. Yet the sacrificial priests, who are no grammarians, know how to gloss the words in the sacrificial prayers.
"Astronomy is a science," they say. But ordinary people perform the rituals on the days when the skies are auspicious. And people know how to ride horses and elephants without studying the texts about horses and elephants.
Cycle 124
Flow 125
To what extent these ideas were actually known is more difficult to ascertain.
The Hidden Transcript of Adharma
And the transgressive part of that message was embedded in the Sanskrit texts through a process that James C. Scott describes in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990). Scott uses the term "public transcript" to describe the open, public interactions between those who dominate-whether in the sphere of politics, economics, culture, or religion-and those whom they dominate.
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The "hidden transcript," then, is the critical discourse that goes on, offstage, among the oppressed, out of the sight and hearing of their oppressors, hidden beneath the surface of evident public behavior. In Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), Scott argues that the everyday resistance of subalterns shows that they have not consented to dominance. The situation of the ancient scientific texts created and perpetuated by Brahmins in ancient India is more complex, for both the surface text and the hidden transcript are embedded in the same document.
But Kautilya and Vatsyayana almost always cite such "scholars" only in order to disagree with them, often to mock them. In the Kamasutra, in particular, the word "scholars" almost always has a pejorative tone, perhaps best translated as "pedants." The public transcript is the message of dharma, put there by the dominant Brahmins and designed for the control of the other, subaltern classes. But the hidden transcript, the subversion36 of dharma, was put there not by subalterns but by another branch of those same Brahmins, designed to challenge the stranglehold of dharma on both them and the other classes.
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My book is about the denial of dharma, the dissent against dharma, and at times the subversion of dharma through the hidden transcript in two great scientific Sanskrit texts. My argument is that these two texts, ideologically closely related (chapter 2), advocate blatant transgressions against dharma (chapters 3 and 4), though both texts developed mechanisms to allow them to pay superficial lip service to dharma (chapter 5). They are evidence of a steady stream of subversive ideas that were maintained by certain Brahmins in the face of the disapproval of other Brahmins.
This undermining of the dominant social and religious order by secular scientific disciplines was continued in a most ingenious and devious way by the creation of a mythology about wicked skeptics and materialists (Charvakas and Lokayatikas), whose words were always cited with shock and disapproval-but always cited, always kept alive in the Hindu tradition (chapter 6). The subsequent history of India, particularly under colonization, has led to the present-day undermining of science by a religious government (chapter 7). We can better understand the subversion of science by religion under the present Indian theocracy by going back to trace the history of the subversion of religion by science, first in the two key texts of politics and erotics and then in the subsequent history of dissension against dharma in India.
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Closing summary
This chapter (One.
Two. The Influence of the Arthashastra on the Kamasutra
Someone who called himself Kautilya evidently borrowed heavily from Manu in drafting the revised standard edition of the Arthashastra (and vice versa). It should therefore not be surprising to learn that the Kamasutra borrowed heavily from the Arthashastra (though, in this case, the Arthashastra did not return the compliment).
Compare 27
The Machiavellian Kamasutra
Someone who called himself Kautilya evidently borrowed heavily from Manu in drafting the revised standard edition of the Arthashastra (and vice versa). It should therefore not be surprising to learn that the Kamasutra borrowed heavily from the Arthashastra (though, in this case, the Arthashastra did not return the compliment). Soon after 1905, when the European and American academic world became aware of the existence of the Arthashastra, scholars began to comment on its general, particularly formal, resemblance to the Kamasutra.
Cycle 129
Flow 130
Hub 28
The Indebtedness of the Kamasutra to the Arthashastra
Ladder 131
Compare 132
Much of the Kamasutra is devoted to Kautilyan trickery and deception of one sort or another: the man-about-town tricks the parents of a young girl and also tricks the girl (book 3); the married woman tells lies as she jockeys for power against her cowives (book 4); the adulterer deceives the woman's husband (book 5); the courtesan lies to get her customers to give her more money (book 6); and various people use drugs to cloud the minds of their sexual objects (book 7). Just as the Panchatantra, the book of beast fables, is in many ways a spoof on the Arthashastra, so the Kamasutra can be read as a light-hearted travesty on selected themes of the Arthashastra.
Hub 133
How did the two texts tackle related problems in their two different spheres as they walked the tightrope of affirming and undermining dharma? Noting in passing the ways in which the Kamasutra pulls away from the Arthashastra, we will conclude with a brief speculation about the consequences that arise when the Kamasutra applies to sex the principles of politics, more precisely the politics of the Arthashastra.
Cycle 134
Cycle 29
Prose versus Verse
The Kamasutra models both its format and its rhetoric closely on that of the Arthashastra. This is immediately apparent: in contrast with Manu, which is in verse throughout (the same simple meter as that of the two great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata), the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra are primarily in prose. More precisely, their prose chapters, containing down-to-earth, often undharmic instructions, are capped at the ends by one or two verses that often express dharmic exhortations, contradicting the point of the preceding prose.
This ambivalent attitude toward dharma, as well as the use of verses to express the dharmic, often pro-Brahmin, overlay,11 is a central trait that the two texts have in common. In both cases, an author other than the one who composed the main prose passages probably added the verses later,12 at the moment when other dharma materials, particularly pro-Brahmin materials, were added. Evidently someone tried to clean up the Arthashastra with the verses at the end of each chapter,13 and the Kamasutra followed suit.
Flow 135
(He may have replicated the points of the Arthashastra or drawn on similar sources.) In any case, the pro-Brahmin, pro-dharma verses at the ends of the chapters were not part of the original plan of the Arthashastra or the Kamasutra.16
Flow 30
Striking Points of Agreement
In addition to these overarching stylistic forms that the Kamasutra has inherited from the Arthashastra, there are numerous specific points of agreement, incidental passages in which the Arthashastra has clearly provided the paradigm for the Kamasutra. For example, the Arthashastra gives elaborate instructions on setting up the royal residence: "On land recommended by architects, he should have a palace constructed with a palisade, a moat, and gates, and inner apartments surrounded by many courtyards. At the back, in a courtyard, the women's quarters, nursery, infirmary, and a yard with trees and water.
Ladder 136
In an outer courtyard, the residence for young girls and princes. In a courtyard in front, the dressing room, the counsel chamber, the assembly hall, and the schoolrooms for the princes. The palace guard should be stationed in the areas between the courtyards" (1.20.1, 10-13).
The "inner apartments" include the harem. This is also how, mutatis mutandis, on a more intimate scale, the Kamasutra instructs the man-about-town to set up his pad: He makes his home in a house near water, with an orchard, separate servant quarters, and two bedrooms. This is how the house is furnished: In the outer bedroom there is a bed, low in the middle and very soft, with pillows on both sides and a white top sheet.
Compare 137
(There is also a couch.) At the head of the bed there is a grass mat and an altar, on which are placed the oils and garlands left over from the night, a pot of bees wax, a vial of perfume, some bark from a lemon tree, and betel. On the floor, a spittoon. A lute, hanging from an ivory tusk; a board to draw or paint on, and a box of pencils.
Hub 138
Some book or other, and garlands of amaranth flowers. On the floor, not too far away, a round bed with a pillow for the head. A board for dice and a board for gambling.
Outside, cages of pet birds. And, set aside, a place for carpentry or woodworking and for other games. In the orchard, a well-padded swing in the shade, and a bench made of baked clay and covered with flowers.
Cycle 139
(1.4.1-4) The Kamasutra goes into much more detail about the layout of the bedroom, of course, and lacks the detailed description of fortifications that the Arthashastra supplies, but the blueprints take the same form in both cases. The Arthashastra advises the king to make use of actors dressed as gods of fire and water to demoralize the enemy during a siege (13.1.3). The Kamasutra prescribes similar playacting to a man laying siege, as it were, to a virgin: he should have a friend dress up not as a god but as a fortune teller and describe the "man's future good luck and prosperity" to the girl's mother to earn her favor (3.1.6).
Flow 140
Ladder 31
But it is surely significant that the commentator on the Kamasutra knew that he could find relevant material in the Arthashastra.
Compare 32
Marginalized People
A close agreement between the Arthashastra and Kamasutra (and a sharp difference from Manu) can be seen in their attitudes to what ancient India regarded as marginalized people. The very people that Manu warns us to shun (such as actors and women ascetics) Kautilya recruits as secret agents and Vatsyayana employs as his party crew. To consider just one list among many such, Manu warns us not to eat the food that someone has sneezed on (which makes good sense) but then continues, "nor the food of a slanderer, a liar, or the seller of rituals, nor the food of a tumbler or a weaver, nor the food of an ingrate; nor that of a blacksmith, a strolling actor, a goldsmith, a basket-weaver, or an arms-dealer; nor that of a man who raises dogs, a bootlegger, a washerman, or a dyer" (4.214-16).
Ladder 141
It is not clear to me why some of these people are socially unacceptable, but Manu's dislike of actors-indeed of all artists-stems both from their ability to make the unreal seem real20 and from the way that they live, moving from place to place, like the Romani (persecuted as "gypsies"), never part of a settled community. In another context, Manu cites a partially overlapping list of those who will end up in the lowest forms of rebirth: strolling actors, pugilists, wrestlers, dancers, arms dealers, and addicted gamblers and drunks (12.44-45).
He also remarks that the rules against speaking with women do not apply to the wives of strolling actors or of men who live off their own wives; for these men have their women embrace other men, concealing themselves while they have them do the act (8.361-63). These people that Manu abhors are the people that do Kautilya's dirty work, as when, for instance, the king wishes to liberate a prince held hostage: Actors, dancers, singers, musicians, those who live by speaking, bards, rope-dancers, and jugglers, who have slipped in earlier, should perform for the enemy.
Compare 142
One after another, they should approach the prince and he should establish that they may come and go and stay as long as they like. Then he should get away at night disguised as one of them. This also applies to women who live on their looks, disguised as (the performers') wives.
Hub 143
Or he should get out carrying the packages of their musical instruments and food. (7.17.34-39) The Arthashastra also prescribes fines for persons who insult the learning of those who live by speaking and the occupation of artisans and performers (3.18.8). As these are the very people whom Manu regards as incapable of being insulted, libel-proof, a blot on the social setting, Kautilya's assertion here directly challenges Manu.
The Kamasutra reveres such people. Here is how Vatsyayana tells his protagonist to treat actors: On a specified day at half moon or full moon, there is always an assembly of invited guests at the temple of the goddess Sarasvati. Visiting players also come and give an audition for them, and on the second day they are rewarded with a fixed fee.
Cycle 144
Then they may give a performance or be dismissed, according to their reception. In case of a disaster or an occasion for celebration, they substitute for one another. They honor and protect visitors who join them.
Flow 145
Those are the customs of theatrical companies. (1.4.15-17) Note that these actors are performing at a religious festival, but their services are not limited to this particular goddess, who happens to be the patron of music and literature: "The festivals dedicated to this or that particular deity can be described in this same way, taking into consideration the different circumstances" (1.4.18). Clearly Vatsyayana does not regard actors as a polluting presence.
Hub 33
Religious mendicants and ascetics, both male and female, are an essential part of this marginal society. Though Manu had great respect for male renunciants, he grouped the wives of actors with women ascetics and "menial servant girls who are used by only one man," as women of so little reputation that a man might converse with them with no consequence but a small fine (8.363). When speaking about the conduct of a wife, Vatsyayana sings Manu's song, advising her never to "have a close relationship with any woman who is a beggar, a religious mendicant, a Buddhist nun,21 promiscuous, a juggler, a fortune-teller, or a magician who uses love-sorcery worked with roots" (4.1.9).
But among the "advisors" whom courtesans and men-about-town employ in their battles and truces are beggar women, women of low birth, and women with shaved heads (i.e., ascetic women) (1.4.6). Vatsyayana also quotes without disagreement the suggestion of another scholar (Gonikaputra) that a meeting with an adulterous married woman "is easy to arrange in the houses of a girlfriend, a beggar woman, a Buddhist nun, or an ascetic woman" (5.4.43). Women ascetics are an essential part of Vatsyayana's crew of panderers, because women will have better access than men to the women the man-about-town wishes to meet.
The use of monks, nuns, and male religious mendicants as spies (Arthashastra) or go-betweens (Kamasutra) demonstrates, in both texts, a total lack of respect for the possible actual religiosity, or reputation, of such people.
Cycle 34
Spying and Seducing
The paranoid psychology of the political text casts its shadow over the erotic text. Eternal vigilance is the price of tyranny-but also the price of adultery. Both the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra often imagine the possible choices being considered in the mind of someone who might be plotting mischief.
Ladder 146
The internal debate of potential adulterers, in the Kamasutra, in persuading themselves of the moral justice of their actions mirrors the king's self-persuasions and justifications for seducing or secretly doing away with an enemy. This is some of what the would-be adulterer says to himself: "This woman has her husband entirely under her control, and he is a great and powerful man who is intimate with my enemy. If she becomes intimate with me, out of her affection for me she will make him reverse his allegiance." Or "That powerful man has turned against me and wishes to harm me; she will bring him back to his former nature." Or "If I make him my friend through her, I will be able to do favors for my friends, or ward off my enemies, or accomplish some other difficult undertaking." Or "If I become intimate with this woman, and kill her husband, I will get for myself the power of his great wealth, which ought to be mine." Or "There is no danger involved in my having this woman, and there is a chance of wealth.
And since I am useless, I have exhausted all means of making a living. Such as I am, I will get a lot of money from her in this way, with very little trouble." Or "This woman is madly in love with me and knows all my weaknesses. If I reject her, she will ruin me by publicly exposing my faults; or she will accuse me of some fault which I do not in fact have, but which will be easy to believe of me and hard to clear myself of, and this will be the ruin of me; or she will cause a break between me and her husband, who is a man with a future and under her control, and she will get him to join my enemies; or she herself will become intimate with them." Or "This woman's husband is the seducer of the women of my harem; I will pay him back for that by seducing his wives, too." Or "By the king's command, I will kill his enemy, who is hiding inside." Or "My enemy is united with this woman's husband.
Compare 147
Through her, I will get him to drink a potion." For these and similar reasons, one may seduce even the wife of another man. (1.5.8-20; see also 5.1.21-42) Compare this with one of the many scenarios that the king in the Arthashastra imagines to justify the counterintuitive tactic of providing power and success to an enemy-ultimately in order to overpower him with the "silent punishment" (secret murder): "If my enemy gets power, he will oppress his subjects through verbal and physical abuse and by confiscating property.
Hub 148
Or, if he gets success, hunting, gambling, drinking, and women will make him careless. When he is weakened by his disaffected subjects, or careless, I will be able to overpower him." . For reasons such as these, he may help even an enemy to get power and success.
Cycle 149
Let's look at those lists. First, the Arthashastra, explaining how to win over angry, frightened, greedy, or proud people in an enemy's territory, begins with a list of angry people: someone who is cheated out of things he had been promised; between two people who carry out a craft or a service equally well, the one who is slighted; someone passed over for a king's favorite; someone who has been challenged and then defeated; someone who is furious because he has been exiled; someone who did not get a position for which he had incurred expenses; someone who is prevented from carrying out his own dharma (sva-dharma) or from receiving his inheritance; someone stripped of honors or office; someone who has become invisible to respectable people; someone whose wife has been sexually assaulted; someone put in prison; someone punished for what someone else said; someone who has been prevented from doing something wrong; someone whose entire property has been confiscated; someone who has been harassed in prison; and someone whose relative has been banished.
Flow 150
(1.14.2) Each of these items could be unpacked into the plot of a soap opera. Then comes the list of frightened people: someone who has injured himself; someone who has been offended; someone whose evil acts have been made public; someone who is alarmed at a punishment given [to someone else] for a similar crime; someone whose land has been seized; someone who has surrendered to the army; the head of an entire department who has suddenly become wealthy; . someone hated by the king; and someone who hates the king.
Flow 35
(1.14.3) And so on, for the lists of proud people and greedy people (1.14.4-5). At the end, Kautilya advises that each of these people may be incited to sedition "by a bribed assassin working undercover as an ascetic, bald or with matted hair, to whom the person to be incited may be devoted" (1.14.6). (5.1.50-54).
Both texts play close attention to people's involuntary gestures and revealing facial expressions as betrayals of hidden political or, as the case may be, sexual emotions. (This art was also developed in the textbook of acting and dancing, the Natyashastra, composed during the same general period.) All of this scrutiny and manipulation casts a presumption of dishonesty and betrayal over erotic as well as political relationships. The Arthashastra employs spies to determine the particular character flaw of an official that might cause a particular problem: He should have them watched by spies.
For an official may cause a loss of revenue-through ignorance, if he doesn't know all the rules and methods; through laziness, if he can't bear the boredom of business; through carelessness, if he is addicted to the objects of the senses . ; through fear, if he is nervous about acting against dharma or artha in the clamor of a crowd; through kama, if he is inclined to be kind to people who come to plead their cases, and through anger, if he is inclined to hurt them; through arrogance, if he relies on his learning, wealth, or connection to a court favorite; and through greed, if he alters weights, measures, estimates, and accounts.
