The aim of this paper is to analyze the intersection of hybridity and cultural dislocation as the primary organizing themes of Amitav Ghosh’s fiction and non-fiction. It purports that Ghosh’s body of work depicts a radical reconstruction of historical and subjective constructions of humanity predicated on movement, encounters, and mixture, thus countering the totalizing abstractions of nation, culture, and civilization. This research attempts to identify how Ghosh approaches hybridity in his major novels, The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and the Ibis trilogy (2008-2015), as not a postmodern condition but one that is historical and ecological. Also, this research attempts to identify this overwhelming sense of dislocation that is often experienced as painful but also generative of new forms of knowledge and solidarity. Ghosh’s historiographical technique demonstrates what it means to revitalize lost narratives, such as those of indentured labourers as well as subaltern historiography, to combat the mono-causal, Eurocentric ‘master narratives’ of history. From an ethical perspective, his works call for radical empathy and propose an approach to history from the vantage point of the displaced and non-human, thus subverting anthropocentric perspectives. Utilizing Bhabha’s framework, Ghosh portrays a world of ‘third spaces’ where cultural hybridization and translation subvert the foundational axes of modernity. His critique addresses not only the political imposition of borders and boundaries but also the fractures that exist in the realms of the separation of modern science from folklore, history from fiction, and human agency from the rest of the material world.

This paper discusses The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh as a work of scientific fantasy. The narrative follows several personalities and jumps around in time, all of which are expertly woven together. Antar, an Egyptian clerk in New York City (NYC), encounters a misplaced ID card in the book. Antar met a weird man named Murugan a long time ago, and he owns it. He is the man renowned to be the foremost expert about Ronald Ross, who was responsible for the 1898 Malaria mystery in Calcutta. As Antar investigates the man's true fate, a tangled web develops, and by the time Antar becomes embroiled in it, already too late to escape. With multiple storylines from various eras, the book has multiple layers. Naturally, the goal is for them to eventually blend together nicely.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome is a novel about ethical responsibility that deals with medical research. It narrates human’s behavior and inter-personal relationship. This research presents the human psychology, existence and knowledge, in exclusionary perspectives around the world in a span of time. This research explores human activities from other centric perspective. In the beginning, this research presents the westerners’ dominance over the non-westerners. Being an anti-liberal, other centered and sensible how a person can perceive the intellectual task in a period of life is the main finding. For this purpose, the action depends according to belief and values. In the span of time, westerns values seem to exclude the eastern values. The researcher opines that self-centered anti-liberalist concept causes diverse actions. It modifies the binary sight of an action, removes fixity, and changes its actions. It fulfills the gap between enlightenment rationality and rational-sensibility of Levine’s notion of ‘other’. The argument of Descartes’ ‘ cogito ‘ ( self ) is counter argued by Levinas, whose notion of self, talks about the self is separate from the world.

In the discussion of posthuman encounters, the focus is predominantly on robotics and the cyborg, artificial intelligence, and the implementation of technological elements into the human body. Less often explored is the complementary vision of the uploaded mind as a promise of life extension or even immortality. Nevertheless, there is, by now, quite a body of conceptual explorations, promises, warnings and also popularizations of this idea. The technological options described range from memory transfer to whole brain emulation or simulation, and they raise a multitude of theoretical, technological, philosophical and ethical concerns. Unsurprisingly, the assessment varies from enthusiastic celebration to dystopian nightmares, and the concepts have also been explored controversially in literary works. In my paper I outline the most important arguments and discuss some works of science fiction which explore visions of uploaded minds, most importantly Greg Evans’s Permutation City, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein.

