NEFZAWI VERSUS VATSYANA

NEFZAWI VERSUS VATSYANA
SEX MANUALS IN LAHORE

A history of impotence

Love in olden times
Love in olden times

A round about in a rickshaw around the city of Lahore is still good even with all the dust and the smoke. Here and there you come across advertisements related to curing impotence in man. A plethora of video advertisements on the cable come again and again of Hakeems promising eternal youth to everyone. German and Greek remedies abound everywhere. Recipes concerning fish aphrodisiacs are a mile a dozen. Is this a new phenomena, man obsessed with his virility? Certainly not. A peek at old newspapers say the same story. I took out a copy of the Lahore Chronicle an English daily which used to come out of Lahore in the 1850s, and even that was full of cures for sexual dysfunction. Making ‘SANDO’ of ordinary men. Sando of course was a heavy weight wrestler and body builder of the 19th century.

Why stop here? Why not take another peek at the back. Sultan Masood Ghaznavi was having a new castle made, and to enhance his libido, he decided to have his bedroom painted with pictures from some unknown Sex Manual of Lahore. The historian Baihqai tells us of this sex room of the Sultan in the 11th century, probably around 1040 AD. But Masood’s obsession was short lived, as Sultan Mahmood Ghaznavi was still alive then. Fearing reprisal from his puritan father, he had the room white washed even before he could be reprimanded for same. We have a re-occurring illustrated manual of LAZAT-UL-NISA circulating all the time in Lahore. This manual was there in the Sultanate period as well as the Mughals and later on too. It seems that there was a dog fight between the Perfumed Garden of Sheikh Nefzawi and the Kama Sutra of Vatsyana.

Kama Sutra
Kama Sutra

The word VATSYANA is even used today. Punjabis referring to another person say, ‘BARA VATSYANA HAIN’. That means you are full of wisdom, aren’t you. Not realizing that the author penned the Sex Manual of India thousands of years ago and named it Kama Sutra. The Hindu religion records different ways of approaching the worship of Bhagwan (god). and Sex is one of them. But the many ways recorded by him of sexual nature, are allergic to the Islamic way of life. What could better prove the validity of the Two Nation theory, than the Sex Manuals of both culture? Our culture was more indebted to the Perfumed Garden of Sheikh Nefzawi, more in line with Muslim traditions and dreams. For instance Vatsyana considers it legal and morally correct for all male Brahmans to have sex with wives and women of other classes of men (all three lower classes) , but considers it illegal and immoral for lower caste men to have any kind of sex relation with the upper class of women. Vatsyana also recomends the use of shields made of gold for impotent men, even if they injure their mates to death. So the difference was there all the time.

Eugen Sandow the culture
Eugen Sandow the culture

The hand made Sex manuals abounded in Lahore, and some used to be made in the hujras of the Wazeer Khan mosque itself. I have seen copies of such manuals with Provence stating them to have been made in the mosque itself. And then the printing age came in. And from ‘Lazat ul Nisa’, the manuals became ‘Shadi ke hiyadatain’. You see these copies printed on cheap newspaper circulating in Urdu Bazaar and Anarkali bazaar to this day. It seems man is obsessed with his Sexual dysfunction and has to find ways and means out of same. The American revolution came to Pakistan with Viagra and Cialis, and has resulted in unknown death of many people.. This is particularly true with the use of the Indian Viagra which is considered to be cheap in price. All societies have issues, and all societies try to resolve them in their own particular way.

One thought on “NEFZAWI VERSUS VATSYANA”

Leave a Reply to Arif Rahman Chughtai Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.