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2. Unlikely Encounters: Fiction and Scientific Discoursein the Novels of Amitav Ghosh
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17 2 Unlikely Encounters Fiction and Scientific Discourse in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh LOU RATTÉ INTRODUCTION WHY SHOULD HISTORIANS of colonialism read Amitav Ghosh’s novels? For pleasure, of course; but there are also what I’ll call disciplinary reasons. Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, historians have wrestled with what our discipline can do to rectify the egregious oversimplifications and appropriations into which it fell over the last two hundred years, and whether it can finally contribute to the production of a fair account of the world outside Western Europe and the United States. This is where Amitav Ghosh can teach us. In the two novels I’ll be considering, The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and The Hungry Tide (2004), Ghosh plays around with time, moving easily back and forth from the colonial to the postcolonial to the present, thus breaking up the narrative line and offering us the possibility of imaging the decentering of master narratives. Perhaps no narrative has a tighter hold over our historical thinking than the one that charts the spread and superiority of Western science throughout the world. In these two novels Ghosh puts that narrative in its place by disrupting the narrative flow of time, complicating motive, and privileging the agency of local people. In the serious process of decentering the master narrative of Western science, Ghosh also offers us some delightful, beguiling, and madcap alternatives to it. In my reading of these two novels, Amitav Ghosh daringly addresses three of the current concerns about understanding science in the colonial context: the role of native informants in the construction of Western 18 LOU RATTÉ scientific knowledge; the effects of applied science on the lives of local people; and the status of indigenous knowledge systems. This is a not a case of fools rushing in, however; Ghosh is a trained anthropologist with a deep and broad historical imagination, as evidenced in three other works, In an Antique Land (1992), The Glass Palace (2000), and most recently, Sea of Poppies (2008). In these books, though, he remains firmly within consensual frameworks , traversing the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean in the twelfth century, taking a three-generation approach to the history of Indians in Burma and Southeast Asia in the twentieth century, and exploring the development of the British opium trade from its home base in northeast India in the nineteenth century. The situation in his two books under discussion here is a little different. In these works the novelist’s problem is not how to fashion characters who will raise our consciousness about life and experiences within existing historical frames; it is about the need to construct a new frame. Both novels take us back to Calcutta and the surrounding region of Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the height of imperial self-satisfaction and before the nationalist challenge had to be taken too seriously. In The Calcutta Chromosome the ostensible starting place is in the 1890s when the British scientist Ronald Ross was working on the cause of malaria in a laboratory in Calcutta. In The Hungry Tide the starting point is the Scotsman Daniel Hamilton’s plan in the 1920s to develop for habitation the riverine area of colonial Bengal. Both men are historical figures. Both novels also move about in time, creating a middle time period still in the past, and a present, in The Hungry Tide, coincidental with ours, and in The Calcutta Chromosome, in our future. Perhaps signaling the difficult terrain being traversed, both novels contain scenes with characters almost drowning in muddy water. Mud, we are told in The Hungry Tide, cuts off the light at the surface of the water so the person caught in muddy water cannot tell up from down and hence cannot get to the surface unaided. In The Calcutta Chromosome, Mangala, a sweeperwoman who works in the laboratory where the British are conducting their malaria experiments, is bathing in one of the city’s ponds. She loses her footing in the soft and pliant mud, falls under the water, feels the clutch of death, and is saved by grasping onto a stone to steady herself. In her view, the goddess has saved her. In The Hungry Tide, the American-born student of river dolphin behavior, Piya, has got government permission to travel to the Sundarbans in West Bengal, but must be accompanied by a government guide. Escaping from the guide’s leering advances, Piya falls into the water...