Scott Gordon

The marketing, publicity and reviews surrounding Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome clearly seek to position the novel within the detective and/or science fiction genres. The cover of the 1997 Vintage edition of the book announces that the book was the "Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel of 1996" - a prestigious award for science fiction novels - and quotes from a Toronto Star review that characterizes the book as "a breathless page-turner of a detective story." The back cover includes a quote from Ronald Wright, "author of A Scientific Romance," another science-fiction-oriented book.

Book sellers and a number of reviewers further reinforce the detective/science-fiction frame surrounding the novel. Amazon.com begins their summary of the book with: "The time: sometime early in the 21st century. The place: a decaying Manhattan where rent control survives even as the population declines," while their science-fiction and fantasy editor calls it "an excellent science fiction novel" (citing the Clarke award as proof). Their reader reviews do not deviate very much in their approach either, regardless of whether they liked it - "If you like Michael Crichton, John Grisham and the X-Files, this book is for you" - or not - "Part science, part science fiction, part mystery, the story becomes less compelling when doused heavily with the technobabble of science and computers (the latter is very unrealistic, even for a futuristic fantasy)".

But is it fair to the novel to frame it within such a limited scope? In her review of The Calcutta Chromosome, Felice Aull from New York University takes a somewhat different approach. Although she begins her summary by emphasizing the setting in the "not too distant future" and Antar's job of "monitoring artifacts which he can study holographically through cyber space," she does, nevertheless, go on to consider some other aspects of the novel that few others mention:

the work is stimulating for its intriguing allusions to genetics, culture, colonialism, Nobel scientists, and their relationship to the disease that continues to kill two to three million people every year. (emphasis mine)

Are either of these frames the "right" ones? That is, does one frame rather than the other give the reader a better opportunity to explore the themes of the novel? A closer look at how the book operates within each frame will show that the novel's greatest strength is the way in which it uses elements of both the sci-fi and post-colonial traditions to achieve its desired ends.

I

If one sets aside the publicity and marketing rhetoric that frames The Calcutta Chromosome, the science-fiction label that has been ascribed to the novel becomes more complicated. According to Samuel Delany's definition of the genre, Ghosh's novel is easily classified as science fiction since it

deals with what could have happened: that which is neither impossible nor verifiably possible. The only rule governing our response to science fiction ... is that its actions must be in accord with what we know of the physically explainable universe. (in Wolfe 18)

In his 1979 study of science-fiction novels, Gary Wolfe adds to Delany's general definition by identifying a number of more specific elements that set sci-fi off as a distinct genre. According to Wolfe, most science fiction is ultimately concerned with transforming the unknown into the known. Of course, the known/unknown binary can be found in many other types of fiction -- detective fiction and thrillers being the most obvious examples. What sets sci-fi apart for Wolfe is the distinct iconography that the genre uses to explore the known/unknown theme. From H.G. Wells through to Isaac Asimov, Wolfe identifies five icons that science-fiction writers repeatedly make use of in their writing: the spaceship, the city, the wasteland, the robot and the monster. Depending on the writer, some stories may make use of only one of these icons, while others may rely on them all.

Considered within Wolfe's science-fiction framework, The Calcutta Chromosome's sci-fi identity is somewhat problematic. While the novel is in many ways clearly interested in the struggle to make the unknown known, it relies on few if any of the icons Wolfe believes necessary to science-fiction texts. Of the five, the city is only icon that might be present. Of the two cities in Chromosome - Calcutta and New York - the latter is the only one of real interest in terms of sci-fi iconography since the scenes set in Calcutta take place either in the distant past (late 19^th century) or recent past/almost present (1995).

But even the 21st-century New York Ghosh portrays barely fits with the traditional sci-fi city. According to Wolfe, cities in science fiction have a number of distinctive characteristics, few of which Chromosome's New York possess. The city, for instance, is generally a confined space from which one must escape the "conformity of [the] densely urban environment," a conformity that is enforced by "a governmental system in which the police play an increasingly important role" (89-90). While Antar dreams of leaving New York and retiring to Egypt, it is not New York City that prevents him from leaving so much as it is his commitment to the International Water Council and his dependence on their pension. Furthermore, although there are some authoritarian forces present - Antar's pay is docked for his doing personal reading while working, for example - none of this authority is imposed by the government nor by its police agents on behalf of the city or country.

