Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c5.s3.45

c5.s3.45

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.