The Calcutta Chromosome

Amitav Ghosh's 1995 novel The Calcutta Chromosome is a multi-layered, postmodernist narrative told through the interplay of past and future. Ghosh shapes the narrative through a series of micro-narratives that are woven together through a combination of memory, storytelling, and mystical inferences. The story reflects the tension between science and belief, with science becoming subservient to the mythic forces that underlie the characters’ lives. These mythic forces, such as reincarnation and the Hindu concept of Mauna, or silence, shape how the narrative evolves. Silence has its own voice and is the demiurge that creates life, and calls to those it deems worthy. Ghosh, though, gives it a modern twist with the help of science. Immortality is not simply an innate quality of the spirit but has been reduced to enabling a trans-positional movement of personality traits from body to body. Science is needed as the means to identifying the mutation in the malaria parasite that allows for unique personality traits to be transmitted from the host to the recipient. The demiurge still creates, but does so through the earthly manipulations of its mistress, the mysterious