WHEN I first sug-gested to my wife that she might like to choose an item from the Kama Sutra's new, totally revamped menu, her reaction was brusque. She stated bluntly that it was the Ashton Lane branch of Glasgow's Ashoka restaurant for her or nothing.

Even I might have noticed, she continued with the merest hint of sarcasm, that she had long been a committed devotee of the Ashoka's Bhuna chicken.

''No, no, darling!'' I riposted. ''In the bedroom! The Kama Sutra! The marital arts!''

It was at this point that my wife insisted there was no way I was going to stand in front of the mirrored wardrobes again and perform a piteous chop-socky-ricked-back repeat of my Jacky Chan-leaping-tiger-in-the-boudoir routine.

Yup, there are a lot of misconceptions about the Kama Sutra. Wendy Doniger knows this better than anyone. She's the American academic who has just written the first 100% accurate translation of the notorious 1700-year-old Indian treatise on living a life of pleasure.

Beloved of sniggering schoolboys, the Kama Sutra has hitherto been seen solely as a smut-propelled list of sexual positions. This is the biggest misconception about the Kama Sutra, but not the most basic one, says Doniger, temporarily absenting herself from her usual teaching role

at the University of Chicago to

undertake a whistle-stop tour of the British media.

''All the misconceptions spring from people not actually having read the Kama Sutra in its best-known English translation by Victorian explorer Richard Burton,'' says Doniger, a graduate of both Radcliffe and Harvard; an expert in Sanskrit, the language in which the book was originally written, as well as being an Oxford DPhil in oriental studies and a lecturer in divinity.

But even if more people had read Burton's 1883 version, they'd still be a long way from the truth - one truth being that the Kama Sutra

is actually the Kamasutra. Then again, even well-read, highly-qualified academics have missed some essential truths about the Kamasutra, as Doniger explains with commendable honesty.

''There's an old gag in college circles about one professor saying to another: 'Have you read such-and-such a book?' and getting the reply: 'Read it? I haven't even reviewed it yet!'

''I first read Burton's English translation, and had probably been teaching classes on the book for a few years without having read it in Sanskrit. Burton's version read well, plus it had been used a lot in teaching since it became legal in 1962, the year I graduated from Radcliffe.

''Then one of my students found a problem which sent me back to the Sanskrit - and I had a very unpleasant shock. I had to tell my classes that Burton Kamasutra texts I'd been citing were wrong, and so they couldn't cite them in exams. I felt terrible - I was a failure, I'd ruined the course.''

What was wrong? Acting in the unconscious causes of male supremacy and nineteenth-century British colonialism, Burton had committed a number of wilful inexactitudes when it came to the Kamasutra's reportage of sexual liaisons.

Specifically, he deliberately downplayed all notions of female sexual pleasure. He entirely re-wrote the book's advice to wives whose men are unfaithful, contradicting an injunction that they be justly scolded for their wrongdoing.

In addition, Burton presented a subsequent commentary on the original text, written 1000 years later, as if it were part of Vatsyayana Mallanaga's work.

Perhaps most crucially as far as generations of school playground smut-hounds are concerned, Burton misappropriated two Sanskrit words which only exist elsewhere as terms in Indian figurative art - lingam and yoni - and wrongly applied them to the male and female sexual organs.

''The book's third-century Sanskrit author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, simply refers to them as genitals,'' says Doniger.

''Burton wanted to avoid being equally frank in English, and he also seemed keen to encourage his Victorian readership to think of Indian Hindus as being dirty, weird, and animalistic, with weird sexual organs - these strange-sounding lingams and yonis. There was something pseudo-pornographic going on there, too, at a time of moral clampdown, when the Victorians were repressing their own sexuality.

''He was propagating an Orientalist view, supporting colonial attitudes. 'These people aren't as intelligent, civilised, or controlled as we are. They're more childish and readily governed by their emotions'.''

Similarly, Victorian prurience has led to the erroneous contemporary belief that the Kamasutra is exclusively about sex, and graphic physical acts. ''Out of the Kamasutra's seven books,'' says Doniger, ''only two chapters in one book are about physical sex. That's three pages out of 200.

