Ambarish Satwik
Il basso ventre dell'impero

ISBN 9788896317044
Pages 192
Euro 12,50

It is a well known fact that History is not an exact science: it can be told from different points of view and through countless images.
For the thirteen stories that make up this surprising journey through Imperial India, Ambarish Satwik, a Delhi-based surgeon and writer, uses an acute and original metaphor: the diseases of the private parts, usually the object of morbid interest and often produced by vices. These are diseases which - in the literary fiction, and in what it reflects - nobody has seen and which have left the emanation of strength, power and authority of some key figures of colonial India apparently intact, but which have in fact had an influence on the psyche and decisions of these and many other politicians and military men.
Using his pen with the surgical precision of a scalpel, the writer describes the torments caused by the throbbing and burning infection under King George V's imperial uniform; he tells us how Sir Henry Lawrence, a high-ranking member of the civil administration, on the arrival of his aristocratic bride from England, proved to be obsessed by the most perverse sexual practices learned in the "depraved" colony; he makes us smile at the outburst of an Indian patriot kicked in the behind affected by a very painful abscess; he amazes us with the outcome of an eccentric operation on the scrotum of Sir Herbert Baker, who built New Delhi, which left his "nether parts" in a similar shape to the town-plan of the heart of the nascent capital.
Fortunately, however, not all power is pathology: the presence of  Mahatma Gandhi is singular and for whom the author lays aside anatomy and surgery, making him stand out as the only "pure" statesman: paradoxically pure in his nudity, before the uniforms dripping with medals that cover up all the rest, at least to the eyes.

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Resources

• Il basso ventre dell'Impero - Rockerilla
• Il basso ventre dell'Impero - Il Manifesto
• Il basso ventre dell'Impero - Vanity Fair
• Il basso ventre dell'Impero - Internazionale
• Il basso ventre dell'Impero - Gioia
• Il basso ventre dell'Impero - Io Donna