The missionary position

It is reasonably probable that the Bible sells more copies, but Vatsayana's inability to file for intellectual property rights two thousand years ago has turned his classic (and highly erotic) work into India's biggest rupee-spinner.

Every Indian publisher worth its salt has its own editions of the Kama Sutra, every co-publisher around the world hankers for rights to this bestseller, and every now and then another author takes a potshot at an "original" attempt at redoing Richard Burton's seminal translation of Vatsayana's Kama Shastra..

Last week, two luridly pink-jacketed Kama Sutras debuted in bookstores promising, as one of the publishers insisted, "a refreshing new take" on what is possibly India's greatest cultural export. That it is also a cottage industry in the West was something I found out the embarrassing way.

As an editor doubling up as rookie publisher at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the nineties, I had with me a dummy Kama Sutra for which I was expected to find co-publishers in different languages and in different countries.

Wanting to pitch the book as a work of erotic art, I fixed appointments with publishers of high quality art books who then prudishly directed me to purveyors of fleshier books, who in turn giggled and showed me modelled and photographed versions of their Kama Sutras (I remember blushing) and then told me to take my comic book drawings elsewhere.

And here, Pavan Varma, whose "art of making love to a woman" was just out, was telling me to read the text before we met. Did anyone actually read the text? Yes, Alka Pande seemed to be agreeing, having aimed her treatise at the New Age woman, "You must read what I've written, especially the introduction."

Because Varma and Pande, when they're in office, are people with high-profile jobs, it was impossible to disobey their directive, and so instead of looking at the (impossible? improbable?) pictures, I flipped through the (fairly brief) texts to find that they had both moved away from Burton's archaic writing to a lucid, contemporary style. It was even possible to understand what they had written.

We met at Pavan Varma's office. Varma is director general of the busy Indian Council for Cultural Relations, a post that has been handled by the best and brightest of India's foreign service, and has a veritable bibliography of books to his credit, jackets of which are framed at the entrance to what must be a government official's plushest office in the capital.

Alka Pande was late coming, but then she's no lightweight herself, with several books to her credit and art advisor and curator at the city's popular Visual Arts Gallery.

"The perfect yin and yang," Pande had chortled when I fixed the ménage-e-trios, but unfortunately our congress remained unfulfilled. Varma had to rush off to another meeting in the building, so we spoke in turns, and when everyone did finally meet up, it was a courtesy of exchanges rather than a dialogue on the books that took precedence.

Varma's and Pande's professional lives do cross on occasion, but it is interesting that both have (also) built up similar reputations for writing on erotica.

Varma's book on Krishna and his anthology of erotic literature is matched by Pande's book on Indian erotica, a forthcoming anthology on erotic literature, and a work in progess on nudes (at Page 3 parties, she's pointed out, wrongly, as the Erotic Queen rather than the Queen of Erotica). Varma, his seminal work notwithstanding, might then be the K of E. Yin and yang?

And no, the Kama Sutra for them wasn't the snigger-snigger piece of work it might have been in the hands of less significant writers. "I have not treated the subject with levity," says Varma with statesman-like poise, and in his office, surrounded by works of art and Dr Karan Singh scheduled to meet him in a half-hour, you do not doubt his claim, despite the illustrations in the book being, well, salacious at the least.

(Later, when he is away, Alka Pande will peek at the pictures in Varma's book and righteously claim she did not want pictures of women "impaled on penises and doing headstands" in her book, and has mostly had her way.) "Mine," claims Pande, "is full of intellectual gravitas."

It does seem the two are serious in wanting their books read. Both talk separately of the essence of the shringar rasa as an evocation of the mood of desire. Alka Pande, coquettish eyes dancing, insists her book deals with femininity and that it is not written from a feminist perspective.

But it is still a sex book, New Age mantras be dammed, I point out.

The coquettish eyes are suddenly piercing. "If people's personal, and by that I mean sexual, lives are fulfilled, they are secure about themselves. And good sex has nothing to do with being beautiful, or twiggy like Elizabeth Hurley (Arun Nayar please note), but comes from sharing a comfort level as good lovers."

Her book, she says, came about after she had read and absorbed the works of feminist thinkers Julia Christeva, Luce Irigiray, Helen Cixous, Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Wolf, even Kamala Das.

Oh dear, suddenly the Kama Sutra isn't so much fun. Was the writing, well, exciting, I ask Varma. Perhaps, perhaps. "I wrote it on the side of writing Being Indian," he strokes a chin recently rid of a beard that was never too fetching.

"That was a dense book and I wrote this Kama Sutra on the side as relief, in Cyprus." And it all comes back, he says, to his view that "nothing in the world view of Hinduism is random".

At no point does the conversation get risqué, even though Varma says his book is about enhancing a woman's sexual pleasure, and Pande says she has aimed at enriching the sexual lives of all lovers.

Time to go and look at the pictures.