Now the highly praised original Viking Penguin edition--in the author's opinion as of December 2005, the most authentic version in English--has been republished by Invisible Man Books. (He has withdrawn his approval from the American edition and also from One Little Indian--an explanation of this may be gleaned from the Preface to the Invisible Man Books Edition). An Italian edition, Il Kamasutra Riveduto e Corretto, has also just been published.

The Revised Kama Sutra tells the story of Vijay Prabhu, a small-town, middle-class Indian boy, a survivor of assorted Jesuit boarding schools and the Five Pillars of Oppression—bells, canes, penis shame, girl shame, and sports. Filled with erotic longing and a deep desire to be free of conservative Mangalore, Vijay Prabhu embarks on a sexual and spiritual odyssey that finally ends in America , the land of free sex, free speech, greenbacks, and Campbell ’s Cream of Chicken Soup.

Along the way, this novel gives us new and gloriously comic insights into sex, childhood, colonialism, desire, ambition, women, and naïve Third World dreamers of the American Dream.

Though this is a rich and multi-layered story probing the politics of desire, colonialism, and the missionary position 500 years after the Portuguese arrival in India in 1498, the writing is "such a sheer pleasure" (Financial Express) and the combination of subject, story, and style so unique among modern novels that two reviewers characterized the book as "unputdownable" (The Pioneer) and "delicate and hilarious" (The Face). An utterly readable, "refreshing", and unique India without the usual clichés and sacred cows.

