Sex addiction of some Indian Celebrities

In a sensational disclosure of 2004, noted Tamil writer Anuradha Ramanan has alleged that Hindu pontiff, Kanchi Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati attempted to sexually abuse her in 1992. He was arrested with his junior, Vijayendra Saraswati in their alleged involvement in Shankara Raman murder case. The matter is still pending before the court. As many as 24 people are accused in the case which pertains to the murder of the manager of Varadaraja Perumal temple in Kanchipuram.

While the Hindu seer dated more with RSS boys, his behavior may just tip the scales to classify him as a sex addict. RSS don’t promote marriage and sexual intercourse as a concept to build a family. Instead they believe in Sangh Parivar, the brotherhood of Hindu extremism and the front end leaders are compelled to live as bachelors in public life.

In December 2006, BJP general secretary and RSS insider Sanjay Joshi quit his party post after an audio cassette, and later a VCD, showing him in a compromising position with a woman. RSS always claims of Brahmacharya (vow of celibacy) about their leaders and members. Joshi, like all other members of RSS, is supposed to be celibate and the CD has exposed these claims.

Jayalakshmi, the nurse who dared to reveal photographic evidence of her relationship with M P Renukacharya,

In April 2007, Jayalakshmi, a nurse from Bangalore attempted suicide following endless sexual harassment by M P Renukacharya, a Hindu extremist party (BJP) legislator and the Chairman of the Karnataka State Electronics Development Corporation Ltd. She later released the pictures and videos of the sexual assault in front of the media.

In the same period , a quantity of locally-made Viagra and sex stimulants were recovered from the baggage of a senior Parliament Member of BJP. Babubhai Katara was arrested at Delhi airport for trying to fly with a woman and teenager to Toronto on the diplomatic passports of his family. He was arrested with one Paramjeet Kaur and a 15-year-old boy, Amarjeet Singh, who were posing as his wife and son.

According to specialists, sex addiction can involve a wide variety of practices. A large number of sex addicts say their unacceptable sexual practices have been the result of a gradual process.

It may have started with an unhealthy relationship, but over the years deteriorated to include compulsive behaviour which is frequently damaging.

Psychologist Sujendra Prakash says he’s come across several cases of happily married men who are addicted to sex. “They are rarely caught,”he says. “This may be because they are not celebrities, but social restrictions in our society mean that much is kept under wraps.”

According to him, “Those who display such behaviour are highly insecure people, mostly uncertain of their potency. They are are not good in bed. They indulge in promiscuous sexual activity to keep proving themselves. Their life is a lie and they lie to everybody. It is just like any other personality disorder and cannot be easily overcome.”

Experts also feel that sex addicts gain very little pleasure from actual physical contact. Yet they engage in sexual activities they don’t enjoy because they are trying to alter their own mood, and to anaesthetise painful feelings of low self-esteem or loneliness. “In our society, sex addicts are forced to wear a mask; they may appear harmless, but a lot is going on in their minds,”explains counsellor Ian Faria.

On whether this is a only male pre-occupation, Sujendra Prakash says, “Nymphomania exists more in literature than in the real world. While men are addicted to sex, women are addicted to love. But there are women who are aware that sex is a weak point for men and may use this to their advantage.”

As for solutions, psychologist Karun Mathews says, “Intense counsellings and sessions with psychologists or psychiatrists is recommended.

In the west, Sex Addicts Anonymous, based on the template of Alcoholics Anonymous, has been doing some amazing work.”But unlike alcohol or drug addiction, where the ‘just say no’ mantra is clear-cut, recovering from sexual addiction is not so straightforward.

Telegraph story about Sanjay Joshi’s SEX CD

New Indian Press Story on Renukacharya SEX CD

Babul Lal Kathara arrested on Human Trafficking charges

 

Eight fold increase in rape behaviour of Indians, quarter of victims were minors

6 Jan 2008,TNN

NEW DELHI: There has been a phenomenal eight-fold increase in the number of rapes committed in India since 1971, the year from which data for rape cases has been collected by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

This stands in marked contrast to other serious and violent crimes like murder, robbery, dacoity, kidnapping and rioting. Overall, violent crimes under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) have actually declined.

