The Kama Sutra Diaries Intimate Journeys through Modern India

Sally Howard, a self-confessed child of the Western Sexual Revolution, sets out on a sexploration through modern India by train, plane and auto-rickshaw.

From the heat of anti-rape protest on the streets of New Delhi to the cool hills of Shimla, playground of the Raj; from a Gujurati retirement home for gay men and eunuchs to a busy sex clinic in Chennai; from patriarchs to matriarchs; GIGs (Good Indian Girls), BIGs (Bad Indian Girls) and the fleshpots of Bombay, she accompanied by feisty Delhi girl Dimple lifts the bed sheets on India's sexual revolution.

And it's a revolution that's full of fascinating surprises and contrasts; for India - the land that gave us that exuberant guide to sexual pleasure, the Kama Sutra - is also the land where women remain cloistered in purdah while teenage girls check out porn online; where families bow down to a conjoined phallus and vagina, the Shivaling, while couples fear to hold hands in public; and where the loveless arranged marriage is still the norm.

Colourful, compelling, confounding, The Kama Sutra Diaries reveal what India has to tell us about modern-day love, sex and sexuality.

Sally Howard is a travel and human-interest journalist who writes regularly on India for some of the world s most prestigious media, including The Sunday Times, the Telegraph, and Forbes. She spends at least six months of the year on the road, primarily in South and East Asia from where she has reported on such diverse issues as the re-emergence of concubines in booming Beijing to the rise of the Indian love marriage.