Within the labyrinthine corridors of contemporary fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome and Stephen King’s The Shining stand as a testament to the genre-blending potential of horror and science fiction. Despite their seemingly disparate narratives, both novels grapple with the monstrous not through spectral apparitions, but through the insidious workings of human nature and the lingering shadows of historical trauma. In The Calcutta Chromosome Ghosh weaves a tapestry of historical trauma and political allegory, where the monstrous manifests in the lingering specters of colonialism and political violence. King in The Shining, on the other hand, speaks about Jack Torrance’s descent into madness and exposes the monstrous potential within seemingly ordinary individuals, a chilling exploration of the psyche’s abyss. This shared thematic core transcends genre boundaries, forging a bridge between the psychological chills of horror and the unsettling realities of science fiction. However, their narrative approaches diverge dramatically. Ghosh, in fact, shatters linearity, employing a fragmented, multi-temporal narrative infused with magical realism. Whereas King’s The Shining adheres to a classic horror structure, employing suspenseful pacing, Gothic tropes, and archetypal characters to evoke claustrophobic dread. This narrative divergence reflects their distinct artistic visions; Ghosh’s sprawling critique of socio-historical forces versus King’s focused exploration of the individual psyche. One can gain a deeper appreciation for the genre-blending potential of contemporary fiction by examining these contrasting approaches. Horror and science fiction, often perceived as distinct, can be potent tools for exploring the monstrous, both within and beyond the individual comprehension. Ghosh and King, through their masterful manipulations of genre conventions, offer unique perspectives on the enduring power of these genres to unsettle, challenge, and illuminate the darkest regions of the human experience.

Abstract This article situates Amitav Ghosh—as both critic and novelist—in relation to the contemporary genre turn, as a means of questioning the logical distinctions undergirding ideas of literariness. Readers of Ghosh tend to cast the overtly science-fictional The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery as a generic anomaly in his otherwise historical realist oeuvre. Against such automatic delineations, this article argues that Ghosh's 1995 work is not such an outlier when we break down the multiple genres at play within novels across his career, and how their interactions produce effects that have been mistakenly attributed to one or other isolated genre. In The Calcutta Chromosome and the Ibis trilogy (case studies that seem generically distant), critical representations of globalization are developed through recourse to speculative genre frames for archival contents, with the effect of estranging historical continuity, collectivity, and narrative conventions. Attending to ambivalent deployments of genre allows for more precise identification of how contemporary novels formally construct and confuse their own world-building effects, and how critics categorize texts and attribute political-critical impact to them.

This abstract delves into the captivating blend of magic realism and historical realism in the works of renowned Indian author Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh, celebrated for his historical and socio-political narratives, occasionally infuses elements of magic realism into his storytelling. Notable novels such as “The Shadow Lines,” “The Calcutta Chromosome,” and “Sea of Poppies” serve as examples where Ghosh adeptly blurs the boundaries between the magical and the real. This research paper emphasizes the diverse ways in which Ghosh explores the interplay between reality and fantasy, encouraging the readers to engage with his narratives on multiple levels and promoting discussions about the thin boundaries of literary genres. Magic realism, which is generally characterized by the inclusion of supernatural or magical elements within a realistic backdrop, challenges the distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Though it is associated with Latin American literature, this genre has been embraced and adapted by writers from a variety of cultural backgrounds. However, the complexities of Ghosh’s narratives and the depth of his characterizations leave room for diverse interpretations, possibly aligning with the principles of magic realism. This paper aims to illuminate the dynamic relationship between representing facts and stimulating the imagination, it also highlights the multi-faceted nature of literary genres and the subjective lens through which readers perceive and interpret literary works.

The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh delves into the subaltern narrative giving voice to marginalized people often overlooked in mainstream literature. The narrative draws on the themes of identity, power, and history through its characters and their experiences challenging traditional narratives and offers a unique perspective on the complexities of colonialism, science, and storytelling. The novel resurfaces the issues of defiance and resistance against the imperial power and its’ hegemony as depicted by Ghosh through the characters like Murugan, Mangala and Laakhan against British scientist Roland Ross and his associates. In the juncture of scientific research about the Malaria in colonial India, Ronald Ross was assisted by the Indian people, however, their contribution remained excluded in colonial historiography which Ghosh's narrative stages to revisit the colonizer's discriminatory policy. Meantime, this study triggers on the voice of the voiceless to subvert the 'orientalism' in Westerners' historiography by staging the voice of the oppressed in the domain of subaltern studies envisaged by Spivak and others. In so doing, it valorises the voice the subalterns by constituting an academic discourse for their age-longed muffled silence.