According to the latest report by NCRB, between 1971 and 2006 murder incidents just about doubled, kidnapping and abduction cases went up by 149%, while cases of dacoity and rioting declined. In general, violent crimes showed a decline of 16% during the period. In this context, the 678% increase in rape cases stands out as a shocker.

While data on other crimes is available from 1953, statistics on the number of rape cases is available only since 1971.

The NCRB report does not provide any explanation as to why data for rape cases has not been collated prior to 1971 although legal provisions are contained in the same statute, the IPC, as other crimes.

The NCRB data also clearly points to the profile of the average rapist – over 75% were known to the victims. In fact, nearly 10% were relatives. Another disturbing aspect was that about a quarter of the rape victims were minors.

TNN

 

Many respecetable women in Gujarat regularly go to see Male strippers

Kama, Time To Out The God We Love

PAVAN K. VARMA, Author-Diplomat

EVERY YEAR IDON’T THINK Indians are more obsessed with sex than other people. Let’s not be that self indulgent. I think Indians are taking longer to accept, or come to grips with, the fact that sex need not be consigned to furtive dark corners. And because this process is not yet complete, there is the fact of repression. But repression always increases the energy with which a particular goal is pursued. In fact, repression leads to obsession. In India part of the obsession with sex is that it is not yet out in the sunlight and, therefore, it needs to sort of explode out of the subterranean depths into which it is often pushed.

India was once an extremely liberal society where – instead of sex I would rather use the word desire – the role of desire in our lives was something that had a fair degree of incontrovertible philosophical validity. That can be seen from the tenets of the essential Hindu world view – the four highest goals, the purushartas – dharma, artha, kama, moksha. Such a balanced and pragmatic world view was not a license to hedonism which is what many people mistakenly interpret it to be. In fact Vatsyayan in the Kama Sutra explicitly says that when dharma, artha, and kama are pursued in proportion and none in exclusion, they automatically lead to the fourth, moksha. In an anthology of erotic literature in ancient and medieval India, you can see the pervasive nature of the erotic, as against the pornographic. One must make that distinction because here we are talking about a philosophical worldview, not a peepshow.

People have to take sex or desire as something for which they need not feel guilty, provided it is not license or hedonism. But to associate desire and its pursuit with guilt is wrong. It creates neurosis and neurosis leads to obsession and obsession leads to all kind of distortions in public behaviour, in public response, the exploitation of women, and the general coarseness of the gender discourse. For most women, sex has been associated with shame, and for men, with guilt. Today, images from the west are beamed across to bedrooms in rural households, and the role models and the expectations that this generates creates its own pressures, especially in the absence of authentic and widely accepted indigenous role models. There is provocation in terms of that imagery but there is the absence of opportunity to express it within your own social framework. And it all leads to curious distortions. And that is something that we all need to introspect about.

When something like sex is not allowed to be taught or discussed with a degree of transparency and wisdom, it becomes the subject of ignorance. A great deal of India’s obsession with sex is wrapped in the cloak of ignorance, or stereotypes: stereotypes about women, about performance, about the inability to perform, and so on. Once again it’s not that the obsession is reduced, it’s just shrouded in ignorance. The thing we have to understand is that because sex is not talked about, and because it is often part of a false value system which looks upon it is as wrong, or associates it with guilt or with prurience, it doesn’t mean that the sexual urge has been sublimated. The old Freudian principle states that the degree to which something is forbidden is the key to the degree to which it is desired.

Victorian morality was unyielding in its relentless criticism of the Indian tradition which gave to desire its due place in a balanced life. For the British, India was a dark, heathen mass of carnality. There is even a story of a Britisher having filed a case against Krishna for debauchery. The case was never decided for lack of witnesses. But many Indians, educated and otherwise receptive to the best in the portfolio of western ideas, internalised that criticism. Mahatma Gandhi admitted to having a great sense of guilt about the whole notion of desire, and he voluntarily announced celibacy at the age of 33, without consulting his wife. The internalising of this Victorian critique has distorted our own value systems and the heritage of our own past. And we are not yet at the kind of balance that we should have.

