Ambarish Satwik on his days as a student of anatomy, poking around in cadavers and studying photographs of extravagantly diseased bodies.
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I was in thrall to a photograph of syphylitic noselessness. It was a late-19th-century photograph of a young woman, quite clearly patrician, and I remember being bewildered by the operatic calamity that was the hole in her face. The external nose was completely absent following an ulcerative destruction. Most of the nasal septum had been eaten away; what could be seen were the triangular bony rims of the nares. Her noselessness marked her body as corrupt and dangerous, as a legatee and keeper of syphilis. It warned against the quality of her flesh, against her virtue, or that of her husband’s. And withal, her eyes were still lambent with the pride and assurance of the well-born.
She seemed to occupy a world of Victorian moral fiction. The photograph was from the collection of the surgeon Jonathan Hutchinson—annalist, analyst and registrar of all things syphilitic. In the accompanying text he warned that her sunken nose would be transmitted to her newborn, who would, from infancy, bear the insignia of corruption in the form of peg-shaped teeth, saddle-nose, sabre shin and blindness from clouded corneas.
She was in an old book, crumbling at the edges, that belonged to a particularly misanthropic professor of surgery. I can no longer be sure if it was a photograph or a picture of a daguerreotype or even a watercolour illustration; I remember her as a sitter in the great continuum of Victorian portrait culture. In my recreation after all these years, I haven’t added features to her facies, or diminished them or changed the angle from which I see her inside my head. In my inner cinema, her form, structure, face and personality are exactly what I encountered on Hutchinson’s plates years ago. What I remember like a mnemonic is her diseased physiognomy; what tugs at the margins of my memory is the traffic carried on her face.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October - December 2016-Ausgabe von The Indian Quarterly.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October - December 2016-Ausgabe von The Indian Quarterly.
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The Image-Maker
Sukumar Ray’s most vivid images were saved for his classics of nonsense verse, but his singular eye, writes Nabarupa Bhattacharjee, found its earliest expression in photography
The Nawab's Last Sigh
Rudely awakened by the fact of independent India, an aristocrat in Meerut clung to his past. Now, he tells Sunaina Kumar, all he has left are his memories of a glorious age.
The Guest
Vaiyavan is the nom de plume of MSP Murugesan. Born in 1936, he did sundry jobs before obtaining postgraduate degrees by correspondence and then served as an English and Tamil teacher till his retirement in 1996. His writing career began in 1956. Multifaceted and prolific, he has to his credit a long list of short story collections, novels, plays, literary essays, poems and children’s stories. He has won several awards including Tamil Nadu government awards for best book on culture (1982) and best science book (1992) and the Malcolm Adiseshiah award for active participation in neo-literacy activities (1996). In his short stories and novels, Vaiyavan revels in a zest for life. Humaneness is the hallmark of his work, as the pain and pleasure, trials and tribulations of people in different rungs of society are described in minute detail. —CGR
The Birth of an Anthem
From right-wing slogan to moving patriotic song and now back to Hindu nationalistic war cry. Rimli Sengupta on the evolution of Vande Mataram
The Birth of a Parent
The beginning of a new life can create other strange new lives, reflects Manidipa Mandal
The Unknown Soldier
One man wondered and worried about his disappeared brother all his life.His granddaughter continued the search. Preksha Sharma resurrects a man and his story
The Art Scene
For the new kid on the block, it certainly has pedigree. The Centre for Con-temporary Art, housed within Delhi’s Bikaner House complex, finally opened its portals to welcome art aficionados during this year’s edition of the India Art Fair. Nature Morte was invited to stage the centre’s much-awaited inaugural show, an opportunity the gallery found too irresistible to pass up. The ambitious exhibition it mounted, The Idea of the Acrobat, occupied both floors of the recently renovated building and brought together the works of a dozen well known artists in a multitude of media. The line-up included Bharti Kher, Atul Dodiya, Dayanita Singh, Shilpa Gupta, Ayesha Singh, Khyentse Norbu and LN Tallur to name but a few.
Long, Long Ago
Arundhuti Dasgupta and Utkarsh Patel recount obscure creation myths from around the world, many echoing each other
Family Business
AT THE DINDUKKAL BUS DEPOT, the abortionist pushed her way through the crowd thronging the bus and finally managed to board it. She placed her travel bag beside her on the seat, calling out to her niece to hurry up. The young woman renewed her efforts to break free of the tangle of limbs and claim the seat reserved for her.
A Goan Childhood
Fragments of memory of a time long gone, from a life lived far away. By Selma Carvalho