Nor is the city a xenophobic one that "promotes a distrust of what might lie outside of the protective boundaries of the collective society" (Wolfe 89). Ghosh's conception of the 21st century resembles a McLuhanesque "global village" much more than it does a series of closed and protected city states. Chromosome's New York appears to have no protective boundary of any kind, its population being seemingly much more international and heterogeneous than native-born and homogeneous. The regulars at the Penn Station coffee shop include a Sudanese bank-teller, a Guyanese woman and Bangladeshi man, while the apartment building Antar lives in has attracted "Middle Eastern and Central Asian families - Kurds, Afghans, Tajiks and even a few Egyptians" (13, 15). Ultimately, regardless of the traits it may or may not share with the conventional sci-fi city, Chromosome's 21st-century New York has such a limited presence and direct relevance to the overall narrative that its importance as an icon is severely compromised.

Other aspects of the novel outside of Wolfe's icons give the book its sci-fi qualities. Ava's presence, for instance, has some sci-fi connotations; she is certainly more advanced than most computers available to people working out of their homes today. In fifteen minutes, for instance, she is able to trace a lost e-mail by "sifting through about six thousand eight hundred and ninety-two trillion cunabytes, ... roughly eighty-five billion times the estimated sum of every dactylographic act ever performed by a human being," and reconstruct it "by running the retrieved fragments through a Storyline algorithm" (126-27). But in the end, even Ava is a weak defense of Chromosome's sci-fi identity since, despite her importance in helping Antar unite the disparate fragments of the story, the fact remains that the majority of the story occurs without Ava and her technological advancements; it is Murugan the science historian, using rather conventional techniques like archival research, who pieces the story together.

Ultimately, few of the obvious sci-fi signifiers are really necessary to the overall structure and plot of the novel. The city and the futuristic setting provide an interesting context for the story but are largely unnecessary to the novel's final outcome. Really, the only necessary sci-fi device central to the plot is the all-knowing, all powerful computer; it is Ava who in the end pieces the information together for Antar and the reader. Despite her importance, however, many of the crucial events in the story occur in a time and place far removed from Ava's presence.

II

With such tenuous links to science fiction, it might be useful, as Ball and Aull suggest, to instead consider Chromosome within a post-colonial framework. In their 1989 overview of post-colonial writing, The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin identify a number of recurring themes and icons that characterize post-colonial literatures - a number of which are also found in Chromosome.

The use of a house as metaphor is a good example of a recurring post-colonial trope found in Chromosome. In the novel there are three houses or buildings that might be read as metonymic structures in the text. The first is Antar's decaying building in New York, symbolic in many ways of Antar's migrant existence in 21st-century United States. When Antar first arrived in New York with his wife, the building was full of apartments teeming with "large, noisy" families and was full of life (15). By the time the reader meets Antar, however, most of the apartments - and the families that once lived in them - have been replaced by "warehouses and storage spaces," and the building is now more closely associated with sickness and death than with life (14). When Antar thinks back on the people who once lived in the building, those who most readily come to mind are those who were somehow diseased or who suffered untimely deaths. His wife and unborn child are killed by "an amniotic embolism ... in the thirty-fifth week of her pregnancy" (15). The chess player next door began to "waste away" one summer while the woman in the apartment below is murdered by the delivery boy who battered "her head in with a cast-iron skillet" (16-17). The stagnant and sick atmosphere of the building reflects Antar's own stagnant and diseased existence. Antar, like his home, has been left behind and forsaken by the modern age.

The second house of some symbolic importance in the novel is the colonial "bungalow" Ronald Ross lives in while working in Secunderabad. Through Murugan the house is set up as an obvious symbol of colonial decadence:

"He calls it a bungalow, but don't let him fool you: this place has a couple of dozen rooms, and half an acre of garden. Then there are the servants quarters, way out back, where you can hardly see them: a long, low line of rooms. The rooms are pretty small, but some of them have six or seven people living inside and some have whole families in residence." (87)

The houses and buildings of particular importance in post-colonial fiction according to the editors of Empire, however, are those being demolished or under construction, an image that Ghosh places right at the centre of the novel (Empire 28). The "large, old-fashioned colonial mansion" at "number three Robinson Street" that Romen Haldar is renovating and allowing his group of counter-scientists to use as a meeting place is the same house Ronald Ross lived in while working in Calcutta at the turn of the century (81). In this case, it is difficult not to read some post-colonial significance into the fact that Indians and Nepalis have dismantled the house's interior and that "the entire construction gang was living in the gutted shell of the house" (161). At the centre of the novel, then, is the deconstruction of a colonial structure by former colonized subjects who are using the building to celebrate their distinctly Indian and non-colonial achievements in area of malaria research.