Today, if you pick up the largest circulating dailies, there are several columns on massage services offering women from several nationalities in a hotel or at your home with all your wishes granted! But the words ‘hygienic and decent’ are inserted in small print, possibly to avoid prosecution. These are the kinds of hypocrisies that we have to deal with, and some of them are laughable. Till very recently, and mostly even now, in the land of the Kama Sutra and Khajuraho, you could not show kissing on screen, but you could, as a substitute, show birds pecking, while running around trees was the normal form of sexual expression. As long as you keep finding artificial ways of not being normal, you add to that an entire spectrum of neurosis. But society is changing in spite of the misguided vandalism of a few, who go about separating couples in public even if they are just holding hands. The paradox is that these goons think they are the upholders of some pristine puritanism, whereas our past is replete with not only the sanction for, but also the philosophical acceptance of, the role of desire. Fortunately, such hoodlums are largely on the fringes of society. Much more is tolerated today in terms of the interaction between men and women, and television and films are becoming progressively less conservative. In any case, with the explosion of the cyber world, anything you want to see is there at the click of your mouse.

India does have its crimes of passion, but I don’t want to exaggerate them, because in any society where human emotions and relationships are involved, there are bound to be a few excesses. We are a billion people but it’s not as if everyone is committing suicide for love. But outside the metropolises, there are fewer avenues for men and women to meet on an equal playing field. Hysteria is more likely to develop in situations where desire is not reduced but the opportunities to give it expression are.

INDIAN MEN think they are good lovers, and sex is greatly on their mind, but they have never really been put to the test. For them, women are either merely objects for their own gratification, or stereotyped as repositories of unbridled sexuality just waiting to be tapped. Such distortions too are a result of repression and ignorance, but things are changing because of the progressive empowerment of women. Women now, at least in the larger cities, are not willing to be taken so much for granted. A lot of them are increasingly aware of their own persona as women and are fighting for their own sexuality. The situation is still fragile, because of the reactions of the self-professed upholders of morality, but the first stirrings are there and they are bound to grow. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge to men in male-dominated societies, who have so far seen sex as largely a one way street to their own pleasure. And that is one of the crossroads the Indian male and Indian society has to navigate.

For example, the hysterical cheering that Shah Rukh receives from women, with or without his shirt, is something new. Women were supposed to keep their feelings to themselves, or to be appropriately coy about them.

I was recently told by a leading TV actress that many ‘respectable’ women in Gujarat regularly go to see male strippers.

One does not know where in the crevices of this otherwise staid and conservative society this kind of change is coming about. Women, as they become more aware of their sexuality, are becoming more adventurous and demanding about their needs. Many of them are willing to be the abhisarika nayika, one of the eight nayikas in Indian aesthetics, the one who is willing to go out on a tryst to meet her lover, unafraid of the world and the impediments put in her way.

Each society has its own contradictions. For instance, more is spent in the United States on the pornographic industry than the national budgets of many countries, but it is a conservative society at another level. Every society has its own context, and I don’t want India to become America. I want it to become a place where we don’t sublimate desire, we don’t drive it underground, but we learn to accept it in enlightened ways which may push against some of the antiquated asphyxiations of the past, but which don’t necessarily break down the social consensus on the pace of change. It’s very important how you proceed. There are certain known limits of decency which societies will not allow to be transgressed. You can push for more freedoms but you cannot discard completely every form of social restraint. Sex will remain a very important pursuit in our country but the challenge is to find the right balance and maturity, in consonance with our own traditions, and societal compulsions.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 1, Dated Jan 12 , 2008

 

94 % Indians are sex starved says CNN IBN Poll

Are Indians sex starved or is it lawlessness?

CNN-IBN, Thu, Jan 03, 2008

It was India’s new year shame: two women molested by over 60 men in the heart of Mumbai, a 15-year-old Swedish tourist groped in Kochi and girl students inside a Patna hostel not spared either.

From North to west to South, are women safe in our country? Are Indians sex starved? That was the question discussed on Face The Nation on CNN-IBN, hosted by Bhupendra Chaubey.

On the panel to debate the issue was ad guru Alyque Padamsee, along with Assistant Inspector-General with Punjab Police Amrit Brar and corporate MC and television anchor Geetika Ganjoo.