The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a convoluted journey through time and space. At once a work of science fiction, a medical mystery, and a history of malaria research, this hybrid novel sets into rivalry India’s old-time wisdom and spirituality against Western science and English colonial presumptuousness, thus advocating transmodernity and the pluriversality put forward by critics such as Rosa María Rodriguez Magda, Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, among others. This paper will analyse the way in which this novel denies the existence of a universal scientific method by deconstructing the certainties of an exclusively rationalist discourse whose discoveries have often gone hand in hand with exploitation, unequal power relations and colonization. Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance and Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas about the ethics of silence and knowledge will also be used to analyse silence as an alternative epistemological framework through which the dominant discourse can be undermined and the subaltern heard, and as a means to make amends for the injustices of the past by reclaiming the histories written by those who were made ‘others’ by the English imperial power.

Wprowadzając termin syndemiocen, artykuł proponuje przegląd najbardziej znanych nazw nowej epoki w dziejach Ziemi. Przynajmniej część z nich podważa zasadność absolutyzacji dyskursu na temat antropocenu, proponując wielość perspektyw i ujęć. Dlaczego to istotne, pokazuje analiza dwóch powieści o epidemiach: The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) Amitava Ghosha i The Blood Artists Chucka Hogana (1998). Nie tylko odnoszą się one krytycznie do medykalizujących definicji i strategii zwalczania epidemii. Subwersywnie realizują także podstawowe wzorce narracyjne Nowoczesnych, wskazując na ich udział w upowszechnianiu antropogenicznych dyskursów i praktyk.

New vaccines to prevent COVID-19 and malaria underscore the importance of scientific advances to promote public health globally. How is credit for such scientific discoveries attributed, and who benefits? The complex narrative of Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, both historical and speculative, demonstrates how medicine has come to value particular kinds of advances over others, prompting readers to question who controls access to resources and at what cost to global populations. In Ghosh's imagined world, scientific discovery is evaluated and rewarded-and ultimately deemed necessary-for its ability to serve communal, public health needs.

Travel Narrative as a genre is a factual representation or rather re-creation of personal and individual anecdotes of travel experiences, that is to say the literary representation of a real travel with all its enthralling experiences. It can also be an introspection of the journey which had been completed by the author and also an objective documentation of his travel experiences. Amitav Ghosh is also one such writer. He frequently uses history in his novels and essays inculcated in travel narrative. He is passionately involved with history crossing of national and international frontiers area old theme, to which Ghosh gives a new dimension. His works, The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace and travelogues –Countdown and Dancing in Cambodia At Large in Burma brought him International fame and recognition. The aim of this paper is to analyze how Amitav Ghosh has reconstructed history of time and history of Cambodia and Myanmar. The narration of Ghosh’s travel experiences in these countries brings to the fore the complex temporal dimensions of history in Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma.

This paper reads colonial archives of malaria in conjunction with Amitav Ghosh’s futuristic medical thriller The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and contends that the novel, loosely based on Sir Roland Ross, ruptures narratives of colonial expertise. The colonial expertise on malaria is embodied by Ross, an officer in the Indian Medical Service; this is in contrast with the model of expertise proposed by the novel. While Ross’s expertise is predicated on the domination of nature and controlling diseased tropical landscapes, the novel resists imperial strategies of mapping and disease control. This paper argues that The Calcutta Chromosome presents an alternative attempt to map the malarial, rewriting history by displacing actors such as Ross and instead placing two colonial subjects, Murugan and Mangala, at the centre of new mapping practices. The novel further questions the notion of ‘colonial improvement’ which malaria facilitated in imperial regimes. Deviating from the colonial history of improving the native body and landscape as a cure for malaria, the novel foregrounds subjugated subjects working at the peripheries of laboratories and scientific practices and thus subverts the notion of the ‘improved subject’ by proposing the idea of the mutational, transformational ‘Calcutta chromosome.’

Amitav Ghosh novel The Calcutta Chromosome: a Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery is considered, - an outstanding literary work in which the writer reveals a discourse of science versus counter-science from the earlier world of social, cultural and ethnical history of Indian subcontinent. India is home to the oldest continuous civilization, nevertheless, the long invasive rule of the Mughals and the Britishers has framed minds to undervalue the indigenous knowledge, practices, customs and discourses. Amitav Ghosh novel denies the Western supremacy in every field and puts a question mark in the invention of Anopheles maculipennis as the cause of malaria. Dr. Ronald Ross received the prestigious Nobel Prize in 1902 for his discovery of malaria parasite but Ami- tav Ghosh supports the contribution of Indian assistants Mangala and Laakhan who were not acknowledged by the British researchers. The novel reflects a postcolonial approach to interpret Western scientific mechanism, posits the question to unethical exploitation of native workers by the English and gives voice to the traditional knowledge of the subalterns. An integral part of Ghoshs approach in this novel is to illuminate the richness of ideas and complexity of Indigenous life, and to create a place where aboriginals are acknowledged for their remarkable contributions.

