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 Mangala.

Time is another element that has been altered by Ghosh. For Ghosh, the concept of time has become mutable, allowing characters to abide simultaneously in the past and future, as though Time itself were no more than a manifestation of the experiences of each character. This is clear from the beginning of the story, when Ghosh introduces the reader to Antar, who lives in an apartment in New York sometime in the future. There is no need to know the precise date, because Time is perceived as fluid, allowing for different stories from different eras to be linked.

Ghosh begins the story with Antar, who discovers an old ID card from a company he once worked for. He has Ava, a global search system, undertake a search on its origins, which are determined to be Calcutta. Ghosh does not stay with Antar but allows the reader to walk between past and future, entering the lives of different characters from different time periods. Ghosh does this by design, so that the reader becomes privy to the underlying threads that have been and are being woven by an unknown person or persons. How Ghosh reveals these threads is through the different stories that link Antar, Murugan, Urmila and Sonali, Ronald Ross, Phulboni, and the elusive Laakhan and Mangala.

When Ava determines that the ID card belongs to Murugan, it stirs a memory in Antar of having met him, and that he went missing in Calcutta in 1995. Antar begins an investigation and the reader is then transported back to Calcutta in 1995. Ghosh does this throughout the book. One minute, Murugan is having a chance encounter with Urmila and Sonali, and the next minute, Antar is talking to Ava or dreaming about his impending walk to Penn Station to have tea with the owner of the donut shop. Just as suddenly, the reader hears Phulboni speak about the secrets that lurk in the city, or is transported back to when Ronald Ross makes his big breakthrough on how malaria is transmitted from mosquitoes. For Ghosh, the flow of time becomes irrelevant; only the threads connecting each story matter.

Ghosh's narrative therefore jumps across time from moment to moment. At the same time, each leap across time and space seems to deepen the mystery. At no point does the reader ever truly know who Mangala and Laakhan are; they remain an unknown quantity to the end of the story, more hyperbole than fact.

Ghosh allows each character to share their story through each other and by way of letters, files, and newspapers. Phulboni talks of the Silence that shapes people’s lives, and writes stories that speak to this mistress of Silence, as well as stories that point to the elusive and dangerous Laakhan. Ross's letters reveal details about his research and about a man named Lutchman, who assisted him in his research. Letters by Farley and Grigson give the reader glimpses of Mangala and Laakhan, and Antar uses Ava and his memory to determine what happened to Murugan.

Ghosh establishes early on that Murugan is pivotal to understanding how the story unfolds. Murugan makes the connections, links characters in time and space, and is the one who first recognizes that they have all been manipulated into participating in an experiment that serves Mangala's and Laakhan's agenda of gaining immortality for themselves and the chosen few. But Murugan also points to the fact that each of them was chosen for a reason, and for someone else in the distant future: Antar. It is through Antar that the story begins and ends. In fact, for Ghosh, Antar's discovery—with the help of Murugan, and Mangala's later incarnation, Tara—is what completes the narrative. Antar, then, functions as both the goal and the discovery—the circle that must perpetuate.