“In the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the translation appears under the generic name of Kama-Shastra, which we first adopted, and the reader is told that only four copies exist for reasons best known to the printer. This is so far true that the limited supply has hitherto prevented the public deriving any benefit from our labours. We now take advantage of an offer made by a well-known house in Cosmopoli, and produce a reprint for PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY, with many additions and emendations.”
Although this work was first published in extremely limited numbers in 1873 (see above) under the title “Kama-Shastra”, twelve years passed before Burton was able to find a publisher brave enough to reprint the text. The resulting Ananga-Ranga is essentially a manual for love-making, thought to have been written by the poet Kalyana Malla. Whilst the descriptions are somewhat graphic, the aim was simple: if a man is able to vary and heighten the pleasures of sex within marriage, there would be no need to seek it elsewhere. Not surprisingly, given the date of the original work, it has an entirely phalocentric outlook, the wife being little more than a sex object: “the husband by varying the enjoyment of his wife, may live with her as with thirty-two different women, ever varying the enjoyment of her, and rendering satiety impossible.”
The “Ananga-Ranga” was the second of the five publications produced by the Kama Shastra Society, which was founded by Burton and Arbuthnot with the aim of publishing Eastern texts. They were, as Penzer coyly puts it, “chiefly of an erotic nature.” However, unlike the notorious “Kama-Sutra”, first published by Burton in parts in 1883, the “Ananga-Ranga” was not an immediate success. Penzer, p171-3; Casati, 73.
