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OTHER STORIES RELATED TO BOOKS A Bomb at the Box Office Behind the Vale Authorspeak

Writing about sex is like figure-skating or tap-dancing like the Fred and Ginger Show. Always better when there is a pair involved. In any case, that's what the authors tell you right upfront in their introduction. They are "a woman and a man, an American and an Indian, a historian of religions and a psychoanalyst ..." You can almost hear the opening bars of a musical score crashing gently in the background as the centuries roll back effortlessly, while the couple appear wearing their badges of identity-she's a "Sanskritist", he's rather plainly described as "a Hindi-speaker" (Wot? No e-speaking English?)-and do a Vatsayana. It has to be said that they do it rather well. The Doniger and Kakar show fairly sparkles.

KAMASUTRA By Vatsayana Mallanaga New Tr by Wendy Doniger & Sudhir Kakar Oxford Price: Rs 350 Pages: 231

They run circles around Vatsayana-their gentle third century hero, an enigmatic figure who has been overshadowed by the sheer nature of the material that he has chosen to document-and drag him centrestage. What is it that makes the Kamasutra tick? Definitely not the promise of the celebrated 64 positions, which only the very coarse, or worse, the millions misguided by previous commentators have made the Kamasutra the bedtime bestseller and diy manual of the sexually dyslexic. For these timid, or should that be tumid, souls there are a few select illustrations that should enhance their appreciation of what is expected of the true explorer of the art of erotic love.

That might be the best description for the author of the Kamasutra. He was an explorer of human passion. He ventured forth into the boudoir and the bedchamber of the society of his day, devoting himself to the pursuit of love. It's the life-enhancing quality of his recommendations that the editors seek to explore. The answers that he discovered are still so loaded with ambiguity that it needs the full panoply of Doniger's zest for Indian legend and mythology, combined with Kakar's own research into the Indian psyche, both the everyday and the mystical, to unravel them in the language and imagery of the present.

If they sometimes sound like Miss Manners reading the "Vagina Monologues", it can't be helped. Vatsayana was just as eager in instructing his reader, ideally the "man-about-town", on the proper etiquette in bed, not to mention the finer points of biting, scratching, moaning, which is elaborated in ever greater detail in the notes. There's much to do with the proper offering of betel leaves to induce if not enhance passion, and the good seducer is also adept at cutting out the leaves into erotically suggestive shapes, when trying to attract a virgin. Never mind that virginity is technically out of fashion today.

PRIMAL TRUTH: There is more to Vatsayana than positions

This is where the vigilantes of the vagina might begin to register a sense of regret. Vatsayana is writing for his times. He sticks to cherished notions about the insatiable quality of feminine passion, likening her need for gratification as a kind of primal itch. He has not heard of female emancipation, despite which he seems to agree that desire is a many splendoured thing for both the sexes and "when the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order".

There is much more to Vatsayana than positions, the authors assure their readers, explaining their reasons with verve and passion. That is to say the intellectual passion with which they are able to marshal not just in the introduction, but in the copious additions on every page, excerpts from other commentators which they have included as an additional part of their translation of Vatsayana's text, and in the explanatory notes at the back of the book. Indeed the rigour of the cross-reference is what lifts the present translation into a realm of pure pleasure.

This might well be their best tribute to Vatsayana. For as he tells us at the beginning of his study, the three principles on which society rests are "religion, power, and pleasure". Whether through the passage of time and custom, or through the dedication of his latest editors, he himself emerges as the Prince of Pleasure. Exotic, Oriental, hopelessly feudal in his attitudes, but still the unflappable scholar of sex, capable of arousing much more than just the curiosity of the first-time reader.