Ladder 151
(2.7.9-10) It is worth noting not only that dharma, artha, and kama are listed in the conventional order but that, instead of revering these ideals, Kautilya regards them as qualities that a worthy official must overcome in order to do his job well. The Kamasutra cleverly adapts this template into a precise and rather cunning psychology for devising approaches to women who are differently resistant to adultery, tailoring each approach to the particular source of resistance (5.1.17-42): A man should eliminate, from the very beginning, whichever of these causes for rejection he detects in his own situation.
If it is connected with her nobility, he excites more passion. If it is a matter of apparent impossibility, he shows her ways to manage it. If the problem is her respect for him, he becomes very intimate with her.
If it stems from her contempt, he demonstrates his extraordinary pride and his erudition. If it comes from his contempt, he prostrates himself before her. If she is afraid, he reassures her.
(5.1.43-49) In yet another pair of closely parallel texts, the Arthashastra presents a fourfold typology of repentant traitors: "Those who have left and returned are of four types: one who left and returned for a good reason, and the opposite of this; one who left for a good reason but returned without a good reason, and the opposite of that" (7.6.23). It is but the work of a moment for the Kamasutra to convert this into a six-fold typology of lovers who leave a courtesan and then may or may not be taken back: If he has gone elsewhere, she must find out about him; he may belong in any of the six possible categories, according to the circumstances: He left her of his own accord and he left the other woman, too, of his own accord.
Ladder 36
He left both her and the other woman because they got rid of him. He left her of his own accord and he left the other woman because she got rid of him. He left her of his own accord and stayed with the other woman.
He left her because she got rid of him and he left the other woman of his own accord. He left her because she got rid of him and he stayed with the other woman. (6.4.3-37) The simple scheme that provided a useful checklist for a king dealing with a traitor would have become cumbersome and impractical if it had ever actually been used by a courtesan dealing with an errant lover.
Compare 152
It serves, rather, as a kind of inspiration for cold-heartedness. Testing The influence of the Arthashastra on the Kamasutra is particularly visible in the techniques of testing people (which Manu briefly alludes to [7.54]). The Arthashastra advises the king to test his potential counselors of various departments to make sure they are impervious to the temptations of each of the Three Aims of life, able to say "No" to dharma, artha, or kama.
Hub 153
Kautilya's test of kama is relatively straightforward: A wandering woman ascetic who has won the queen's confidence and is received with honor in the women's quarters should urge each high official one by one: "The chief queen is in love with you and has found ways to meet with you. There will also be a lot of money for you." If he refuses, he has integrity. That is the secret test for kama.
(1.10.7-8) And any man who has thus been proven impervious to kama is to be made a guard of the harem and women's quarters (1.10.13). This program of testing then appears in the Kamasutra as just a single test for the guards of the harem, but this one test combines the four elements, including fear, that the Arthashastra used to test four different sorts of counselors: Scholars say: "'Guards stationed in the harem should be proved pure by the trial of kama." Gonikaputra says: "But fear or artha may make them let the women use another man; therefore guards should be proved pure by the trials of kama, fear and artha." Vatsyayana says: Dharma prevents treachery.
Cycle 154
But a man will abandon even dharma because of fear. Therefore guards should be proved pure by the trial of dharma and fear. (5.6.40-42) In the end, therefore, and in contradiction of Kautilya (whose opinion Vatsyayana cites here under the rubric of "scholars"), Vatsyayana decides that imperviousness to kama is not the most important quality for a harem guard, after all; fear and dharma trump kama.
Compare 37
But since the Arthashastra precedes the Kamasutra logically as well as chronologically, when the Kamasutra tries to take the Arthashastra scheme for testing counselors and adopt it for a scheme to test the guards in the harem, it has to condense it so that each guard is tested in four ways, some of which are totally irrelevant to the qualities of a guard in the harem. On the other hand, again unlike Vatsyayana, Kautilya suggests that the women of the harem must themselves be tested for "honesty and dishonesty," lest they prove a danger to the king.
For Kautilya is primarily concerned not so much to protect the king's wives (Vatsyayana's worry) as to protect the king from his wives (1.17.1): Going to the harem, he should meet with the queen after old women have made sure she is unarmed. For Bhadrasena was killed by his brother hiding in the queen's chamber, and Karusha by his son hiding under his mother's bed. The king of Kashi was killed by his queen with puffed grain mixed with poison that she said was honey; Vairantya with an anklet, Sauvira with a girdle-jewel, and Jalutha with a mirror-all smeared with poison.
Flow 155
But, as we are about to see, the form of the warning-the list of mythical and historical characters who were destroyed by kama-does indeed appear in both texts to make a related point: the danger to men posed by their own kama, usually in the form of attacks by the men whom they have cuckolded. And there is another close parallel that appears in the context of this testing. The Arthashastra, speaking of testing the counselors, warns against the danger that one might corrupt the uncorrupted, "like water with poison; for you may never find a cure for a person who has been corrupted" (1.10.18) In the same vein, Kautilya also objects to the suggestion that the crown prince who may be plotting to seize his father's throne should be tempted with the four royal vices or the vices that spring from kama (a quartet that we have seen Kautilya imagine as corrupting the enemy king).
Ladder 156
One of his ministers suggests: "One of the secret agents should entice him with hunting, gambling, drinking, and women, saying, 'Attack your father and seize the kingdom.' Another secret agent should dissuade him; so say the Ambhiyas." Kautilya says: "It's a big mistake to awaken one who is not awake, for a fresh thing absorbs anything smeared on it. In the same way, a prince, whose mind is newly awake, will believe anything he is told as if it were the teaching of a shastra.
Therefore, one should teach him what accords with dharma and artha, never anything that is contrary to dharma and artha" (1.17.28-33; see also 1.6.5-6; 8.3.38-66). This same concern about corrupting the uncorrupted appears when the Kamasutra speaks of testing the chastity of wives: "The followers of Babhravya say: 'To find out about his own wives' purity or impurity, a man should test them through charming women who have deeply hidden their own involuntary signals and who will report what other people say.' But Vatsyayana says: Because corrupt people can succeed among young women, a man should not set in motion, without a reason, the corruption of a person who is not corrupt" (5.6.43-44).
Compare 157
And so the Kamasutra suggests better ways to control women, primarily through knowledge of the Kamasutra.
Hub 38
The Need to Control the Senses
The widely shared fear of the four vices that arise from kama is part of a larger concern for self-control. Manu, as we might expect, has a great deal to say about this. He warns the king to make a great effort to avoid the vices that arise from kama and anger,26 which all end badly.
Hub 158
For a king who is addicted to the vices born of kama loses his dharma and artha, but if he is addicted to the vices born of anger he loses his very self (7.45-46). With regard to the other two texts, one would have thought that concern for the control of the senses would make far more sense in the Arthashastra than in the Kamasutra, but not so. An emphasis on the need for a man to control not (or not just) his women but his own senses pervades both texts; both Vatsyayana and Kautilya would have loved Nixon and hated Clinton.
Cycle 159
A king who behaves in the opposite way and has no control over his senses will perish immediately" (1.6.1, 3-4). Again and again, the Arthashastra speaks of the need for control: "[The king] should conquer his senses by abandoning the set of six enemies" (1.7.1). Spies, in particular, are advised to avoid women and liquor, to stay sober and sleep alone (1.16.18-23), for people reveal secrets through the indiscretions of love affairs (1.51.11).
Flow 160
The Arthashastra's definition of the mastery of the senses is framed by this concern for control. Kautilya says: "Conquering the senses means that the senses-ear, skin, eye, tongue, and nose-do not veer about among sounds, touches, visible forms, tastes, and smells" (1.6.2). Almost the exact same wording, and the same concern for control, is used for the opposite purpose in the Kamasutra's definition of kama: "Kama, in general, consists in engaging the ear, skin, eye, tongue, and nose each in its own appropriate sensation, all under the control of the mind and heart driven by the conscious self" (1.2.11-12).
Where the Arthashastra does not want the senses to "veer about" among the objects of the senses, which it enumerates, using this passage in the context of an argument that one should give up kama, the Kamasutra uses the "appropriate" engagement of the same senses enumerated in the Arthashastra in its argument for the enjoyment of kama-under the control of the conscious mind. The Arthashastra's list of kings who were destroyed by treacherous women (with mirrors or lips smeared with poison and so forth) is mythologized in another Arthashastra list of kings who were destroyed by the far more dangerous enemies within: When the Bhoja king named Dandakya was aroused by a Brahmin's daughter, kama destroyed him, along with his relatives and his kingdom, as it did the demon Karala of Videha, too; and anger destroyed Janamejaya when he attacked Brahmins, and Talajangha when he attacked the Bhrigus; greed destroyed Pururavas when he took too much from the four social classes, as it did Ajabindu of the Sauviras; arrogance destroyed Ravana when he would not return another man's wife, and Duryodhana when he would not return a portion of the kingdom; pride destroyed Dambhodbhava, who treated his people with contempt, and Arjuna of the Haihayas; and excitement destroyed the demon Vatapi when he attacked Agastya, and the Vrishni confederacy when it attacked Vyasa.
Ladder 161
These and many other kings, who were addicted to the set of six enemies and had not conquered their senses, were destroyed, with their kinsmen and kingdoms. But Rama, the son of Jamadagni, who had renounced the set of six enemies and conquered his senses, enjoyed the earth for a long time, as did Ambarisha, the son of Nabhaga. (1.6.5-12) Several of these figures are heroes of the Sanskrit epics (Janamejaya, Duryodhana, Vyasa, Rama [not Sita's husband, but another Rama, "Rama of the Axe"]) or of mythological texts, some killed in conflict with demons or ogres.
Compare 162
The Kamasutra (here quoting unnamed "fatalists" rather than presenting Vatsyayana's own opinion) uses an abbreviated version of the very same list (notably including Ravana, the villain of the Ramayana), though it attributes all the disasters to kama alone. It begins with a word-for-word quotation of the tale of the first unfortunate sinner on the Arthashastra's list: "When the Bhoja king named Dandakya was aroused by a Brahmin's daughter, kama destroyed him, along with his relatives and his kingdom. And Indra the king of the gods with Ahalya, the super-powerful Kichaka with Draupadi, Ravana with Sita, and many others afterwards were seen to fall into the thrall of kama and were destroyed" (1.2.34-36).
Vatsyayana also remarks that a king "who suppresses the band of six enemies within him conquers the earth too" (5.5.37), though this sentiment occurs in a verse at the end of a chapter, where Vatsyayana usually lodges pious sayings that he has contradicted at numerous points of the preceding chapter and does not really mean. Kautilya's and Vatsyayana's shared list of kings who were destroyed by the "enemies within"-their own passions-may have been inspired by a similar list offered by Manu, though the kings on Manu's list were destroyed not by kama but by lack of vinaya, a word that can be translated as "humility" as well as "discipline" or "good manners." The examples of proud kings given here suggest that what Manu has in mind is the need for a king to humble himself before a Brahmin: The king should rise early in the morning, attend respectfully to learned Brahmins who have grown old in the study of the three Vedas, and abide by their advice.
Hub 163
He should always serve unpolluted old priests who know the Veda; for a man who serves old people is always revered, even by ogres. He should learn humility from them even if he is always humble, for the king who is humble is never destroyed. Many kings have been destroyed, together with their entourages, through lack of humility, while even forest-dwellers have won kingdoms through humility.
Cycle 164
Sex in the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra
The list of kings destroyed by their own lust brings us to our final concern, sexuality. Manu here provides a very simple benchmark: he is against it. He says: It is the very nature of women to corrupt men here on earth; for that reason, circumspect men do not get careless and wanton among wanton women.
It is not just an ignorant man, but even a learned man of the world, too, that a wanton woman can lead astray when he is in the control of lust and anger. No one should sit in a deserted place with his mother, sister, or daughter; for the strong cluster of the sensory powers drags away even a learned man. (2.213-15) And so forth and so on, blaming women, of course, but also blaming men.
Flow 165
Beyond that, Manu does not have much to say about sex, other than to forbid sodomy and bestiality (11.174) and to advise the reader not to eat the food of "a man whose wife's lover lives in his house; nor that of those who put up with such lovers, or who are dominated by their wives in all things" (4.127). But this is the area in which the other two texts most directly converge. For though the Kamasutra never discusses politics explicitly, it has absorbed a great many political attitudes from the Arthashastra, while the Arthashastra does explicitly address sexual issues at various points.
In the Arthashastra, sex is merely the background for political power, whereas, in the Kamasutra, political power is merely the background for sex. Both texts are interested in the manipulation of power; the Kamasutra applies to sex the Arthashastra theory of power. The Kamasutra's list of reasons that justify adultery include many that are far more political than erotic.
Ladder 166
Let us begin with the agreements. All three texts agree that sex is dangerous on the personal level; the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra also agree that it is dangerous on the political level. Kautilya states that the penalty for having sexual intercourse with the queen is being boiled alive (4.13.33).
Vatsyayana similarly warns of the dangers of sneaking into the harem-but, unlike Kautilya, he still tells the would-be adulterer how to do it: Vatsyayana says: A man-about-town should not enter a harem even if it is easy to get into, because this usually ends in disaster. But if he has considered, with an eye to the rewards, all the factors-if the harem has an exit and is deeply hidden by thick woods, the wall enclosing the harem is long and divided up, the guards are few and careless, and the king is away-and if he has been invited many times, and he has worked out a way over the wall, and the women have shown him the way to do it, he may enter.
And within the field of possibility, he should come out every day. (5.6.10-12) Elsewhere Vatsyayana cites, with agreement, some anonymous sage voicing warnings about certain forms of kama that are politically dangerous: "The man in power should not enter another man's home [to bed his wife]. 'For when Abhira, the Kotta king, went to another man's home, a washerman employed by the king's brother killed him.
Compare 167
And the superintendant of horses killed Jayasena, the king of Varanasi.' So it is said" (5.5.28-29). Since neither Abhira nor Jayasena appears in the extant Arthashastra, a literal citation of Kautilya is unlikely, but the form is Kautilyan, and Kautilya may in fact be the person Vatsyayana has in mind when he remarks, "So it is said"-though the phrase may also be used to mean, "So they say," in the sense of "Some people believe this, but not I." Both texts accept the concept of eight forms of legal marriage, as set forth by Manu: they include four conventional rituals with minor variations, followed by four more irregular scenarios.
One of the irregular ones is the centaur marriage (mutual consent and sexual union, so named because witnessed only by centaurs [Gandharvas]), the love-match union celebrated in Indian myth and poetry. But the other three amount to rape: the demonic marriage (in which the groom bribes the bride's relatives and carries her off), the ogre's marriage (in which he carries the girl off, disregarding her screams, after he has maimed and murdered her male relatives), and the ghoul's marriage (in which the man secretly has sex with a girl who is asleep, drunk, or out of her mind) (3.27-34).
The Arthashastra ranks these eight forms of marriage only slightly differently than does Manu, raising the centaur marriage from sixth to fifth (3.2.1-10). Manu condemns the rape of a virgin (8.364), but Kautilya explicitly condemns rape altogether (3.20.16). And Kautilya suggests, as the other two do not, that a woman abducted (presumably not as part of a marriage) should either hire an assassin to kill the abductor or do it herself by means of poison.
Hub 168
He advises the abductee to declare that the abductor had killed her lover (11.1.34-39). If this does not work, Kautilya goes on to suggest, an undercover agent should win the confidence of the abductor by providing him with love-potions, then trick him by substituting poison and run away. "Then secret agents should declare that it was the work of a rival," he says (11.1.40-41).
There is no concern for dharma here, to put it mildly, but there is a concern for the rights of the abducted woman, a concern that is evident neither in Manu nor even in Vatsyayana. The Kamasutra limits its discussion of the first four forms of marriage, the conventional forms, to one verse at the start of his discussion of virgins (3.1.19). From then on, however, Vatsyayana concentrates instead on what he calls "devious devices for weddings." It begins with four rather manipulative variations on the centaur marriage, in one of which the man tricks a virgin into running away with him and then performs a wedding ritual of some sort himself before deflowering her.
Cycle 169
The Kamasutra even explicitly remarks, "Since mutual love is the fruit of wedding rites, therefore even the centaur wedding, though of middling rank, is respected as a means to a good end" (3.5.29). Even Manu grudgingly admits the appeal of the centaur marriage, stating that the best marriage for Brahmins is either of the first two forms of marriage, but that the best "for the other classes is when they desire one another" (3.35). The Kamasutra, however, at the very end of this passage, puts in a good word for dharma, in a verse citing the familiar rule for ranking concepts such as the Three Aims: With regard to maintaining dharma, each form of wedding is better than the one that follows it; but each time the preceding one is not possible, the following one should be used.
(3.5.28) Yashodhara spells it out: the centaur wedding is better than that of the demons, then the ghouls, and last the ogres. We often see such verses in the Kamasutra restoring a dharmic balance that the preceding prose has shattered, and often, as in this case, admitting that dharma is sometimes impossible to fulfill. Vatsyayana also takes for granted the type of rape that we now call sexual harassment, as he describes men in power who can take whatever women they want: A young village headman, or a king's officer, or the son of the superintendent of farming, can win village women just with a word, and then libertines call these women adulteresses.