So how does this maddening behaviour reflect on our society? “It is absolutely disgraceful. When I was in college this kind of thing was unheard of. It was Bombay then, and Bombay had a certain civic sense. People queued up for buses. Today, due to the influx into Mumbai, the whole cultural ethos of good manners, good breeding has totally broken down. People coming in from across the country, particularly from the north, have the idea of treating women like property. Given that 48 per cent of marriages have wife beating, you can imagine at what level men treat women. I’m disgusted that the Mumbai police did not even file a suo motu case,” said Alyque Padamsee.

Molesters on the prowl

But the case in Mumbai is not in isolation. It seems to be happening across the country. Where is such behaviour coming from? Is it just a group of rowdy men getting carried away in what we could call mob frenzy?

“This is the complete failure of the police and judiciary because men seem to think they can get away with it. They need to come down very severely on such elements,” insisted Geetika Ganjoo.

On the part of the police, Commissioner D N Jadhav on Wednesday accused the media of making “mountain out of molehill” in the case, completely downplaying the issue and dismissing it as a “minor issue”. So is the protection of women at all a priority for the police? “The police cannot be looked at in isolation. There were 60 people at the spot. What were the rest of them doing? The police cannot reach out to every single citizen. The police is supposed to respond to certain things but this is not terrorism we are talking about,” said Amrit Brar.

Who’s to blame

But have women now lost the freedom to be out on their own and have a good time? “If you go back in history, a 1000 years ago, it was all marvelous and there was sexual emancipation. Now sex is a taboo like in the Victorian era. We don’t even allow sex education in schools. How many schools have co-education? When men do not have the cultural background about respecting women, when they are in a mob, after a few drinks, they get rowdy and they think women are an amusement. I think the people to blame are the politicians,” said Alyque Padamsee.

If there was a comparison to be made, we see moral police coming out in full force the moment a couple is holding or kissing and in the same country, there are cases of such molestation. Is there not a sense of hypocrisy in our attitude towards sex?

“The politicians allow goonda elements to do anything they like,” put in Alyque Padamsee.

But a lot of people, at the end of the day, put the blame squarely on the women and say they were dressed provocatively. “The world doesn’t belong to men. If they can wear what they want so can the women. I don’t believe this is so much a problem about sex-starvation, I think it’s more about lawlessness. Hang 10-15 of these men or cut them off and we’ll see how many of them have the guts to do it again,” said Geetika Ganjoo.

Taking off from her point, Alyque Padamsee said that it was disgraceful for any man to think any women is pray. “The rapes in this country happen to lots of women wearing saris or those covered from head to toe. There is basically no sex education to treat women equal to men,” he said.

Challenging Alyque Padamsee’s argument, Geetika Ganjoo said that men tend to target women in western attire because they were still not used to it. “But the point is the cops not coming down heavily on such men. Nab them and punish them,” she said.

So has the time now come for our law enforcement agencies to think of with exemplary punishments?

“The law enforcement agency is not the punishing authority. There are courts involved. Has the media said one positive thing about the police the whole day? It’s the courts that are responsible for punishment, not the police,” said Amrit Brar.

Concluding the debate, Alyque Padamsee said if people could be locked up for one to three days for drunk driving why could the police not take similar action for molestation?

SMS Poll

Are Indians sex starved?

Yes: 94 per cent

No: 6 per cent

IBLIVE

 

Google search results: Indians are best at sex and sleaze

Tuesday, 25 December 2007

CHANDIGARH; Indian are more prone to sex or at least to sex talk, to be more precise say dirty talk, if one believes the search data of Google search. Egypt and Turkey follow India in sex searches.

However in “Homosexual”, top position is acquired by Philippines followed by Chile and Venezuela. Chile also made it to the top spot by searching for the word ‘gay’ and weer followed by Mexico and Colombia.

It seemed Love exists only in Philippines, Australia and United States. India which is considered land of Lord Krishna didn’t fine place any place in search for love. As far as “Viagra” is concerned, Italy has the top position followed by United Kingdom, Germany. Indian still seemed surviving on natural herbs.

The goddess of beauty and love and hollywood actress “Britney Spears” has highest following in Mexico, Venezuela, Canada.33 year old “Kate Moss”, the England born super model is top choice among serachers in Ireland followed by United Kingdom and Sweden. She is also top model at askmen.com.

