Richard Burton's Kama Sutra Quest 

The Kama Sutra has become the urtext of sexual enlightenment. This classical Sanskrit work has been translated into most major languages, and in the United States alone there are over a hundred books currently in print that use the words Kama Sutra in their titles, ranging from scholarly editions of the original text to The Pop-up Kama Sutra and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Kama Sutra.

Uncovering the world's oldest sex manual

Until the late nineteenth century, however, the Kama Sutra was virtually unknown, even in its native India. Much of the credit for bringing it to the attention of the public goes to Richard Francis Burton. Although Burton did not actually discover the text or translate it from Sanskrit, as is commonly supposed, he did shepherd the first English-language translation of the work into print in 1883. His motivation went beyond an antiquarian interest in ancient Indian culture; he wanted the Kama Sutra to be read as a practical guide to a more sensible and satisfying sexual life. It was one of several Sanskrit and Arabic-language guides to lovemaking that Burton introduced to English readers, the others being the Ananga-Ranga (1885) and The Perfumed Garden (1886). A similar purpose informed his frank and unexpurgated translation of the Arabian Nights, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (1885-86). These publications were intended to challenge Victorian censorship of sexually explicit literature and criminalization of deviant sexual behavior.

Burton’s unconventional attitudes toward sexuality were informed by his equally unconventional career. Explorer and ethnographer, poet and polyglot, soldier, consul, and travel writer, this immensely talented man was born in England in 1820 but spent most of his life abroad. His duties and travels took him to South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, West Africa, North America, South America, and even Iceland. He encountered cultures that were far more open about sexuality than his own and he was introduced to exotic practices such as polygamy, concubinage, eunuchism, female circumcision, and male prostitution. He acquired a keen and enduring interest in the varieties of human sexual desire and expression. At the same time, he grew increasingly frustrated by the prudery and priggishness of his own society, which were personified in the prototypical moral scold, ‘Mrs. Grundy’.

Progressive sexuality or pornography?

In the final decade of his life, Burton launched a direct assault on the forces of Mrs. Grundy, declaring his intention to cause her to “howl on her big bum.” He began by collaborating with the Indian civil servant F. F. Arbuthnot to privately publish English translations of the Kama Sutra and Ananga-Ranga. The actual translation of these works, which were originally written in Sanskrit, was carried out by several Indian scholars hired by Arbuthnot, while Burton polished the English prose, supplied introductions and footnotes, and oversaw their printing and marketing. In order to avoid prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act, he sold the books by subscription and distributed them by mail, using a fictive organization, the Kama Shastra Society, and fictive place of publication, Cosmopoli, while keeping his and Arbuthnot’s names off the title pages.

Burton employed the same stratagem with his subsequent translations of the Perfumed Garden, a medieval Arabic sex manual. His magnum opus, the ten-volume Book of a Thousand Nights (followed by the six-volume Supplemental Nights), was printed, marketed, and distributed in similar fashion, but in this instance Burton proudly placed his name on the title pages and appended to the final volume a “Terminal Essay” that openly expressed his views on sexuality. In so doing, he sparked a vigorous public debate about purity and pornography, desire and deviance, state regulation and personal freedom.

Sexual knowledge for women's sexual pleasure

Burton was an early exponent of the modernist view that the Victorians’ shackling of sexuality within a strict moral regime was emotionally stultifying and psychologically destructive. He believed that the sexual knowledge provided in the Kama Sutra and similar works was essential to healthy human relations. He saw himself “in the light of a public benefactor,” bringing emotional enlightenment and liberation to his countrymen—and women.

An important aspect of his critique of the Victorians’ attitudes toward sexuality was their failure to acknowledge and fulfill the sexual needs of women. Whereas conventional opinion in nineteenth century Britain held that women were the passive and often passionless partners in relationships, Burton believed that “the passions and the sexual powers of the females greatly exceed those of their males.” One of the principal intents of works like the Kama Sutra and the Perfumed Garden was to provide instructions to men into “the art and mystery of satisfying the physical woman.” By translating these works, Burton hoped to educate British men about their erotic responsibilities to the opposite sex. It should be added, however, that he was ambivalent about women obtaining independent access to such knowledge: In this regard he remained enmeshed within Victorian notions of separate spheres.

Liberating views on love

Burton also launched a daring inquiry into the issue of male homosexuality, notably in a fifty-page section of his “Terminal Essay.” Here he argued that “what our neighbours call Le Vice contre nature—as if anything can be contrary to nature which includes all things”—was a widespread phenomenon, though most prevalent in the region he termed the Sotadic Zone (named after the classical Greek poet of homosexual love, Sotades), which he identified with the Mediterranean, Middle East, and other warm regions of the world (including California). This emphasis on an environmental impetus to what he called pederasty (the term homosexuality had not as yet become part of the English lexicon) now seems quaint and even comical, but we need to understand that it allowed Burton to naturalize the practice, removing it from the realm of moral judgment.

A decade before Havelock Ellis published Sexual Inversion (1897), often considered the first modern English-language study of homosexuality, Burton had produced a serious, frank, and sympathetic study of the subject, one that insisted it deserved “not prosecution but… the study of the psychologist.” Male homosexuality would become Burton’s “special subject” in the final year or so of his life, and he launched several projects that gave him reason to believe, as he mischievously confided to a friend, “I have shocked Mrs. Grundy this time.” As it happened, they also shocked his wife, who burned the most substantial of these manuscripts upon his death in 1890.

Richard Burton’s inquiries into the varieties of sexual desire challenged the socio-religious convictions and conventions that regulated sexuality among the British bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century. His efforts made him an early exponent of modernist thought, advancing its agenda both through his assault on the Victorians’ normative claims concerning the need for emotional restraint and through his embrace of sexuality in its manifold forms as a natural and liberating force. It is for this reason that Richard Burton is best remembered as the man who did so much to make the Kama Sutra the famous “brand” that it is today.

Dane Kennedy is the author of The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Harvard University Press, 2005). He holds the Elmer Louis Kayser Professorship in History and International Affairs at George Washington University.