Flow 170
And in the same manner, the man in charge of the cowherds may take the women of the cowherds; the man in charge of threads [presumably the supervisor of women engaged in sewing and weaving] may take widows, women who have no man to protect them, and wandering women ascetics; the city police chief may take the women who roam about begging, for he knows where they are vulnerable, because of his own night roamings; and the man in charge of the market may take the women who buy and sell. (5.5.7-10) Where Vatsyayana assumes that these men will simply get away with it, as usual, Kautilya would at least punish the "man in charge of threads," the superintendent of yarns, even for much milder sexual offenses: "For looking at the face of a woman [employed in the work of threads] or for speaking with her on other matters, the penalty is the lowest seizure fine" (2.23.14).
The punishment is as minimal as the crime, for Kautilya implicitly agrees with Vatsyayana that this sort of thing will in fact happen. Both the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra offer detailed, but not identical, lists of the skills of a courtesan (2.27.28; 1.3.15). Both texts speak about the use of male statues as dildos-the Arthashastra, specifying that the statues are of divine beings, disapproves of the practice (4.13.41), while the Kamasutra does not specify divine beings and thinks that such statues might be useful in the harem (5.6.3).
Ladder 171
(Manu's prohibition against damaging "images and statues" [9.285] would also presumably apply here.) The Arthashastra regards as sexually available a woman whom a man has saved when she has been carried away by a flood, who has been abandoned in the wilderness during a time of famine or left there for dead, or whom the man who claims her has rescued from robbers, from the current of a river, from a famine, from an upheaval in the region, or from a wilderness, or when she had been lost, abandoned, or left for dead (4.12.36-40). Similarly, the Kamasutra suggests that a man might pick up a woman during the spectacle of a house on fire, the commotion after a robbery, or the invasion of the countryside by an army (5.4.42).
The Arthashastra (like Manu) regards as a crime the deflowering of virgins to whom one is not married (4.12.1-9); the Kamasutra regards the deflowering of virgins (to whom one may or may not be married) as a psychological opportunity to initiate a young girl into the pleasures of the bedroom (4.2.1-34). Sometimes, but rarely, the Arthashastra is more sexually permissive than the Kamasutra. The Arthashastra takes for granted the woman with many husbands (3.2.31), who poses a problem even for the Kamasutra (1.5.30).
Compare 172
But almost always, the Arthashastra toes the dharma line on sexuality, often closely following Manu, where the Kamasutra diverges wildly from it. Occasionally Kautilya and Vatsyayana lock horns. In one passage, Vatsyayana first defends dharma against its imagined attackers (materialists), then defends artha against its imagined attackers (fatalists), and then-surely the point of the whole exercise-defends kama against its imagined enemies: "People who worry about artha say: 'People should not indulge in kama, for it is an obstacle to both dharma and artha, which are more important, and to other good people.
It makes a man associate with worthless people and undertake bad projects; it makes him impure, a man with no future, as well as careless, lightweight, untrustworthy and unacceptable'" (1.2.26-33). These critics of kama then list, in support of their contentions, the series of kings "in the thrall of kama," who were, as we have seen, destroyed. Finally it is Vatsyayana's turn to reply in defense of kama: "Vatsyayana says: Kama is a means of sustaining the body, just like food, and it is the reward for dharma and artha.
Hub 173
But people must be aware of the flaws in kama, flaws that are like diseases. For people do not stop preparing the cooking pots because they think, 'There are beggars,' nor do they stop planting barley because they think, 'There are deer'" (1.2.37-38). (We may note in passing that Vatsyayana blithely assumes that people would prefer not to offer food to beggars, though such charity is an essential part of dharmic behavior.) The people Vatsyayana claims to be quoting-"people who worry too much about artha" [arthacintakas], people we might call pragmatists-are "other schools" whom Vatsyayana imagines as objecting to his book about kama.
But is Vatsyayana just imagining such people? Is it not more likely that here he is actually referring to the Arthashastra and obliquely criticizing Kautilya for worrying too much about artha? Certainly Kautilya's definition of the shortcomings of kama-"Kama involves disgrace, the loss of property, and association with worthless people: robbers, gamblers, hunters, singers, and musicians" (8.3.15)-seems to be precisely what Vatsyayana quotes the "people who worry about artha" as saying, an opinion to which he strenuously objects: "Kama makes a man associate with worthless people," etc.
Cycle 174
Here, where Kautilya sounds an awful lot like Manu (as he occasionally does), Vatsyayana directly opposes him.
Sex and Politics
The Kautilyan base of the Kamasutra's portrayal of the relationship between the sexes is expressed by this astounding statement: "They say that sex is a form of quarreling, because the very essence of kama is a contest, and its character is competitive" (2.7.1). (The commentator, Yashodhara, explains the competition: "because the man and the woman each try to achieve their own desires by overcoming the other.") This agonistic view of sex is the essence of the Kamasutra. But who are the "They" in "They say"?
And does Vatsyayana concur with this opinion? The Kamasutra, under the influence of the Arthashastra, politicizes sex. Recall how Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, used the political idea of censorship as the basis of his idea of the censoring superego, which repressed sex more than anything else; for Freud, as for the Kamasutra, politics set the pattern for sex.
Flow 175
Perhaps because Vatsyayana found Kautilya a sympatico fellow traveler; perhaps because he felt that the similarity in form would lend the Kamasutra some of the gravitas of the Arthashastra. Whatever the cause, the concept of a sexual relationship as a war with no Geneva Conventions; a conflict in which the two parties try to deceive and outmaneuver one another; an encounter that requires ambassadors and truces; a battle in which the combatants conceal or display the wounds they receive (from bites, slaps, and scratches [2.4, 5, and 7]) was Kautilya's gift to Vatsyayana.
Closing summary
This chapter (Two.
Three. Dharma and Adharma in the Arthashastra
At this point it will be useful to make a distinction among three different aspects of dharma. For, just as there were many different sorts of Brahmins in ancient India, so did the many different traditions within Hinduism ascribe very different meanings to dharma.
Cycle 39
Three Aspects of Dharma
At this point it will be useful to make a distinction among three different aspects of dharma. For, just as there were many different sorts of Brahmins in ancient India, so did the many different traditions within Hinduism ascribe very different meanings to dharma. Three of these meanings play particular roles in the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra.
Ladder 176
Compare 177
Often the Mahabharata plays on the moral ambiguity of political dharma. A warrior, attempting to persuade his companions to massacre their opponents in their sleep (he succeeds), cites a verse that he attributes to unnamed ancient authors "who worried about dharma but had realistic goals"3-quite possibly the ancestors of our own Kautilya: "The enemy army can/should be attacked when it is exhausted, wounded, eating, without a commander . or asleep at dead of night" (10.1.53-55).
Hub 178
The ambiguity comes in the gerundive form "to be attacked" (prahartavyam), which can be taken either as a simple statement of fact ("is vulnerable to attack") or as an argument for [im]moral action ("should be attacked," so we should abandon our scruples and attack the sleeping enemy). Kautilya, however, does not scruple to give unambiguous and detailed instructions on how to kill a sleeping enemy (12.5.44-48). Dharma as moral or ethical law may also be characterized as ideal dharma, the dharma of what should be.
In contrast, dharma as social law-sva-dharma, one's own particular dharma, in relation to the particular dharmas of other people-is the dharma of what is, the status quo that must be maintained. Social dharma concerns ritual, the worship of the gods, the honoring of ascetics, and various interactions with people of all castes and classes. This second aspect of dharma often entails violation of essential points of ethical dharma.
Cycle 179
The sva-dharma caste requirements of a butcher, for instance, not to mention a king, violate the sadharana dharma rule against injuring living creatures. To this degree, sva-dharma itself is, in a very real sense, subversive of ethical dharma. Yet the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra go far beyond this common moral impasse to advocate actions-such as murder and adultery-that are subversive of both sanatana dharma and most sva-dharmas.
Flow 180
A third type of dharma, what we might term theological dharma, involves faith in and respect for the gods. Our three texts pay far less attention to this aspect than to the other two. In order to appreciate what the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra risked in their challenge to dharma, it is useful to make a distinction between two aspects of religion, orthodoxy (believing the right thing, believing in the gods) and orthopraxy (doing the right thing, maintaining religious rules and rites).
Flow 40
The distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy corresponds roughly to the distinction between dharma as moral/ethical/theological law and dharma as social law. Though the categories are rather crude and there were exceptions, Hindus during the period in question were far more orthoprax than orthodox; they cared far more about social dharma, the way people behaved, than about ethical or theological dharma, the way they thought. They cared about revering the Veda as a part of ritual life rather than as a text whose ideas and gods people knew and accepted.
People could therefore always say things that they did not dare to do. Manu cares about all three aspects of dharma, though particularly the second, social dharma. Kautilya is totally immune to ethics (his cavalier attitude toward dharma as moral law is what led some scholars to call him Machiavellian) and often brutal in his disregard for ascetics and the gods.
His subtle manipulation of dharma as social law, however, was far more complex, for he is very careful about caste. Vatsyayana hardly ever even mentions class or caste and doesn't care at all about the gods or any of the elements of moral dharma, but he has his own particular concern for sexual ethics. These distinctions clarify what the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra risked in their challenge to dharma.
Ladder 181
They constantly violate moral dharma and theological dharma, but these aspects of dharma were never really enforced. They also, however, violate social dharma, the Kamasutra by facilitating adultery and the Arthashastra by corrupting male renunciants and desecrating temples and rituals, as well as by endorsing torture, murder, invasive spying, and the spreading of lies at home and abroad-that is to say, government. This sort of adharma does have serious consequences; the refusal to honor Hindu social law caused many Buddhists to be excommunicated.
Our texts go to fairly elaborate lengths to protect themselves from such consequences, usually by providing a superficial coating of sanctimony, often in the form of moral dharma.
Ladder 41
Three Levels of Dharma
In addition to these three aspects of dharma, differently enforced, the texts distinguish three levels of culpability-action, speech, and thought, also differently enforced. Near the end of his text, Manu generalizes: "The three kinds of [negative] mental action are thinking too much about things that belong to others, meditating in one's mind-and-heart about what is undesirable, and adhering to falsehoods. The four kinds of [negative] speech acts are verbal abuse, lies, slander of all sorts, and unbridled chatter.
Compare 182
The three kinds of [negative] bodily action are traditionally said to be taking things that have not been given, committing injury against the rules, and having sex with another man's wife" (12.5-7). The commentators helpfully offer examples of what is undesirable to think about (beginning with killing a Brahmin) and of falsehood (saying, "There is no world beyond" or "The body is the soul"-sentiments that are typically attributed to materialists). Manu specifies reparations for violations of dharma on each of the three levels.
Speech acts are of special interest to us here, since this is the field in which our texts might find themselves in danger. Speech acts fall within the domain of social dharma; they are punished more severely than mental acts, though less severely than physical acts. For instance, Manu asks the king to be lenient about verbal abuse against himself: "A king who wishes to do what is good for him will always forgive men who insult him, if they are parties to legal disputes, children, old, or ill.
Hub 183
If [a king] who is insulted by people in distress tolerates it, he is exalted in heaven as a result, but if his royal power makes him unable to endure it, he goes to hell as a result" (8.312-13). Of course, Manu didn't have to spell out for the king the measures that could be taken for verbal abuse against the ruler, since (as we learn from the Arthashastra) the king could always, unofficially, send one of his secret agents and assassins to "uproot" such "thorns" by applying what Kautilya euphemistically calls the "silent punishment." Still, it is interesting that lèse majesté does not seem to have been officially regarded as a crime, and this opening does create a theoretical space for dissent.
Cycle 184
But the penalty, in Manu, for verbal abuse of a Brahmin by someone of a lower class is much more severe: "If a man of low birth hurls cruel words at a Brahmin, his tongue should be cut out. If he mentions his name or caste maliciously, a red-hot iron nail ten fingers long should be thrust into his mouth. If he is so proud as to instruct Brahmins about their duty, the king should have hot oil poured into his mouth and ears" (8.270-73).
Equally severe punishments prevail if a low-caste man offends a higher-caste man even below the rank of Brahmin: If a man of the lowest caste injures a man of a higher caste with some particular part of his body, that very part of his body should be cut off; this is Manu's instruction. If a man raises his hand or a stick, he should have his hand cut off; if in anger he strikes with his foot, he should have his foot cut off.
Flow 185
If a man of inferior caste tries to sit down on the same seat as a man of superior caste, he should be branded on the hip and banished, or have his buttocks cut off. If in his pride he spits on him, the king should have his two lips cut off; if he urinates on him, the penis; if he farts at him, the anus. If he grabs him by the hair, or by the feet, the beard, the neck, or the testicles, [the king] should unhesitatingly have his hands cut off.
Ladder 186
(8.279-84) The Arthashastra is more concise, more vivid, and, significantly, far more lenient than Manu as to prosecution for verbal abuse. The Arthashastra prescribes-for all classes, unlike Manu, who discriminates sharply between them-fines of three coins, but no physical punishment, for "insults about a person's body, nature, education, occupation, and country, for an insult about the body using words such as 'one-eyed' and 'lame,' if it's true," and the fine is to be doubled if the insult is false (3.18.2), a circumstance that Manu does not take into consideration at all.
Compare 42
But the Arthashastra occasionally does take class into account in dealing with slander. When someone of a lower caste insults the character of someone higher, such as by saying, "Foul Brahmin! [ku-brahmana]," the fine is incrementally increased depending on the degree of difference between the classes, and when someone higher insults someone lower, it decreases depending upon the degree of difference (3.18.7).
Significantly, neither Manu nor Kautilya prescribes any punishment for verbal abuse of the gods. Hindus in this period had nothing like our concept of blasphemy; slandering Brahmins or the Veda would pose serious problems, but not slandering the gods. Written insults (libel) do not appear in these texts but might have been prosecuted along the lines set out for slander.
Compare 187
With this web of dharma in mind, let us now consider first the Arthashastra and then, in chapter 4, the Kamasutra-in both cases noting first the superficial nod to ethical dharma and then the more substantial subversion of social dharma.
Hub 43
Anarchy and the Ambivalent Dharma of Kings
Let us look to Manu, as usual, for our benchmark, recalling that Manu and Kautilya borrowed from one another particularly freely in the section on the dharma of kings. Take the question of the divine nature of the king. Manu basically argues that the king is a god, and we should obey him: "Even a boy king should not be treated with disrespect, with the thought, 'He is just a human being'; for this is a great deity standing there in the form of a man" (7.8).
Hub 188
Manu fears the violence of anarchy and uses it to justify the violence of kingship: "If the king did not tirelessly inflict punishment on those who should be punished, the stronger would roast the weaker like fish on a spit. The crow would eat the sacrificial cake and the dog would lick the oblation; there would be no ownership in anyone, and everything would be upside down" (7.20-21). This Hobbesian view of human and animal nature fuels a widespread ancient Indian myth, famously told in the Mahabharata: to stem primeval anarchy, the people chose a king (here, and in most tellings, Manu is that king)5 and promised to pay him a portion of their income in taxes (12.67.16-34).
(In another version of this myth in the Mahabharata, the Creator creates the Triad of Human Aims in order to stem anarchy [12.59.30-94].) Manu tells the story, too, but, with uncharacteristic modesty, does not name himself as the king: When this world was without a king and people ran about in all directions out of fear, the Lord emitted a king in order to guard this entire field . taking lasting elements from Indra, the Wind, Yama [god of the dead], the Sun, Fire, Varuna [god of the waters], the Moon, and [Kubera], the lord of wealth.
Cycle 189
Because a king is made from particles of these lords of the gods, he therefore surpasses all living beings in brilliant energy (7.3-4). Kautilya makes a very different use of this same myth of anarchy. First, near the start of the Arthashastra, he establishes the idea that anarchy is a constant danger, warning the king that a king's failure to punish the wicked would "give rise to the law of the fish-for if there is no punishment, a strong man devours a weak man, but if [the weak man] is protected, he will prevail" (1.4.13-15).
Flow 190
The law of "big fish eating little fish," the equivalent of our "dog eat dog," is the ancient Indian term for Hobbesian anarchy, and it is one of the primary justifications for a repressive regime of law and order. Later in the first book, the Arthashastra cynically advises the king to manipulate the myth of primeval anarchy, instructing his spies to spread the story among the people to make them fear the king and to shut down dissent-what Plato would have regarded as telling the good lie-in order to control the gullible, to make them fear the king and pay their taxes: Once he has set spies on the high officials, he should set spies on the people who live in the cities and the countryside.
Secret agents in pairs should argue with one another at pilgrimage places, assemblies, congregations, and wherever people gather. One should say: "We hear that this king has all the virtues. But I don't see any virtue in this man whose fines and taxes oppress the people who live in the cities and the countryside." As the people there applaud this, the other spy should reply to them and to the first spy: "Oppressed by the law of the fish, the people made Manu, the son of Vivasvat, king.
Ladder 191
They allocated to him as his share one-sixth of the grain and one-tenth of the merchandise, and gold, too. That's how kings are paid to protect their subjects. Even forest dwellers, therefore, present one-sixth of their gleanings, thinking, 'This is the share for the one who protects us.' .
Compare 192
Divine punishment strikes those who treat kings with disrespect. Therefore one should not disrespect kings." In this way he should restrain petty people. And [the secret agents] can also find out what people are saying.
