Interview with Alain Daniélou by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach

Europe 1. April 23, 1992

Presenter: Jean-Pierre Elkabbach welcomes Alain Daniélou for the Kama Sutra, the translation of the Breviary of Love published by Editions du Rocher.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Finally, we’re going to talk about serious things. Good morning Alain Daniélou.

Alain DANIÉLOU: Good morning.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Let me say straight away that you are one of the greatest living Orientalists. You are a specialist in India. You lived there for a long time. You converted to the Hindu religion.

Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: And you are a musician, a painter or you have been a musician, a painter, a poet, a philosopher, a researcher and at the age of 85, you are going to surprise again with this publication of the complete translation of the Kama Sutra because for a long time the texts were incomplete. What some people knew of this book, which for a long time was the height of scandal and prohibition, was that the texts were incomplete.

Alain DANIÉLOU: Completely incomplete and even tendentious, oriented towards a kind of pornography that is not at all the character of the book, which is devoted to the art of living in a great civilisation in which love and sexuality naturally play a fundamental role, as in all civilisations.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: So, this has long been exploited by pornographers and the Kama Sutra is worth more than that. Who wrote it and when?

Alain DANIÉLOU: The text we have is a compilation made by a student of religion called Vatsyayan who brought together books that date, for the most part, from the 9th to the 4th century BC, which are important texts and from which they quote entire chapters.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: And they are commented on. There’s even a commentary, you told me earlier, which is from the beginning of the century and which is modern. Is this a work for today or is it a work that you are publishing because you need to have this complete translation, but which means nothing to contemporary readers?

Alain DANIÉLOU: No, it’s a work conceived as the art of living for all times and all countries. It’s a very systematic study that covers all aspects of the pleasure of living, comfort, success and love.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Absolutely. It’s a realistic book. There’s no sentiment, or not too much sentiment.

Alain DANIÉLOU: Not at all sentimental or religious. It’s a pragmatic, technical book, part of a series of works describing a balanced society and the ways of life of the city-dweller, the well-bred, cultured and wealthy man.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: That’s Alain Daniélou’s introduction, to whet the appetite, so to speak.

So the courtship is one of the most important moments, along with the coquetry, the sighs and the foreplay. Is it important?

Alain DANIÉLOU: Very important. In fact, I think there’s even a chapter on how to negotiate with a young wife so as not to shock her, which I think is quite charming.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Negotiating probably doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to Mr Dumas or Mr Balladur. It depends on where.

Alain DANIÉLOU: To deal with it.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: To approach it.

Alain DANIÉLOU: To approach it with delicacy.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: The Kama Sutra, what does it mean? Kama Sutra?

Alain DANIÉLOU: Kama is the god of love and Kama is, I would say, like the erotic instinct. So it’s a treatise on eroticism.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: It’s a treatise on eroticism.

Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: And we can see how encouragement is given to develop, for example, the sense of touch and caressing.

Alain DANIÉLOU: That’s very important, isn’t it? All the foreplay. And to reach a climax, foreplay is essential, and we need to negotiate the development of sensuality, particularly in women, so that she can achieve intense, shared pleasure.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Does this mean that the Kama Sutra is also concerned with women’s pleasure and desire?

Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, that’s considered. In fact, there are all sorts of technical ways of achieving this, all sorts of ways of behaving.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: So you say caresses, but there are also – and I say this for Julie’s sake – bites and blows.

Alain DANIÉLOU: The blows, of course.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: How many kinds of kisses are there?

Alain DANIÉLOU: There are a lot of them.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: The vibrating, the rubbing, the crooked kisses, I quote you, with the Kama Sutra. The claws?

Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, and then you trim your nails in a special way so that the claws are both stimulating and delicate, and you also have to be careful not to hurt your partner, but at the same time to ensure that a certain amount of pain is a very strong stimulus to an exalted state of passion.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: So, not with just any nails, claws, not just anywhere, not just any time.

