Positioning the Body: An Account of Sex Positions in the Kokaśāstras in Medieval South Asia

Presenter:

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Abstract

The “Kama Sutra” is widely known as “the” classical Indian sex manual. Yet, one of its most famous features—the list of sex positions—remains unstudied. These sex positions have substantially changed and proliferated over time. They permeate “pop erotic-self-help culture” today, in works like “Kama Sutra Workout”—which boasts 300 sensual “sexercises.” However, why are there so many, and what do they mean? The “Kama Sutra” belongs to the Sanskrit literary genre on erotic pleasure, and it was a significant part of South Asian courtly culture. Despite socio-cultural and psychoanalytical studies of this genre, which label its sex positions “acrobatic,” there is no sustained analysis of the sex positions as a phenomenon. From the very first list that remains extant, the twenty-six body positions for attaining sexual pleasure in the view of the possible combinations of the genitalia of different sizes in the fourth-century CE “Kama Sutra,” to the eighty-four sex positions that intertwine worldly pleasure (bhoga) and asceticism (yoga) for householders in the sixteenth-century vernacular “Koka Shastra,” there is a remarkable socio-cultural shift in the treatment of sex positions. I will analyze how the physically complex and rich bodily sex positions were developed and how its authors combined eroticism with ascetic and tantric body cultures. The authors of the “Koka Shastra” genre, ascetic and tantric practitioner themselves, brought courtly eroticism into the ascetic world and contributed to the tantric sexual-yoga. This study will investigate published and unpublished manuscripts from the 15th through the 17th century to historicize and analyze their portrayal of sex positions