Abstract
This essay argues that when reading Amitav Ghosh's Anglophone novel The Calcutta Chromosome we should be attentive to the genre of the non-Anglophone short story in South Asia. Doing so offers the reader insights into the current limitations of postcolonial studies, as well as a vision for what avenues the field might pursue in the future. Postcolonial studies has come under frequent attack for the excessive attention it bestows upon the novel, a gesture which in turn generates readings linking the novel to questions of nationhood and modernity. Taking this critique as its point of departure, this essay deliberately engages the Indian short stories that Ghosh references in his novel. The short story is a genre whose specific literary qualities are all too often neglected by subsuming them under the blanket term ‘prose’. This essay shows that attention to the short story is crucial not only because of the important role it plays in South Asian literary history, but also because it allows, indeed requires, the postcolonial literary critic to ask of it an entirely different series of questions than those that would be appropriate for the novel.
Published Version
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