Sex and the Sanskrit Classics: Untranslatability, Code-switching, and Sexed-up Translations

Abstract

By looking at some unconventional and hitherto unstudied episodes in the modern reception history of two erotic stanzas ascribed to Bhartṛhari—translated into French and Latin by Hippolyte Fauche, and into Hindi and English by Purohit Gopinath—this paper aims to complicate the narrative about the (un)translatability of sex as represented in Sanskrit classical poetry, and to move beyond more traditional narratives of obfusca-tion and censorship of sex in the classics (usually understood as the Graeco-Roman classics) during the long nineteenth century.