In Postcolonial fiction, the past, the present and the future are fused along with the imperial and colonial cultures, which are made to revolve around transposed time with the intention to subvert the imperial purpose in the ongoing course of narration. Colonization gives rise to freshly shaped transcultural forms known as hybridity. Hybridity takes linguistic, cultural, racial and political forms. Language and culture go hand in hand, but language also has the capacity to accept new cultures and take intense pleasure in it. In his novels, Ghosh mixes up many genres, explores them, merges them and makes the divisions of genres blur and fade away. Amitav uses complex narrative techniques with many layers of meaning displaying power relations. He narrates like a poet, merging family chronicle with personal history.

Conceptions of genetic kinship have recently emerged as a powerful new discourse through which to trace and imagine connections between individuals and communities around the globe. This article argues that,...

Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, a speculative novel which blends Western medical science with Eastern stories of ghosts, magic and immortality, criticizes the Eurocentric discourse of science and offers the possibilities of an alternative history from a subaltern perspective. By providing a logical and yet mystical order that privileges the marginalized, the novel casts doubt on the nature of knowledge. The aim of the article is to show that by substituting silenced protagonists (Eastern) and their ancient cultural practices for the ‘noble’ (Western) practices, and by providing agency to the subaltern by combining elements of myth, mysticism and the supernatural, Ghosh questions the superiority and nature of Western rationality. By providing an alternative life story of the scientist Roland Ross, where the subalterns Mangala and Laakhan have better knowledge of the malaria transmission process than Ross himself, Ghosh suggests the greater legitimacy of Eastern esotericism and mysticism over Western science. Thus, by allowing the story of the counter-science group to surface through the research of Murugan, Ghosh suggests the existence of a secretive historical records which have been removed from the official records of Western medical science. Finally, by contesting the idea that only Western science offers the ability to liberate humanity, Ghosh hints at the existence of alternative possibilities.

Winner of the 1997 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) takes place within an apartment in a near-future, wrecked New York, where Antar, an immigrant computer programmer, finds himself cyber-investigating the mysterious disappearance of a colleague in Calcutta, brought there by the compelling desire to find out the truth about the transmission of malaria in 19th-century colonial India. Across various locations and temporalities the novel is then launched in a time-bending, overlapping post-modern narration which, through the multiple, ‘transfective’ embodiments of the malarial Plasmodium, refracts the global interconnectedness of human migrations, old and new colonialisms, and dynamics of hospitality and community formation. As I will discuss in my study, Ghosh’s fourth novel imaginatively re-negotiates Asian American writing in a globalized framework, inaugurating the author’s creative engagement, in the following decades, with broader and more ramified transatlantic histories across Europe, Asia and the United States. With a look at its circuits of publishing, readership, and reception my reading of the novel, therefore, will investigate how the deployment of a cyberpunk avatar aesthetic integrates, contests and re-inscribes South Asian American diasporic experiences and literary representations, particularly via gendered tropes.

Forms of knowledge and our understanding of the world are central concerns in Amitav Ghosh's fiction. His novels often deconstruct epistemology derived from the Western philosophical tradition, with the aim of pointing at its relativity in spite of its claim to universality. This essay wants to demonstrate how The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) closely connects the production of an alternative form of knowledge (the counter-science) with a different way of perceiving and conceiving space. Focusing specifically on Calcutta's urban space, it will examine the correlation between space and epistemology in the novel through three spatial and gnoseological categories: borders, the labyrinth, and, finally, networks.

This paper focuses on the introduction of Western medicine in colonial India and its relationship with indigenous Indian medical practices against the background of Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome. It tries to locate an alternative narrative of the subalterns who, instead of conceding subordination, actually manipulate the state of the art of contemporary malaria research in early 20th century and reincarnate themselves in a futuristic New York but never let the elites discover their true motive. Simultaneously, it throws light on instances of epistemic violence because of cultural encounters.