Amitav Ghosh: The Calcutta Chromosome

The Calcutta Chromosome presents us with an alternative history of Victorian England, which is closely related with developments in computer culture and scientific theories of today’s world.  The perspective from which changes are brought to the official image of the Victorian era has to do with colonialism as well as scientific discovery.  The computer plays its role, but that happens in contemporary United States.  Otherwise this computer is almost as advanced as the ones that Hiro uses in Snow Crash.

More than the previous novel, The Calcutta Chromosome is based on a theory of information.  Information theory has developed as a result of the possibilities that computers have offered to scientists.  Its infancy goes as far back as the fifties when Norbert Wiener first imagined that a human being could be downloaded into a computer.  The operation, Wiener commented, is not possible because the human body made of flesh would not survive it.  Theoretically, however, the possibility exists, since a human being can be seen as a collection of data, practically, as information.  The idea that practically everything can be regarded as information has pervaded sciences today.  The work done on DNA is basically a result of the information theory.  DNA contains information, which is then used to grow a living thing.  The assumption here is that nature also works based on information.

Information thus gives us a unified and uniform way to look at everything from nature, our creations, the stars, to society and history.  All these things are simply arrangements of data.  In Snow Crash, we have seen only some aspects of information theory.  We have seen how many of the characters began to use information to their advantage.  Information began to be used as a commodity, something that could be bought and sold.  We also saw information hunting done by greedy capitalists.  The virus, a by product of information, which in Snow Crash is passed from computer to the human mind, also figures prominently in The Calcutta Chromosome, although here, it takes the form of the malaria parasite.  Starting as a cause for disease in human bodies, the parasite eventually penetrates the computer program.

It appears that the greatest challenge in dealing with information is organizing it in meaningful configurations.  This challenge is the greater since a lot of information exists that does not seem to be connectible to anything else.  There are many things that come to our attention, but do not seem to be relevant to anything else.  This is the challenge that Antar, the main character in the contemporary strand of the story faces.  Antar lives sometime in the near future.  Since the book was written in 1995, we can assume that this near future is now.  Indeed it would not be unusual that someone should have a job working at home and using a computer to do his or her job. 

Antar’s computer seems to be a bit more advanced than the computers we have today.  It is capable of speaking all languages and interacts with its user.  It is also capable to see when Antar loses interest or attention for what is happening on the screen.  AVA has the capacity to tell what Antar is doing, and almost what he is thinking.  AVA deals with only one individual whose moves she monitors.  It is interesting that Antar has found a way to escape the surveillance by using another gadget that projects the page of a book on the wall behind the screen.  However, AVA catches up with him in no time.

Antar’s reason for slacking has to do with the irrelevance of the information he has to examine.  He is not a computer whiz like Hiro Protagonist, using the computer in some playful and interesting ways.  He is middle-aged and his work is routine.  AVA is doing inventories for him and he does not even know the reason why he has to be aware of them.  Antar’s situation tells us something about the contemporary working conditions.  Antar’s work is easy in many ways: is he not burdened with any physical effort, and he does not even have to leave his home.  However, these conditions of work do not make him happy.  His body is still stressed because of the immobility to which he is forced.  His home loses the quality of home as it gets to be organized around AVA.  There is practically no difference between his home and an office.  We see this as his former life, when his wife was alive, is described.  The death of his wife makes it possible for him to bring his work home.  He becomes so isolated that he does not seem to enjoy his own habitat.  The only moments of intimacy and satisfaction are those he spends at the food stand in Central Station where he has tea with people he does not know.

It is interesting also that Antar comes from a culture that used to be very community-oriented.  When he first moved into his apartment, his wife liked it, because the building had many immigrants in it, and people seemed to relate to each other.  Antar’s progress from a social man, a man integrated in a community to a loner practically imprisoned in his own apartment is also the progress of our society.  We have lost the sense of intimacy at home even as we have also lost the distance and formality of the public place.  The difference between public and private has been rendered insignificant, even turned inside out.  Personal life takes place in public and public work is done at home.  Whether this social development has anything to do with the use of machines and information theory is hard to say.  In Antar’s case it would seem to be so.

Antar does not only exemplify the contemporary man who works more with machines than with other human beings but also the global man, the man who has been detached from his home and lives in a place that lacks any kind of national or local specificity.  New York is as anonymous and irrelevant as the inventories that pass on AVA’s screen.  Lots of people, coming from the most different corners of the world congregate around cups of tea at the station, itself a metaphor of their mobility, and instability.  When the novel progresses, we see that some of the people Antar meets there begin to reveal details about themselves, and Antar feels that as a violation of an unspoken rule of the place.  This is a place where people must meet and interact anonymously, their identities not exactly hidden but obscure, simply because there is no context in which they would be relevant.

