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Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c5.s3: Historical Data about the Date of Vātsyāyana

Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vātsyāyana's Kāmasūtra c5.s3

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English

Historical Data about the Date of Vātsyāyana

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The well-known passage¹ referring to the Andhra monarch Kuntala Sātakarṇi first pointed out by Sir R.G. Bhandarkar² furnishes important data. According to the Puranic list of the Andhra monarchs, Kuntala Svāti or Svātikarṇa is the thirteenth in descent from Simuka, the founder of the family. Sri Malla Sātakarṇi, the third monarch in this list, has been identified by Mr. K.P. Jayaswal with the Sātakaṇi mentioned in the Hāthigumpha inscription of Khāravela and it has been shown by him that an expedition was undertaken by Khāravela in 171 B.C. aganist this Sātakarṇi.³ Kuntala is separated from him by 168 years according to the Puranic enumeration⁴ which is held as substantially correct. Kuntala therefore reigned about the very beginning of the Christian era.⁵ Calculating again back from the great Andhra monarch Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi who according to professor D. R. Bhandarkar came to the throne in A.C. 133 ⁶ and who according to the Puranic list is separated from Kuntala Sātakarṇi by about 123 years, we find that the reigning period of Kuntala falls in the early years of the first century A. C.

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¹ कर्सव्या कुन्तः सातकर्णः सातवाहनो महादेवी मलयवतीम् (जघान), *Kāmasūtra*, Ben. ed., p. 149.

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² *Early History of the Deccan*, p. 31. I beg leave to submit that *Kartari* here does not mean "a pair of scissors" as translated by Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, but it is a technical term to denote a kind of stroke dealt by a man with one or both of his hands at a woman's head at the parting of the hair (*Simanta*). Vātsyāyana says that these strokes are in vogue among the people of the south (*Dākṣiṇātyānām*) and he condemns them as they sometimes proved fatal. The case of Kuntala Sātakarṇi is an example in point. See *Kāmasūtra*, Ben. ed., pp. 147-9.

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³ *J. B. O. R. S.*, Vol. III, pages 441, 442.

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⁴ Pargiter, *Dynasties of the Kali Age*, pp. 38-40.

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⁵ Mr. Ramaprasad Chanda would place Sātakaṇi of Khāravela about B. C. 75-20. Kuntala then would belong to the end of the first century A. C. (*Memoirs of the Arch. Sur. of Ind. No. 1, p. 11, 1919*).

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⁶ *Dekkan of the Sātavāhana Period*, Ind. Ant., 1918, p. 78.

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This is then the upper limit of the composition of the Kāmasūtra which was therefore written between the first and the fifth centuries after Christ. We may next attempt to come to a closer approximation.

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Vātsyāyana mentions the *Abhīras* and the Andhras as ruling side by side at the same time in the South-West of India. He speaks of an *Abhīra* Kottarāja,¹ a king of Koṭṭa in Gujarat, who was killed by a washerman employed by his brother. Then, again, in his chapter on the conduct of women confined in harems, Vātsyāyana describes the sexual abuses practised in the seraglio of the *Abhīra* kings among others. Now, King Īśvarasena, son of the *Abhīra* Śivadatta, is mentioned as a ruling sovereign in one of the Nasik inscriptions and is thought to have reigned in the third century A.D.³ Besides, Mahākshatrapa Īśvaradatta is considered on very reasonable grounds to have been an *Abhīra*, and his coins show that he reigned some time between *circa* 236 and 239 A.D.⁴ About a century later, in the early years of the fourth century A.D. (*circa* 336 A.D.), the *Abhīras* were met by Samudragupta.⁵ The period when the *Abhīras* most flourished, therefore, was the third century A.D. on epigraphic and numismatic grounds. The Andhra rulers are also referred to by Vātsyāyana but certainly as mere local kings. In his chapter on *Īśvarakāmita*, or "The Lust of Rulers," Vātsyāyana describes various forms of sexual abuse practised by kings and it is significant that all the rulers here mentioned are referred to by the names of the people they ruled over and belong to the South Western India, *viz.*, the Kings of the Aparāntakas, the Vaidarbhas, the Saurāṣṭrakas, the Vātsagulmakas and the Andhras.¹ The Andhra monarchs here referred to evidently ruled over the Andhra people proper, and the social customs and practices of the Andhra people are described in various other parts of the book also.² There is no reference in the Kāmasūtra to the position of the Andhras as sovereigns exercising suzerain sway. The time, therefore, described by Vātsyāyana is that when the line of the great Andhra emperors had come to an end and the country was split up into a number of small kingdoms, among which the most considerable were those ruled over by the *Andhra-bhṛtyas*, or dynasties sprung up from the officers of the imperial Andhras. Among them the Purāṇas mention the Ābhīras, the Gardabhinas, the Śakas and also some Andhras³ who evidently ruled over a limited territory at the time referred to. The time when Vātsyāyana flourished is therefore the period when these later Andhra kings and the Ābhīras ruled simultaneously over different parts of Western India, that is, subsequent to *circa* 225 A.C.,⁴ when the line of the great Andhras disappeared and before the beginning of the fourth century A.C.,