Cycle 44
(1.13.1-7, 9, 11-14) It is brutally clear from this passage that the king is using the well-known Hindu myth of kingship for no purpose other than to suppress dissent among the people, particularly those who do not wish to pay their taxes. Returning to Manu, we take up the other side of the tax agreement: the king's duty to the people. Manu threatens the king: "Know that a king who disregards the moral boundaries, who is a Nastika (Naysayer) and plunders the property of Brahmins, who does not protect his subjects but devours them, sinks down" (8.309).
We will return to the Naysayers; here let us just note that plundering the property of Brahmins is what is primarily at stake in this passage.
He speaks out of both sides of his mouth, depending upon his intended audience. It's all about rumor: tell the good lie to your people, and make sure no one is telling the bad lie against you. Other texts, too, warn the king that he will get into trouble if he opposes dharma.
Hub 193
Let us install in his place some other, dharmic person," is expected to be believed, presumably because people might in fact say such things. And one passage (significantly, in verse) does seem to threaten the adharmic king with revolution: Getting rid of good people and taking up bad people, setting in motion unprecedented and adharmic acts of violence, . not punishing those who ought to be punished and punishing those who ought not to be punished .
Cycle 194
makes the subjects become impoverished, greedy, and disaffected. When they are disaffected, they either go over to the enemy or kill their ruler themselves. (7.5.19, 22, 26-27) Kautilya's sermons on the need for self-control are primarily addressed to the king.
Flow 45
Parroting Manu, Kautilya insists (in one of his verses at the end of the chapter) that the king's own dharma leads him to heaven when he protects his subjects according to dharma but to hell when he does not (3.1.41). He rephrases this threat in another end-of-chapter verse: "When dharma is infected by adharma, / it destroys the ruler who overlooks it" (3.16.42). But, aside from occasional, unexpanded lines like "they .
kill their ruler themselves," no popular revolution is ever described, here or elsewhere in ancient Indian literature. There are, instead, many palace coups and many myths in which the Brahmins magically destroy a king who treats them badly, such as the myth of Vena8 and the story of Pururavas and the three divinized Aims. The Kamasutra assumes that the king casts a long shadow: "Even citizens far away from the king do not step across the moral line that he sets" (1.3.9).
Flow 195
Yet the threats about subjects destroying a bad king made it essential to his public image that the king preserve the myth of his own dharmic behavior.
Ladder 46
Defending Dharma
The Arthashastra is therefore careful to say a great deal in defense of dharma. When pacifying a conquered territory, the king "should arrange for the worship of all deities and hermitages and hand over land, wealth, and exemptions to men who are heroes in knowledge, eloquence, and dharma" (13.5.11). This chapter ends with a verse of general advice to the king: He should promote dharmic customs even if they are not yet practiced or have been established by others; he should not promote any customs that violate dharma, and should abolish them if others have established them.
Ladder 196
(13.5.24) In dealing with the crown prince, Kautilya remarks, "One should teach him what accords with dharma and artha, never anything that is contrary to dharma and artha" (1.17.33). He could no more reveal his actual disregard for dharma than an American president could say that he did not pray or believe in God. Perhaps to justify the employment of generally censured "esoteric practices" (such as the use of poison, drugs, and black magic), Kautilya introduces that section of his text by saying, "For the sake of protecting the four social classes [the king] should employ esoteric practices against very adharmic people" (14.1.1).
(In fact, the Arthashastra proposes the use of poison and black magic against everyone, without regard to their dharma or adharma.) Similar dharmic statements are scattered throughout the Arthashastra. But just as it is not at all clear who might enforce the sanctions against an adharmic king, it is not clear that there would be serious consequences if kings went around yelling, "Foul Brahmin!" The punishment for these anti-Brahmin and adharmic royal acts may have been nothing but a fantasy cherished by the Brahmins.
Compare 197
Hub 198
And so we are told that performing our own caste dharma gets us to heaven and eternal bliss; when we transgress it, the mixture of castes destroys us (1.3.14-15). Kautilya cites as given truths aphorisms that support the caste system: "A cow that belongs to people who hunt with dogs is milked for the dogs and not for Brahmins" and "A Chandala's [Dalit's] well is fit only for Chandalas to use, and not other people" (1.14.9-10). He also repeats, with minor variations (3.7.21-34), Manu's totally fantasized myth about the origin of the castes from the intermarriage of classes (10.8-20).
Somewhat more puzzling is the Arthashastra's ambivalent attitude toward the gods, toward theological dharma. Kautilya states, "If gods, Brahmins, ascetics, women, children, old people or sick people, with no one to help them, can't come to court themselves, justices should act on their behalf" (3.20.22). Does this mean that Kautilya thought that sometimes gods could come to court?
Cycle 199
Flow 200
But Kautilya's scorn for the gods, evident in numerous other parts of the work, cancels out any possible piety that we might have seen in these passages.
Compare 47
Hub 48
Subverting Dharma
Ladder 201
The Arthashastra doesn't always treat Brahmins with the great respect that Manu demands for them: when a Brahmin commits a crime, the king is instructed to proclaim it, scar him with a mark, and exile him (4.8.19). So Brahmins were not, at least in theory, entirely immune to punishment. The Arthashastra warns the king, in replenishing the treasury, not to take the property of Vedic scholars (5.2.6).
But in an emergency (and the king, of course, is the judge of that), his officers should take over the property of religious orders or temples, stating that it was lost because the person with whom it had been deposited died or lost it when his house burnt down. (In other words, lying.) The temple superintendent should similarly take the treasures belonging to the temples of the city (5.2.37-38). The religious exemptions (except for Vedic scholars) were therefore fragile, and the king was told to lie when he wanted to violate them.
Compare 202
Manu spends pages and pages describing the most important of all Hindu rituals, the offering to the male ancestors (shraddha), which is the occasion that establishes who is and who is not able to share in the feast that defines membership in Hindu society (3.124-286). Kautilya, however, subverts this ritual to a scheme to liberate a hostage, substituting, for the consecrated food that is dedicated to the ancestors, drugged food used to overcome the guards: "When there is an offering to the deities or to the ancestors, or a festival, [the hostage] should give the guards poison or drugged food and drink, and flee" (7.17.44).
Hub 203
A truly stunning subversion of social dharma in the Arthashastra occurs in one of the tests that the king is told to use to choose his counselors. The test for dharma is a test against dharma, a test to make sure that this counselor is impervious to dharma-for, as we have seen, the Arthashastra regards each of the Three Aims as a potential flaw in any official. The dharma test requires the chaplain [purohita] to pretend to object to an order from the king.
The test begins as follows: "The chaplain [allegedly] refuses to put up with being ordered to officiate at a sacrifice of a person at whose sacrifice one is forbidden to officiate." This order violates the law forbidding Brahmins to perform ceremonies for, or teach, people of lower castes, actions for which Manu prescribes terrible punishments (2.112-16) and which Kautilya himself forbids in one of his chapter-end verses (4.7.28). The test then continues: The king should then [pretend to] dismiss him. He should send secret agents to tempt each counselor [to be tested] one by one, under oath, saying: "This king is adharmic.
Cycle 204
Let's replace him with some other, dharmic person-someone from his family, a prince in disfavor, a member of the royal household, a single-minded man, a neighboring king, or a forest chief. How about you?" If he turns it down, he is a man of integrity. That is the secret test for dharma.
Flow 205
(1.10.2-4) In other words, Kautilya wants the chaplain-the chief counselor and priest, the person in charge of the dharma of the entire kingdom-to be someone who doesn't care about dharma as much as he cares about his loyalty to the king. This "test" under mines the ability of the most important priest in the country to perform the rituals correctly; there could be no more serious violation of dharma. In general, in the Arthashastra the chaplain has almost no powers (1.9.9-10).
But Kautilya cautions that other officials, too, might "cause a loss of revenue through fear," if they hesitate to act against dharma or artha (2.7.9-10). He wants officials who are immune to moral principles of any kind. The Arthashastra seriously undermines another aspect of dharma through the widespread use of ascetics, both male and female, as spies and secret agents-or the use of spies who pretend to be ascetics.
Ladder 206
Compare 207
Mocking the Gods
All three texts sometimes read as if their authors believe in the gods, though their attitudes toward them differ widely. For instance, on several occasions Manu mentions Indra, the Vedic king of the gods, as a great god, worthy of worship, and tells the king to emulate him (7.3, 7.7, 9.304). The Arthashastra has the king's spies mention Indra when they tell the myth of anarchy to get the people to pay their taxes (1.13.1-12).
Hub 208
But the Kamasutra mentions the tale of Indra's punishment for adultery as a cautionary tale exemplifying a way that the king should not behave (1.2.34-36). In general, the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra seem to have no sense of divine sanctions for the rules that they break in such a cavalier manner. But where lack of respect for the gods bleeds over into the area of the corruption of sacrifice or temple rituals, the Arthashastra comes into direct conflict with social dharma.
In one noteworthy passage, spies dress as gods of fire and water during a siege: When an aggressive king desires to capture an enemy settlement, he should encourage his own faction and terrify his enemy's faction by proclaiming his omniscience and his connection with gods. This is how he proclaims his connection with gods: he talks with and worships secret agents posing as gods of a fire sanctuary, agents who have entered the hollows of statues of deities in the fire sanctuary through the mouth of an underground tunnel; or he talks with and worships secret agents disguised as Nagas [cobra deities] and Varuna [god of the waters] emerging from water.
Cycle 209
(13.1.1, 3) This sort of divine intimacy was enacted on other occasions, too. When besieging an enemy's fort, the king's astrologers were, once again, instructed to "encourage his own faction and terrify his enemy's faction by proclaiming his omniscience and his intimacy with gods" (10.3.33). To enrich his treasury further, after stealing from the temples, the king could play sacrilegious theological tricks: He should have the shrine of a deity or the mysterious place of a magician built at night, and make a living through pilgrimages and fairs.
Flow 210
Or he should proclaim that a god has arrived in a tree in a sanctuary grove that bears flowers and fruit out of season. Or he should announce that a dangerous demon in a tree is demanding a human being as a tax, and then have agents working undercover as ascetics stop the demon from harming the people of the city and the countryside in exchange for gold. Or, for a gift of gold, he should show people a snake with several heads in a well equipped with an under ground tunnel.
(5.2.39-42) And if there is anyone who is not taken in by these tricks, the king can always fall back upon a theological variant of the usual "silent punishment": "If there are people who are not credulous, he should poison them when they are drinking water or washing, and announce that this was the curse of the deity. Or he can get a man condemned to death bitten [by a real snake and blame his death on the deity]" (5.2.44). Among the many devices to lure an enemy into a secluded place to murder him are several bits of religious theater: A man with a shaven head or matted hair should settle in the vicinity of the city, claiming that he lives in a mountain cave and is four hundred years old.
Ladder 211
His many pupils, also with matted hair, should approach the enemy king, and his counselors, bearing roots and fruits, should urge him to pay honor to their master. [The master] then persuades the enemy king to stay there for seven nights, with his sons and wives, and while he is there he can be ambushed. Or someone posing as a matted-haired yogi should pretend to live underwater, while he actually surfaces through a concealed tunnel or an underground chamber built under the bank.
Compare 212
Secret agents should gradually make the enemy king believe that the yogi is Varuna or the king of the Nagas. [The yogi] then persuades the enemy king to stay there for seven nights, with his sons and wives, and while he is there he can be ambushed. (13.2.1-2, 5, 16, 19) How could a counselor who believed in the gods encourage the king to mock them like this?
The statues of gods came in handy as murder weapons. First they were to be used merely to demoralize the enemy: "[Secret agents] should cause blood to flow profusely from revered statues of deities. Then other agents should say that the flow of blood from a god predicts defeat in war" (13.2.27-28).
Hub 213
But the statues could also be used actually to kill the enemy king: When the enemy king is on a pilgrimage to worship a deity, he will stop at many places to honor the deity with his devotion. Those are the places to trick him. As he enters the house of the deity, [the king's agent] should release a device to make a concealed wall or a great stone fall on him; or send down a shower of stones or weapons from an upper chamber; .
Cycle 214
or make the statue, banner, or weapons of the god fall upon him. (12.5.1-5) All aspects of dharma melt together in these scenarios, straight out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,17 which offend both belief in the gods and the human customs that respect them.
Four. Adharma and Dharma in the Kamasutra
Vatsyayana generally simply ignores social dharma, with what A. B.
Cycle 49
Adharma and Dharma in the Kamasutra
Flow 215
Though modeled on both the form and the slippery ethics of the Arthashastra, the Kamasutra still tries in many ways to make sex ethical in the deepest sense while trashing the conventions of Hindu social dharma.
Flow 50
Defending Dharma
At times, Vatsyayana seems to assume a dharmic position. He offers a detailed defense of dharma against the imagined assertions of skeptics or materialists, whom he quotes as saying: "People should not perform dharmic acts, for their results are in the world to come and that is doubtful. Who but a fool would take what is in his own hand and put it in someone else's hand?
Ladder 216
Better a pigeon today than a peacock tomorrow, and 'Better a copper coin that is certain / than a gold coin that is doubtful'" (1.2.21-24). Vatsyayana then blows these arguments out of the water with an uncharacteristically otherworldly credo: Vatsyayana says: People should perform dharmic acts, because the text cannot be doubted; because, sometimes, black magic and curses are seen to bear fruit; because the constellations, moon, sun, stars, and the circle of the planets are seen to act for the sake of the world as if they thought about it first; because social life is marked by the stability of the system of the four classes and four stages of life; and because people are seen to cast away a seed in their hand for the sake of a crop in the future.
Compare 217
On the whole, this is a strange cluster of defenses of dharma, and the whole exercise (along with the defense of artha) is surely nothing but a prelude to Vatsyayana's real concern: the defense of kama. In listing reasons why a married woman might resist the protagonist's invitation to betray her husband, one of the "scholars" Vatsyayana often cites as predecessors (in this case, Gonikaputra) says, "A woman does not consider dharma or adharma; she just desires. But consideration of some other factor keeps her from making advances.
Hub 218
A man, by contrast, considers the stability of dharma and the conventions of noble people and turns back even when he desires. And even when he is pursued he does not give in, because he is aware of these considerations" (5.1.10, 13-14). Mind you, Vatsyayana by no means necessarily agrees with this view, which, in any case, merely tells us what people do, not what they ought to do.
But Vatsyayana himself contradicts at least the first sentence when he mentions, as the very last in a long list of the possible reasons for a woman's resistance to committing adultery, her regard for dharma (5.1.42). And he contradicts his own exemplum of the man turning back from adultery because of dharma by describing, throughout the rest of this long section, men who do in fact commit adultery. In contrast with almost all other shastras of this period (including the Arthashastra), the Kamasutra largely ignores caste and class.
Cycle 219
There are only a few references to class (varna), all peripheral. And there are equally few references to caste (jati), embedded in lists, never discussed (3.5.5, 6.1.17, 6.2.51). But we can read, throughout, the unexpressed assumptions about class and caste behind this text.
Flow 220
The Kamasutra nods to the notion of class as it introduces its section on the women with whom one may and may not have sex: "Kama enjoyed according to the texts, with a woman who is of the man's own class, and who has not been with another man before, is a means of getting sons, a good reputation, and social acceptance. But that "But" introduces a long, long list of other sorts of women that a man may enjoy if he is not particularly concerned about class, sons, reputation, or social acceptance-indeed, it introduces the rest of the text, since this is the attitude of the man-about-town who is its protagonist.
Ladder 51
Vatsyayana repeats the dharmic part of this idea later, in slightly different words: "In a [virgin] who is of the same class, who has not been with another man before, and who has been taken in accordance with the texts, a man finds dharma, artha, sons, connections, the growth of his faction, and straightforward sexual pleasure" (3.1.1). Again, there is a "But," though this one comes two chapters later: "But a man who has good qualities but no money, or who has indifferent qualities but no opportunities, [etc.
etc.] should not court a virgin, because he will not get her" (3.3.1). And so the text goes on to offer other, more viable alternatives. In book 1, Vatsyayana notes that kama with women of higher classes or with women married to other men is forbidden (1.5.2),3 but in book 5, married women of all classes are considered fair game.
So the issue of class (and legitimate sons) is briefly considered on several occasions-but always quickly rationalized away. And we can see Manu's deeply ingrained hierarchical and hypergamous attitude toward class-the insistence that the man should always be of an equal or higher class than the woman he marries (3.12, 3.43-44, 10.5)-scandalously adapted, indeed satirized, in the Kamasutra's basic and pervasive ranking of sexual partners according to size, with the insistence that the man's genitals should always be equal to or bigger than those of the woman whom he beds (2.1.1-4).
Ladder 221
One of the rationalizations for having sex with a woman normally off limits takes class into consideration: Gonikaputra says: "Under the pressure of some other reason, a woman who aids his cause may become his lover, even if she is married to another man. The man may think, 'This is a loose woman. She has already ruined her virtue with many other men.
Even though she is of a class higher than mine, I can go to her as I would go to a courtesan, without offending against dharma. She is a secondhand woman. Since another man has kept her before me, there is no reason to hesitate about this.'" .
For these and similar reasons one may seduce even the wife of another man. (1.5.4-7, 21) Here the justification for disregarding dharma either with a married woman or with a woman of a higher class (or both) is put in the mouths of two other people-first Gonikaputra and then a man of a relatively low class-and rationalized. The relatively rare references to dharma in the Kamasutra sometimes occur in surprising contexts.
