Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire [Apr 30, 2007] Satwik, Ambarish by Ambarish Satwik

Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire [Apr 30, 2007] Satwik, Ambarish Reviews

• 
  Sudhang Shankar

  Satwik's proposition: that the seat of power lies literally in the seat of power, makes sense. Much wheeling and dealing is done behind closed doors, as is other private activity. Surely the two are connected?
  
  Perineum, starts off on this theme with a fanciful story of Robert Clive's corrective surgery ("Robert, I shall have to make you a Moor") back in the days when he was a mere clerk. By the end of the short chapter with its squirm-inducing detail of the procedure, one doesn't find the concept of his miraculous fortune being linked to this watershed moment outlandish. The best of the stories in this collection are like that. They don't require you to suspend disbelief, it suspends itself.
  
  It isn't all humour and scatological references for Satwik, though: some of the stories, like that of the half-caste Mary Carey (forbidden from boarding a ship of deserters leaving Fort St. George for being half brown, thrown into the Black Hole of Calcutta for being half white) are filled with genuine pathos.
  
  The book could easily have been a mere shocker, one that makes you reel while reading, but forget about it afterwards, but Satwik's deft period-appropriate prose and his underlying sensitivity (ha!) make his best stories the sort you would read again, this time, with a medical dictionary alongside.
• 
  Greeshma

  I have so many unresolved feelings about this book. It's so full of brusque imageries that as you read, you gasp for a sense of rootedness. The anecdotes carry this strange unwholesome and repulsive burden of the past, of the Britishers, of India and of the Empire carrying on with its agendas as the body flails and fails. But these stories also feel too intimate to be splashed thus in the annals of history. Is it a distortion or is it a rewrite?
  
  Such an eclectic collection of stories, of the underbelly that was the Empire. The anecdotes range from Jinnah's last ejaculation, to Babadur Shah's love(?) for enema as was given to him by his daughter-in-law, to Edward Baker's diseased groin as a singular metaphor of a decaying(?) Raisina in Lutyen's eyes, the stories carry some real scrotal punch.
  
  I'm wavering in terms of the prose though. It's a funny book in parts but the prose is not as lucid as it is lurid. Then again, the language is distant. It tries to be so prosaic and it's so full of surgical (Ambarish is a surgeon after all) terms that the prose lacks that efficiency in delivering its intended meaning at times. Though the author does provide some context towards the end of each story which is some respite.
  
  Read at your own peril though. You might realize that there exists a slight puritanical side to you reading some of these excerpts.
• 
  Divij Sood

  What a disaster of a book...
• 
  Lalit

  Completely crazy entertaining and horrifying read at the same time. Read at your own peril. And yes do have a Medical Encyclopedia with you( PS the Older the edition the better it will be).
• 
  Akhilesh Kumar

  Worst book ever read by me.