The monotony of Antar’s life is interrupted by two events at once, and this simultaneity reinforces the parallel between the station and the home as different poles of Antar’s existence.  At the station he is introduced to a woman who needs an apartment and wants the one that has just been vacated in his building.  This obviously threatens the separation between home and the station, and the threat is not insignificant.  Although the two spaces do not correspond to the difference between private and public, they offer enough contrast so that Antar gets a relief from one when he goes to the other.  But Tara’s move into the apartment next door disturbs this arrangement and threatens to throw Antar’s life into an even more chaotic state.

This event is paralleled by a piece of information that appears on AVA’s screen and Antar can relate to his own life.  It is an identification card of a man that Antar had previously worked with.  This is the point in the story where it forks into three different paths.  One path is Antar’s continued existence in his present, working on AVA.  The second is his memory of his meeting with Murugan in 1995, followed by Murugan’s his adventures in Calcutta.  The third is the history of the discovery of the cause of malaria, which, according to Murugan’s sources of information appears to be totally different than the official version of it.

As the new strands of the story develop, Antar seems to disappear from the scene, and the main character is Murugan.  In the historical part, however, the main character is the mysterious Laakhan.  The change of focus in the narrative gives us the impression that the characters have switched places or simply have transformed from one into another.  The importance of this impression will become apparent later in the novel.

It would be important to first focus on the alternative history that emerges from Murugan’s research.  The discovery of the parasite that causes malaria is credited to a British doctor, who lived in India in colonial times, approximately a hundred years before Murugan’s adventure.  Ronald Ross was able to discover the parasite and the fact that it was transmitted from insect to insect through the reproductive cycle.  He also isolated the variety of mosquito that transmitted the disease.  Work on malaria had been done by others. The Frenchman, Laveran, had discovered the flagellae, using a microscope.  An American doctor, MacCallum, had discovered that “flagellae” were in fact mosquito sperm.  Murugan’s research leads him to believe that neither Ross nor MacCallum knew what he was doing.  They seem, however, to have been manipulated into knowing by a mysterious character called variously Luchman, Laakhan, and man other names.

Ghosh does an excellent job of critiquing and even making fun of 19^th century British science.  Although science did advance a lot in the 19^th century, the enthusiasm for it created a lot of false hypotheses and even branches of knowledge that today appear as completely unscientific.  It is also important to note that scientific activity in the 19^th century was inextricably related to the colonial enterprise.  Most of the discoveries that confirmed or generated various scientific theories were made in the colonies: Africa, India, and whatever was left un-colonized of America.  It was probably the encounter with these unknown territories, these totally new and different spaces, that stimulated the desire to know more, to turn toward the secrets of nature as well as to the secrets of history.

Malaria had been dealt with without actually knowing its cause.  It had been variously connected with bad air, marshes, or hot climates.  Just relating it to the mosquito was a discovery.  Although malaria can plague any region of the earth, toward the end of the 19^th century it was associated with the tropical countries, which made it a sort of colonial disease.  This is why, for a long time, it did not receive the same attention as other diseases in the metropolis.  Nevertheless, as the British were suffering from malaria in India as well as the Indians, the discovery of the parasite was very important.

After showing us how the Victorian prudishness does not allow Ross to understand what is happening under his microscope, Murugan gives us more and more clues that the Indians had discovered the parasite long before Ross, and that they actually had fed him the information.  This suggestion of a conspiracy that manipulates the scientific discoveries of the British doctor is interesting in more ways than one.  First, it undercuts the self-confidence of the British, who, in their position as colonizers of India, thought that they were in charge and that they exerted power over the Indians.  The scientific ambitions of the Brits have to do with social advancement and recognition, and the apparently innocent scientific activity is in fact another form of exploitation of the natives. 

Revealing the role of the natives in the process of scientific discovery also shows the arrogance of scientific research that imposes a mode of acquiring knowledge, which it considers exclusive.  Other ways of knowing that are outside the scope of reason are not only underestimated but unacknowledged as well.  In many ways, the British doctors are handicapped by their methods, which they are so proud of otherwise.  Other sources of blindness are the social and moral beliefs that the colonizers hold, which prevent them from finding out the truth.  The blindness caused by social and moral beliefs shows that science is not as pure and objective as they held it to be, that it is in fact backed by an ideology.

Murugan’s own research resembles the scientific research in the sense that he is collecting information from a variety of sources and putting it together.  After that, he is faced with the task of assigning it a meaning.  Like on Antar’s computer screen, a lot of irrelevant information passes through Murugan’s hands, and he has to select and discard many parts of it.  Up to this point in the book, we do not actually know what motivates the Indians to help Ronald Ross.  According to Murugan, their purpose is to hide their discoveries, yet they also want to make them known and work hard to make Ross discover the clues that lead to the parasite.  This again questions the Western ways in which knowledge is handled.  In the Western world, discoveries acquire their meaning and importance from publication, while the Indians who know about the mosquito want to remain anonymous.  They even hide their identity in the process, which indicates that identity is not an important issue with them.