Prologue

PART I: THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM, or

ENCOUNTERS WITH DHARMA 1

1. The Churchill Factor 3

2. The Beginnings of Sorrow 7

3. The Aunt Who Loved Water Sports 15

4. Underwear 21

5. The Water of Life 30

6. Bag Lady 40

7. The Five Pillars of Oppression 51

PART II: TURNING AWAY THE DOGS OF GOD, 65

Or, In The Time of Artha

8. Reunion 67

9. Low Living, High Thinking 76

10. Prometheus Unzipped 86

12. How To Succeed 100

13. Love in the Region of Filaria 116

14. The Road to a Woman's Heart 124

15. Domestic Bliss 133

16. Kiss Kiss Kill Kill 146

17. Love's Labours Lost 160

PART III: DELICIOUS UNDERTAKINGS, or The Rule of KAMA

18. Dancing School 171

19. City of Nawabs 179

20. The Real Thing 190

21. So Long, Shillong 202

PART 1V: ENDLESS LAUGHTER, or THE MOKSHA EXPRESS

22. The Tao of Power 217

23. Of Human Bondage 232

24. Toil and Trouble 246

25. God Bless America 260

26. Les Miserables (The Beautiful and the Dispossessed) 269

26. Running Away 279

27. Return of the Native 292

28. Moksha Express 309

Epilogue 321

Narrator's Whimsical Glossary 324

THE BEGINNINGS OF SORROW

The sex life of the average human male begins with his Mummy. This most secretly erotic of bonds, more intense in some cultures than in others, is energised and inflamed in our country by unlimited breast-feeding, oil massages, intimate caresses such as may never recur in an often-poor, often-blighted life. And some would argue that that Original Sin of Love never ends, that every significant woman in his life merely takes the place of his dear, dear Mummyji. So momentous is our maternal obsession that we idealise it in concepts such as Divine Mother, Mataji, Goddess, the Eternal Female Principle, and so on, and one out of every three Hindi movies reaches its crisis with a scene like this:
SON [ditching his current skirt-chasing interest and rushing to dying mother’s bedside]: Maaaan!
MOTHER: Don’t call me ‘Maaaan’! I’m not your mother!
SON [in tears]: Don’t say that, Maaaanji! What all you are talking?! If you are not my motherji, who are you ' my Uncleji?
MOTHER [sobbing]: I lied to you, son! I’m not your real mother.
SON: Not my mother?! Haré Rama! Then who is my real motherji? Indira Gandhi? Ganga Devi? V.V. Giri?
MOTHER: Your real mother is . . . Your real mother is . . . [she croaks].
SON: Maan! Maan! Oh, poor, poor, motherless me!
As the plot lurches into the son’s tearfully hysterical search for his real mother, he bursts into a heartrendingly melancholy song. The audience washes the theatre floor with its tears and the box office packs in the loot.
This mystical and sometimes exhausting maternal relationship is the prologue to my own tale, which had begun in Bangalore, where I was born in 1953, moving from the hospital to the very house that Winston Churchill spilt his seed in, presiding over the seminal staining of a tiny fraction of the Empire’s walls. Those early years of innocence, the first fresh years of India’s independence and of the Republic, before assorted dogs began to corrupt my Paradise, were as benign as a mother and child walking in a garden - a timeless scene in a timeless dream-movie.
Look at me, then, in my third year of Paradise, in my first, full-fledged, technicolour memory: I, a little monkey and recent mud-eater, tugging at the blue-flowered sari of a beautiful lady, my mother, as we amble about the luxuriant grounds of the tree-studded garden compound of Churchill’s sometime sub-imperial residence. Mummy’s face is powdered, fair, and young, her dark hair falls straight to mid-back, except for two braids pinned together and adorned with a string of jasmine blossoms, and her red silk blouse is cut low to present to me the twin orbs of my infantile desire. Brilliant white sunshine is tamed and softened by the garden’s jacaranda and gulmohur trees, its begonias and marigolds and chrysanthemums.
We walk out onto the road, empty except for a horse carriage trotting by in a vapour of horse dung and urine-flavoured hay, the horse’s silver anklets tinkling; I am lifted up into a soft cocoon of arms, bosom, and feminine perfume; and soon, we are inside a grey, steepled church, Mummy kneeling, I standing on the bench and saying, ‘Pitty flowers! Pitty eerings!’ as I play with her ears and hair.
‘Sshh! Sshh!’ two old ladies in the front row turn back and say, eyes scolding.
Retreating from their unfamiliar cries, I bury my face in my mother’s sari and brush my nose against the soft skin of her neck and breathe in her rapturous scent " a mixture of soap-of-the-day, Himalaya Bouquet talcum powder, and fresh underarm sweat " a benevolent scent in a benevolent world.
At that time, Bangalore was a paradise blessed with cool breezes, pure air, milkwhite sunlight, endless gardens, and ancient trees. And life, for me, was as colourful and rich as a hawker’s basket of plastic bangles.

"Exuberant, unabashedly raunchy picaresque novel . . . indefatigable good humor transcends the personal to stand for the contradictions and struggles of India as a whole. Considerable, irreverent charm." --Publishers Weekly

"Very Funny!"--Kurt Vonnegut

"Irreverent, unputdownable . . . has a comic timing never seen in any Indian novel to date."--The Indian Express

"An Indian novel with a difference . . . an entertaining romp of a novel, with the Hindu culture at odds with Western sexual freedom. A startling change from A Suitable Boy, Heat and Dust, or The Maneater of Malgudi."--Tim Manderson in "Tim Manderson's Special Selection", PUBLISHING NEWS, U.K.

"Humorous and irrepressibly manic. An Indian Portnoy educated by Catholic nuns."--The Independent, U.K.

"A verbal craftsman . . . hilarious." --Time Out, London

"A delightful and zany debut. Crasta has managed a voice, unlike most Indian authors. This book is the Empire striking back at the new colonists, the land of Coca Cola and Kentucky Chicken. With his zany sense of humor and a chutzpah fed of locker room bravado and a no-holds-barred attitude towards all holy cows, including the Church, has tossed up a desi kind of Portnoy's Complaint."--India Today

"The episodic nature of sex is most believably represented. Hilarious and delicate"
--Kimberly Leston,The Face, U.K.

