Sexual Pleasure as Thought: Erotics in Pre-modern South Asia

As a change from war and geopolitics, I came across this presentation by Shubham Arora, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia and a Harold Coward India Research Fellow at the University of Victoria.

In this talk, Shubham Arora introduces a long and often misunderstood intellectual tradition from South Asia devoted to thinking about pleasure. Beginning with the world-renowned Kāmasūtra and continuing into the modern period, this tradition did far more than describe sexual practices. It treated pleasure as a subject worthy of reflection, analysis, and debate. Like other fields of knowledge in premodern South Asia—such as law, medicine, or aesthetics—these works developed ways of classifying desire, discussing relationships, and reflecting on how pleasure fits into a well-lived life. The authors of these texts were asking questions about intimacy, emotion, social roles, and human fulfillment. Yet in modern times, these texts, especially the Kāmasūtra, have often been reduced to exotic curiosities. Shaped by colonial fantasies and later commercial reinventions, they have been marketed globally as manuals of sexual practices, while at the same time facing censorship and controversy within South Asia itself. By revisiting these works in their historical context, this talk offers an as-yet unexplored perspective: understanding erotics as a thoughtful and evolving tradition concerned with how principles, possibilities, and practices of pleasure changed.