The most interesting fact is that ‘Iraq’ is searched by majority of Americans followed by Australians and Canadians. Australia is interestingly among the three top countries, others Pakistan and Philippines which search most for terrorism. ‘Taliban’ is top search in Pakistan, Australia and Canada. Jihad (meaning holy war) seemed to be the most often typed key word in countries like Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco.The concept of “Car bomb” is most popular in Australia followed by United States and Canada.

Internet users from Germany, Mexico and Austria were the world’s top three searchers of the word “Hitler”, while “Nazi” got most hits in Chile, Australia and the UK.

If you understand the meaning of ‘Hangover’ then it is Ireland, United Kingdom, United States which are most effected by it.

The most users deadly drug “Marijuana”, appeared to be in Canada, USA and Austrailia. “Marijuana” is the common name for a crude drug made from the plant Cannabis sativa.

“Burrito”, a Mexican food is most popular in United States followed by Argentina, Canada. In USA it is also known as Sanfransisco Burrito.

American Actor and Film producer “Tom Cruise” is most popular in Canada followed by United States and Australia.

An anti-aging injection “Botox” is most searched in Australia, United States and United Kingdom. Of late this product is becoming popular in India.

“David Beckham”, the world famous football player is most loved in Venezuela followed by United Kingdom and Mexico.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) gets most visitors from Austria followed by Pakistan and Iran, all Muslim countries.

Punjab Newsline Network

 

X generation need more internet sex and less adultery

Adultery, Multiple Sexual Partners Less Common Among Generation X: Study

The term Generation X may soon come to be known as “Generation with no sex”, with a research revealing that people who are currently aged between 20 to 40 are less prone to adultery and multiple sexual partners than generations before and after them.

The new research shows that adultery is less common among people born between 1965 and 1985. They are also likely to have fewer sexual partners than the generation either directly before or after them.

The research was conducted by Edward Laumann, the professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

According to the scientists, these people are less inclined to believe in “free love”, and place more emphasis on commitment due to the emergence of Aids and a boom in divorces among their parents.

The invention of the Pill enticed the sense of sexual adventure in those who were born before the 1960s. The resultant high level of relationship break-ups however, convinced Generation X to stay away from adultery.

According to Laumann, those lessons have been lost by teenagers and those in their early 20s, who are increasingly using sex as entertainment thanks to the internet.

“It’s clear that, while Generation X has sex, obviously, it’s probably not as much or as varied in styles as that of their parents or today’s teenagers and students,” the Telegraph quoted Laumann as saying.

The term Generation X, which was first used in the 1960s, has since become associated with those approaching adulthood in the early 1990s.

Source-ANI

 

HIV women forced into sex for treatment in India: report

Dec 21, 2007

NEW DELHI (AFP) — HIV-positive women in the northern Indian state of Punjab were forced by technicians at a medical institute to have sex in return for tests and medicines, a report said Saturday.

Police were investigating the allegations against employees of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in state capital Chandigarh, the Times of India said.

The women who complained of abuse were mainly young patients from city slums.

“I was helped by a technician there. He provided me medicines and other testing facilities without any problem,” a 27-year-old widow who was diagnosed with HIV in 2005 told the paper.

“But this was all for his sexual gratification.

The woman said she was also asked to procure other girls for workers at the institute’s AIDS testing and counselling centre.

Stigma and discrimination against HIV-positive people are widespread in the country of 1.1 billion people, where an estimated 2.5 million people are infected with the virus, according to the United Nations.

The number of estimated AIDS cases in India came down sharply this year from estimates of 5.7 million cases in 2005, reflecting an increase in testing and better statistical sampling methods, the UN said.

 

Females’ Screaming Make Males to Ejaculate During Sex

December 19, 2007

Scientists have shed new light on monkeys’ sexual behaviour, by finding that female monkeys may shout during sex to help their male partners climax.

A new study by scientists at the German Primate Center in Gottingen discovered that male Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) almost never ejaculated without these screams.

Female monkeys regularly give out loud, characteristic yells during or after sex. However, the exact purpose behind this behaviour has remained heavily debated.

Thus, to find an answer, the German scientists thoroughly studied Barbary macaques for two years in a nature reserve in Gibraltar.

They found that females shouted during 86 percent of all sexual encounters, reports LiveScience.

When females shouted, males ejaculated 59 percent of the time, they discovered. However, when females did not yell, males ejaculated less than 2 percent of the time.