So there are several kinds of sex, depending on the moment and the desire, and 64 love games. Why 64?

Alain DANIÉLOU: 64 is a bit of a symbolic number, because on the one hand there are 64 postures, 64 ways of making love, and 64 arts linked to the art of pleasure and sexuality. I think, and I haven’t counted, that’s really if they’re developed exactly in 64, but anyway…

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Do you remember what the queen of heaven or the posture of the cow is?

Alain DANIÉLOU: The cow stance, yes, I think that goes without saying. It’s a four-legged stance.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: What about bird entertainment?

Alain DANIÉLOU: It’s a way of delicately pecking at the female organ.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: And then the Kama Sutra, Alain Daniélou, because it’s so serious and wise, is a breviary, giving advice on choosing a wife, on how to treat the wife, on how to treat the mistress, on the relationships between men and the wives of friends, the wives of neighbours in fact… that’s what you were saying earlier, an art of living with sometimes accents of a manual for young girls from good families too.

Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, there’s also the chapter on the virtuous wife, where I don’t think the most bourgeois women of our time are so moralistic and restrictive. It’s all there.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: The essential thing is fidelity, apparently in the Kama Sutra, but it also talks about adultery and the many kinds of lovers. And then there are the means, the women who are best avoided.

I’m trying to find page 98 quickly: “Women best avoided: fools, those incapable of keeping a secret, immodest women, those who are too old, those whose skin is too white or too black, those who smell bad, those with whom one has friendly relations, those who have taken monastic vows of all kinds.” The Kama Sutra has it all.

Alain DANIÉLOU: It’s got everything. It’s really a very general book.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Do you think, more seriously, that Westerners are sensitive enough to appreciate this type of refinement, this art of living, these erotic-aesthetic or aesthetic-erotic subtleties?

Alain DANIÉLOU: I think it would be to their great advantage to study all these approaches and all these techniques, especially as the Kama Sutra makes it very clear that most marriages end up being so much trouble because people lack technique, lack skill, lack kindness, lack imagination and that if you want to have a successful sex life, you need a technical knowledge of the subject.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: As someone who comes from between India and Europe, and who is currently living near Rome, do you sense in Westerners a need for spirituality of some kind, for the sacred as well?

Alain DANIÉLOU: That’s not what the Kama Sutra is about at all.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Absolutely. This is the subject of the other book that you are republishing or re-editing with the same publisher, Rocher. It’s called “Les Mythes et dieux de l’Inde” with an X, and it’s a plural of course, Hindu polytheism. But there’s a need there that you sense in us Westerners?

Alain DANIÉLOU: Of course, but things are not completely separate. We need to broaden our horizons enormously in terms of religion, social life, love and how to earn money. All this is studied in great depth in the Sutras, the great period of Indian civilisation.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: Five years ago, Alain Daniélou, you said: “I don’t deserve to be 80 years old. All you need is patience. What are you going to do now? What are you going to publish for your 100th birthday?

Alain DANIÉLOU: If I can last this long — I’m only 84 and a half — I’d like to look at the counterpart of the Kama Sutra, which is the Arthashastra, the art of prosperity, the art of making money, the art of success and the art of politics. It’s an absolutely marvellous Machiavellianism.

Jean-Pierre ELKABBACH: We’ll talk about this together and also when you republish the history of India and, at the same time, your own autobiography, which was a great success a few years ago and which you are going to republish.

The Kama Sutra deals with all sorts of subjects, including male and female homosexuality, often with a great deal of humour. For example, there’s a piece of advice given to lesbians: they can pull their partner’s goatee. And that’s it! Let’s hope that everyone has a Kama Sutra in their library or in a good library, and that everyone puts their Kama into practice with the advice of Vatsyayan and Alain Daniélou. Thank you.

Responsable éditoriale : Anne Prunet.
Réalisation : Archipel Studios.