Put What Where? (10 page)

Middle-class Victorian society had developed a surreal talent for perceiving vice, scandal, fornication and depravity wherever it looked. It was obsessed with sex, although this perversely manifested itself as an extremely lurid sense of propriety. Burton’s books acted out this repressed fixation by displacing British sexuality to a far-off land where
foreign Johnnies spent their ample spare time copulating all over the place. We still think of the
Kama Sutra
as proof that everyone beyond Calais lives in a broiling stew of sex, but in fact the ancient text had long been out of circulation in its native land. Burton’s helpers struggled to find a complete and usable copy of the
Kama Sutra
in India. It was the same story with several other old works of Indian erotica, but Victorian-era Europeans were sufficiently fascinated to find and revive them. Britain was even selling the Indians their own sex back. The most modern Indian posture-book being widely circulated in India at the time was an English translation of a German compilation of old Indian sex positions, called the
Kinaesthesia of Love.

Such convolutions were typical of Burton’s life. He was born in Devon in 1821, a startlingly vivid redhead. His grandfather had always wanted a red-haired heir and decided that little Richard should inherit the family fortune. Grandad was mounting the steps of his solicitor’s, will in hand, when he dropped dead of a heart attack. Richard did not inherit. Baby Burton’s hair subsequently turned from red to black. He grew up in France and Italy before going to Oxford, where he became a notable fighter and womanizer. He was sent down for absconding to watch a horse race, which enabled him to abandon the Church career that his father had chosen him and to join the Army instead. Burton bought a commission for £500 in the Bombay Native Infantry and, on arrival in India, started learning Hindustani, Gujurati, Persian and the
Hindu religion. Fellow officers called him the White Nigger. He even corralled 40 monkeys together and learnt to imitate their grunts, until he felt they could converse together. His monkey-speak dictionary was not a success, though. Later he studied Islam and attempted the rigorous life of a Sufi.

To learn local Indian customs, he put on long hair and a beard, stained his limbs with henna, and called himself Abdullah of Bushire, a half-Arab. In this guise, he travelled the country offering to sell trinkets in native homes. In Bombay he searched the bazaars for rare books and manuscripts. Around this time, his Army chief, Sir Charles Napier, heard that three houses in Karachi were selling an unspeakable vice – gay sex. Napier needed a spy: Burton was the natural choice. He went undercover into these male brothels, which were staffed by young boys and eunuchs, and found most of the customers to be British officers. His report caused uproar and consigned his Army career to the doldrums. He subsequently contracted cholera and returned to England to recuperate in 1848. But he returned to the foreign fray and in 1861 formally entered the diplomatic service as consul at Equatorial Guinea, and later served in Santos, Brazil, Damascus and Trieste. He wrote books on all these locations.

No one is certain exactly when Burton first met his
Kama Sutra
partner, Forster FitzGerald Arbuthnot (whom he always called Bunny), but by 1853 they were firm friends. Both shared a dream of translating the famous books of the East into English – especially the erotic ones. They believed
they could get away with it if they ensured that the books were expensive and that only academics bought them. The pair set up the Kama Shastra Society in 1882 to publish the books (Kama is the Hindu love god, Shastra means gospel). It was merely a front-organization to fend off obscenity trials. The books purported to be published in Benares, though really they were printed in Stoke Newington, in North London.

They planned to publish seven Indian erotic books, but in the end only the
Kama Sutra
and the
Ananga Ranga
appeared. The
Kama Sutra
(its name can be translated as ‘pleasure treatise’) is thought to have been written around
AD
300. Virtually nothing is known about the author, except that his family name was Vatsyayana and that his own name is supposed to be Mallinaga or Mrillana. Vatsyayana says in the introduction that he wrote the
Kama Sutra
using earlier texts, while studying as a religious student at Benares and contemplating the divine. The finished work apparently became a must-read for thousands of Indians, though when Burton and Arbuthnot began trying to translate it, no complete copies could be found. Their manuscript was compiled from four incomplete versions borrowed from Sanskrit libraries around the subcontinent, along with additions and alterations that have since been blamed on Burton.

Burton’s plan to circumvent British censorship failed: the authorities promptly banned the book. It stayed banned for the next 80 years, although short runs of pirate copies were published. The
Kama
Sutra’s
nudge-nudge infamy steadily spread, thanks mainly to the very fact that very few readers ever saw it. For as far as practicalities are concerned, it is possibly the least useful sex manual ever to see printer’s ink. The book is written for a narrow, if not non-existent readership: ancient subcontinental equivalents of Hugh Hefner, Indian playboys with little else to do but charm local women into their lavishly appointed homes and then engage in any number of permutations of sex acts from the 529 that legend says are contained in the work. And how do you lure so many women to your bed? The book’s advice is to ‘carry on an amusing conversation on various subjects’. A few more ‘killer chat-up’ details might have proved helpful, but then this is all really only an exotic fantasy, an ancient precursor to the sort of ‘How to pull a supermodel in 59 seconds’ article that men’s lifestyle magazines peddle nowadays. Other handy hints include the fact that a married woman might reject your advances if she loves her husband, and that sleeping with ladies who are lepers and lunatics is generally a bad idea. Much of the book’s useless information is contained in lists – again, a modern magazine staple, but many of these are particularly bizarre, such as 17 kisses, 16 bites and scratches and 17 slaps and screams. And do you really need to be told that it’s a bad idea to bite your partner’s eyeball during lovemaking?

