"Swipe Right on the Kama Sutra: Love, Longing, and the Politics of Desire in Ancient India"
with Aditi Angiras and Riya Sarkar

The Kama Sutra has survived two thousand years, colonial censorship, and the internet, and is still mostly misunderstood. Written in early classical India, it was never intended as a handbook of erotic technique. It was a guide to living with desire: how attraction works, how intimacy is negotiated, and how pleasure fits alongside duty, wealth, and liberation.

In this illustrated, storytelling-led talk, Riya Sarkar and Aditi Angiras use the Kama Sutra to explore how ancient South Asia understood love in all its forms, from secret affairs to sanctioned relationships, from romance to strategy. Desire was not hidden or moralised, but studied, organised, and given rules. Moving beyond the familiar man–woman binary, the evening also looks at figures of the “third nature” as essential social actors in a world that understood wanting as powerful and disruptive.

Drawing on art, poetry, mythology, and cinema, the talk asks what intimacy and freedom meant in the past, and why those ideas still unsettle us today.

Doors 12pm
Introduction 12:25pm
Lecture 12:30pm
Q&A 13:10pm