300 by a Hindu philosopher named Vātsyāyana Mallanaga, of whom historians know very little other than his name. The Kama Sutra is thought to have been written around the year A.D. 'And I get really annoyed when we talk about positions because it's not a book about positions.' It's about refinement,' says Seema Anand, a sexuality educator, mythologist, and scholar of the Kama Sutra. Therefore, kama sutra roughly translates to 'pleasure manual'-though again, it's about pleasure in the broader sense. A sutra is a specific type of Indian literature, typically written in aphorisms and meant to be instructive. The word kama translates to 'love, desire, and pleasure,' according to Srinivasan. 'It's a book about how to live life and appreciate the finer things.' 'You can actually say that it's a little bit of everything,' says Varuna Srinivasan, MPH, FRSPH, a sexual health consultant and gender justice advocate. It was originally written to teach young, wealthy men how to live well, and it includes instructions on a wide variety of topics, such as how to build a house, how to find a wife, how spouses should treat each other, and much more. Though it''s most known for one of its sections that gives instructions on how to have better sexual experiences, the book isn't predominantly about sex. The Kama Sutra is an ancient Indian treatise on living a pleasurable life.
