Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c5.s3.28

c5.s3.28

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 During the many centuries that intervened between the two authors, Kautilya's work had not been superseded but still dominated the field as it continued to dominate for many centuries longer.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?