Amitav Ghosh’s novels are often concerned with endangered people, cultures and
histories of the region and deal with those who have suffered under European
colonialism and its contemporary neocolonial antecedents. His work is restlessly
inventive and delightfully difficult to summarize. Though The Calcutta Chromosome
won the 1996 Arthur C Clark Award for Science Fiction, it would be fruitful to examine
how the course of history is used creatively to give a significant inter-text to the novel.
History no longer remains history for Ghosh, and he explores how the various psychological
damages, which played a crucial role in determining the colonial identity at crucial personal
level, have altered the traditional meaning of history for the novelist; and the question of
colonial mimicry also attracts his attention, and he analyzes the politics of history in the
postcolonial world submerged in politics of identity.
The Calcutta Chromosome has a resonance with the theme of Ghosh’s debut novel
The Circle of Reason—science, reason, colonial power/knowledge. Ghosh craftily “blends
elements of the thriller, the detective novel, science fiction, ghost stories, Gothic melodrama,
and historiography to deliver a tongue-in-cheek potboiler that engages seriously with the
intervention of scientific knowledge—this time in the form of colonial medicine—in a
colonial society and its reception by the colonized. What is at stake in the novel is once
again those Eurocentric self-representations about the diffusion of modernity, reason,
progress and the civilizing mission enforced by colonialism” (Mondal, 2010, p. 1). Ghosh’s
text dwells upon the problems of representing the fragments, of people (the subalterns),
of history, of knowledge, using protocols of knowledge that exclude them on preliminary
reading.
The Calcutta Chromosome interweaves a network of traces—from the history of
malaria research, theological movements generally deemed to be heretical in the West,
and slightly futuristic computer technology inter alia—to provide the possibility of an
alternative subaltern history which exists in parallel with colonial history as an equally, or
possibly more, potent epistemological system, albeit one which has traditionally operated
through silence (Thieme, 2003, p. 1). The main narrative of the novel involves a
re-examination of history by Antar, L Murugan, and Urmila Roy. |