Compare 222
The courtesan, for instance, wonders, "Will I serve dharma or violate it if I go, on the sympathetic advice of a friend, to a Brahmin who knows the Veda, or to a man who is under a vow of chastity or consecrated for a sacrifice, or a man who has taken a vow or who wears the sign of a religious order, if he has seen me and conceived a passion for me and wants to die?" (6.6.29). She would violate dharma in one way if she allowed or helped any of these men to break his vows, but she would violate it in another way if she let him die through his unsatisfied passion for her.
Compare 52
Vatsyayana also states that top courtesans spend their excess profits in solidly dharmic ways: "building temples, pools, and gardens; setting up raised mounds and fire altars; giving thousands of cows to Brahmins through the mediation of people worthy to receive them; bringing and offering articles of worship to the gods" (6.5.28). Dharma slips in in another unexpected spot in the Kamasutra, too. The long list of women a man should not sleep with ends with "a wandering female ascetic, or the wife of a relative, of a friend, of a Brahmin who knows the Veda, or of a king" (1.5.29), though the final one, the king, reminds us that it is the power, rather than the sanctity, of the Vedic Brahmin that might make a man hesitate to seduce his wife.
Hub 223
Hub 53
The Myth of Sexual Anarchy
A bit of indirect support for dharma comes from Yashodhara's commentary on the Kamasutra, in a myth told to explain why some women are, theoretically at least, sexually off limits. Just as the Arthashastra uses the myth of anarchy to justify the creation of the repressive rule of kingship, so the commentator on the Kamasutra imagines a time of sexual anarchy, an archaic promiscuity that is no longer in effect, to justify the creation (by several mythical authors, including the sage Shvetaketu) of the rules of the Kamasutra, lax though they are: Once upon a time, there was so much seduction of other men's wives in the world that there was a verse about it: "Women are all alike, / just like cooked rice.
Cycle 224
/ Therefore a man should not get angry with them / or fall in love with them, but just make love with them." But [Shvetaketu] forbade this state of affairs, and so people said: "[Shvetaketu] forbade common people to take other people's wives." Then, with his father's permission, Shvetaketu, who had amassed great ascetic power, happily composed this text, which distinguishes those who are eligible or ineligible for sex. (1.1.9) Primeval promiscuity devalued women until Shvetaketu invented the law against adultery, which puts married women off limits to other men.
Yashodhara did not invent this story; it was told, at greater length, in the Mahabharata, pointedly reminding the woman whose husband tells it to her, and any other women who may have heard (or read) the text, that female promiscuity was an ancient option no longer available to them: In the old days, we hear, women took their pleasure wherever they fancied. They betrayed their husbands, but this was then dharma. Even today, animals, without passion or hatred, follow this ancient dharma that favors women.
Flow 225
The great sage Shvetaketu was a hermit, people say. Once, they say, right before the eyes of Shvetaketu and his father, a Brahmin grasped Shvetaketu's mother by the hand and said, "Let's go!" The sage's son became enraged and could not bear to see his mother being taken away by force like that. But when his father saw that Shvetaketu was angry he said, "Do not be angry, my little son.
Ladder 226
This is the eternal dharma. The women of all classes on earth live without being fenced in; all creatures behave just like cows, my little son, each in its own class." The sage's son could not tolerate that dharma. He made this moral boundary for men and women on earth, for humans, but not for other creatures.
And from then on, we hear, this moral boundary has stood: A woman who is unfaithful to her husband commits a mortal sin that brings great misery, an evil equal to killing an embryo. And a man who seduces another man's wife, when she is a woman who keeps her vow to her husband and is thus a virgin obeying a vow of chastity, that man too commits a mortal sin on earth. (1.113.9-20) What begins as happy sexual freedom for women and then turns into a rape by a violent man, traumatizing a child, somehow leads to a law that punishes willing female adultery and only as an afterthought punishes adulterous men, as uncontrollable male sexuality is projected onto the need to control allegedly oversexed women.
Compare 227
Cows here are paradigms not, as is usual, of motherly purity, but of bovine license, the exemplars of primeval female promiscuity. (Perhaps because they are so pure that nothing they do is wrong?) Yet the author keeps insisting that this is all hearsay, as if to make us doubt it. Elsewhere in the Mahabharata, a god who is trying to seduce a young girl (and who does eventually take her against her will) answers her dharmic protests by insisting that women are sexually free, and alludes to this ancient tradition, perhaps to the Shvetaketu story: "All women are unfettered, as are men; this is the nature of people.
Hub 228
Cycle 54
After Vatsyayana defends dharma against imagined materialists and before he defends kama against imagined pragmatists in the camp of artha, he defends artha against imagined fatalists (1.2.26-31). But supplementing this at least superficially balanced triad of attacks and defenses of each of the Three Aims, the Kamasutra includes an extra paragraph justifying the existence of a text about kama, though Vatsyayana does not deem it necessary to defend the texts of dharma or artha, in part perhaps because their importance is more generally acknowledged and in part because it is his job to defend kama alone against people who might argue as he imagines here: Scholars say: "Since even animals manage sex by themselves, and since it goes on all the time, it should not have to be handled with the help of a text." Vatsyayana says: "Because a man and a woman depend upon one another in sex, it requires a method, and this method is learnt from the Kamasutra.
Cycle 229
The mating of animals, by contrast, is not based upon any method, because they are not fenced in, they mate only when the females are in their fertile season and until they achieve their goal, and they act without thinking about it first." (1.2.17-20; see also 3.1.1) In arguing that women, unlike animals, are "fenced in," Vatsyayana is drawing indirectly upon the myth of Shvetaketu's rule against adultery, the rule that fenced them in, putting an end to their animal promiscuity. To this extent, the argument for the text is also an argument for dharma, for the civilizing of otherwise anarchic, bestial sex.
But in this same passage Vatsyayana manages in passing to dismiss the dharmic assumption that the purpose of the sexual act for humans (in contrast with that for animals) is to produce children (since humans do not, like animals, "mate only when the females are in their fertile season"). Given the enormous emphasis that the dharma texts place on having sex only to produce children, and Manu's insistence (at 3.45-46) that a man must have sex with his wife in her every fertile season (which the Arthashastra echoes, at 1.3.9 and 3.3.44), and never at any other time (which the Arthashastra does not echo), the Kamasutra's assumption that people differ from animals precisely in their ability to have sex separate from fertility is wildly adharmic and highly scientific.
Flow 55
Subverting Dharma
Thus even in some passages that seem to defend dharma, the Kamasutra seriously undermines it. Vatsyayana portrays an idealized vision of the lives of wealthy people who did not necessarily follow the rules of dharma, especially when it got in the way of kama. (In commenting on the statement that the elements of the Triad must not "interfere with each other" [1.2.1], the commentator Yashodhara remarks, "For example, through too much generosity, dharma impedes artha and kama.") At one point, Vatsyayana says: "Since learned men disagree and there are discrepancies in what the dharma texts [the smirtis] say, one should act according to the custom of the region and one's own disposition and confidence" (2.9.34).
Note Vatsyayana's casual scorn for the texts of dharma and his awareness of their self-contradictions, as well as his preference for individual conscience. The most dramatic instance of the irrelevance of dharma for the Kamasutra comes in the prelude to its defense of dharma against imagined materialist attackers. For, before defending dharma, Vatsyayana defines it in terms that damn it with faint praise: "Dharma consists in engaging, as the texts decree, in sacrifice and other such actions that are disengaged from material life, not of this world, with invisible results; and in refraining, as the texts decree, from eating meat and other such actions that are engaged in material life, that are of this world, and have visible results" (1.2.7).
Flow 230
Vatsyayana here totally dismisses the role of dharma in this world, a role that, as we have seen, he cites, with approbation, in his defense of dharma just a few lines later-"because social life is marked by the stability of the system of the four classes and four stages of life." The definition of dharma as entirely involved with things not of this world leaves out most of social dharma, the dharma about whom we should marry and what we should eat. (Indeed, the meat eating that Vatsyayana here takes as the paradigmatic adharmic, forbidden act, he casually recommends in another context [2.10.8]).
Vatsyayana here seems to confuse dharma with theology or to limit it to its third aspect, theological dharma. Yet, in his earlier defense of dharma, his approval of doing something for the sake of what we can't see-sowing seeds for the future-is an affirmation of this very same otherworldly aspect of dharma. Adultery It is in the casual references to adultery that pervade the book, as well as the great detail with which Vatsyayana teaches the reader how to manage it, that we can best see the Kamasutra's disregard for dharma.
(Here is perhaps the place to remark that "adultery" is technically not the right word to convey the ancient Indian concept. The Sanskrit term for it is para-darika, "[sex with] another man's wife"; it is something a man does to another man, like the English term "cuckolding." A married man in this culture is never punished for sleeping with a woman who is not his wife-unless she is another man's wife. Yet the married woman is punished for participating in the para-darika, which thus applies, in fact, to both participants, just like the English word "adultery.") Vatsyayana cites an earlier authority on the best opportunities for picking up married women, of which the first is "on the occasion of visiting the gods" and others include a sacrifice, a wedding, or a religious festival.
Ladder 231
(Secular opportunities involve playing in a park, bathing or swimming, or attending theatrical spectacles. More extreme occasions are offered by the spectacle of a house on fire, the commotion after a robbery, or the invasion of the countryside by an army [5.4.42].) Somehow I don't think Manu would approve of the man in question meeting married women at all, let alone using devotion to the gods as a shill for it, or equating such an occasion with spectator sports such as hanging around watching houses burn down.
Manu assumes that every woman desires every man she sees: "Good looks do not matter to them, nor do they care about youth; 'A man!' they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly" (9.12-17). The Kamasutra takes off from this same assumption but then limits it to good-looking men and modifies it with an egalitarian, if cynical, formulation: "A woman desires any attractive man she sees, and, in the same way, a man desires a woman.
But, after some consideration, the matter goes no farther" (5.1.8). The text, however, goes on to state that women have less concern for dharma than men have; it assumes that women don't think about anything but men; and it is written in the service of the protagonist, the would-be adulterer, who reasons, If all women are keen to give it away, why shouldn't one of them give it to him? Most of all, by devoting an entire book (book 5) to minute and psychologically acute instructions to the man who wishes to commit adultery, the Kamasutra is boldly undermining the very basis of the social system.
Compare 232
Ladder 56
The Arthashastra regards adultery as a crime (3.3-4), as does Manu (5.161-64; 8.352-78). Manu says, "If a woman who is proud of her relatives or her own qualities deceives her husband with another man, the king should have her eaten by dogs in a place frequented by many people. And he should have the evil man burnt on a red-hot iron bed, and people should pile wood on it, and the evil-doer should be burnt up" (8.371-72).
The Arthashastra is slightly more lenient: "If the husband forgives her, both [the woman and her lover] should be set free. If she is not forgiven, the woman's ears and nose should be cut off, and her lover should be put to death" (4.12.32-33). So Manu tells the male reader to kill the adulteress, the Arthashastra to forgive her (or mutilate her), but the Kamasutra to find a way to get her to go to bed with him.
In his discussion of married women "who can be had without any effort, who can be had merely by making advances," Vatsyayana shows how sympathetic he is to women, particularly in what they suffer from husbands who are inadequate and inferior to them in so many ways.
(5.1.50-54) Here Vatsyayana reveals a powerful understanding of why the wives of such husbands do commit adultery, despite the dangers, why it is important to them. He realizes that it fulfills them in some important ways that their marriages do not. And he understands, sympathetically, that this need often outweighs a woman's fear that, were she to be taken in adultery, she might be very severely punished for it.
In this he clearly values kama over dharma. (In passing, we might note that the authors of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana also described, in great and sympathetic detail, what the heroines of these dramas, Draupadi and Sita, suffered at the hands of their husbands and how bitterly and sharply each of them complained to their husbands. That Sita was also accused of adultery, but completely absolved, serves to make all the more remarkable Vatsyayana's observation that mistreated wives are inclined to commit adultery and his implicit suggestion that they are justified in doing so.) Vatsyayana also empathetically imagines various women's reasons not to commit adultery, and the would-be seducer takes seriously the woman's misgivings (of which consideration for dharma comes last, as an afterthought), even if only to disarm her: Here are the causes of a woman's resistance: love for her husband, regard for her children, the fact that she is past her prime, or overwhelmed by unhappiness, or unable to get away; or she gets angry and thinks, "He is propositioning me in an insulting way"; or she fears, "He will soon go away.
There is no future in it; his thoughts are attached to someone else"; or she is nervous, thinking, "He does not conceal his signals"; or she fears, "His advances are just a tease"; or she is diffident, thinking, "How glamorous he is"; or she becomes shy when she thinks, "He is a man-about-town, accomplished in all the arts"; or she feels, "He has always treated me just as a friend"; or she cannot bear him, thinking, "He does not know the right time and place," or she does not respect him, thinking, "He is an object of contempt"; or she despises him when she thinks, "Even though I have given him signals, he does not understand"; or she feels sympathy for him and thinks, "I would not want anything unpleasant to happen to him because of me"; or she becomes depressed when she sees her own shortcomings, or afraid when she thinks, "If I am discovered, my own people will throw me out"; or scornful, thinking, "He has gray hair"; or she worries, "My husband has employed him to test me"; or she has regard for dharma. (5.1.23, 25-26, 28-29, 31-35, 37-41) Vatsyayana here brilliantly imagines the resistance of a woman who is tempted to commit adultery, with insights that rival the psychologizing of Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert.
This discussion is ostensibly intended to teach the male reader of the text how to manipulate and exploit such women: "A man should eliminate, from the very beginning, whichever of these causes for rejection he detects in his own situation" (5.1.43). But, perhaps inadvertently, it also provides a most perceptive exposition of the reasons why women hesitate to begin an affair. Vatsyayana details dozens of complex stratagems by which the man-about-town may seduce married women even under the eyes of a watchful society (5.2.1-26; 5.4.9-10; etc.).
Compare 57
But then, at the very end, he pulls back, with verses warning the man not to do it, and to guard his own wife: A man who knows texts and considers, from the text, the devices whose telltale signs are detailed in the discussion of the seduction of other men's wives, is never deceived by his own wives. But he himself should never seduce other men's wives, because these techniques show only one of the two sides of each case, because the dangers are clearly visible, and because it goes against both dharma and artha.
This book was undertaken in order to guard wives, for the benefit of men; its arrangements should not be learned in order to corrupt the people. (5.6.46-48) There is something blatantly hypocritical about this switchback move. But at the same time there is other, more subtle evidence that Vatsyayana may be more genuinely conflicted about adultery.
Both contradict the more cynical message of the main text, the "Take it wherever you can get it" message. But which one expresses Vatsyayana's own opinion? In general, the Kamasutra assumes a kind of sexual freedom for women that would have appalled Manu but simply did not interest Kautilya.
Vatsyayana tells us that a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love may hate her man and leave him for another (3.2.35; 4.2.31-35). If, as the context suggests, this woman is married, the casual manner in which Vatsyayana suggests that she leave her husband is in sharp contrast to the position assumed by Manu: "A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities" (5.154).
Vatsyayana casually mentions, among the women that one might sleep with (1.5.22), not only "second-hand" women (whom Manu despises as "previously had by another man")15 but widows, whom Manu positively forbids to remarry,16 though Kautilya regards them as quite free to remarry (3.2.19-32). The Kamasutra says: "A widow who is tormented by the weakness of the senses . finds, again, a man who enjoys life and is well endowed with good qualities" (4.2.31-34).
Vatsyayana has virtually no concern for dharma in the abstract, either as social law or as moral law. He doesn't seem to care at all about the danger that a woman creates for herself (or her children, or her lover) by committing adultery, nor does he care about injuring the institution of marriage. He knows that people will commit adultery.
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He thus implicitly rejects the traditional patriarchal party line that one finds in most Sanskrit texts, a line that punishes very cruelly indeed any woman who sleeps with a man other than her husband. But Vatsyayana is genuinely concerned about the harm sex can do to women. In a formula familiar from the lists of kings who came to grief through their failure to control their passions, he warns men about this: "One should also avoid, even in the region where it is used, anything that is dangerous.
The King of the Cholas killed Chitrasena, a courtesan, by using the 'wedge' during sex. And the Kuntala king Shatakarni Shatavahana killed his queen, Malayavati, by using the 'scissor.' Naradeva, whose hand was deformed, blinded a dancing-girl in one eye by using the 'drill' clumsily" (2.7.28-30). Vatsyayana caps this passage with cautionary verses: For, just as a horse in full gallop, blinded by the energy of his own speed, pays no attention to any post or hole or ditch on the path, so two lovers blinded by passion, in the friction of sexual battle, are caught up in their fierce energy and pay no attention to danger.
And so a man who understands the text will apply it only after he has come to know the delicacy, ferocity, and strength of his young woman. (2.7.33-34) Admittedly, this comes at the end of the chapter, where the pro-dharma afterthoughts are so often lodged. But Vatsyayana here expresses a concern for human welfare and happiness that is at heart deeply ethical.
Homosexuality The dharma textbooks either ignore or stigmatize homosexual activity. In general it was punished, albeit mildly: Manu prescribes a ritual bath (11.174-75), Kautilya the payment of a small fine (4.13.40). Manu forbids a man to "shed his semen in nonhuman females, in a man, in a menstruating woman, in something other than a vagina, or in water" (11.174).
