The Postcolonial Cyborg in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome

Abstract

In this chapter, Kamal argues that Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), by exploring postcolonial themes through a science fiction lens, offers a new form of knowing and being as an alternative both to Western, positivistic formulations of science and to visions of the future that derive from such formulations. Kamal argues that the novel’s explorations of knowledge, technology and existence push the limits of conventional Western science in ways that fit the genres of both science fiction and postcolonial literature, culminating in Ghosh’s conceptualisation of a “postcolonial” cyborg. This postcolonial cyborg offers a vision of the future that has successfully disentangled itself from oppressive colonial power structures. In doing so, Kamal shows that Ghosh’s imagining of this alternative future articulates a postcolonial ethics of relationality between the Global North and the Global South.