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¹ आभीरं हि कोट्टराजं परभवनगतं भ्रातृप्रयुक्तो रजको जघान *Kāmasūtra*. Bom. ed., p. 287. Vātsyāyana here mentions a Koṭṭarāja Jayatsena about whom very little is known.

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² क्षत्रियसंज्ञकैरेन्तःपुररक्षिभिरेवायं साध्यन्त्याभीरकानाम्। *Ibid.*, p. 294.

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³ *Archaeological Survey of Western India*, IV, p. 103. See also Professor D. R. Bhāndārkar's paper on the Gurjaras, *J. B. B. R. A. S.* Vol. xxi, p. 436.

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⁴ *The Western Kshatrapas* by Pandit Bhagwānlal Indraji, *J. R. A. S.* 1890, p. 657 ff. See also *Catalogue of the Coins of the Andhra Dynasty* by E. J. Rapson, pp. cxxxiii ff. Prof. D. R. Bhāndārkar assigns Īśvaradatta to A. D. 188—90 (*Arch. Sur. Ind., An. Rep.*, 1913-14, p. 230).

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⁵ J. F. Fleet, *Gupta Inscriptions*, p. 8.

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¹ *Kāmasūtra*, Ben. ed., pp. 287-288.

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² *Ibid*, pp. 126, 135, 287, etc.

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³ Pargiter, *Dynasties of the Kali Age*, p. 45; the Matsya, Vāyu, and Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇas read—

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⁴ Dr. V. A. Smith, *Early History of India*, 3rd ed. p. 212 Prof. D. R. Bhāndārkar, *Dekkan of Sātavāhana Period* (Ind, Ant. 1918, p. 85), also holds that "the Sātavāhana power came to an end in the first half of the third century A. D."

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अन्ध्राणां संस्थिते राज्ये तेषां भृत्यान्वया नृपाः ।
सप्तैवान्ध्रा भविष्यन्ति दशाभीरास्तथा नृपाः ।
सप्त गर्दभिनश्चापि शकाश्चाष्टादशैव तु ।

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when the Guptas of whom there is no mention in the Kāmasūtra, were again uniting northern India under a common sway. From this the conclusion is inevitable that the Kāmasutra was composed about the middle of the third century A.C. and this agrees with the conclusion arrived at from an examination of the literary data.

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Since the above remarks about the date of the Kāmasūtra were placed before the public in the *Journal of the Department of Letters of the University of Calcutta* (Vol. IV), several scholars in India and Europe have expressed their opinion on the same subject. Of these, Prof. A. Banerji Sastri has examined the question in the *Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society*¹ and has arrived at almost the same conclusion as myself on mostly the same arguments, the only difference being that Prof. Sastri would place Vātsyāyana to "approximately the end of the third century A.D." while I have placed him about the middle. Prof. Sastri, moreover, differs from me in thinking that Bhāsa's drama, *Avimāraka*, was known to Vātsyāyana,² while I have expressed my doubts about it.³

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¹ Vol ix, Part I, p. 19 ff.

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² *Ibid.*, p. 57.

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³ See ante p. 17.

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Prof. Jolly in the introduction to his edition of the Arthaśāstra has sought to prove that the Arthaśāstra was composed in the third century after Christ and the Kāmasutra which was modelled upon it, in the fourth century A.C.⁴ Every one of the arguments of Jolly with regard to the date of the Arthaśāstra has been critically examined by Mr. K. P. Jayaswal in his recently published work on *Hindu Polity*⁵ and has been shown to be untenable, and the 4th century B.C. has been proved to be the only probable date for that work. His theory therefore with regard to the date of Vātsyāyana naturally falls to the ground.

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⁴ *Arthaśāstra of Kautilya*, a New Edition, Vol. I, Lahore 1923 pp. 24-29.

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⁵ *Hindu Polity, A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times*, Calcutta 1924. Appendix C, pp. 203-14.

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Applying to this date Prof. Jolly's dictum that the Kāmasūtra and the Arthaśāstra could not have been separated by more than a century at most¹ we would arrive at a date which is absurd for the Kāmasūtra. Jolly does not consider the political evidence as very conclusive and holds that "it will be necessary to confine oneself to the literary data in fixing the age of the Kāmasūtra" (p. 29); and the evidence offered by the literary data is this according to him: "If both Kālidāsa and Subandhu are rightly referred to the fifth century A.D., the Kāmasūtra might be placed in the fourth century."² This theory twice applied here by Jolly that whenever there are two authors of whom one shows evidence of his debt to the other, they cannot be separated by more than a century, is one that will hardly hold good in the history of literature of any country in the world. There is no earthly reason why Kālidāsa and Vātsyāyana cannot be separated by two centuries and Kauṭilya and Vātsyāyana by six centuries. Kālidāsa, when he had occasion to refer to the Kāmaśāstra, found Vātsyāyana's book to be the standard work on the subject and naturally borrowed from it, and Vātsyāyana too, when he set himself to write the Kāmasūtra, a work on a secular subject in a country where most of the literature was religious, had naturally his eyes turned to this masterly work which like his was 'thoroughly realistic and worldly'³, and withal manifested 'a rare unity of plan and structure'⁴, and which even now we have no hesitation in declaring 'the most precious work in the whole range of Sanskrit literature.' During the many centuries that intervened between the two authors, Kautilya's work had not been superseded but still dominated the field as it continued to dominate for many centuries longer. Is it any wonder then that Vātsyāyana should take this work on an allied subject as his model and borrow its method and style?

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¹ Jolly, op. cit., p. 29.

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² Ibid., p. 28.

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³ Ibid., p. 3.

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⁴ Ibid., p. 5.

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¹ *Ibid.*, p. 1. 2 मांसभक्ष्यादिसर्वः शास्त्रादेव निवार्यः धर्मः। *Kāmasūtra*., p. 12. 3 अच्छरसकयूपमम्लयवागूं भृष्टमांसोपदर्शानि पानकानि घृतफलानि शुष्कमांसे etc. *Ibid.*, p. 174. 4 Macdonell *Vedic Mythology*, p. 150.

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I, however, agree with Prof. Jolly (p. 26) in holding that the abstention from meat which Vātsyāyana refers to while defining *Dharma* is only a theory, or rather an ideal which, as Vātsyāyana says, people would learn from the *Śāstra* or the works on that subject and it did not represent the actual state of things in his time. A glimpse at real life which we have in his section on *Samprayoga* shows that meat diet was in vogue, and both amongst men and women. Vātsyāyana advises a lover to please his mistress when she feels rather tired or exhausted, with such relishes as roasted or dried meat as well as gruel and extracts of meat of various kinds. One of them is called by Vātsyāyana *accha-rasaka-yūṣam* and the commentary explains that it was a fresh extract of meat (*māṃsa-niryūham*), and another called *amla-yarāgū* is said to be prepared by boiling with meat (*māṃsa-siddhā*).³ The doctrine of *ahiṃsā* and the eating of meat have existed in India side by side since the earliest Vedic times and no conclusion can be arrived at with regard to the date of a work simply from the mention or non-mention of the doctrine of *ahiṃsā* in it. Even in the Ṛgveda, the cow was recognised as *aghnyā* and the ox as *aghnya* (not to be slaughtered), while in the *Vinaya Piṭaka* itself we are told that oxen in plenty were slaughtered by Siha, the Licchavi Commander-in-Chief to feed the Buddha and his attending bhikṣus.¹ A newly converted minister at Benares placed twelve hundred and fifty dishes of meat (māṃsa-pāti) before the bhikṣus including the Buddha himself.² The mere fact, therefore, that a work prohibits meat-eating is not sufficient reason to dub it as post-Buddhistic.

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¹ Mahāvagga, vi. 31, 12; vi. 38, 3.

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² Ibid. vi. 25. 3.

