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Magazine
Wielding the forceps and the pen
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Dr. Ambarish Satwik talks about his foray into the world of words. MITA KAPUR
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Photo: Anju Dwivedi
Novel risk: Dr. Ambarish Satwik.
He steps out of the operation theatre, wiping blood off his hands. His powerful grip on the dissecting forcep pares open the nether parts of the Empire. As Ambarish Satwik worked his way through piles and fistulas of the British Empire in Perineum, a melancholic undertone swells through the book despite attempts at dark humour.
Perineum, his first book, is an experimental attempt that came from a deeper thought process. Ambarish said, “The prose is stilted, almost occidental. Everything seemingly vernacular has been blotted out from it.”
Emotional catharsis
Satirical wit acerbically rejects any artificiality, the book is dark, dreadful, funny, tragic… what drove the author to explore emotional catharsis the way he did? “Pudendal and perineal maladies are all grist to the surgeon. There are no sophisticated framings here. This is the completely illegitimate manipulation of history for the purpose of amusement. A capital bit of kink sans padding.”
Yet, we need a dictionary when we read the book; it stops the smooth motion of reading. “That is valid criticism. But I think it is essential when rogue historical revisionism is attempted. One has to exhibit fidelity to prose of a certain vintage to situate the atmospherics. The other objective was to celebrate medical rhetoric. The lay reader might need a dictionary to understand some of the medical terms and phrases. But when one goes to the dictionary, one realises the formal aesthetic of the medical jargon and its preciseness. It has this great epigrammatical quality. It would be anomalous to call it pedantry.”
Perineum is clearly a risk on the part of the writer. “The greatest risk is when a recursive device, a kind of leitmotif is employed in works of fiction. If it fails, it fails spectacularly. Then there’s also the matter of historical slander and kink. Perineum will never qualify as popular, commercial fiction. We were clear about that from the outset. So the real risk was run by Penguin,” Ambarish is clearly having the last chuckle.
Towards the end when he uses Baker’s scrotum as a metaphor for Raisina Hill, he clearly joins the bandwagon of writers who unite the political with their art. “All art and literature is political. Even comic books are political.” Is Perineum an allegory for the dirty world of Indian politics? “Perineum allegorises the fate of colonial projects. Perennial gratification has a temporal but acute association with the act of colonising. ‘The East Offering Her Riches to Britannia’ is too tempered a description; it needs the metaphor of pathology and the perineum.”
Balancing act
The savagery of his language and the brisk and brusque tone would otherwise have turned the book into a rant. Ambarish’s pen deftly manages to balance the extremes. “It’s probably because the authorial voice is non-aligned and patently non-subaltern. Secondly, quite purposefully, the gender dyad of the female observed object and the male viewing subject has been played out and then reversed to establish neutrality. Even the most abject portions of the most violent story in the collection ‘The Beresfords’ are neutral. The medical gaze is never scopophilic.”
To pack in the action on the operating table with the demands of writing is like bending over a pregnant belly to see one’s toes, “The irregularities of the surgical discipline leave me with weekends to write. I am, essentially, a Sunday writer and decidedly non-prolific. Perineum was written when I was working for the government (Ram Manohar Lohia hospital). I would spend Friday and Saturday evenings scouring the National Archives on Janpath and come and write bitty tracts on Sundays. These would then be inflated and embellished into stories.”
Defining his parameters of story telling and what he would expect from a book, “Brevity. Kurt Vonnegut has a set of rules for short fiction. I remember a few of them, but the most important one is perhaps: start as close to the end as possible. Poe writes somewhere that there is a distinct limit to all works of literary art: the limit of one sitting. I’m completely sold on the whittled down short story format or the novella.”
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