I love good vintage erotica, and it’s always a treat to find an example I’ve not read before.

Venus in India (or Love Adventures in Hindustan), by Captain Charles Devereaux, purports to be a memoir of the good captain’s service in India and Afghanistan at the height of the British Empire. First published in Paris in 1895 (though – as with all Victorian erotica, hard bibliographic data is scarce and there may be unknown earlier editions), the book would probably have been found on the same shelves as My Secret Life and illicit volumes of The Pearl in the libraries of collectors and epicures of naughty writing.

Whether Devereaux was an actual soldier for the empire or only a clever fictioneer, the story is full of convincing details about life in the hot climes, where the conventions of English life are quickly abandoned by our tireless hero. As the old joke goes:

“Do you like Kipling?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never kipled.”

The characters in Venus kiple freely and joyfully. It’s hard not to cast Cary Grant or David Niven in the narrator’s role, dressed in their Gunga Din costumes when they are dressed at all.

Venus is composed of two volumes, usually collected as a single book. Devereaux apparently intended further volumes, but none are known to exist. Volume one tells of his arrival in India, newly wed with a pretty wife back in England, and how he falls instantly into the arms of lovely nymphomaniac Lizzie Wilson, whose carefree embrace of all things erotic quickly scatters the captain’s vows to the incensed wind.

Like most vintage erotica, the book’s main action involves florid, detailed descriptions of sex combined with stories within stories that build the background and provide variety among the kiplers.

Book two depicts Devereaux’s adventures at a new post and his gradual conquest of the three daughters of his commanding officer, Fanny, with whom he falls in love, Amy, who blackmails him into becoming her lover, and Mabel, a sexually precocious 12-year old no modern day publisher would touch.

The book’s style is light and never takes itself too seriously:

The tempest past, we lay in one another’s arms; tenderly gazing into one another’s eyes. We were too breathless to speak at first. I could feel her belly heaving against mine, and her throbbing cunnie clasped my tool as though it had been another hand, whilst her motte leaped and bounded! I looked into that angelic-looking face, and drank in the intense beauty of it, nor could I believe it could be an abandoned woman, but rather Venus herself, whom I held thus clasped in my arms, and whose tender and voluptuous thighs encircled mine! I could have wished that she held her peace and let me dream that I was the much desired Adonis, and she my persistent, longing Venus, and that I had at length won her amorous wishes, and found the heaven in her arms of which, before I entered her matchless cleft, I had no notion. But my airy fancies were dispelled by her saying:

“You are a good poke and no mistake! Oh! You know how to do it! No fellow ever rams it like that without he has been taught!”

Apart from the novel’s intrinsic entertainment value, it is culturally interesting as a document of its times, as underground literature always tends to be. While Devereaux is always cynical about the hypocritical values of Victorian society, it is notable that none of his sexual unions are with Indian women (although he is tempted by them). All his lovers are English girls and it is the setting, India itself, which is the erotic stimulant that makes his adventures possible.

Perhaps the most interesting character in the book is an Indian woman named Sugdaya, the native caretaker of the Selwyn family. Sugdaya contrives to have all the sisters become Devereaux's lovers and even incites the 12-year old to sexual mischief. She is the living spirit of the erotic east, an embodiment of the exotic Orientalism that illuminates so much English art and literature of the 19^th Century.

It’s interesting too that Devereaux’s entry into the sister’s “crannies” is enabled by a rapacious attack by vengeful Afghanis on the daughters, including a brutally vivid buggering of one of the girls by a dusky skinned brute. As the hero of their rescue, the captain is afforded liberties he might not otherwise have with the young ladies.

India in the book stands for sexuality. It inflames the senses and enlivens the slow blood of empire. One of the side stories that is unfortunately never elaborated on (perhaps it would have been in book 3) is the story of an officer’s wife who, repulsed by his anal appetites, becomes a famous harlot to enrich herself and humiliate him but she also acts out of an appreciation of her own sexuality, awakened by her life in the orient.

Keeping in mind that a work like this intentionally puts itself at odds with the values of the society that produces it, the expressions here are still powerful and point toward the 20^th Century, when the hemispheres mingled on a more equal basis and eastern eroticism became a staple of western culture with the spread of the Kama Sutra, Vama Marga rites, and Euro cinema exotica.

East may be east and west, west, but the two have certainly come together nicely since Captain Devereaux’s time.