There is more than just the central image of the house, however, to lend credence to the notion that the novel is at least partially post-colonial in nature. The alternative history that the novel proposes and its re-working of the 'official' metanarrative is also a common theme in post-colonial literatures. By re-interpreting historical fragments the novel is able to undermine the authority of colonial narratives. Not only does the novel present the official history of malaria research as an elaborate facade, but, even more radically, it also suggests that this facade was constructed by the colonized who used the colonizers as unwitting pawns in their scheme.

Furthermore, in deconstructing one history and constructing another, Ghosh, like a number of other post-colonial writers, disrupts the conventional binary between the centre and the margin.

The 'marginal' and the 'variant' characterize post-colonial views of language and society as a consequence of the process of abrogation. The syncretic is validated by the disappearance of the 'centre', and with no 'centre' the marginal becomes the formative constituent of reality. (Empire 104)

Like Murugan, the group of counter-scientists who are both at the centre of the novel and at the centre of malaria research and discovery operate and exert their control from the margins of society and scientific discourse. The woman in charge, Mangala, is characterized by the colonial scientists as deviating from the psychological norms - "'Don't pay her any attention;' Cunningham said to Farley, with a wink, 'she's a little touched ... you know'" (141). Likewise, the work she is overseeing is often set up in binary opposition to the accepted centre. For Murugan, just as there are "matter and antimatter," "rooms and anterooms and Christ and Antichrist," there are "science and counter-science" practiced by "fringe people, marginal types [who are] so far from the mainstream you can't see them from the shore" (103, 105). The discoveries of the counter-scientists always occur outside of the scientific centre, subversive alternatives to the 'accepted' European scientific experiments. Murugan even uses the "Other Mind" theory to describe their work - a label fraught with post-colonial connotations. That it is Murugan - a marginal character in his own right - who positions these people as peripheral says a great deal about just how far removed from the centre they are.

Of particular significance to the relationship Ghosh establishes between the margin and centre in the novel is Farley's visit to Cunningham's lab to test Laveran's theories. While in the lab, Farley becomes a first-hand witness to the counter-scientists' literal displacement of the centre and the shifting of power towards the margins. During his first day in the lab Farley sees, through a reflection in his glass of water, that it is Mangala - the one, according to Cunningham, who is "not all there" -- who is choosing the slides and in effect running the lab (146). Determined to find out what Mangala and Lutchman are doing, he decides to return the following day. Upon arriving the next day, Farley notices "a great deal of activity in a nearby anteroom" (149). Just as on day before he sees nothing of importance in Cunningham's slides, slides that are results of experiments made in what "was once one of the best-equipped research laboratories in the whole Indian subcontinent" (199). Farley soon realizes that everything of importance going on in the lab is occurring in the anteroom and not in the laboratory proper. After threatening to stay all night he watches Lutchman snatch "up a set of clean slides," then slip "away to the anteroom" (151):

Once he was gone, Farley made his way silently across the laboratory. Flattening himself against the wall, he crept towards the door until he had maneuvered himself into a position where he could look into the anteroom without himself being detected. Farley had steeled himself for anything, or so he thought, but he was unprepared for what he saw next. (151)

III

In the end, the most interesting aspect of Ghosh's novel is not the degree to which it is either a science-fiction novel or a post-colonial text but the ways in which Ghosh brings the two very different conventions together to create something new - a hybrid novel that draws attention to different themes by casting them in a new light. Its hybridity can be explored through a number of examples, but it is in the novel's use of silence that is the key to understanding its hybridity. Through silence, Ghosh pits conventions of science-fiction and post-colonialism against one another and succeeds in problematizing the notions of borders and barriers and the known/unknown binary in both literary traditions. Silence in Chromosome is both a sci-fi barrier that must be overcome in order to expose the unknown and a post-colonial means of resisting the dominant discourse and defending knowledge against unwanted appropriation.

All of the recurring icons Wolfe finds in science fiction he traces to the "image of the barrier" (33). Certainly barriers are not unique to science fiction; post-colonial texts, including Ghosh's previous novels, are replete with barriers of different kinds. In an interview with Ghosh, Eleanor Wachtel comments that "Borders, boundaries -- whether real or imagined, natural or artificial, whether political or social -- the boundaries and borders that divide people and places figure very prominently in your work" (132). But it is not any kind of barrier or boundary that Wolfe sees recurring in science fiction, but specifically those barriers that separate "the known from the unknown [;] beyond the barrier is the unknown, or chaos, and in this chaos is the knowledge that will enable the society to sustain its impetus of growth" (33). Wolfe separates 'barrier texts' into two categories: those that treat the barrier as secondary "to the depiction of the worlds that it separates," and those that

focus on the barrier itself, treating is as a central metaphor around which the action of the story revolves. What lies beyond the barrier may be new planets to settle, new knowledge to exploit, an enemy that threatens human existence -- but the attainment of these goals may be reduced to an aspect of the denouement of stories in which the central conflict and climax are represented as the attempts to breach the barrier. (34, emphasis mine)

Thus, although Chromosome does not rely on any of the specific icons normally employed by sci-fi writers to symbolize the barrier, it still has at its core the central image of a barrier. According to Murugan:

"the first principle of a functioning counter-science would have to be secrecy ... It would have to use secrecy as a technique or procedure. It would in principle have to refuse all direct communication, straight off the bat, because to communicate, to put ideas into language, would be to establish a claim to know - which is the first thing that a counter-science would dispute" (103)

As well as being an example of a barrier in the science-fiction tradition, silence, of course, is also a common trope of resistance in other literatures. Feminist critics, for instance, have demonstrated its importance in texts by women. In post-colonial texts, it may take any number of different forms depending on the writer and the particular tradition out of which they are writing. In their critical interpretation of Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds, the authors of Empire discuss the "literal silencing which will not permit the freedom necessary to appropriate language" and which often takes the form of censorship of some form or another (Empire 84). They write that in

all post-colonial societies the word leads to knowledge, which provokes questioning, which generates change. The corpus of post-colonial literature is replete with examples of the fear that the dominated will gain knowledge and hence, power. (85)

Michel Foucault's theories regarding knowledge and power are particularly useful for understanding silence as a means of undermining oppressive power structures. Charles Barbour, in an article on forms of resistance in Renaissance women's writing, discusses Foucault's theory regarding power and knowledge: "By producing rather than repressing discourse, power produces 'knowledge'. As behaviours are to be examined ..., subjects are enticed to offer up their 'knowledge,' to confess, to testify, to add to discourse" (56). This process occurs in any number of different relationships from priest and confessor to prison guard and inmate. In Discipline and Punish Foucault uses the example of teacher and student:

the examination in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed the movement of knowledge from teacher to the pupil, but it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved for the teacher. (187)

The "network of writing" and "mass of documents" are central to Foucault's power/knowledge theory. In The Order of Things, he traces the tendency for humans to make sense of things by classifying and ordering knowledge. The knowledge we acquire, whether as historians, scientists or examiners, seems to be best understood through categorization based on similarity and difference. As an example, Foucault considers the ordering tendencies that he sees occurring in the construction of natural history,

which orders the knowledge of beings so as to make it possible to represent them in a system of names. There were doubtless, in this region we now term life, many inquiries other than attempts at classification, many kinds of analysis other than that of identities and differences. But they all rested upon a sort of historical a priori, which authorized them in their dispersion and in their singular and divergent projects, and rendered equally possible all the differences of opinion of which they were the source. ... This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man's everyday perception with theoretical powers and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true. (157-58)

In his article, Barbour suggests that one way of avoiding inscription is through silence (60). The authorities have more difficulty inscribing people into the dominant discourse when they refuse to speak. In this way, the silence as practiced by the counter-scientists becomes a means of resisting the dominant discourse(s) of colonialism and European scientific research, in addition to being a barrier separating the known from the unknown.

The novel is teeming with people and organizations engaged in a Foucauldian endeavour to collect and classify as much information/knowledge as possible. The International Water Commission, through Ava and Antar, are in the process of creating a vast archive of information/knowledge in the hopes that they will be able to use it to their advantage in the future:

They saw themselves making History with their vast water-control experiments: they wanted to record every minute detail of what they had done, what they would do. Instead of having a historian sift through their dirt, looking for meanings, they wanted to do it themselves: they wanted to load their dirt with their own meanings. (7)

"spent about five hundred days altogether working on malaria. And ... I've tracked him through every single one of those five hundred days: I know where he was, what he did, which slides he looked at; I know what he was hoping to see and what he actually saw; I know who was with him, who wasn't with him." (51)

"And wherever he goes Grigson takes notes. Boy, does he take notes: he keeps a diary, he keeps a journal. When Ypsilanti College bought his collected papers in 1990 they had to hire an eight-axle truck to ship the stuff out. There's nothing he doesn't make a note of: and that means nothing." (88)

The scientific establishment's 'rules' constantly hover around Murugan and the counter-scientists, and around their respective endeavours. As Foucault points out, the European scientific tradition is no different from any other dominant power structures. Science, for him,

has become institutionalized as a power. It is not enough to say that science is a set of procedures by which propositions may be falsified, errors demonstrated, myths demystified, etc. Science also exercises power: it is, literally, a power that forces you to say certain things, if you are not to be disqualified not only as being wrong, but, more seriously than that, as being a charlatan. Science has become institutionalized as a power through a university system and through its own constricting apparatus of laboratories and experiments. (in Kritzman 106-07)

Positioned as a deviant from accepted norms, Murugan is no longer a threat; relegated to the margins, he is no longer taken seriously. There is little outcry, for instance, when the History of Science society revokes his membership. His speaking "openly about his notion of the so-called 'Other-Mind'" leads "to his estrangement from several of his friends and associates" (36). The more he talks the further away the establishment is able to push him from the centre. Eventually, giving voice to his theories leads to Murugan being inscribed as insane and housed in "the Department of Alternative States" (239). Despite the fact that in the context of the novel his theories seem to be correct, voicing his opinions and providing evidence leaves him almost completely powerless by the end of the novel.

The counter-scientists, on the other hand, take the opposite approach in dealing with the scientific community. By working in secret and remaining silent they are able to pursue their research without the powerlessness that normally comes from being marginal or eccentric/ex-centric. As Murugan sees it:

"Fact is we're dealing with a crowd for whom silence is a religion. We don't even know what we don't know. We don't even know who's in this and who's not; we don't know how much of the spin they've got under control. We don't know how many of the threads they want us to pull together and how many they want to keep hanging for whoever comes next." (218)

In fact, the counter-scientists are in such control of the knowledge exchange process that they have almost managed to reverse the power structure. In the example from Foucault quoted above, the teacher/examiner imparts some knowledge to his/her pupils in order to draw out different, potentially incriminating knowledge from them. In the novel, the supposedly marginal counter-scientists manage to put themselves in the position of authority by systematically releasing bits of knowledge in order to have the conventionally trained scientists unknowingly offer up more in return. According to Murugan, the counter-scientists carefully release knowledge to Ross by making "it look like he's found out for himself" (105). They do so in the belief that to impart this knowledge to Ross is to alter it and push the inquiry to the next level: "If it's true that to know something is to change it, then it follows that one way of changing something - of effecting a mutation, let's say - is to attempt to know it, or aspects of it" (104). Without knowing it, Ross is the pupil providing knowledge to further the counter-scientific discourse, and the roles become reversed.

In the end, the novel is perhaps more post-colonial than the publicity surrounding it gives it credit for. The Calcutta Chromosome's greatest strength lies in its success at blending the post-colonial with science fiction traditions. Placed as they are in the science-fiction framework Ghosh sets up, the familiar post-colonial tropes of borders and resistance become unfamiliar and beg a closer examination. Ultimately, the novel forces readers to abandon their pre-conceived notions regarding our often arbitrary classifications of literature. There is no reason a post-colonial novel cannot employ science-fiction tropes or vice versa. Success, as we can see in The Calcutta Chromosome, lies in being able to successfully exploit a given genre's or tradition's strengths and themes to best suit one's ultimate objectives.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge, 1989.

Ball, John Clement. "Malaria Mystery." Rev. of The Calcutta Chromosome The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad. 16.1 (Fall 1997): 105-08.

Barbour, Charles. "Power and Counter-Position in Askew's Examinations: Post-Structuralist Strategies of Resistance and the English Renaissance Protestant Hermenuetic." Journal of Student Writing. 18 (July 1996): 48-69.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

--. Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Calcutta Chromosome. Toronto: Vintage, 1995.

Kritzman, Lawrence D., ed. Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1979.

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