The second book Burton and Arbuthnot translated, the
Ananga Ranga of Kalyanamalla
(or
Stage of the Love God)
, was written by an Indian poet, Kalyan Mall, and was of no more practical use.
Burton said it was written in about 1450 though other sources say it is far earlier, around 1170. Either way, much of its content was lifted from the
Kama Sutra.
But the work did bring one innovation to the genre – it was the first manual to promise to show you how to ‘stay in love with the same lover for the rest of your life’. Kalyan Mall explains: ‘The chief reason for the separation between the married couple and the cause which drives the husband to the embraces of strange women, and the wife to the embraces of strange men, is the want of varied pleasures, and the monotony which follows possession.’ Burton’s evangelism shines through here in a footnote to the
Ananga Ranga’s
definition of the woman who can most easily be subdued. It describes her as ‘She who has never learnt the real delight of carnal copulation.’ Burton’s footnote reads, ‘This is the case with most English women and a case to be remedied by constant and intelligent study of the
Ananga Ranga
literature.’

Nowadays, it is fashionable to criticize Burton – not least for committing the gross error of being a Victorian and harbouring one or two typically reactionary Victorian attitudes. Wendy Doniger, the American author of a recent
Kama Sutra
translation, accuses him of ‘flowery’ writing and says he mistranslated sections and obscured the role of women, blatantly altering the text to make them seem more submissive. One glaring example that she quotes describes what a woman should do when her husband is unfaithful. Burton’s text says, ‘She should not blame him excessively, though she be a
little displeased. She should not use abusive language toward him, but rebuke him with conciliatory words.’ Doniger argues that the original text says quite the reverse, and should read, ‘She scolds him with abusive language when he is alone or among friends.’

The 1970s
Joy of Sex
author, Alex Comfort, also accused Burton of confabulation. He claims that the following description of a handy female trick in the
Ananga Ranga
is actually ‘pure Burton’ and does not exist in Sanskrit texts: ‘She strives to close and constrict the yoni until it holds the penis, as with a finger, opening and shutting at her pleasure and finally acting as the hand of the Gopala-girl who milks the cow. This can only be learnt by long practice. Her husband will then value her above all women, nor would he exchange her for the most beautiful queen in the three worlds.’ Whether this addition was in fact made by Burton, Arbuthnot or the Indian pundits who translated the text for them is ultimately unclear. But Burton gets the blame.

Nevertheless, I have stuck with Burton’s translations of the
Kama Sutra
and the
Ananga Ranga
in this book, because they are all we really knew in the West for nearly a hundred years, and because they are masterpieces of Victorian strangeness – fossils of our idea that exotic, contortionist copulation exists somewhere ‘out there’ in a time and place beyond our own narrow rain-sodden lives. These convictions still exist somewhere deep in the British consciousness, making Burton’s Indian translations the living coelacanths of sex advice.

Burton has also been accused (oddly) of being a prude. Any such ideas may be banished by reading Chapter One of his translation of the Arabic
Perfumed Garden.
It relates in explicit detail an acrobatic marathon of adulterous sex between the sultan’s daughter and the court fool. The book was both a sex manual and a work of erotica, and is believed to have been written in Tunis sometime near the beginning of the sixteenth century. It borrows many of the sexual positions described in earlier Indian texts and throws in some of its own. It also has its own chapters of advice, such as the ideal penis size, penile-enlargement tips (rub with tepid water until red, then anoint with honey and ginger) and herbal cures for impotence, as well as that old favourite: how to seduce women – and how to ditch them afterwards. Burton published the book in 1886, anonymously through the Kama Shastra Society. He did not translate it from Arabic, but used a French translation made before 1850 by an unknown French army officer in Algeria.

Burton also had a hand in
The Priapeia
(1890), an anonymous collection of rude Roman rhymes in praise of the phallic garden-god Priapus, which was translated by L.C. Smithers. Burton’s appendix gives explicit explanations for many classical pagan sexual practices and includes a vocabulary of dozens of Latin terms for male and female genitalia, along with essays on classical references to anal and oral sex, bestiality, exotic dancers, masturbation and sex positions. These were so shocking that Burton denied any responsibility, in spite of obvious
evidence of his involvement, including several shameless attempts to plug his other books. At the time, Burton was also working on his own original translation of the
Perfumed Garden.
He planned it to be his crowning achievement, a truly comprehensive version (the French version omitted a chapter on homosexuality), complete with all his lifetime’s wealth of insights into human sexuality. But, just as his life had started with a mishap, it ended with one: Burton died in 1890 just before he was to publish the new book. Lady Isabel Burton (with whom he shared a strangely sexless marriage) examined the manuscript, along with his reputedly pornographic travel journals, and thought it all way too strong. She burned his wealth of papers, even though she had been offered six thousand guineas for them.

Despite all his achievements as a great Victorian explorer, the sex books meant that Burton was considered unfit to be buried in Westminster Abbey alongside Dr Livingstone. He lies instead at Mortlake Cemetery in south-west London. Isabel moved to a cottage overlooking her husband’s tomb before dying six years later. The
Kama Sutra
remained banned in Britain until 1963.