Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c7.3

c7.3

Vatsyayana in the *Kāmasūtra*, presents a beautifully vivid and realistic picture of various aspects of social life in India about seventeen hundred years ago. Though mainly concerned with erotics, yet he throws light on many an obscure side of Indian society, furnishing facts and circumstances hardly available from any other source. From his work we get a picture of ancient Indian society under the operation of the *Varṇāśrama Dharma* of the religious law-books and while discussing the ideals and forms of marriage, Vātsyāyana gives us an insight into the actual life of the young people, their loves and jealousies, their courtship and coquetry. He depicts the gay life of the Nāgaraka, the city-bred man of fashion of his days—his house and gardens, his daily round of pleasures, his sports and festivities, his many-sided culture and refinement. He furnishes a picture of the Indian home, of the sweet, pure and devoted Indian wife, the mistress of the household and controller of the family purse. From Vātsyāyana also we can glean an account of the arts and crafts that flourished in this age of fine aesthetic tastes and artistic pursuits, and we see how the artiste, the gaṇikā, by virtue of her intellectual accomplishments and skill in the fine arts, occupied a position of no mean importance in society. At the same time, we realise that the merry life depicted in Vātsyāyana's work, representing, as it does, but one side of the entire Indian social structure, supplements the picture as obtained from the *Dharmasastras*, and the ideal life, according to Vātsyāyana, is one in which the three elements of *dharma*, *artha* and *kāma* are harmoniously blended together.