The Arthashastra specifies punishments for many men raping a single prostitute; for a man who has sex with a female wandering ascetic, with a prostitute by force, or with a woman in a place other than the vagina; or for ejaculating in a man or in the vagina of an animal (4.13.37-41). The Kamasutra ignores some of these acts and regards others as noncriminal, though in bad taste. The Kamasutra does not use the pejorative term kliba (the equivalent of "fairy") that most texts of the period use, but speaks instead of a "third nature" (tritiya prakriti) or perhaps a "third sexuality" or even a "third gender" in the sense of sexual behavior rather than anatomy.
And it departs from the dharmic view of homosexuality in significant ways, principally by not regarding it as a crime at all. In place of the conventional law against sex between men, it describes, in totally nonjudgmental language, two types of men who make their living performing oral sex on other men. One is a cross-dressing male, with women's clothing and stereotypical female gender behavior (chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness) (2.9.1-5).
The other is a closeted man who dresses in men's clothing, and whose fellatio technique Vatsyayana describes in considerable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing any physical act, and with what might even be called gusto (2.9.6-11). This is a remarkably frank analysis of the mentality of the closet, the extended double entendre of an act that is cleverly designed to appear sexually innocent to a man who does not want, or does not want to admit that he wants, a homosexual encounter, but is an explicit invitation to a man who is willing to admit his desire for such an encounter.
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Nowhere else in the entire corpus of ancient Sanskrit literature is there a positive portrayal of men who have sex with men. The legitimacy of this person of the "third nature" is supported by a casual remark in the passage describing the four sorts of love and the contexts in which they arise. One of the four types is called "the love that comes from erotic arousal," and it is said to arise from the imagination, not in response to any object of the senses: "It can be recognized in the course of oral sex with a woman or with a person of the third nature, or in various activities such as kissing" (2.1.42).
Vatsyayana also lists the third nature among women who can be lovers (1.5.27). One remark, in a passage warning a bridegroom not to be too shy with his shy bride, suggests that some people disapprove of men of the third nature: "[Certain scholars] say, 'If the girl sees that the man has not spoken a word for three nights, like a pillar, she will be discouraged and will despise him, as if he were someone of the third nature'" (3.2.3). At first glance, Vatsyayana seems to be making a negative judgment about men of the third nature after all.
But when we look more closely we see that the people who make this judgment are the "scholars" with whom Vatsyayana almost always disagrees, as he does here, for he goes on to remark, "Vatsyayana says: He begins to entice her and win her trust, but he still remains sexually continent. When he entices her he does not force her in any way, for women are like flowers, and need to be enticed very tenderly. If they are taken by force by men who have not yet won their trust they become women who hate sex.
Therefore he wins her over with gentle persuasion" (3.2.4-6). This is the sort of man whom the wrong sort of scholar, but not Vatsyayana, might fear that a young bride might stigmatize as someone of the third nature. It is evidence, all the more impressive for being so casual, of the prevalent homophobia of that time and place, and of Vatsyayana's courage in opposing it.
Two verses describe men who engage in oral sex not by profession, like the men of the third nature, but out of affection: Even young men, servants who wear polished earrings, indulge in oral sex only with certain men. And, in the same way, certain men-about-town who care for one another's welfare and have established trust do this service for one another. (2.9.35-36) These men, who seem bound to one another by discriminating affection rather than promiscuous passion, are called "men-about-town" (nagarakas), the term used to designate the heterosexual heroes of the Kamasutra.
In striking contrast with men of the third nature, always designated by the pronoun "she," these men are described with nouns and pronouns that unambiguously designate males. This, too, is stunningly adharmic. Manu mentions them only to make brief references to the punishments for a woman who seduces a virgin, generally cutting off several of her fingers, but occasionally having her whipped, her head shaved, or making her ride on a donkey (8.369-70).
Kautilya prescribes a fine for a woman who deflowers a virgin (4.12.20-21), higher if the virgin did not desire her and the other woman acted only to satisfy her own passion. (The punishment is much more severe for a man who deflowers a virgin; his fingers or his whole hand may be chopped off [4.12.1-3]). It is noteworthy that Kautilya acknowledges that women may have desire and passion for other women.
Even Vatsyayana does not say this; the women of the harem whom he discusses engage in sexual acts with one another only in the absence of men, not through the kind of personal choice that drives a man of the third nature: "The women of the harem cannot meet men, because they are carefully guarded; and since they have only one husband shared by many women in common, they are not satisfied. Therefore they give pleasure to one another with the following techniques" (5.6.1).
The Kamasutra makes only one brief reference to women who may have chosen women as sexual partners: the text says that a girl may lose her virginity with a girlfriend or a servant girl (7.1.20). Vatsyayana is, however, unique in the literature of the period in describing lesbian activity and never mentioning any punishment at all. He does this at the beginning of the chapter about the harem, where the women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits that have the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual characteristics (5.6.2-4).
Yashodhara's commentary helpfully suggests the particular vegetables that one might employ: "By imagining a man, [these women] experience a heightened emotion that gives extreme satisfaction. These things have a form just like the male sexual organ: the bulbs of arrow-root, plantain, and so forth; the roots of coconut palms, breadfruit, and so forth; and the fruits of the bottle gourd, cucumber, and so forth." One can imagine little gardens of plantain and cucumber being lovingly cultivated within the inner rooms of the palace, the harem.
Between Dharma and Adharma
The Kamasutra aspires to describe all the things that a person could possibly do to have fun in and around bed; many of these acts, such as adultery and homosexuality, violate dharma, but Vatsyayana seems to feel duty-bound to mention them in order to cover the full spectrum of possibilities, as befits a shastra, a genre that aspires to totality. And sometimes this inclusiveness leads him to ricochet between dharmic and adharmic agendas. Take the case of kings.
We have seen how Manu and the Arthashastra incorporate conflicting ideas about the dharma of kings. The ambivalence of the Kamasutra on this issue is even more blatant. At first the Kamasutra states (at the beginning of a chapter, in a verse, always inclined to the dharmic side): Kings and counselors of state do not enter into other men's homes, for the whole populace sees what they do and imitates it.
The three worlds watch the sun rise and so they too rise; then they watch the sun moving and they too start to act. (5.5.1-2) And, at the end of the chapter detailing "devices" for adulterers, again in verse, we read: A king who takes pleasure in the welfare of his people should absolutely not use these devices. (5.5.37) But immediately after the first couplet the text adds, in realistic prose: "Therefore, because it is impossible and because they would be blamed, such men do nothing frivolous.
But when they cannot help doing it, they employ stratagems" (5.5.3-4). And the entire body of the chapter contains elaborate "stratagems" that a king can use to lure women to him, of which this one is typical: "He has her husband slandered by a spy, saying, 'He is an enemy of the king,' and then seizes the woman as the man's wife, and by this means has her enter the harem" (5.5.27). It continues: "Those are the secret methods.
They are generally used by the king's sons." And it concludes: These and many other devices for seducing other men's wives were put into circulation by kings, and are employed in region after region. (5.5.35-36) The tension between dharma as what should be and dharma as what is is stunningly manifest here. Albrecht Wezler offers valuable insights into Vatsyayana's ambivalence.
And sometimes he simply falls back on a kind of dharma of individualism: listen to your own conscience, don't just do what the text says, and always have a care for your partner's individual tastes and physical capacities (2.6.52; 2.7.25-27, 34-35). It is on this level, outside the scope of dharma and adharma, that Vatsyayana seems most secular, and most rational.
Five. Glossing Adharma with Dharma
Although the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra occasionally defend ethical dharma, their underlying arguments show a stunning disregard for it, as well as for social dharma and theological dharma. At times these texts seem to ricochet between conventional and more or less antinomian ideas.
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Dharma and Dissent
Although the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra occasionally defend ethical dharma, their underlying arguments show a stunning disregard for it, as well as for social dharma and theological dharma. At times these texts seem to ricochet between conventional and more or less antinomian ideas. Indologists have often taken at face value the superficial, explicit statements in support of dharma that both texts made1 but disregarded the texts' deeper implicit violations of dharma, therefore incorrectly assuming either a balance between pro- and anti-dharmic stances or a basically dharmic stance.
I intend here to explore the implications of the contradictions between these superficial pro-dharma assertions and actual anti-dharmic attitudes. The tension between the promotion of dharma and dissent against dharma was exacerbated by various other conflicts within these texts, whose robust intertextuality allowed them to grow over the centuries like intersecting palimpsests and often led to apparent internal dissonance. The influence of Manu on the Arthashastra (and of the Arthashastra on the Kamasutra) can account for some of the conflations of diametrically opposed points of view in both the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra.
Since many ideas taken from Manu were eventually stitched into the Arthashastra, some, but not all, of the bits of pro-Brahmin ideology in the Arthashastra may be attributed to that revision, and others to the pro-Brahmin overlay that may have occurred in the Kamasutra as well as the Arthashastra. But it is also likely that these texts incorporated bits of popular antinomianism that seeped into the Brahmin establishment, bringing traces of widespread resistance to the official moral norms. There are also contradictions within each text that do not derive from textual conflations.
We can see this already in Manu, who speaks both in favor of and against eating meat (5.39-41; 5.45-56) (and, more broadly, in favor of both animal sacrifice and animal noninjury [ahimsa]), and both in favor of and against both the bride price and levirate marriage (9.64-68; 9.57-63, 120-21, 145-46, 159, 162-63, 167, 190-91). Manu also offers wildly divergent options for many punishments: For a man who sleeps with his guru's wife (the defining sin in Brahmin dharma), for instance, Manu offers two alternative restorations: either the man can castrate himself and walk, holding his testicles in his hand, until he drops dead, or he can drink for several weeks a mixture of the "five products of the cow" (pancha-gavya-milk, cow urine, cow dung, yogurt, and clarified butter) (11.104-7).
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The Hays Office / Bookend Ploy
How did Kautilya and Vatsyayana get away with it? They managed to stay inside the Hindu fold by creating a smoke screen, a façade of dharma as ethical law, to mask the fact that they were trampling actual, practical social dharma into the dust. They deployed a veneer of dharma beneath which they lodged a pervasive adharmic agenda, a kind of body armor for the vulnerable body of the text.
The Kamasutra here regards Manu not as a human scholar but as a son of the Creator, echoing the myth with which Manu begins his own dharma text; Vatsyayana includes Manu and his text as part of the divine pedigree of the Kamasutra. He then goes on to tell us how two sages (Shvetaketu and Babhravya, whom he cites again in the course of his work, unlike Nandi, who never appears again) reduced Nandi's text (originally in a thousand chapters) to its present seven parts, first in 500 chapters and then in 150 (1.1.9-10).
After that we learn that seven human authors,9 whom Vatsyayana cites and argues with throughout his book, made separate books out of each of the seven parts. This myth is closely based on a myth in the Mahabharata (12.59.30-94), not about the Kamasutra but about the Arthashastra, a myth that Vatsyayana adapted for his own use (yet another instance of the Kamasutra's dependence on the Arthashastra). According to the Mahabharata, in order to put an end to the primeval period of anarchy, the Creator first made a text about the Three Aims in 100,000 verses, after which Vishalaksha ("Far-Sighted," an epithet of the god Shiva) reduced the book about artha to 10,000 verses, in view of the brevity of human life.
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And even this is little more than a literary flourish. Thus, even in their most theological moments-the invocations-the authors of our two shastras try to make some sort of human sense out of the inherited myth. Both the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra begin and end with statements ranking dharma ahead of artha and kama (statements that both texts contradict in the bodies of the works).
The second verse here-"For the statement that . ."-is the only one in the entire Kamasutra that Vatsyayana uses twice; the first time was after his discussion of oral sex, which he also regards somewhat askance (2.9.41). On that occasion he added another verse: Medical science, for example, recommends cooking even dog meat, for juice and virility; but what intelligent person would eat it?
In this final bookend, Vatsyayana adds an even more surprising verse: Vatsyayana . made this work in chastity and in the highest meditation, for the sake of worldly life; he did not compose it for the sake of passion. (7.2.57) No one has any idea what sort of life Vatsyayana actually led,14 but in any case, using his life to defend his text is a very long shot indeed.
The book concludes by placing the control of passion within the Triad: The man who is well taught and expert in this text pays attention to dharma and artha; he does not indulge himself too much in passion, and so he succeeds when he plays the part of a lover. (7.2.59) This bookend technique somewhat resembles the method that Hollywood producers adopted to get around the strict moral code (the Motion Picture Production Code) enforced by the Hays Office from 1930 to 1968 forbidding, inter alia, the depiction of the success of a crime such as murder or adultery.
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In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, directed by Tay Garnett), for example, Lana Turner and John Garfield seem to succeed in committing both adultery and murder-until, at the very last minute, as they are driving off into what appears to be a beautiful sunset, he loses control of the car (while kissing her) and drives into a tree, gratuitously and meaninglessly killing her (a death for which he is convicted of murder and executed). In Ocean's Eleven (1960, directed by Lewis Milestone), Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack execute a brilliant and entirely successful robbery of the Las Vegas casinos-only to watch, at the last minute, all their money accidentally burn up in an incinerated coffin.
Such tacked-on endings allowed Holly wood to violate the production code in the body of the movie. In the Arthashastra and Kamasutra, bookend verses were similarly tacked on to exculpate the main text.
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Blaming Earlier Scholars and Teachers
After invoking, at the start, their mythical ancestors, the two texts go on to invoke human authors of earlier texts on their subjects, as well as earlier schools of thought. These lists of sources-the ancient Indian equivalent of "citations of the literature" in present-day academic dissertations-are sometimes capped by the statement "This is what the scholars/teachers (acharyas) say." (Manu doesn't cite any predecessors, since he claims to have been there on the spot at the beginning of the world, and had no predecessors.
But here the text that so often advocates lying may well be speaking what Richard Nixon used to call "inoperative" truths (nowadays known as "alternative facts"). Vatsyayana, too, begins by invoking his academic ancestors, "the scholars who made known the mutual agreement among the Triad" (1.1.3), and then, after the brief mythological episode about the Creator, he continues in a long paragraph that mentions his human predecessors by name (1.1.10-12). In the course of the work he invokes these authorities, one by one, in a number of conversations, beginning with an argument about what sorts of women are and are not eligible as sexual partners (1.5.22-26) and continuing in a debate about whether or not women have orgasms as men do, presenting the cockamamie theories of Audalaki and Babhravya (such as that women don't have orgasms but have worms inside them that produce an itch that demands to be scratched) before stating, and defending against objections by several unnamed interlocutors, Vatsyayana's own sensible opinion (that they do have orgasms like those of men) (2.1.8-30).
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The Purva Paksha (Opponent’s View) as a Straw Man
Ancestors and predecessors also played another, more specific role in facilitating the adharmic discourse of the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra. For Kautilya and Vatsyayana often used them to smuggle in dangerous opinions through one of the standard conventions of Indian arguments. Among the many ways in which the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra are alike (and different from Manu) is their manner of arguing.
In particular, and essential to my argument, it is the custom in the shastra tradition first to cite an opponent's opinion-known as the purva paksha ("prior view" or, literally, "preceding wing"), often without explicitly noting that it is, in the author's view, incorrect-and then to state the author's own, correct opinion (which is called the siddhanta, the perfected view, the solution). Our two authors put the purva paksha tradition to work in the tap dance they do around dharma. The critical citations of the anonymous "teachers" allow Kautilya and Vatsyayana to put in "opponents'" mouths opinions that may not actually have been expressed by anyone but are merely part of a mythical purva paksha.
This is a possibility that we will see, in chapter 6, at work in later centuries in India, as the purva paksha then shaded off into the entirely mythical in the textual traditions of the skeptics and materialists. The unspecified "scholars/teachers" (acharyas) whom both texts mock, as well as particular named scholars whose ideas are cited from time to time as part of the purva paksha, only to be rejected, voice sentiments that the texts officially reject but may want to make the reader think about.
And indeed, the two roles are lexically related, according to Merriam-Webster online, which gives a double meaning for "straw man": "a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted, or a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction." In this second sense, an author uses the purva paksha to smuggle a "questionable" opinion into readers' minds under cover of an "easily confuted" quotation. The very format of quotations in Sanskrit facilitates the use of "opponents" to express one's own secret view.
For Sanskrit does not mark the beginning of a direct quotation; it simply marks the end of the quotation with the particle iti-"thus," as in "iti Gonikaputra," meaning "This is what Gonikaputra says/said." The reader therefore does not know until the end of the quotation whether the author is speaking for himself or quoting someone he may disagree with, so the reader is inclined to accept the quote as the author's words-unless, at the end, he or she is told not to accept it. For instance, we have seen Vatsyayana, who has elsewhere warned married women (in keeping with social dharma) to avoid beggar women and ascetic women, advise the would-be adulterer as follows: "'A meeting [with a married woman] is easy to arrange in the houses of a girlfriend, a beggar woman, a Buddhist nun, or an ascetic woman'-this is what Gonikaputra says" (5.4.43).
