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13. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery: A Tour de Force Transcending Genres
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191 13 The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery A Tour de Force Transcending Genres RUBY S. RAMRAJ AMITAV GHOSH’S The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery (1996, UK release), winner of the 1997 Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction, is seen first and foremost by some as a science fiction text, but it is also very much a postcolonial text, belonging to that new genre breed: postcolonial science fiction. Ghosh’s other novels, both before and after The Calcutta Chromosome, have placed him solidly in mainstream postcolonial tradition. The Shadow Lines (1988), In an Antique Land (1992), and The Glass Palace (2000) explore the sociocultural/sociohistorical aspects of such postcolonial societies as India and Burma, employing sociorealistic not science fiction form. Unquestionably science fiction, The Calcutta Chromosome is yet vintage postcolonial writing, focusing on offering alternative historical narrative that subverts the imperial perspective of achievement in the colonies. The novel contends centrally that Indian scientists played a much larger role in innovative thinking about the transmission of malaria than that depicted in the Western history of scientific advances. That having been acknowledged, The Calcutta Chromosome is more than just a postcolonial text. It can be read at once—satisfyingly—as a gothic story, a thriller, a detective story, and, of course, science fiction. Ghosh’s use of science fiction, a genre not yet commonplace among mainstream postcolonial writers, is nevertheless not exceptional. Doris Lessing is one of its prominent promoters (who described it as “the most original branch of literature,” noting that in it “is some of the best social fiction of 192 RUBY S. RAMRAJ our time”); at mid-career she switched to this form, penning such novels as the Four-Gated City (1969) and Shikasta (1979). Margaret Atwood, a mainstream Canadian novelist, has turned occasionally to science fiction, as in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003). In Midnight Robber (2000) and Salt Roads (2004), Nalo Hopkinson, a Caribbean-Canadian, has written, respectively, a futuristic space narrative of the imperial-colonial divide and alternative histories of the plight of exploited colonial women. Of course, writers—not just postcolonial writers—who move from traditional forms to genre novels recur throughout literary history. Herman Melville wrote Mardi (1849), which examines utopian societies; and Mark Twain took a contemporary American back to a fictional British past in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The Calcutta Chromosome, then, as a mainstream novel employing science fiction’s form and ideas, has a worthy pedigree. But some have raised the question of whether it is in fact science fiction, however this genre defines itself.1 One complaint is that it focuses more on the past rather than on the future, the common temporal setting of science fiction, and though it examines malarial research in the 1800s, and is set in a dystopic twenty-first-century New York, it advances no new ideas about science and scientific experimentation. Paul Rosenberg of The Christian Science Monitor puts it this way: “But as a novel of ideas which science fiction at its best usually is The Calcutta Chromosome is less successful. Ghosh imagines a wholly different way of seeking knowledge indirectly, based on the supposition that knowing something changes it.” By choosing to set the main narrative of this novel in the past, Ghosh limits his narrative to historical rather than futuristic speculation , and so the absence of imaginative creation regarding the future seems understandable and appropriate. It is perhaps unfair to fault a writer for not doing something he never intended to do. It can be argued further that the novel is of the science fiction genre much like another work that focuses on the past—Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Like Twain’s novel, The Calcutta Chromosome does not attempt to extrapolate the future as so many contemporary science fiction texts do. In an interview with Paul Kincaid, Ghosh justifies turning to the past for his science fiction locale: “Science and science fiction are old passions of mine. . . . it is a pity that science fiction seeks to project into the future; it’s just as interesting to project into the past.”2 Ghosh attempts this successfully in The Calcutta Chromosome. The Calcutta Chromosome casts doubts on the authenticity of the nineteenth -century malarial research of the historical personage, Sir Ronald Ross, who, after researching for three years (1895–1898) in India the...