The winner's preface is a graveyard map

Claim (verbatim)

The Kāmasūtra opens with a bibliography of its own extinction event: an original attributed to Nandin in a thousand chapters, condensed by Śvetaketu Auddālaki to five hundred, recut by Bābhravya Pāñcāla to one hundred and fifty in seven sections, then parcelled out among seven specialists — Cārāyaṇa on generalities, Suvarṇanābha on union, Ghoṭakamukha on maidens, Gonardīya on wives, Goṇikāputra on other men's wives, Dattaka on courtesans (commissioned, the text says, by the courtesans of Pāṭaliputra), Kucumāra on esoteric recipes — until Vātsyāyana, finding the science scattered in specialist monographs difficult to obtain, recompressed the whole into one book. Every predecessor is lost; the cascade survives only as the winner's preface, seconded by Yaśodhara's thirteenth-century commentary. But Vātsyāyana does not merely list his sources — he argues with them by name throughout the work, and that turns the preface into an auditable claim: if he genuinely worked from the seven monographs, each specialist's dissents should surface where that specialist's subject is on the table, not decoratively scattered. Prediction: tallying every named citation of the seven specialists across the Kāmasūtra's seven books, for at least five of the seven the modal citation site will be the very book matching the specialization the preface assigns him, and the pooled own-book share of named citations will exceed 60% (primary clause: the five-of-seven modal match; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: count name-occurrences per book in the e-text and cross-tabulate against the preface's assignments in Kāmasūtra 1.1. Kill: the GRETIL e-text of Vātsyāyana's Kāmasūtra with Yaśodhara's Jayamaṅgalā (Nirṇaya Sāgara and Chowkhamba editions), the assignments standing in the opening adhikaraṇa.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: tallying every named citation of the seven specialists across the Kāmasūtra's seven books, for at least five of the seven the modal citation site will be the very book matching the specialization the preface assigns him, and the pooled own-book share of named citations will exceed 60% (primary clause: the five-of-seven modal match; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: count name-occurrences per book in the e-text and cross-tabulate against the preface's assignments in Kāmasūtra 1.1.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the GRETIL e-text of Vātsyāyana's Kāmasūtra with Yaśodhara's Jayamaṅgalā (Nirṇaya Sāgara and Chowkhamba editions), the assignments standing in the opening adhikaraṇa.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The preface's cascade and the seven specialists' subject assignments (Kamasutra 1.1) are textbook, and the scholarship registers that Vatsyayana argues with the named authorities throughout the work; but the positional tabulation - modal citation site per specialist matched against the preface's assignment, with a pooled own-book share - was not located as ever having been computed.

• H.C. Chakladar, Social Life in Ancient India: A Study in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra (Calcutta, 1929)
• W. Doniger & S. Kakar (trans.), Kamasutra (Oxford, 2002), introduction

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.