The erotic tradition in India is thousands of years old. In The Parrots of Desire, the modern reader, to whom the anthology is dedicated, will find a wealth of Indian erotic writing-beyond the famously unbridled passages of the Kama Sutra and Koka Shastra. There is, for instance, the extract 'Why does sex exist?' recreated from the 3,000-year-old Rig Veda; the work of the Tamil Sangam poets, whose contemporary finesse belies their antiquity; Bhakti...