To determine whether yelling was caused by how vigorous the sex was, the scientists counted the number of pelvic thrusts males gave and timed when they happened.

They found that when shouting occurred, thrusting increased, suggesting that hollering led to more vigorous sex.

Lead researcher Dana Pfefferle, a behavioural scientist and primatologist at the German Primate Center, said that counting monkey pelvic thrusts is ‘quite weird, but it’s science.’

Male and female Barbary macaques are promiscuous, and often have sex with many partners, meaning that sperm levels can get quite drained. The females yell when they are most fertile, so that males can make the most use of their sperm.

 

Skewed sex ratio amongst NRI’s in UK

Rachna Prasad, NDTV, December 9, 2007 (London)

The growing Indian population in UK has made it to the headlines recently. But apparently, this growth is an unequal one.

A recent study at Oxford University by Dr Sylvie Dubuc shows a skewed sex ratio among Indians in UK. While there exists an imbalance in India, in the UK, the ratio for Indians is abnormal.

The study shows that for children born to India-born mothers between 1990 and 2005, the sex ratio was 1040 to 1080 boys for every 1000 girls. In cases where there is a third child, the ratio is even more skewed, 1130 boys for every 1000 girls.

”The most plausible explanation for this trend is sex selective abortion that has been used by a small minority of families, where the mother is born in India and she wants to have a boy,” said Dr Sylvie Dubuc, Oxford University.

In UK, sex determination tests are common and are advertised openly. Doctors feel it helps detect genetic abnormalities in the foetus and gives parents more options on how to deal with them.

In such a scenario, abortion based on the sex of the foetus would go almost unnoticed in the larger agenda of UK’s National Health Service.

”Whether the NHS could do something about it, its difficult. The NHS is very open. When a woman is pregnant in this country, of any origin, if she wants to know the sex of her child its easily available. She can walk into an anti natal clinic; have an ultrasound by 20 weeks, the sex is known.

”But when it comes to aborting the female foetus, the NHS will not accept that, I don’t think any hospital, even private will do that. That’s why these people go to India,” said Dr Ramesh Mehta, President, Physicians of Indian Origin, Britain.

The average Indian woman born in Britain is usually well educated but her family may still hold on to values they brought with them from the subcontinent decades ago. Values that are fuelled by television serials from India, that are now easily available on satellite television here.

Rani Atma came to England and qualified as a lawyer in 1971, but changed course to become a social worker aiming to help Asian families adjust to life in England. Her Asian Family counselling service has centres all across the country helping families deal with all kinds of issues, including marriage and children.

”Most of the pressures are that the daughter in law is expected to behave like a traditional woman,” said Rani Atma,Chairman, Asian Family Counselling Service.

”I know somebody who had 5 daughters and wanted a son, he eventually had a son and then had another daughter. He now has 6 daughters and a son. Every time the wife was pregnant she came to us. They did not go in for sex detection but if they had, they might have had an abortion,” she said.

Rani feels that the Indian girl child is finding her place in the UK, getting herself educated and becoming a professional who stands tall among her western counterparts.

But unfortunately, those who want a gender-based abortion don’t go to counsellors like Rani. Instead, they travel to India where despite strict laws and campaigns against female foeticide, it is a facility that seems to be readily available.

This research study is a warning sign for both British Indians and the medical community in the UK. The NHS will continue to offer scans for sex determination, and education will be the only way, Indians will learn to value their girl child.

NDTV

 

The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra

Over the counter once more
Ian Pindar is glad that James McConnachie’s tome of good conduct for men, The Book of Love, has been rescued

The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra
by James McConnachie
272pp, Atlantic, £17.99

In The Book of Love James McConnachie lays to rest some of the enduring myths surrounding the Kamasutra: it is not a sex manual but a book of good conduct. It is not illustrated and it has nothing to do with Tantric sex.

Little is known about its author, Vatsyayana, but he probably lived in third-century northern India. What we do know is that he started a trend – some have called it a revolution – when he decided to write a sutra or scholarly treatise about kama or sexual desire.