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The subversive use of the purva paksha may have led some members of the scholarly community to distrust the convention. A medical textbook composed during this approximate period, for instance, depicts a series of physicians arguing about the etiology of a disease until the author states his own view: Now, as the sages were arguing in this way, Punarvasu said, "Don't talk like this. It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides.
Vatsyayana usually cites his opponents with respect, simply adding his own opinion at the end, while Kautilya often makes fun of the people he disagrees with, remarking that the truth is so obvious, only a fool could disagree, or shouting "No!" before he introduces his own, correct opinion. But Kautilya uses the method adharmically when he cites, and officially dismisses, the opinions of a series of earlier authorities on the way to deal with a king's potentially patricidal sons (1.17.4-21). One of these authorities, likening princes to crabs, who "eat their begetters," suggests that they be secretly murdered, "before their father has started to love them." A second, objecting that it is cruel to kill the innocent and unwise to wipe out the race of kings, suggests imprisonment.
A third objects that the prince will anticipate this move and seize the king; he suggests sending him to a frontier fort. A fourth says the fort of a neighboring lord, outside the territory, would be better. A fifth would send him to his mother's kinsmen.
The sixth suggests that he be made addicted to vices. Kautilya lets the "scholars" quarrel among themselves and objects only to this last suggestion: "'That is a living death,' says Kautilya, 'for if the royal family has undisciplined sons, as soon as it is attacked it will fall apart like a piece of wood eaten by worms'" (1.17.22-23). (The reference to worms caps all the animal metaphors that the other scholars have used: besides crabs, they liken the son to a snake, a ram, a calf-this is a feral world!) And then Kautilya, having put on the table, in the mouths of other people, a number of truly diabolical suggestions that may never have occurred to anyone but him, caps the argument with his own, less violent though still rather heartless advice: "If he has only one son, and that son is dear to him, the king should imprison him.
If he has many sons, the king should banish them to the frontier or to another region" (1.17.41-42). None of the truly appalling methods are actually recommended, but we will not forget them. They might come in handy some day.
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Six. Skepticism and Materialism in Ancient India
Who Were the Lokayatikas and the Charvakas? I have argued that the Kamasutra and the Arthashastra often deviated significantly from dharma in ways that amounted to a covert attack.
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Skepticism and Materialism in Ancient India
Who Were the Lokayatikas and the Charvakas? I have argued that the Kamasutra and the Arthashastra often deviated significantly from dharma in ways that amounted to a covert attack. Now I want to argue that this attack was continued in a most ingenious and devious way by the creation of a mythology about wicked skeptics or materialists whose words were always cited with shock and disapproval but always cited, always kept alive.
The Lokayatikas and the Charvakas, materialists and skeptics, are the heirs of the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra, at least to the extent that the idea of doing whatever you need to do to get what you want (in the Arthashastra) and having as much fun as you possibly can (in the Kamasutra), with no regard for dharma in either case, was fuel for the Lokayatika/Charvaka legend. The texts attributed to Lokayatikas (or, later, Charvakas) carry on the materialist and skeptical legacy of the scientific shastras, sniping away at dharma.
We can identify places where the Kamasutra and the Arthashastra are skeptical, and then trace such views as they are attributed to the Lokayatikas and the Charvakas. Thus resistance to the dharmic party line continued to be present in ancient and medieval India, producing numerous fissures in the smooth surface of the conventional theocracy. The Arthashastra praises the Lokayatikas and the Kamasutra criticizes them, but both texts show a striking congruence with the adharmic sentiments that many texts of the period (including the Kamasutra) often pejoratively attributed to the Lokayatikas.
The verb char means "to move about" but also "to get around" (that is, "to be promiscuous")3 and "to be tricky or slippery with words." To further complicate the issue, sometimes the Lokayatikas or the Charvakas were called "Barhaspatyas," from the allegedly lost (and much-cited) text called the "Sutra of Brihaspati,"4 attributed to Brihaspati. This Brihaspati could have been either the mythical, conniving chief counselor of the king of the gods or a human person whom the Kamasutra regards as the original author of the Arthashastra.
According to the Mahabharata, Brihaspati invented the adharmic Lokayatra [sic] doctrine.5
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Lokayata and Lokayatikas in the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra
At the very start of the Arthashastra, right after the table of contents, Kautilya states that one of the four knowledge systems that enable a person to know dharma and artha (he omits kama) is critical inquiry (anviksha) (1.2.1). Critical inquiry (he continues) has three parts, one of which is the Lokayata system,12 which critically applies logic to the other three knowledge systems-the Veda (i.e., theology), economics (cattle rearing, farming, and trade), and politics (1.2.10). Lokayata (he concludes) applies logic to the Vedas to distinguish dharma from adharma; to economics to distinguish artha from anartha; and to politics to determine what is good policy and what is bad policy.
The Lokayata in the Arthashastra is not a sect at all but simply a philosophical school; yet its commitment to logic, as well as to economics and politics, may have made it already suspect in the dharmic world. For the Sanskrit word for "logician," hetuka, literally "one who has [argues from] causes (hetu)," often takes on, in dharma texts, much of the pejorative tone of "rationalist," "casuist," "Sophist," or even "Jesuitical"-someone who uses cold reason and plays tricks with words to deny the truths of the heart.
Kautilya approves of the followers of the Lokayata school, who study the Vedas in order to distinguish dharma from adharma, even though they do so through the morally suspect techniques of logic. In laying out the knowledge systems as he does, Kautilya rejects two extant views of critical inquiry. First he challenges the assertion of the followers of Manu (presumably the author of the dharma text, not the sage present at the original creation), who drop critical inquiry entirely, regarding it as subsumed under the Veda.
Kautilya's rejection of this view is a vote for reason over Veda (more precisely, a vote against people who value the Veda over reason) and a vote against the world of Manu (with whom Kautilya often disagrees). But then Kautilya criticizes the views of the Barhaspatyas, who omit both the Veda and critical inquiry and argue that the Veda is "merely a cover for those who know how the world works" (1.2.2-4). Here, in the opening frame of the book, Kautilya is still in his pro-dharma mode, and he clearly disapproves of the anti-Vedic Barhaspatyas, even as he approves of the Lokayatikas.
Later this distinction between Lokayatikas and Barhaspatyas becomes blurred by people who assert that someone named Brihaspati both founded the Lokayata school (thus merging the Barhaspatyas and the Lokayatikas) and composed the Arthashastra (as the Kamasutra says he did). The "Brihaspati politics" that a learned Brahmin teaches in the Mahabharata (3.33.57)14 are deeply Kautilyan. But there may well be several different Brihaspatis, one the guru of the gods, one the alleged human author of an arthashastra, and one the alleged human founder of a school of skeptics or materialists.
Ladder 71
There are several quite different descriptions of "the school of Brihaspati," as there are of the Lokayatikas and the Charvakas. The Kamasutra, in dramatic contrast with the Arthashastra, is highly critical of the Lokayatikas, whom it represents as people who attack dharma (2.2.21-24). Vatsyayana presents their text as the opponent's incorrect argument about dharma, the purva paksha: don't believe in anything you can't see; don't waste your money on sacrifice in the hope of the existence of a heaven with gods who will receive your offering and give you something in return.
By this time, significantly, the depiction of the Lokayatikas had moved from the field of ethical dharma (in the Arthashastra, where they argue about perception and values) to the world of social and theological dharma (in the Kamasutra, where they urge people not to perform actions in accordance with dharma). The Kamasutra lists the Lokayatikas as part of a group of three, of which the other two are fatalists (who attack artha) and pragmatists (who attack kama), not philosophical schools but types of persons.
The Lokayatikas here are just people who care only about material wealth and having fun, as we might speak of a person as a Stoic or Epicurean-not meaning someone who follows the Roman philosophies but just someone who enjoys a good bottle of wine. This is the cluster of beliefs that the Lokayatikas represented in Vatsyayana's day.
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Skeptics and Materialists in Ancient India
The English terms "materialist" and "skeptic," as well as, occasionally, "hedonist," are often applied to Charvakas or Lokayatikas, though the English words only rather grossly represent the Indian arguments and can serve only as rough placeholders for the Sanskrit names. Even so, it is best to define them. A "materialist," as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is someone who believes that nothing exists except matter, or that mental phenomena are nothing more than the operation of material agencies.
The broader, looser meaning denotes someone who denies the competence of reason, or the existence of any justification for certitude, outside the limits of experience. And a hedonist is, still according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "one who regards pleasure as the chief good." Skepticism in India certainly predated the first references to Lokayatikas or Charvakas. Skepticism began in the very earliest of the Hindu texts, the Rig Veda, in a poem that is known, from its first words, as the "Nasadiya" (or the "There was not" poem; the phrase "nasad/na-asat," "There was not," is the past tense of "na-asti," "There is not.").
This short, linguistically straightforward poem, which explicitly lays out an open-ended attitude to the first things, raises unanswerable questions: There was neither nonexistence nor existence then; there was neither the field of space nor the sky that is beyond. Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. Who will here proclaim it? The gods came afterward, with the creation of this universe.
The hymn asks, "Who really knows?"-questioning the very nature, perhaps the very existence, of God. Amartya Sen cites it as a source of Indian skepticism.17 D. Jha is right to call skepticism an "undercurrent of Indian thought."14 But it is often very far under.
The general sort of antinomian thinking that eventually flowered in the Charvaka citations was probably always there, as there are always people who resist the dominant paradigms. The folklore that left traces in texts as early as the Rig Veda and remains a staple of Indian oral traditions to the present is often stunningly antinomian. But even the more specific and more dangerous statements attributed to the Charvakas, violating social rules and rituals and criticizing Brahmins, had begun to appear, somewhat tentatively, in the Vedic corpus.
Hub 73
Cycle 74
Lokayatikas, Charvakas, and Nastikas (Naysayers)
The Lokayata and Charvaka traditions have not played the same sort of role in Indian history as the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra. We do not have Lokayata or Charvaka texts, so they have no place in the continuous fabric of the Sanskrit textual and commentarial tradition. Nor does any extant text advocate their views; they are cited only as negative examples, indeed as cautionary extremes, reductio ad absurdum arguments.
Yet their ideas do pop up with impressive frequency in major Sanskrit texts as well as in the much broader oral traditions, and therefore, as bogeymen, they remained alive and well in the consciousness of Indians for many centuries. They cannot have posed real subversive threats to the Brahmin establishment-but this can also be said of the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra. All of this has been happening only in the Indian imaginaire, and the Lokayatikas and Charvakas are simply even more imaginaire than the kings and playboys that Kautilya and Vatsyayana imagined.
Flow 75
By these evasive criteria, then, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish Charvakas from Nastikas. But Charvakas are not the same as Nastikas. Charvakas are usually accused not only (like Nastikas) of not believing in gods but of not believing in piety, in the efficacy of religious rules and rites-in a word, in social dharma.
We can distinguish three levels of doctrines attributed to Lokayatikas/Charvakas during this period. Charvaka doctrine Type A is a kind of extreme logical skepticism: we can't know anything for sure. This may be what the wily Kautilya admires in the Lokayata school, which seems to have been part of a significant philosophical tradition.
The Type B Charvaka is a materialist and hedonist. The Type C Charvaka goes on to argue that, if there are no gods, there is therefore no afterlife, and therefore no point in sacrifice (to get us to heaven when we die), and therefore no point in Brahmins or the Veda. This sort of Charvaka could have gotten into trouble-but there's no evidence that they ever did.
Ladder 76
Apparently authors could put into the mouths of the Lokayatikas and Charvakas just about any adharmic argument they wanted to air, things that no real people probably ever said and that would probably have gotten them killed if acted upon. The Type C Charvaka is a mythical dissident. These three types of Charvaka arguments pop up in different ways at different times but are often combined in a single accusation.
The history of the statements attributed to Charvakas (and, occasionally, Lokayatikas) is a history of dissent against dharma safely attributed to someone other than the speaker.
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Charvakas in Epic Texts
This is what Jabali says: I pity those who care most about dharma and artha. They have nothing but misery in this world, and when they die they just disappear. People devote themselves to performing the ritual meal for the ancestors.
But look at the waste of food! For what can a dead man eat? And if something that one person ate here could fill the body of someone else, you could simply offer the ritual meal of the ancestors on behalf of a traveler, and he wouldn't need to pack provisions for the road.
Those books that tell us, "Sacrifice, give, consecrate yourself, practice asceticism, renounce," were devised by cunning men just to charm people into paying them. Your majesty, you must realize that there exists no world beyond. Face what is in front of your eyes and turn your back on what cannot be seen.
Yet elsewhere the Ramayana seems to regard Lokayatikas simply as logicians, as when Rama challenges his brother Bharata, saying, "I hope you do not associate with Brahmins who are Lokayatikas, dear brother. Their only skill is in bringing misfortune: they are fools who think themselves wise. Although preeminent texts on dharma are ready to hand, those ignorant fellows derive their ideas from logic alone and so propound utter nonsense" (2.94.29).
This confusion between skeptics (or even just logicians in general) and Lokayatikas pervades many later texts as well. But it is in the Kamasutra that we first encounter people called Lokayatikas who say the specific naughty things that the Ramayana attributes to Jabali. Charvakas cast their shadows in several parts of the twelfth book of the Mahabharata.
There Charvaka is the name of an ogre (rakshasa) who disguises himself as a Brahmin, wearing the garb of a religious mendicant, carrying the trident that identifies worshippers of Shiva. The Brahmins, furious, say they said nothing of the kind.
Hub 78
Then they realize that Charvaka is an ogre and a friend of Duryodhana, the king whom Yudhishthira has just conquered. They kill Charvaka by chanting "Hum!" at him. Yudhishthira later learns that Charvaka had obtained a boon that he could not be killed unless he insulted Brahmins (12.39.22-47), one of the signature habits of the human Charvakas.
No other doctrinal issues arise, and the episode seems designed primarily to literally demonize the Charvakas, evidence that they were regarded as a serious threat to human life (and occasionally indistinguishable from followers of the ascetic god Shiva). This passage was reworked in an eighth-century play, The Catastrophe of the Braid, in which an ogre named Charvaka, a friend of Duryodhana, disguises himself as a Brahmin sage and urges Yudhishthira to commit suicide, this time not out of guilt about the general devastation brought by the war but because, Charvaka says (falsely), Yudhishthira's brother Bhima has been killed.
He says: "I used to be a learned logician (haituka) who scorned the Veda; I was devoted to critical inquiry (anviksha) and logic (tarka), which are useless. I based my arguments on reason and slandered Brahmins. I was a Nastika who doubted everything, a fool.
And this is the result: I've become a jackal!" (12.180.6-8, 45-53). It is probably not irrelevant that the jackal, in the beast fables based on the Arthashastra, plays the role of the chief counselor, like Kautilya. Elsewhere (12.10.20), Yudhishthira, whose ideas of nonviolence owe much to Buddhism but who is also known as the dharma king, is accused of having Nastika tendencies.
Cycle 79
Charvakas are indirectly demonized by the incarnate god Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (a philosophical discourse that is a part of the Mahabharata) in a passage that argues that there are two sorts of people, the godlike and the demonic. The demonic bear a suspicious resemblance to both Charvakas and Lokayatikas, whose position is often called the demonic doctrine. Krishna says: There is no purity in demonic people, no morality, no truth.
They say, "The universe has no reality, no firm basis, no lord; it has not come into existence through mutual causation; kama is its only cause-what else?" Since they insist upon this doctrine, their souls are lost and their wits are feeble; and so they commit horrible actions in their wish to harm and destroy the universe. Immersing themselves in insatiable desire, possessed by hypocrisy, pride, and madness, in their delusion they grasp at false conceptions and undertake impure enterprises. They are afflicted by countless worries that end only at doomsday, for their only aim is to enjoy what they desire, since they are convinced that this is all there is.
Bound by the fetters of hope, by the hundreds, obsessed by desire and anger, they long to amass great wealth, by whatever foul means, to satisfy their desires. This is my money, and this, and this will be mine soon. I killed that man-he was my enemy; and I will kill the others, too.
"Mutual causation" is a strongly Buddhist phrase, while "amass[ing] great wealth" puts us in the field of the Arthashastra (as does "I killed that man-he was my enemy"), while "satisfy[ing] their desires" (not to mention the argument that the whole universe is founded on kama) belongs to the world of the Kamasutra. Yet there is still a layer of cunning hypocrisy: such people do sacrifice and give to charities, but it all means nothing. And so, Krishna warns, all of it gets them into an eternal hell from which there will never be any way out.
Flow 80
Charvakas in the Puranas and in Medieval Plays and Poems
Other versions of the story specify that Vishnu took the form of the Buddha and invented the evil doctrines of Buddhism; sometimes it is Jainism; sometimes both. But most of these texts incorporate a miscellaneous, kitchen-sink collection of wicked ideas, usually involving denial of the Vedas and the rituals of sacrifice, which often strangely resemble the alleged doctrines of Lokayatikas or Charvakas. The Vishnu Purana, for instance, one of the earliest Puranas (c.
In the third act, the Charvaka puts forth adharmic, materialist, and hedonist impieties but also ideas about inference. He begins by saying, "I am going to do away with God, set aside the world-to-come, and demolish the validity of the Vedas" (3.80). Later he says: "Asceticism is just a variety of torture; self-restraint is just a way to cheat yourself of pleasures; while sacrificial rituals seem to me just like children's games" (3.87-88).
