In the case of the woman, there are thirty-two points that, in their totality, produce perfection and beauty for the allurement of men. These points include whiteness of skin, dark hair, pink tongue, small ears, and moderate height.
Other Oriental handbooks elaborate, on the other hand, on all the possible permutations conducive to amatory consummations. These almost exclusively follow Hindu, Arab, and Turkish tradition.
CHAPTER V
INDIA
India is a spacious land of astounding contrasts and variations. It is a land of mystery and mysticism, and at the same time it investigates reality with infinite patience. It is a land of diversified, age-old cultures, and its ancient university at Taxila in the Punjab ante-dated the Hellenic Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum by long centuries. Yet it has had and still has illiterate villages, where legends and sagas of antique doings are still transmitted orally. It is a continent of abundant wealth, and its maharajas and princelings and emperors have been resplendent in golden raiment, exultant in their treasure houses where lakhs of rupees lie heaped alongside rubies and emeralds, diamonds and pearls, and a dozen other varieties of precious stones, almost beyond human reckoning and evaluation. Yet, within this very century, children have stood at lonely wayside stations, from Bombay to Rawalpindi, in the Punjab and in Bengal, in the North West Frontier and in Madras Presidency, clamoring for roti and pani, bread and water. It is a land of lavish fertility, and a land of recurrent famine and devastation. A land of hieratic formalities and a land of innovation.
India is a country of artistic achievements of the highest order, of profound philosophical speculation, of monumental poetic and literary production. It is dedicated to things of the spirit, yet its Kali craves blood. It clings adhesively to remote traditions, to ethnic and religious mores, to indurated social ways. Yet it forges ahead, eager to maintain itself in the forefront of industrial expansion. It maintains old domestic and communal demarcations and rigidities, yet it welcomes the novelties, the mutations of this restless age. It is dedicated to intellectual, cosmological meditation, yet it probes into sexual manners, into the characteristics of lust and passion, and all the secretive unspoken intimacies of carnality. It has practically made a monopoly of texts and treatises on the subject of love and all its darker and more intricate and subtle manifestations. It is a country that has produced, in this field, six of the major manuals, poetic eulogies or expositions, dealing with the forms and practices of Aphrodite Pandemos.
The Ratirahasya, variously called the Koka Shastra, was the work of the poet Kukkoka. It consists of some eight hundred verses on love techniques.
The Ananga-Ranga, also called Kamaledhiplava, was written by the poet Kullianmull, and belongs in the fifteenth or sixteenth century A.D. The contents describe factually and realistically the physical characteristics of various types of women, their deportment, dress, facial and bodily traits, their amatory responsiveness, together with certain principles that establish objective amatory criteria.
The Rasmanjari was the work of the poet Bhanudatta. It classifies men and women according to personal behavior, age, physical type.
The Smara Pradipa, consisting of some four hundred verses, expounds amatory laws or tendencies. It was the work of the poet Gunakara.
The Ratimanjari is a brief poetic exposition on love, whose author was the poet Jayadeva.