The word kamasutra has become a sort of shorthand for “advanced fucking”, says McConnachie, but it doesn’t really deserve its reputation as a book of sexual gymnastics. The sexual positions Vatsyayana discusses (“the crab”, “the lotus”, and so on) are not especially acrobatic, nor are there all that many. Certainly not as many as can be found in The Horn-Book: A Girl’s Guide to Good and Evil (1899), which lists 62 positions – including the “view of the Low Countries” and the “elastic cunt” – or the Golden Book of Love (1907), which offers 531.

Vatsyayana organises sex into eight distinct topics: embracing, kissing, scratching (love marks were “a major fetish in ancient India”), biting, the notorious sexual positions, moaning, “the woman playing the man’s part” (women-on-top) and oral sex (the art of fellatio; cunnilingus is barely mentioned). The Kamasutra is a male fantasy aimed at nagarakas, wealthy young men in the cities, and it presents a world in which women are always available and compliant and never need to be seduced, only aroused in frescoed bedchambers filled with flowers and incense. The effect of the work, says McConnachie, is to surround us in a kind of “erotic cocoon”. If Vatsyayana has advice for women, it is how to keep men happy, not how to enjoy themselves sexually. His greatest crime in modern eyes is not that he never once questions the caste system, but that he appears totally unaware of the existence of the clitoris.

What McConnachie calls the “coffee-table Kamasutra” is a modern invention, usually borrowing erotic images from medieval India, long after Vatsyayana was writing. The Kamasutra is also travestied in modern editions as a book of Tantric sexual positions, but as McConnachie shows Tantrism was a much later development and its aim of harnessing the power of sex to attain spiritual knowledge is at odds with Vatsyayana’s extremely practical and entirely secular approach to sex as an end in itself.

McConnachie’s chapters on the original Kamasutra are interesting, but he is more concerned with the book’s reception in the west. His account only really picks up pace with the entrance of Richard Francis Burton, the charismatic sexual anthropologist whose pioneering 1883 edition introduced The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana to modern Europeans. “The free treatment of topics usually taboo’d will be a great national benefit,” argued Burton, and McConnachie shows how he was the first of many translators to regard the Kamasutra as a key book in the battle against sexual repression. Burton successfully avoided prosecution by emphasising the text’s scholarly credentials: it was not a dirty book at all, but a monument to Oriental wisdom, albeit kinky wisdom. As McConnachie reveals, the shady “Kama Shastra Society” responsible for the landmark 1883 edition was a bizarre mix of Sanskrit scholars and erotic bibliophiles, serious Indologists and creepy erotologists. He is especially good on the curious link between sexual libertinism and religious relativism.

The 1883 Kamasutra was as much of a revelation in India as it was in Europe, its open eroticism hinting at an ancient liberal past that had been totally suppressed by a triple whammy of Hindu asceticism, Victorian prudery and Islamic repression (although one of the last great Sanskrit sex manuals, the Ananga Ranga, was composed in the 16th century for a Muslim ruler, Lada Khan). “Could this be the country that created the Kamasutra?” wondered the filmmaker Mira Nair when her film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996) was banned by India’s Board of Censors. It seems much has changed since Vatsyayana’s time.

The Kamasutra remained an under-the-counter commodity until the end of the Chatterley ban in 1960, which led to what McConnachie calls “the great sex rush” in publishing. For Dr Alex Comfort in The Joy of Sex (1972) the Kamasutra offered an ancient model of sexual sophistication, “devoid of stupid patriarchal hang-ups about the need for her to be underneath”, while in the 90s Alain Daniélou’s translation of the Kamasutra made it a gay text, changing all the pronouns in the chapter on fellatio from “she” to “he”. In the past, translators have tended to “dequeer” the Kamasutra, says McConnachie, for it does mention lady-boys and masseurs, but Daniélou’s translation goes to the opposite extreme.

Today the Kamasutra brand – given a spurious New Age, Tantric twist – has launched a thousand tacky spin-offs lacking all the subtlety and grace of the original, from Viz Fat Slags Kama Sutra to FHM’s Kama Sutra 2, in which two exquisitely bored young women in black lingerie demonstrate the “reverse seated cowgirl” or “extended doggie”. It all has precious little to do with the original Kamasutra, according to McConnachie, and this scholarly and enjoyable book rescues Vatsyayana’s masterpiece from the grubby little corner of the bookshop to which it has been condemned for so long.

The Guardian,UK