He goes on to liken the concept of god to logical impossibilities like the son of a barren woman, a mirage, and a bow made of hare-horn (3.91), and to laugh at the idea that the Vedas are authoritative (3.189). But then, when his opponent says that inference proves the existence of god, the Charvaka demolishes the validity of inference, as a skeptic would: "Even if clever logicians infer something with great effort, other, extremely competent logicians account for the same thing in another way" (3.109).
He therefore appears to combine the characteristics of the materialist Charvakas (Type B) and the skeptic Charvakas (Type A). The third act had begun, however, with a complaint that a cruel king has been rounding up quasi-Tantric Shaiva mendicants, beating them up, and expelling them for being outside Vedic religion, and that he threatens to kill them or throw them in prison (3.10-14). "We drink booze, eat meat, have women," one of them remarks (3.13)-all actual offenses against social dharma, and not merely talk about such offenses (like those attributed to Type C Charvakas).
If this is a reflection of actual historical policy, for which there is scattered evidence,53 it would mean that such Tantric groups were in fact actively prosecuted, and this play seems to assume that Charvakas, who do nothing but talk, slipped into the reformer's net as well. The Saura Purana says that Charvakas (and several other groups, including Tantrics)54 should not be allowed to enter a kingdom (38.54). The mythology about Tantric groups prevalent in more conventional Hindu texts functioned in some ways that are closely parallel to the mythology of the Charvakas.
The Charvaka then enters and says: The three Vedas are crooks' patter! For they make no difference when it comes to reaching heaven. Look: If those who perform the sacrifice find their way to paradise, once agent, act, and object are destroyed, then plentiful fruit there ought to be after the fire has burned up the trees.
Much of this is in Jabali's speech in the Ramayana. It is boilerplate extreme Charvaka talk, Type C. The twelfth-century poem The Adventures of Nala attributes to the demon Kali (the genius of the present evil Kali Age) a mélange of specific heresies: "In the army of Kali, his generals were Kama, Anger, Greed, Delusion, and others.
A Charvaka in the ranks mocked the gods, citing various Buddhist doctrines. Some of the gods called Kali's troops Nastikas; others called them Lokayatikas, still others heretics. Kali stood there surrounded by evils, .
If an animal killed in the sacrificial rite will go to heaven, why then doesn't the sacrificer kill his own father in that ritual? If the shraddha offering to the ancestors satisfies beings who are dead, . then here, too, there's no need to make provisions for the road for people who set out on a journey; they can be satisfied on the road by shraddha offerings made by people at home.
If those in heaven are gratified by our offerings here, then why not give food down here to people who are standing on the roof terrace? While a man lives let him live happily; let him feed on butter even if he gets into debt. When the body has been reduced to ashes, how can it ever return again?
If someone who departs from the body goes to another world, why doesn't he come back again, overwhelmed by love for his family? And so it is only as a means of livelihood that Brahmins have established here the ceremonies for the dead; there's no other use for them. The authors of the three Vedas were buffoons, cheats, and night-prowling ogres.
Buddhist and Jain Satires on Charvakas
Kosambi regarded Keshakambali as "a thoroughgoing materialist."78 He said that the doctrines attributed to Keshakambali "seem to be of a composite character" in that many different ideas have been lumped together and blamed on him.79 A passage in the Buddhist Pali Canon attributes to Ajita Keshakambali doctrines strongly evocative of Lokayatika or Charvaka doctrine.80
Jayarashi’s Skepticism
All we have now is the mythology about them, which has replaced whatever history there may have been. Charvaka ideas became very real indeed. Kapstein sums up the case well: "The Cārvākas are difficult to refute.
Though the Charvakas lacked an ongoing tradition, what the Indians call a parampara, "from one to another," they existed as a tradition of thought without a school. Into the vacuum created by their absence, the Brahmin imagination freely rushed with all their own wicked ideas and attributed them to people unable to defend themselves or to contradict the false statements attributed to them. Two very different sorts of Brahmins might have developed the ideas attributed to the Charvakas.
No matter what their intentions, the Brahmins who cited the Charvaka ideas did in fact keep them alive. The people who made up the views of the nonexistent Charvakas or quoted the lost Charvakas became, in effect, the Charvakas. By the time of the Kamasutra the Charvakas had become a useful figment of the Hindu imagination.
That the Mahabharata actually called one of the Charvakas an ogre in disguise suggests how much of a myth they were (though it should be noted that Hindu texts also call Buddhists and Jains demons, and we know that they really existed). And once the mythology was in place, anyone could play. It would have been easy for every village rake who thought wicked thoughts about killing his father to blame them on the Charvakas, convenient scapegoats for various sorts of dissidence.
It would also have been easy to pick up an existing tradition of Brahmin bashing (in Buddhist texts as well as Hindu folk traditions, perhaps vernacular traditions)99 and put it into the Sanskrit texts under the cover of attributing it to the Charvakas.
The Later Fate of Indian Skepticism
Paradise they regard as a state in which man lives as he chooses, free from the control of another, and hell the state in which he lives subject to another's rule. The whole end of man, they say, is comprised in four things: the amassing of wealth, women, fame and good deeds. They admit only of such sciences as tend to the promotion of external order, that is, a knowledge of just administration and benevolent government.
It may well be, therefore, that Charvakas of the old, legitimate logical branch, the Jayarashi branch, still existed at the time of Akbar and were still being confused with the nonexistent dissidents excoriated in all the Sanskrit texts. Or Abu'l Fazl may have fallen for the Brahmins' Charvaka fantasy. Charvakas continued to exist in the Brahmin imaginaire.
The great Charvaka contribution is to the unquenchable tradition of challenging the dominant paradigm. They were the champions of those people whose sva-dharma is adharma. In a very real sense, the Charvakas were the purva paksha for rational Hindus throughout Indian history.
Seven. Epilogue: Dharma and the Subversion of Science
The Afterlife of the Kamasutra and the Arthashastra The ideas advanced by Kautilya and Vatsyayana remained alive in India. Their texts attracted few commentaries,1 but they are cited quite frequently in a general rather than literal way, often (particularly in the case of the Arthashastra) negatively: these texts, which made such brilliant use of the purva paksha, sometimes themselves became, rather like the Charvakas, the purva paksha quoted in books that disagreed with them.
Ladder 81
Dharma And The Subversion Of Science
The Afterlife of the Kamasutra and the Arthashastra The ideas advanced by Kautilya and Vatsyayana remained alive in India. Their texts attracted few commentaries,1 but they are cited quite frequently in a general rather than literal way, often (particularly in the case of the Arthashastra) negatively: these texts, which made such brilliant use of the purva paksha, sometimes themselves became, rather like the Charvakas, the purva paksha quoted in books that disagreed with them. They inaugurated a line of dissent that preserved certain antinomian, adharmic ideas in the face of the growing authority of social dharma, a line continued, in a shadow form, by the Charvaka mythology.
This dissension was carried on in Sanskrit texts created and disseminated by Brahmins of a certain persuasion in the face of the greater Sanskrit tradition maintained by other sorts of Brahmins who upheld social dharma. Evidently these texts answered a need for dissension, for protest against the ever-tightening noose of caste dharma, that never died in intellectual circles in India. There is an honesty and realism in these two texts that endeared them to later generations.
Though heavily embroidered with fantastic details, their basic subject matter is the stuff of real life. Their ideas survived in popular traditions-the Arthashastra in the animal fables of the Panchatantra and the tales of the lion king and his wily jackal counselor, the Kamasutra in miniature paintings and the carvings on the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak. Some of their ideas were also maintained in later political and erotic texts derived from them, though there the concepts were toned down and blunted, brought closer to the rules of social dharma2-evidence that the tradition did in fact find them in violation of dharma.
The Arthashastra's ideas about royal dharma (rajadharma) were taken up by the dharma texts, and its ideas about polity went into the later political texts, the "textbooks of polity" (niti-shastras). Perhaps this led to a feeling that one no longer needed the Arthashastra itself and contributed to its eventual demise as a separate text, just as the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra themselves eclipsed their predecessors. The Arthashastra wasn't suppressed so much as just allowed to fade out of the textual tradition, though its antinomian content may also have discouraged people from keeping it available.
Only a few other artha-shastras have survived, all considerably later and nowhere near as comprehensive. Kamandaka's Essence of Polity (Nitisara, probably from the Gupta period, the fourth or fifth century CE), essentially an abridgment of the Arthashastra, concentrates on foreign policy and war, leaving out many subjects that loom large in Kautilya's text. On the other hand, the last great comprehensive Sanskrit political text, Shukra's Essence of Polity (Nitisara, probably composed between the ninth and thirteenth centuries CE), though shorter than the Arthashastra, is wider in scope, concentrating on the moral norms needed to regulate conduct and sharply distinguishing between politics and ethics.
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Scholars cherished it for its rich detail about upper-class urban life in ancient India, poets for its ideas about the intrigues of romantic love and its imaginative anatomical detail, and religious leaders for its template for the often agonistic love of god. The survival of the full Sanskrit texts of the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra, however, depended on the copying of manuscripts. The desire to win religious merit, a principal motive for the copying of dharma texts, was unlikely to have motivated patrons of the Arthashastra or the Kamasutra.
But the texts must have been copied at least every two hundred years or so by someone who valued them, or we would not have them. The wet heat and the white ants destroy any manuscript in India within a few centuries at the most, especially since taboos about the use of animal skins limited the scribes of ancient India to the use of palm leaves, which do not last nearly as long as vellum. To survive over the centuries, a text must have inspired an unbroken line of people willing to pay to have it copied.
Manu was constantly recopied from the ancient period to the present and became well known in Europe after Sir William Jones translated it into English in 1794. By contrast, after about the twelfth century CE, the full Sanskrit texts of the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra were only sporadically available to the scholarly community. They were relatively neglected by the scribal traditions all those years because they were dangerous texts, adharmic texts.
The Arthashastra was lost for centuries and rediscovered only in 1905. (Perhaps the same thing happened to the works of the Charvakas, and someone will someday discover a Charvaka text.) Yet those factions of society that supported the subversive agendas of Kautilya and Vatsyayana must have commissioned enough manuscripts for the two Sanskrit texts to survive. And the texts also lived, like most ancient Indian texts, in the oral tradition, as Vatsyayana himself assures us (1.3.5-10.) The Arthashastra and the Kamasutra were part of a vibrant, rich oral and written tradition from the time of their composition to the present; they continued to be known and discussed because they remained relevant to the great intellectual legacy of India.
Hub 83
At the same time, the underside of Victorian prudery, Victorian pornography (among what Stephen Marcus called "The Other Victorians"), also flourished in its Orientalist form, and it was an Englishman, Sir Richard Burton, who brought the Kamasutra to the attention of Anglophone Indian as well as British readers in 1883, when he published the first English translation of the book. But proper Europeans were scandalized by the Kamasutra. To get around the censorship laws, Burton set up an imaginary publishing house, the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, with printers said to be in Benares or Cosmopoli.
They propounded a white-washed brand of Hinduism limited to ethical dharma, particularly sanatana dharma ("the eternal dharma"), heavily flavored by Unitarianism. A number of such Hindus, particularly in Calcutta (now Kolkata), went about trying to silence the love songs to the gods, to cover up the erotic sculptures, and to kick the temple dancers out of the temples. This sanitized sanatana strain of Hinduism was just one form among many, and a minor strain at that.
In the twentieth century, kama in general fell into still deeper disrepute. The British lion, even after its official death in India in 1947, dealt another blow to Indian freedom of expression through the Film Censor Board (the cousin of the US Hays Office), which, from the early 1950s, implemented a policy that had roots among the British (who had worried more about sedition than about sex). The Film Censor Board cast a shadow that extended over Indian visual arts and literature as well as film.
Naipaul, in his book Half a Life, offers his own, rather jaded version of the anti-Muslim accusation as applied to the Kamasutra: "In our culture there is no seduction. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me of the Kama Sutra.
Cycle 84
National security adviser Shivshankar Menon has taken part in some discussions. Some enterprising enthusiasts have set up an institute in Mumbai to teach leadership qualities to youngsters looking for careers in the corporate world and politics and written popular books on the Arthashastra. The text is being introduced in training courses for soldiers and diplomats.
Flow 85
This is oversimplification and a gross distortion of Kautilya. The perception must be rectified. The Arthashastra must be adapted to suit contemporary realities.
A new Arthashastra for contemporary geopolitical realties should be evolved.29 Does Mr. Gupta actually approve of the methods of the Arthashastra? How much "adaptation" would be required for the book to be used in India today?
(Probably very little, though the tricks with cobra deities underwater might not work so well.) And does Gupta admire Machiavelli's ruthlessness and regard "Machiavellian" as a compliment? The accusation that the Pakistanis, too, were studying the Arthashastra, not to make use of its suggestions (as Mr. Gupta thinks the Indian government should do) but to find out what the Indians were thinking, might have been inspired by statements such as the following, made by Javid Husain, a retired ambassador and the president of the Lahore Council for World Affairs, as reported in a Lahore newspaper in 2015: "Just a few years ago, a former Indian National Security Adviser praised this book [the Arthashastra] as an important guide on strategy.
But then, in a kind of compensatory reaction against their uncomfortable admiration of their colonizers, many Hindus kept the foreign values but denied that they were foreign. Just as they had reasserted their own "eternal" sanatana dharma in response to British moral codes, now they asserted that their own oldest religious document, the Veda, back in 1500 BCE, had already anticipated European science. They claimed that ancient Indian scholars had made major scientific discoveries not only in grammar and mathematics (which they had, though not in the Vedas) but in aeronautics (which they had not, ever).
Ladder 86
First, because it's always easier to argue that something is "in the Vedas" than in a later text, since Vedic language is so archaic (it is to classical Sanskrit what Beowulf is to Shakespeare) that only relatively few priests and scholars know what's in the Vedas well enough to contradict anyone who cites the Vedas as their authority. And second, because the Vedas, being much older than the shastras (indeed, even older than the Bible), have more authority-particularly, of course, religious authority.
Hindu Nationalists, working to expel the British from India, therefore advanced a series of two-pronged arguments, not just "You are scientific, but we are spiritual" (though this was often said, too), but, better, "Our religion is wiser than your science-and our religious texts contain science much older than yours." And, finally, "We're better than you, in religion and science, because our religion is scientific and our science is religious, and we want you to leave." The complex relationship between science and religion in India continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and took a sharp turn to the right under the impetus of a Nationalist movement known as Hindutva, "Hinduness." This term was invented by the nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 pamphlet entitled Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? Hindutva's members call themselves Hindutva-vadis ("Those who profess Hindutva"), but one can call them, more simply, Hindutvats (on the analogy of bureaucrats).
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Werner Heisenberg, Singh explained, had based his famed Uncertainty Principle on the Vedas. Some of Singh's fellow travelers admitted that Heisenberg hadn't really read the Vedas, but quickly added that he did once have a conversation with Rabindranath Tagore, which was pretty much the same thing. That the Heisenberg-Tagore conversation took place two years after the German physicist had completed his career-defining work was irrelevant, for time is relative.
Hub 88
But "this research is not new . Dr Matapurkar was inspired by the Mahabharata." For the Mahabharata tells us that a queen gave birth prematurely to a hard mass of flesh, which a great sage divided into 100 parts and nourished for two years until 100 kings were born out of it. And so, the revised textbook tells us, "On reading this, he [Matapurkar] realized that stem cell was not his invention.
It is entirely possible that Indian civilization would have degenerated into a pleasure-seeking hedonistic world like ancient Rome, and perished in its insatiate orgies. Or again, the no-nonsense attitudes towards what they regarded as priestly mumble-jumble, and the crass Skepticism of the Charvakas might have saved Indian culture from the myriad superstitions that still plague it. More significantly, the Charvakas might have sown the seeds for the positive sciences which would have germinated in India rather than in sixteenth century Europe.
Cycle 89
Until then, India remains a land in which, after so many centuries in which scientific traditions managed to keep alive a subversive attack on religion, religion now is invoked in the subversion of science.
Flow 90
Main Points
1. Dharma is never alone: artha and kama press it from inside the same elite conversation. 2. Manu consolidates orthodoxy while absorbing rival sciences. 3. Kautilya weaponizes realism against pure ritual duty. 4. Vatsyayana treats desire as a science with its own rules and risks. 5. Commentary traditions keep the quarrel alive rather than closing it. 6. Gender and caste shape who may dissent and how texts stage that dissent. 7. Translation choices tilt the quarrel; watch glosses that soften conflict. 8. Comparative myth habit: find the rule by watching who breaks it on stage. 9. Law books argue by story as much as by sutra. 10. Political science in Sanskrit is already a moral psychology. 11. Pleasure literature is not soft: it disciplines bodies and households. 12. Orthodoxy grows by answering, not by ignoring, rival sciences. 13. Doniger's "against" is a reading strategy; flag when it overclaims. 14. The practical takeaway: read the three sciences together or misread each alone.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Three sciences | Dharma / artha / kama as co-present disciplines | When an Indian text seems "only" moral or erotic |
| Dissent map | Track who contradicts whom inside the corpus | When orthodoxy looks seamless |
| Gendered voice | Ask which speaker may say the dissent | When women or servants speak law |
About this book
Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics by Wendy Doniger, 2018. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions