39 x 52 in.

Vatsyayana is accredited with being editor of the Kama Sutra. He appears to be a Brahman and a great man of letters. The Kama Sutra does not claim to be an original work, but a compilation.Vatsyayana states that he himself had checked through personal experience the practices he describes. The Kama Sutra is not a pornographic work, merely an impartial and systematic study of one of the essential aspects of existence. First and foremost, it is a picture of the art of living for the civilized and refined citizen, completing in the sphere of love, eroticism, and the pleasures of life, those parallel treatises of politics and economy and ethics. Eroticism is firstly a search for pleasure and the goal of the techniques of love is to attain a paroxysm considered by teh Upanishads as a perception of the divine state, which is infinite delight. The refinements of love and the pleasures that include music and other arts are only possible in a prosperous civilization, which is why the Kama Shastra, the art of love, is linked to the Artha Shastra, the rules of prosperity and the art of making money.

Society is the hierarchical society of India, with its castes - brahmans, warrior-princes. merchants. monks and workers' corporations - which collaborate without any problem. Marriage and procreation between different social groups is not recommended in the children's interests, although amorous relations are very free.

The Citizen - The work is essentially addressed to the citizen, meaning a wealthy cultivated bourgeois male who is an art-lover or civil servant living in a large city. The citizen is first and foremost a merchant or landed proprietor. The arts play an important role in his life, especially music, painting, theatre and literature.

The City - For Vatsyayana, the great city is Pataliputra, an immense town and riverport, situated on the Ganges between Benares and Calcutta. It was also a great cultural center. The Kama Sutra describes the customs of various regions of India including present day Afghanistan and Tadjikistan.

Women - In Vatsyayana's time, women enjoyed great freedom. The Kama Sutra obviously describes the duties of the faithful wife attending solely to her family and her household, but also at the same time indicates all the ways of seducing her and inviting her to deceive her husband. For form's sake it cites the various kinds of marriage mentioned in the books of law, but recommends the love-marriage or gandharva marriage and explains how to seduce the woman with gifts. The remarriage of widows, later forbidden, was accepted. Although polygamy was widespread, Vatsyayana extols teh advantages of having a single wife. It is above all, in speaking of the royal haren that it describes not without humor the sometimes wearisome side of the sovereign's obligation to satisfy numerous wives and deal with the intrigues fo the seraglio.