Indian
Mallanaga Vatsyayana compiled the Kama Sutra in Sanskrit somewhere between the second and fourth centuries CE, probably in Pataliputra, and almost nothing else is known about him. He says in his own text that he wrote it in celibacy and in contemplation of the divine, compressing a much larger earlier literature on kama that he names and credits. He was a systematiser rather than an inventor: he cites Babhravya, Dattaka, and Suvarnanabha, all of whose treatises are lost. His work belongs to the Sanskrit tradition of shastra, technical manuals covering each of the aims of human life, and only one of its seven books concerns sexual positions. The rest describe how a cultivated man should furnish a house, what a wife's household duties are, how courtesans should manage clients and money, and how to conduct an affair. Richard Burton's 1883 English version made him famous in the West for the wrong reasons.