Empire and its carnal hubris

Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire

Ambarish Satwik, Penguin Books, 2007,

Pages 159, Price Rs 200

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata

If anal, rectal, penile, and vaginal metaphors were to be enmeshed in Victorian verbiage and inserted into a medical journal, the academic reading would become worthy of quarantine like strains of bubonic plague. If the British Empire forcing Hindu and Muslim soldiers to cut with their mouths bullets which had ends daubed in animal fat is said to have ushered in the first war of Indian Independence in 1857, here is the counterfoil that could call the Raj to insurrection. Call it a clinically carnal smut but here is a book where you get to discover emissaries of colonialism — like Lord Clive, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Dr Haffkine and King George V, flagrante delicto, that is, in such states of wanton undress, that you wonder how this book has avoided proscription.

Drawing heavily upon what noted French philosopher Michelle Foucault called 'the verbalisation of the pathological', Ambarish Satwik uses a faux-colonial language, turned typically askew, to batter the holy cows of the British Raj. Being a surgeon himself, Satwik's art of 'mainstreaming' medical rhetoric, for its deliberately prurient style, helps him to make the book a hilariously scathing satire.

The 13 stories in the book are so subversive and irreverent that one finds it difficult to find another so delectable an instance of literary cross-dressing. He starts with Robert Clive, whom Karl Marx called as the 'great robber' for hypocritically prating in Europe about the inviolable sanctity of the national debt, or the debt of the British Empire, while confiscating in India the dividends of the rajahs who had invested their private savings in the East India Company's own funds. He leaves aside the history of 1757, when on account of the British victory at Plassey, a military force led by Clive defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, and the East India Company found itself transformed from an association of traders to rulers exercising political sovereignty over a largely unknown land and people.

While this much we know about why we should loathe Clive, Satwik makes such a pigmy of Clive that had he been alive to read this fictive account, he would not have required to slit his own throat with a pen knife that the 18th century gentlemen used to sharpen their quill pens with. Why did Clive become a predator? Dr Ives' remark about Robert Clive, dated September 2, 1757, notes — “His inordinate erectability is like that of ye Simiae, who are purportedly extreamly Copulatory" (sic.). In Satwik's hand, Bobby Clive is seen lusting after one 'particular wench'. His circumcision is pending and the task is entrusted to John Rae, a British civil surgeon whose 'principal recreation of his life in Madras was restoring ye genital parts of ye company curs' like Bobby Clive. Often, he gets his own thrills by acting out his perversions by seeing the company's 'communal whore' whose 'orifices showed good husbandry and splendid form' — “There she was, squatting before him after coition and pissing in three distinct streams, each in the happy colour of the Leburnum flower.” And in what state was Clive's organ? “The head was therefore swollen, and full of fluid and ignominy”. The circumcision over, Clive could indulge in a “little bloodletting in the Carnatic” and can have both a lair and a wench of his own (“not some shared whore”). As if Clive's circumcision and the urgency of his libido being set right was anticipatory of two hundred years of British rule!

In the early days of the company's rule a legend was constructed around the 'Black Hole of Calcutta'. Satwik bases the story called Mongrel on the capture of Fort William and Calcutta, the principal possession of the East India Company in 1756, by Siraj-ud-daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. In a small and airless dungeon at Fort William, most of the146 people imprisoned are said to have died. The 'Black Hole of Calcutta', became an emblem of the villainy of the Indians, mostly recounted by the survivor John Zephaniah Holwell, who gave currency to the colonial stereotype of Indians as a base, cowardly, and despotic people. The account has been proved to be grossly incorrect and Satwik jibes at the colonisers by drawing in Mary Carey, one of the survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, who is refused place on the boat of fleeing British refugees because she's a half-caste and imprisoned in the Black Hole because she's white.

One can think that Satwik does his bit of venal counter-mythography to punch a hole in the pathology of British colonial power. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58 gave rise to an elaborate mythography on both sides. Delhi was recaptured by British troops in late 1857, the Emperor Bahadur Shah, last of the Mughals, was put on trial for sedition and predictably convicted, and by mid-1858 the Mutiny had been entirely crushed. Based on this, 'The Beresfords' is a violent tale of rioters in Delhi in 1857 marauding an English household, crucifying Sarah naked, and raping Rebecca, a “rapturously beautiful” girl of seventeen, to death most brutally, simply because colonisers have to be avenged.

In 'Vaginismus', we get to know of Sir Henry Lawrence, the chief commissioner of Oudh, who died of the wounds from a howitzer shell ripping his genitals and splintering his pelvic bone in 1857. In the form of diary entry by his wife, Honoria, we learn that Henry loved to masturbate while compelling his wife to be Bella as in the The Autobiography of a Flea. Honoria plays to his sick fantasy and rues that “coition brings no telos and no equity” to her and wonders if the “subordination of the female is a Christian ideal” until hubris strikes at the punishing organ of her husband to set her free from the “strange sequelae of perversions” of Henry.

Why was the Indian capital shifted from Calcutta to Delhi? It was, Satwik tell us, due to King George V's testicular torsion (and Ajmal Khan's workings on the Sovereign's testicle). What led the Viceroy to grant concessions that eventually got India its freedom? It was his lack of sphincter control. What is the reason for the changed gradient of the Raisina Hill? As 'Baker's Scrotum' tells, it was due to the indisposition of the scrotum of Herbert Baker, who was summoned for the architectural layout of New Delhi by Edward Lutyens in 1912.

Mukul Kesavan writes in the blurb of the book: “If the story of colonial India were written as a sequence of feverish fiction, lit by Kafka and stage-managed by Manto, this would be that book”. No tall claim this, because Satwik's debut is bravura for its deliberately purposed account to settle a score — anglicised/sexualised/genitalised to the hilt - with the empire. The book is almost epigrammatic for its brevity. Its tone of mock-seriousness is a constipated form of most hilarious laughter. It indeed brings perineum — the diamond-shaped pleasure zone of our bodies that starts with the anus as tip and goes up to the lower abdomen — as the zone which has moved history!