The stories of Arabian Nights begin with a string of adulterous affairs that end in murder.

Central to its stories are Scheherazade, the female narrator of the tales, who cleverly
staves off her imminent death at the hands of her husband, indefinitely, every night, by
promising to tell a more compelling story, the next day, if she is allowed to live for one more night.

Scheherazade’s tales are filled with sensual pleasure, palaces with bubbling fountains, young men with skin “the colour of fresh dates” and young girls “like jasmine nudes” whose love making sets
off new adventures.

The deep understanding of female sexuality, shown in the tales, have prompted some psychoanalysts to speculate that Arabian Nights might have been conceived by women, just
like many scholars now believe that the book on ‘Courtesans’ in Kamasutra might have been commissioned by the women of Patliputra (modern day Patna).Women reign at the heart of pleasure in both these books.

Not surprisingly, the idea was too much to stomach for the Europeans, reeling under the vice-like grip of Christian sex phobia and misogyny. Fearing religious and cultural backlash, Kamasutra was kept a secret in the West for a long time. Explorer Richard Burton, who first published it in English in 1883 (ungratefully ignoring the Indian translators who did the work for him) had to invent a fictitious publishing house to escape censorship. Two years later, he published Arabian Nights.

The first French version of Kamasutra had to be published anonymously in 1913, as its contents were too hot to handle even for the country cousins of Marquis de Sade, the emperor of depravity. Perhaps it’s a quirk of destiny then that both these texts are now more respected and admired in the West than in the East.