Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome won him the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and rightfully so. It is a novel about knowledge, about people who want to find truth and understanding, about the secret of a chromosome that can travel from person to person. The plot unfolds in several time-lines, and in different places and narratives. The beautiful thing about the story is that all these threads coalesce into a peaceful but profoundly transforming climax in the end.
Along the way, Ghosh has some quite perceptive things to say about the world today. He introduces us to a young man who works in the virtual world of computers, networks, and information reconstruction for the veiled purposes of big corporations; he follows a young journalist in India as she tries hard to pursue her professional goals; he tells the story of an ageing man seeking knowledge, a man who himself becomes the narrator in the novel very often, lifting the shrouds from the past; he places us under the gaze of a woman whose origins and powers are unknown and seemingly unknowable. Ghosh also ironically returns to the colonial past to recreate the discovery of the malaria virus which plays a major role in the history of the Calcutta chromosome. The novel, divided into two parts and 40+ chapters, somewhat deliberately confuses the reader by interweaving all these stories and several more, only to resolve the confusion at the end. This strategy allows Ghosh to hold the reader on a very tight leash as well as increase and maintain the suspense until the grand finale.
Finally, while reading and thinking about the novel, I deeply appreciated two general features of Ghosh’s writing. First, he is not afraid of transformation and change; he cannot be intimidated and forced back into circularity and rigidness by concepts of intentional “high-brow” literariness. His stories lead somewhere, his characters change, and that can only be good because it is such a heavy, substantial, material process. Second, Ghosh proves, and indeed not only in this novel, that there is more to be found out there, that the world still holds riddles and enigmas and wonders — all those things we can marvel at, and invest our passion in. The universe we live in possesses enormous breadth and depth, and we are the privileged ones who were given the chance to explore it. Let us do so, says Amitav Ghosh, and fear not, for the journey to understanding will change us forever.
