-
8. Sharing Landscapes and Mindscapes: Ethics and Aesthetics in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
109 8 Sharing Landscapes and Mindscapes Ethics and Aesthetics in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome CHITRA SANKARAN INTRODUCTION The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery, as it is described, is Amitav Ghosh’s first venture into science fiction territory. The novel, published in 1996, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the year’s best science fiction in 1997. The story of The Calcutta Chromosome is set in what appears to be the not-too-distant future. It begins with the omniscient narrator focusing on Antar, an Egyptian computer programmer, who is part of a global migrant labor force for a highly technologized world. In its complex global networking and in the way humans seem subordinated to the unceasing demands of machines, this futuristic setting seems the logical end result of a world that is being relentlessly dehumanized. Antar’s job is to sort through the interminable stream of data pouring out of his computer, named AVA. Thus, when Antar encounters a virtual ID card tossed up on his computer screen of his former colleague L. Murugan, a South Indian, it becomes his mission to discover Murugan’s current whereabouts . Murugan himself had disappeared from Calcutta several years ago while on a quest to prove a pet theory of his—that Ronald Ross, the British scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1902 for discovering the life cycle of the Anopheles mosquito and its role in causing malaria, had, in fact, had his research path directed by ostensibly “inconsequential,” shadowy helpers. Antar’s search for Murugan leads him to unravel the strange mysteries surrounding the “Calcutta chromosome.” This chromosome is distinguished 110 CHITRA SANKARAN by its anomalous nature. Murugan describes this graphically to the Bengali correspondent Urmila Roy: One of the reasons why the Calcutta chromosome can’t be found by normal methods is because unlike the standard chromosomes it isn’t present in every cell. Or if it is, it’s so deeply encrypted that our current techniques can’t isolate it. And the reason why it isn’t present in every cell is because unlike the other chromosomes it’s not symmetrically paired. (247) This is the reason, he says, that this chromosome is “to the standard Mendelian pantheon of twenty-three chromosomes what [the elephantheaded Hindu God] Ganesh is to the [other] gods; that is, different, nonstandard , unique—which is exactly why it eludes standard techniques of research” (247). It is Murugan’s thesis that the Calcutta chromosome transfers biological correlates from one individual to another through a “transference ” that is nonsexual and one that penetrates the blood/brain barrier. The narrative speculates on the possibility that the chromosomal transfer has the capacity to enable personality traits to be transmitted from the donor to the recipient. Murugan traces this back to Mangala Bibi, an illiterate sweeperwoman who ends up working for the nineteenth-century British scientist, Ross Cunningham. It is Murugan’s contention that Mangala Bibi accidentally stumbled upon the possibility of this chromosomal transfer and by some native genius fine-tuned the methods and thereafter steadily effected “transfers” of herself and several others through the centuries. This stupendous theory, apart from anything else, seems to shake some fundamental cultural preformulations. The notion of a contained, cognizant Self, for one, comes to be destabilized in interesting ways in the narrative. THE SELF AND OTHER In the traditional Cartesian model of consciousness, the cogito circumscribes the Self as a recurrence of the same. The Self is convinced that it is separate from the world with a fixed interior that is separate from the rest of the world. The notion of the unified “I” is linked to a notion of interiority. Even Levinas, whose notion of the self differs from the Cartesian model, talks about the Self that is separate from the world (Totality and Infinity 36). It is noteworthy that in The Calcutta Chromosome, the notion of the Self is left strangely fluid and ambiguous. For instance, if Mangala Bibi is the high priestess of a secret “counter-science” cult, who deals in “transference” of the mind, then the twentieth-century Armenian lady resident in Calcutta, [3.235.42.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:24 GMT) Sharing Landscapes and Mindscapes 111 Mrs. Aratounian; the sophisticated babysitter in New York, Tara; and finally Urmila Roy, the self-sufficient Calcutta correspondent; are all to be perceived as Mangala’s “reincarnations.” Similarly, Laakhan or alternatively Laxman or Lutchman, the lab assistant who features in the...