kama

Etymology

From the root kam, “to wish, desire, love.” PIE *keh₂- (“to desire, to wish”), with cognates that include Latin cārus (“dear”), Old Irish cara (“friend”), and, a linguistic fact, not a moral, English whore, from a Germanic derivative of the same desire-root. The cognates show the root’s range: dearness and wanting, not a single English genre.

Kāma is not derived from English “sex,” and the Kāmasūtra is not the origin of the word. It is one later treatise in a much older semantic field.

Historical use

In the Ṛgveda, kāma is already cosmic as well as human: in the Nāsadīya sūkta, desire is “the first seed of mind.” In the Atharvaveda, Kāma is invoked. This is not yet “erotic literature.” It is cosmology.

Classical dharma literature names kāma as one of the four puruṣārthas, the legitimate aims of a human life, alongside dharma, artha, and mokṣa. To treat kāma as a sin to be deleted is to misread the tradition that also wrote the laws. The argument is about measure and season, not about whether desire belongs to a human being.

Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta is a poem of viraha, love in separation; the force that makes the yakṣa send a cloud is kāma under the sign of absence. Jayadeva’s Gīta Govinda makes kāma and bhakti change clothes until Krishna’s desire and Rādhā’s anger are a theology. The Kāmasūtra, for its part, is a book of social aesthetics, house, courtesy, the arts, as much as of sexual technique.

Semantic range

• Wish, want, desire as such, including for non-sexual objects.
• Pleasure, including aesthetic and sensual pleasure.
• Sexual love and the domain of the erotic arts.
• A god; a puruṣārtha; a problem for the yogin, who must know it without pretending not to have it.

Semantic change

Colonial and later English made “kama” mean “Hindu sex,” often with a leer toward the Kāmasūtra. That is a reduction of a word that can name the wish that founded the mind. Modern Indian languages keep kām / kaam in compounds where English hears only lust.