Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c8.s4.27

c8.s4.27

A word here about the *nāgaraka*'s friends whom we meet again and again in the *Kāmasūtra*, will not be out of place. Besides the many artists and craftsmen who served him in his quest of love and pleasure and who are called his *mitras* or companions by Vātsyāyana, the *nāgaraka* appears to have possessed some real, true and devoted friends. Vātsyāyana says that fast and genuine friendship often sprang up among those who had grown up together from infancy tended by the same nurse, who in early boyhood were fellow playmates or were at school together, those who were marked by the same temperament and the same tastes in pleasure and sport, were attached to each other by mutual obligations and whose closest secrets were known to each other. Vātsyāyana regards it particularly fortunate in friendship when the friendship has come down between two families for several generations, has never been tainted by selfishness or greed, nor has been changed by time or by any considerations whatsoever and where the mutual secrets have never been betrayed.²