''It was Burton who gave numbers to some sexual acts, when there were no numbers to begin with. He over-emphasised the mechanical in a very non-sexy, superficial way.

''He's thus misrepresented some far more intimate, sensual, vivid, extraordinarily detailed, and frank descriptions of love-making . . . about, say, what a man can do when he's inside a woman, or when a woman is on top of a man. In Burton, it boils down 'Number 4 - up against a tree.'

''There's also an educational passage about fellatio, which plainly in the original refers to the act occurring between male homosexuals. Suppressing any mention of homosexuality, Burton chooses to call them 'eunuchs', which ruins the whole thing.''

In other words, whenever physical sex raised its singular head in the Kamasutra's narrative, Burton opted to look the other way. However, as we've established, sex is only a small part of the book.

DONIGER points out: ''Book two is the one which concerns the sexual act, and yet the bulk of the writing is about kissing and embracing. Three-quarters of the book is about the psychology of sex. It's a subtle, highly civilised book about relations between men and women. It's about how to make someone like you. How to get rid of a lover you no longer care for.

''How to send signals to a possible partner without them being seen by anyone else. How to spot whether another man's wife might be willing to engage in adultery; what thought-processes might inhibit an otherwise willingly adulterous wife. How to overcome female resistance.

''There's a book devoted to aphrodisiacs, and another advising courtesans how to chose their lovers - something which has a greater resonance for women in our time than it did then, as it assumes a greater freedom for women than was true in that era.

''There's also lots of accurate information about ancient India - what they ate at that time; what they wore; how they furnished their homes; what they planted in their gardens.''

Conversely, Burton's text posed other questions for modern interpreters of the Kamasutra, once Doniger had been inadvertently encouraged to undertake her three-year-long process of translation by one of her students in Chicago.

''She was doing a publishing course that required her to devise a marketing strategy for a virtual book.

''So I ended up being presented with virtual publicity that said: 'The story that must be translated accurately at last! And Wendy Doniger is the ideal person!' She convinced me I was.

''But I decided I had to be a lot more direct in my writing than Burton was. He was obviously writing for his time, for Victorians, when language was more flowery, more elaborate to the point of being padded so much so that it's hard to see the point of some of his sentences.

''I hope my translation from Sanskrit more evokes Hemingway. I see it as punchier and easy to understand; more readily applied to the lives we lead today. In fact, there's a lot of direct speech in the original that comes over very well; that doesn't have you thinking 'Wow, these ancient Indians were weird'.''

One mystery persists about the original text, though. ''Unlike most of the Indian texts of the time and, indeed, unlike ones which predate the Kamasutra, it has no mention of the caste system. No-one is identified by class, which is unique.

''It's a fantasy of sexual freedom, in which the hero is a man-about-town who never goes to work. He never dutifully visits his mother. He has no social ties. He spends all his time teaching parrots to speak, going to cock-fights, and thinking of ways to give women pleasure.''

There's perhaps one other mystery, too: how did a well-educated New Yorker get mixed up in the steamy waters of the Kamasutra?

''As a kid I was fascinated by fairy tales, long agos and faraways, make-believe. In my teens, my mother gave me E M Forster's A Passage to India, which entranced me.

''I began to learn more about a country that eats food with its fingers - to me, that was a place that had to have something going for it, as I'd always hated knives and forks. Then I studied Latin and Greek, and my Greek teacher told me Sanskrit was way more fun than Greek.

''Plus, ancient India's got fantasy literature, and an eroticism to its paintings and sculpture. It's got rich fabrics and sensuous music.

''Additionally, as a Jewish emigrant, I naturally grew up always being interested in other cultures - you're on the fringes of other cultures all the time. You speak one language at home; another in the street.''

Hence the laudable bi-cultural impulse which led Wendy Doniger to a new Kamasutra. Imperfectly paraphrasing Richard Burton, I thus feel the onset of a new message for my wife: ''Let's try position 472. You'll be me, and I'll be you - ooh!''

Kamasutra, by Vatsyayana Mallanaga; translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kaka. Published next Thursday by the Oxford University Press, (pounds) 14.99.