English: The Kama Sutra is a Hindu text, whose title literally means "a treatise on desire / emotional pleasure / love / sex". It is likely a 3rd- or 4th-century CE text according to scholars, but some estimates place it centuries before or after that range. It is a Sanskrit text by Vatsyayana Mallanaga. Vatsyayana mentions in the Kama Sutra that his work relies on earlier Kama sastra texts. He cites them, but these older texts have not survived into the modern era. The Kamasutra exists in many Indic scripts. Being a sutra, it is terse and distilled.

The text has attracted scholarly studies since the ancient times, and these are called bhasya (commentaries that include interpretation, citations and views of the scholar). It is one of many popular Hindu text that has attracted translations in and outside India over the centuries. One of the most important and well-known commentaries on the Kama Sutra is by Yashodhara, named Jayamangala (c. 13th-century).

The manuscript above is a commentary copied and preserved by the Raghunath Hindu temple in old Jammu city in the 19th-century.

This manuscript was acquired by the temple in the 19th-century, and was produced in or before. The photo above is of a 2D artwork from the text that was itself authored more than 500 years ago. Therefore Wikimedia Commons PD-Art licensing guidelines apply. Any rights I have as a photographer is herewith donated to wikimedia commons under CC 4.0 license.