"A Dickensian tale of a young boy's travails, a comic-sexual odyssey, and a modern Joycean anti-novel. Peppery wit, no-holds-barred, desanitised, Rabelaisian. His concerns lie with the basic instincts of the middle class."--Times of India

"333 pages of pure fun punched with serious matters of contemplation, topped with irreverence at its healthy best. A Pickwickian comedy. The Glossary is a marvelous example of meaningful iconoclasm . . . sounds which make the book sparkle, an audio-reading delight. Exciting innovations . . unabashedly candid, honest, sharp, Camusesque . . . may seem too daring to some."--Debonair

"Delightfully witty . . . unputdownable . . . a novel written from the heart. From the first sentence to the last, the story unfolds in a manner that is not dissimilar to the languid stretching of arms of a woman after making love. Should be read for the sheer pleasure of reading. "--The Pioneer

"Hilarious contemporary Indian novel shot with some serious undercurrents . . . a rich and multifaceted novel . . . an indictment of colonialism and the colonial legacy on which we depend. A surrealist vision of India . . . Important."--The Hindu [Selected as the BOOK CHOICE of the fortnight by this most distinguished Indian newspaper]

"The author's approach to sex is warm, sensitive, and very, very funny. He may well be the best humorist we've had in ages. [But] the book is also about growing up in a time much more innocent than our own. Crasta's tale is both quaint and poignant, qualities sadly absent from life in the naughty nineties."--Business Standard

"The hero is a Tom Jones. Crasta builds upon sex and colonialism--both being tools of control. Sex controls the body; colonialism the land and the consciousness of its people. Crasta uses sex as a liberating phenomenon." --India Abroad, New York

"Manages from the first page to overturn most of our expectations of what the Indian novel should be . . . He gives us a different India, a surprising and refreshing one. The book is clever, funny, lighthearted, readable and sexy . . . rampant, riotous, Rabelaisian. It is that great thing, the novel of literary quality which is capable of being enjoyed by a wide readership, and it has an utterly original voice."
--John Saddler, Transworld Publishers, U.K.

"A craftsman of letters. Hilarious. Almost read it nonstop."
--Khushwant Singh, prolific author/critic, India's most widely read columnist.

"Penguin's hot new book now making waves has a hero with a perpetual bulge in his pants and the Stars and Stripes in his eyes. An undiluted ode to the omnipresent Oedipus in the Indian male psyche. Personifies the post-Independence Indian male."--Canara Times

"The book is about growing up with a half-empty stomach and a constant state of arousal . . . In a bittersweet satirical way, the book is about the life of an average Everyman from India. Crasta, who has taken the humor in the book to the point of near subversion, has managed to encapsulate the feelings of an entire generation of Indian men."--Masala Magazine, New York.

"A serious, intelligent writer who means business. Witty, snappily written dialogue . . . an insightful protest against the way the colonial mentality still pervades our lives."--Society

"Crasta has created waves with his non-conformist novel . . . which has arrived on the Indian literary scene with a resounding bang. The author delves into the labyrinthine relationship between Indian men and women, especially across class lines. A brutally honest picture of the male mind. It is an examination of the identity of the Mangalorean Catholics and Indian Christians living in an overwhelmingly Hindu society and of their complex relationship with their ancestral religion." --Amrita Bazaar Patrika

"Much that is real and genuine. Surprises you with its remarkable perceptivity." --Times of India.

"Sensational . . . fascinating . . . a writer who refuses to say things the way they've always been said, and manages to find new ways of saying them. A writer who makes you laugh, but also makes you question your value systems. Revels in bawdy, earthy sex, but talks poignantly and yearningly of love. A refreshing revolt against our boring, middle-class mores . . . our rarely confessed prudery. Crasta has spoken out against censorship, against oppression."--SOCIETY

"Delightful . . . unpretentious . . . such pleasurable reading."--FINANCIAL EXPRESS.

"He brings to the English language a freshness we've stopped expecting from our reigning literary lions."--Business Standard

"The Rushdie of Catholicism"--The Asian Times, London

"Enough to get him banned and excommunicated."--The Hindu