Love, Eroticism and Female Sexuality in Classical Sanskrit Literature

This book is an attempt to analyze the conception of kama in the early-medieval classical Sanskrit literary tradition from a gender perspective. By reading against the grain, the author has tried to illumine the sexual status of women within the different genres of these classical Sanskrit sources. The book highlights that far from being a unitary homogeneous category with only a certain kind of sexual status, women and their sexuality have been conceived differently in different philosophical schools, be they dharmasnstra, kamasastra, Lokayata, tantric, ayurvedic and the ascetic philosophies.