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What has been said above with regard to Prof. Jolly's theory about the date of the Kāmasūtra applies with equal force to what Prof. M. Winternitz has observed on the same subject in the third volume of his *History of Indian Literature* where he has arrived at the same conclusion as Dr. Jolly and on the very same grounds, though independently. Thus the Professor observes : "That it (the *Kāmasūtra*) is later than the Kauṭilīya-Arthaśāstra cannot be doubted. But it can hardly be much later; for the great similarity between the two books makes it clear that the Kāmasūtra is separated from Kauṭilya only by a short interval. If we place the latter, say, in the third century after Christ, then the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana is to be placed somewhere in the fourth. But it is nothing more than a guess."³ Here it will be seen that Winternitz also has nothing more to fix the date than the mere guess that Kauṭilya and Vātsyāyana cannot be separated by more than a century. As in the case of Jolly, Winternitz's failure to establish the third century for Kauṭilya necessarily leads to the rejection of the fourth century for Vātsyāyana.

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³ Translated from *Geschichte der Indischen Litteratur* von Dr. M. Winternitz, III Band, p. 540.

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Mahāmahopādhyāya Haraprasad Sastri in his *Magadhan Literature* has, on the other hand, sought to push back the date of the *Kāmasūtra* to the first century A.C., his argument being that "Vātsyāyana flourished at a time when the memory of the scandal (of Kuntala Śātakarṇi) was fresh. So he may be placed in the first century A.D.; for, the public memory is far short and in one or two generations, people forget these scandals."¹ Here the Mahāmahopādhyāya, unlike Jolly, considers the political data as the deciding factor, but accepting his conclusion we are met by the difficulty that in the first century A.C., we have no evidence of Ābhīra monarchs ruling side by side with the Andhras. Both according to epigraphic as well as Pauranic evidence, the Ābhīras rose to power in the third century A.C., so that the date of Vātsyāyana who is no less acquainted with the scandals of the Ābhīra court than with those among the Andhras, cannot be placed in the first century A.C. Moreover, we have ample evidence to show that court scandals are referred to by Indian writers many centuries after they took place. Vātsyāyana himself refers to the scandal of Dāṇḍakya, the Bhoja² who must have lived many centuries prior to the composition of the *Kāmasūtra*. Visākhadatta in his *Mudrārākṣasa* refers to court intrigues and scandals many centuries older than his time. The *Bṛhat Saṃhitā* refers to scandals like that of king Vidūratha who was killed by his queen with a sharp instrument hid in her hair and to a Kāśirāja who was similarly killed with a poisoned anklet³ and there is nothing to show that they lived about the same time as Varāha-mihira. Aśvaghoṣa in the fourth chapter of his *Buddhacarita* relates scandals most of which were far removed in date from his. We are therefore unable to see eye to eye with MM. Haraprasad Sastri with regard to the date fixed by him for the Kāmasūtra.

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¹ *Māgadhan Literature* by MM. Haraprasad Sastri, Calcutta 1928, p 84. 2 *Kāmasūtra*, p. 24. 3 *Bṛhat Saṃhitā*, Ch. 78, 1.

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Some other points in MM. Sastri's work call for comment. He identifies Śvetaketu,¹ the mythical reformer of primitive society, who according to an account in the Mahābhārata set up the institution of marriage, with Śvetaketu Āruṇeya, the highly cultured philosopher of the Upaniṣads. The Ṛgveda shows a well-organised family life with the institution of marriage fully developed amongst the Indo-Aryans, and therefore, the age when that institution grew and developed must have preceded the Ṛgvedic era by a very long period and the age of Śvetaketu Āruṇeya—an age of intense metaphysical speculation when the Upaniṣadic literature grew, could certainly not be identical with it. Then there is not the least justification for MM. Sastri's statement that "Auddālaki wrote more on union or Samprayoga than on other subjects. He divided that subject into ten major heads. So his work was called Daśatayī"² These are all statements unauthorised by Vātsyāyana who on the other hand asserts that Śvetaketu's huge work in five hundred chapters dealt with the whole of the Kāmaśāstra and that it was Bābhravya who divided and arranged the contents of Śvetaketu's work into seven adhikaraṇas or sections; in fact, of the three passages in the Kāmasūtra where Vātsyāyana quotes Auddālaki, one belongs to the Samprayoga section, another to the Pāradārika, and the third to the Vaiśika section.³ The third of these is the longest quotation from Auddālaki where a whole group of sūtras is spoken of by Vātsyāyana as the opinion of Auddālaki as distinguished from the theory of Bābhravya, so that there is no justification for the conjecture that Auddālaki's work dealt with the one topic of Samprayoga alone It was rather Bābhravya, the Pāñcāla who specially shone in his delineation of the sixty-four Samprayoga-kalās. For the other statements that Auddālaki's work was called Daśatayī or that he divided Samprayoga into ten sections, there is absolutely no foundation. Vātsyāyana says that the Rgveda was called Daśatayī and not Auddālaki's work and in the whole chapter where this topic is dealt with there is no reference to Auddālaki at all.

