Free Put What Where? by John Naish Page B

obsessed with sex, although this perversely manifested itself as an extremely lurid sense of propriety. Burton’s books acted out this repressed fixation by displacing British sexuality to a far-off land whereforeign Johnnies spent their ample spare time copulating all over the place. We still think of the Kama Sutra as proof that everyone beyond Calais lives in a broiling stew of sex, but in fact the ancient text had long been out of circulation in its native land. Burton’s helpers struggled to find a complete and usable copy of the Kama Sutra in India. It was the same story with several other old works of Indian erotica, but Victorian-era Europeans were sufficiently fascinated to find and revive them. Britain was even selling the Indians their own sex back. The most modern Indian posture-book being widely circulated in India at the time was an English translation of a German compilation of old Indian sex positions, called the Kinaesthesia of Love.
    Such convolutions were typical of Burton’s life. He was born in Devon in 1821, a startlingly vivid redhead. His grandfather had always wanted a red-haired heir and decided that little Richard should inherit the family fortune. Grandad was mounting the steps of his solicitor’s, will in hand, when he dropped dead of a heart attack. Richard did not inherit. Baby Burton’s hair subsequently turned from red to black. He grew up in France and Italy before going to Oxford, where he became a notable fighter and womanizer. He was sent down for absconding to watch a horse race, which enabled him to abandon the Church career that his father had chosen him and to join the Army instead. Burton bought a commission for £500 in the Bombay Native Infantry and, on arrival in India, started learning Hindustani, Gujurati, Persian and theHindu religion. Fellow officers called him the White Nigger. He even corralled 40 monkeys together and learnt to imitate their grunts, until he felt they could converse together. His monkey-speak dictionary was not a success, though. Later he studied Islam and attempted the rigorous life of a Sufi.
    To learn local Indian customs, he put on long hair and a beard, stained his limbs with henna, and called himself Abdullah of Bushire, a half-Arab. In this guise, he travelled the country offering to sell trinkets in native homes. In Bombay he searched the bazaars for rare books and manuscripts. Around this time, his Army chief, Sir Charles Napier, heard that three houses in Karachi were selling an unspeakable vice – gay sex. Napier needed a spy: Burton was the natural choice. He went undercover into these male brothels, which were staffed by young boys and eunuchs, and found most of the customers to be British officers. His report caused uproar and consigned his Army career to the doldrums. He subsequently contracted cholera and returned to England to recuperate in 1848. But he returned to the foreign fray and in 1861 formally entered the diplomatic service as consul at Equatorial Guinea, and later served in Santos, Brazil, Damascus and Trieste. He wrote books on all these locations.
    No one is certain exactly when Burton first met his Kama Sutra partner, Forster FitzGerald Arbuthnot (whom he always called Bunny), but by 1853 they were firm friends. Both shared a dream of translating the famous books of the East into English – especially the erotic ones. They believedthey could get away with it if they ensured that the books were expensive and that only academics bought them. The pair set up the Kama Shastra Society in 1882 to publish the books (Kama is the Hindu love god, Shastra means gospel). It was merely a front-organization to fend off obscenity trials. The books purported to be published in Benares, though really they were printed in Stoke Newington, in North London.
    They planned to publish seven Indian erotic books, but in the end only the Kama Sutra and the Ananga Ranga appeared. The Kama Sutra (its name can be translated as ‘pleasure treatise’)