On Grafting the Vernacular: The Consequences of Postcolonial Spectrology

The literary icon Amitav Ghosh has lately acquired the status of elder statesman among South Asian writers, a political designation bestowed on him following his withdrawal of The Glass Palace from the Commonwealth Writers Prize "Best Book" nomination in 2001. In a modulated letter, Ghosh writes, "As a literary or cultural grouping however, it seems to me that 'the Commonwealth' can only be a misnomer so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives of these countries."¹ His abrogation of the cultural currency of English in the postcolonial world, and his consequent focus on the vernaculars of that world, hones my perception of a certain quality in his oeuvre: the stalking of the novel in English by vernacular Indian fiction. This "other" archive—a phrase I use deliberately to capture Ghosh's ongoing historiographic projects—that shadows his novels generates what can only be called a hauntological literary oeuvre.

Here I speak to the contours of Ghosh's literary haunting through the pursuit of a particular spectacular example, The Calcutta Chromosome (1996).² It is in this novel that Ghosh most elaborately deploys the tropology of the specter through his ethical spectrology (ghosting) and epistemological excavation (grafting), twin processes that can be considered, I shall argue, key postcolonial imperatives. Haunting is central to the text's interrogation of a colonial truth: Ronald Ross's discovery of the cure for malaria. Versed in medical journalism, Ghosh embarks on an arduous explanation of chromosomes and their functions. At full speed in this breakneck romp through medical discoveries, folk rituals, murders, hallucinations, transmigrating souls, and scary panoptical computers owned by futuristic megacorporations, we encounter a syphilitic homeless woman, Mangala, an untrained genius who, in pursuit of the little-known scientific discovery that the malaria bug could be used to regenerate decaying brain tissue in the last stages of syphilis, stumbles upon a DNA conglomerate that she cannot name: the "calcutta chromosome." A chromosome only by analogy, this genetic bundle, we are told with grave objectivity, would amount to a "biological correlate" to the "human soul" (206). Residing only in non-regenerative human tissue (the brain), the "chromosome" survives only through incessant mutations, recombining the traits designating the uniqueness of each individual. But the ability to cut and splice DNA is precisely one of the pernicious features of the malaria bug, as Mangala accidentally discovers; and in the process of cutting and splicing human DNA, the bug can actually digest (and thus retain) this otherwise untransmissible genetic blueprint. An infected person's brain can thus be rewired to fit an original mold. Material souls, in this novel, migrate not through but by the transmission of disease. Hence the scientific "discovery" in this novel is the truth about transmigratory souls (Mangala's practice of corporeal immortality), a ghost story foisted upon the reader of a medical thriller.

The Calcutta Chromosome is a medical thriller that won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Award in 1997, and the project was soon under a film contract with Gabriele Salvatores. Yet the novel's uncovering of the "facts" leads us to a series of ghost stories that supposedly explain the puzzle set up in the opening pages of the mystery; these fragmentary pieces are the "Lakhaan stories" published in an obscure Bengali literary rag by a local writer, Phulboni. For many, the detective story ends rather abruptly, unsatisfactorily: the novel fizzles out as a medical mystery. Said one irritated reviewer for Under the Covers Book Reviews, "He [Ghosh] veers sharply from the detective mystery format some thirty pages from the end of the book in that he fails to deliver the promised solution. . . . In the end he serves to only denigrate the resourcefulness of the human mind."³ But if we take seriously Ghosh's postcolonial unraveling of an established colonial truth, then the very genre of truth-telling must suffer. Indeed, a great deal of "resourcefulness&quot...