Murugan’s research takes place in contemporary India, itself a place of mixed cultures, colonial inheritance, and old traditions that coexists with technological advancements.  Calcutta has ancient temples testifying to a grand past civilization, unruly maidans with overgrown vegetation and dirt, and modern buildings, where Western taste and technology brings about a kind of superfluous luxury that makes life uneasy for their occupants.  Most people in Calcutta seem to be poor: in the streets, Murugan is being followed by a young man in a T shirt that wants to get money out of him one way or the other.  Murugan feels haunted by the boy, as if the poverty he himself has managed to avoid were following him everywhere.

At the same time, we see both the privileged and the upwardly mobile classes in India.  In many ways, the distribution of privilege is very similar to the situation of class in the US.  Sonali Das is an actress and author, who has a relationship with a capitalist magnate, reminding us of Donald Trump.  Urmila, on the other hand, comes from a poorer family but she is upwardly mobile as young career woman.  Her career is made possible by the modernization of India.  We also get a glimpse of a poet or writer named Phulboni who gives a lecture in an auditorium.  It is difficult to see how all these characters relate to each other and what role they play in the story.  We are in the same position as Murugan or Antar, as we are confronted with a lot of information and we have to make sense of it.

The set-up we have in the novel reveals at once the dramatic differences and the astonishing similarities between New York and Calcutta.  In a parallel order the past, the 19^th century appears to be very different from the present, but also reveals itself to be very similar.  This may indicate that the world we have today is the inheritance of colonialism.  The poverty and social polarizations of the former colony have the same source as the multi-ethnicity of New York.  This is now called globalization, and it is a phenomenon that began with the first steps of colonization. 

We also saw that science is inextricably related to colonialism that made possible scientific discoveries in more ways than one.  It provided material for discoveries, room for theories, and labor for their testing.  This becomes quite clear if we look at the situation in the lab of Dr. D. D. Cunningham.  The doctor is surrounded by native assistants whom he personally trains and whom he uses for all sorts of purposes, from the highest to the lowest.  His assistants do everything from sweeping the floors to preparing the slides for the microscope, to providing the sources of samples, and as it turns out, even the necessary theoretical knowledge to do the job.  They are, however, subordinated to the ignorant Dr. Cunningham.

Another aspect of subordination is the situation of women.  From the beginning of Murugan’s adventures in Calcutta, we have met two characters Sonali Das and Urmila Roy.  The two women obviously belong to different social classes and have different economic situations.  In the second part of the book, we find out more about Urmila and her life within her family.  Urmila is highly educated, a career woman who works for a well-known magazine.  However, she is treated as if she were the servant of the family.  This is possible because she has only brothers.  Her mother and sister in law can also claim seniority for being older than her and married.

Urmila is mistreated in more ways than one.  First, her contribution to the family income, and therefore her economic value to the family, is not at all respected.  Whatever she has to do has to take second place to the most trivial activities of the other members of the family.  She is asked to cook before going to work and to shop for the purpose, because her father has to do his breathing exercises, and her mother has to say her morning prayers.  Even the younger brother is not to be disturbed, simply because he is a man.  Urmila is also scolded and insulted because she has a profession, and because she is not married.  The fact that Urmila not only accepts the treatment her family gives her but also complies with their requests indicates that a treatment like that is to be expected.  Modern day India gives some freedom to women but that freedom is not to be had at the expense of traditional duties.

In spite of the subordinated role they accept though, women seem to have found a way to escape their traditional roles and even to exercise power in some situations.  Sonali Das, for instance, has some power due to her status as an actress and writer.  She chooses not to marry and keeps a lover who is supporting her economically, but who cannot require that she do anything for him.  Mrs. Aratourian also seems to be independent and wealthy enough to have her own house and be in charge of her own affairs.  They are women with some power, but they exert it in such a way that it does not disturb the existent social order.

This kind of quiet exercise of power draws support from ancient matriarchal traditions that have long been displaced by patriarchy.  There have been ancient societies where women were given powerful roles, even when they were not the leaders.  Women were associated with fertility and other creative powers that were given a lot of respect.  We can see a sample of such power in the servant/assistant of Dr. Cunningham.  The woman seems to be in charge of everything that is happening in the lab.  Several times we find her surrounded by people and treated as if she were a priestess, a queen or a goddess.

Mangala, the woman in Cunningham’s lab is also in possession of the knowledge that is transmitted indirectly to the British doctors.  In the incident with Farley, she decides to release some knowledge to him in order to be left alone and continue her own activities.  As we mentioned before, the idea of knowledge that we have, based on the principles of science, is not the only kind of knowledge that is possible.  The so called primitive peoples of the countries that form now the third world have their own ways of organizing knowledge.  We regard such knowledge as being mystical, intuitive and superstitious.   The same characteristics are usually attributed to the knowledge that women possess.  Women are supposed to be closer to nature and to understand things by intuition, rather than by reason.