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 unabridged edition. 564 pages

Brilliant guide to how men and women should portray themselves.
‘Poverty is not a virtue, it is an obstacle, not only to pleasure, but also to ethics and virtues. Morality is a luxury which very poor people can rarely afford.
It emphasizes the need for cleanliness, bathing before eating food.

Review: This book is a modern translation of the original text and is a highly academic treatment. Unfortunately, it is rather confusingly laid out, there are three strands of text running concurrently the literal translation, period commentary and authors commentary. Despite this it is readable though bordering on the tome in dimensions you can zip through the translation which is not very long.
On a more practical level I have found some of the advice to be very good – but you have to read this in context. If you are unfamiliar with the original text then you should be aware that this is not a ‘positions’ book, the majority of the Kama Sutra is devoted to relationships between men and women, courting, marriage etc. It is a fascinating insight into an ancient civilisation, and underlying it is a fundamental understanding of what makes people tick.
This is an obvious choice for the those who wish to read the whole book, because the earlier Burton translation was edited by Victorian sensibilities. However, if you just want to get a sense of this work you might consider the earlier version on grounds of cost.
Whichever version you get you will find this a fascinating read, especially if you like the perfumed garden, now all I need is a translation of the Chinese Taos…

The Kama Sutra is an ancient Indian Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfilment in life. Attributed to Vātsyāyana, the Kama Sutra is neither exclusively nor predominantly a sex manual on sex positions, but rather was written as a guide to the art of living well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, maintaining one’s love life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life. It is a sutra-genre text with terse aphoristic verses that have survived into the modern era with different bhāṣyas (exposition and commentaries). The text is a mix of prose and anustubh-meter poetry verses. The text acknowledges the Hindu concept of Purusharthas, and lists desire, sexuality, and emotional fulfilment as one of the proper goals of life. Its chapters discuss methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics. The majority of the book is about the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire, what sustains it, and how and when it is good or bad.

The text is one of many Indian texts on Kama Shastra. It is a much-translated work in Indian and non-Indian languages. The Kamasutra has influenced many secondary texts that followed after the 4th-century CE, as well as the Indian arts as exemplified by the pervasive presence Kama-related reliefs and sculpture in old Hindu temples. Of these, the Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Among the surviving temples in north India, one in Rajasthan sculpts all the major chapters and sexual positions to illustrate the Kamasutra. According to Wendy Doniger, the Kamasutra became “one of the most pirated books in English language” soon after it was published in 1883 by Richard Burton. This first European edition by Burton does not faithfully reflect much in the Kamasutra because he revised the collaborative translation by Bhagavanlal Indrajit and Shivaram Parashuram Bhide with Forster Arbuthnot to suit 19th-century Victorian tastes.