Most studies on erotic representations from early India focus either on their ritual-cultic role or on their putative courtly settings, thereby only inadequately deferring to the wider socio-emotional milieu in which such representations were produced and to which they might relate. This paper argues that there is a strong connection between erotic representation and urbanism in cultural material from early India. As a significant illustration, it looks at a body of classical Sanskrit literature called kavya – aesthetic poetry, drama and tale – and allied texts like the Kamasutra, which concertedly display this connection. It samples an array of the eroticised characters and patterns of behaviour these texts locate in and identify with the city, in the process characterizing the city as a centre of kama culture -- a culture of love, desire and eros. This paper then, seminally, proposes various explanations for why the city is so represented, including the role of aesthetic conventions, on the one hand, civilizational discourse such as that of trivarga (dharma, artha, kama) on the other, and of socio-sexual attitudes, moral conflicts and behavioral unorthodoxy generated in and peculiar to the early Indian city. A fundamentally sociological contextualisation of love and sex in a cuturally specific milieu is thereby achieved as also a scrutiny of urban structure, processes and qualities, like heterogeneity and the attenuated hold of tradition, that yield such a complex treatment of the emotion and consequences of love.
