Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c8.156

c8.156

Vātsyāyana in his work holds up the ideal of city-life. He wrote the Kāmasutra as a practical handbook for the guidance of city-bred men of fashion—the Nāgarakas. A whole section of his book is called Nāgaraka-vṛttam, wherein he describes the life of a city-man, not of a mere dweller in a city—such a person would only be a nāgara,—but of a nāgaraka, who, according to Pāṇini, is a city-bred man skilled in the arts and knaveries that specially develop in a big city, one possessing the virtues and vices of "a cockney": he might be a clever artist or a knave, as the Kāśikā-vṛtti so naively explains.¹ Vātsyāyana's book is calculated to benefit such men and women, among them princesses and daughters of high officials (Mahāmātras), who armed with an expert knowledge of the practical directions given by him, would be able to subdue the heart of a husband whose love is shared by a crowded harem of as many as a "thousand" wives.² Vātsyāyana recommends the city as the proper place of abode for a person who after finishing his education, thinks of entering the world, the gṛhasthāśrama, with the wealth that he may have acquired, either by inheritance or by the pursuit of the profession particularly appertaining to his own caste and his postion in society;¹ such a man should adopt the life of a *nāgaraka* and fix his habitation in a city—whether small or big, a *nagara*, or a *pattana*, or a *kharvaṭa*, or at least in a resort of many good and noble persons.² In the age of Vātsyāyana, apparently everybody who was marked out from the rest by any pre-eminence in intelligence, or learning, or skill in the arts, was attracted to the city, and found his patron in the king, or in a wealthy *nāgaraka*, or found employment at the clubs and assemblies of citizens, or under the guilds of merchants and artisans.