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¹ Magadhan Literature, p. 78.

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² Ibid., p. 79.

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³ See ante, p. 7 ff. and p. 10, note 2.

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Prof. Batuknath Bhattacharya in his paper headed "A Brief Survey of the Sāhityasāstra" in the *Journal of the Department of Letters* of the University of Calcutta, has incidentally discussed the date of the Kāmasūtra.¹ He has not hazarded any definite opinion on the date but has expressed his difference with the conclusion arrived at by me, mainly on two grounds. In the first place, he observes, "It is hard to believe that it (the Kāmasūtra) could have been composed later than the Nātya-Śāstra, considering the style in which it is written—a style distinctly aphoristic in nature and reminiscent of the sūtra period (600-200 B.C.)." Vātsyāyana's mention of Kuntala Śātakarṇi precludes any possibility of his composing the sūtras on erotics in the so-called sūtra period of Max Müller, and while comparing the Kāmasūtra with the Nātyasāstra it should be borne in mind that the latter, though passing as the product of *one* author who is more or less mythical, bears on its face the evidence of the handiwork of different ages, that, in fact, we have before us, as Prof. Winternitz observes, "a compilation of various older and later texts," The same scholar also remarks that "the original work was probably a Sūtra-text, as indeed the oldest scientific works as a rule were composed in the Sūtra style.”² The Nātyaśāstra has been variously assigned by scholars from the first to the sixth or seventh century A.C.,³ so that it is not unlikely that some portions of the Nātyaśāstra were older than the Kāmasūtra while others were much younger.

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¹ See Vol. ix, pp. 110-113.

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² Ges. d. Ind. Lit. iii. 8. See also Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics by Sushil Kumar De, M.A., D. Litt., vol. I, pp. 23-36.

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³ Winternitz, op. cit., p. 8, n. 3.

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The particular point on which, however, Prof. Bhattacharya sets up a comparison between the two works viz., the classification of men and women into different categories, proves nothing, as the different authors have proceeded to classify them from different points of view. Vātsyāyana divides men into Śaśa, Vṛṣa and Aśva and women into Mṛgī, Baḍavā and Hastinī from their different capacities for samprayoga, while Bharata’s classification of women into 24 varieties⁴ is based on æsthetic, intellectual and moral standards. No comparison lies between the two authors in this respect and the more elaborate classification of Bharata does not necessarily imply a later date. We find the same threefold classification of males and females in the Ananga-raṅga, a work on erotics composed in the late 15th or early 16th century A.C. when the Lodi Emperors were ruling at Delhi.⁵

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⁴ Kāmasūtra, p. 71 and Nātyaśāstra, xxii, 96-142.

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⁵ Ananga-raṅga, trans. by Burton and Arbuthnot, Paris. 1908. p. xvi. See S. K. De. op. cit., p. 842.

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Next, Prof. Bhattacharya remarks, “It seems a little remarkable that Vātsyāyana should not have mentioned any of his predecessors more contiguous to his own date but should have looked so far back as to the 4th century B.C. This would argue a certain break in the continuity of the study.” There was indeed such a break in the continuity of the study of the science of Erotics, as Vātsyāyana himself asserts that the Kāmaśāstra was very near extinction (utsannakalpam-abhūt) before he took it up, so much so, that he had to fall back upon the ancient and little-read text of Bābhravya to compile his work; he does not think much of the monographs of Dattaka and others which he holds were rather fragmentary and scrappy (khaṇḍaśaḥ praṇītam).⁶

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⁶ Kāmasūtra, pp. 7 and 381. See also ante, p. 3 ff.

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