Washington: Kama Sutra is a broad survey of sexual and social relationships between men and women, said an Indian scholar who has written a revised version of the 1,800-year-old ancient text, as he attempts to make it back on people`s reading list.
An N D Haksar, an Indian scholar, has written a revised version of the ancient Kama Sutra by adapting it to modern lives and relationships and presenting it as a `lifestyle guide for the modern man and woman`.
Haksar`s version to be published by Penguin on February 3, 2011, sees the ancient text updated from a sex guide to a lifestyle reference guide.
He says, "Any honest reading of the book will tell you that it is a broad survey of sexual and social relationships between men and women."
"A new, faithful translation of the Kama Sutra turns stereotypes on their head and gives the 1,800-year-old text a whole new position -- back on your reading list," a news channel said.
The original Kama Sutra does not have any pictures. Only words, no graphic graphics.
The Kama Sutra is not all about sex. Just a fraction of the Kama Sutra, roughly 1/24th, concerns copulation.
Vatsyayana, the 3rd BC author of the Kama Sutra, wrote it "while observing a celibate`s life in full meditation." That`s right, no funny stuff. None at all.
Haksar`s "Kama Sutra: A Guide to the Art of Pleasure" didn`t set out to be a myth-buster.
That was just a corollary of a larger task he undertook over two decades ago "to bring to the present day English readership those aspects of Sanskrit literature that are lesser known," Haksar was quoted as saying by the news channel.
Not that the Kama Sutra has suffered much from neglect in recent decades. But since the first English translation in 1962 by Sir Richard Burton, successive interpretations have funneled its meaning until it shrunk into a graphic synonym for sex squeezed into a book the size of a pocket.
Perhaps the only real shocker about the Kama Sutra is that, as a text, it isn`t widely read.
What it is not, is a compilation of contortionist sexual positions devised or derived by Hindu sages of a distant millennium.