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This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham]On: 19 November 2014, At: 18:26Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Interventions: International Journal ofPostcolonial StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20
Not Just ProseShital Pravinchandraa
a Yale University, USAPublished online: 13 May 2013.
To cite this article: Shital Pravinchandra (2014) Not Just Prose, Interventions: International Journal ofPostcolonial Studies, 16:3, 424-444, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2013.798915
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N O T J U S T P R O S E
The Ca l cu t t a Ch romosome , the Sou th As i an Sho r t S to r y
and the L im i t a t i on s o f Po s t co l on i a l S tud i e s
Shital PravinchandraYale University, USA
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.
................
genre
Ghosh, Amitav
postcolonialstudies
short story
South Asia
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.....................................................................................interventions, 2014
Vol. 16, No. 3, 424�444, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.798915# 2013 Taylor & Francis
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On Being Prized as ‘Postcolonial’
Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) defies easy
classification. It can be read as science fiction, as a medical thriller, as a
detective novel, or even as a modern-day meditation on reincarnation. In this
essay I read The Calcutta Chromosome as a pedagogical exercise of sorts: I
argue, in short, that we should read the novel from the unfamiliar vantage
point offered by the non-Anglophone South Asian short story. Adopting this
alternative literary lens places us face to face with the limitations of
postcolonial studies, and allows us to envision possible avenues into the
future of the field.
It is fitting to initiate a critical reading of the novel with a discussion of
prestigious awards. To begin with, the novel’s plot partially revolves around
the historical figure of British colonial medical officer Ronald Ross, winner
of the 1902 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the role of the Anopheles
mosquito in the transmission of malaria. Secondly, we have the author’s own
track record in the world of literary accolades to consider. Amitav Ghosh has
won the Prix Medicis etranger and the Sahitya Academy award, and was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel Sea of Poppies (2008). Thirdly,
there is his much talked-about decision to withdraw his earlier novel, The
Glass Palace, from the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize, to which Ghosh’s
publishers had submitted his work without consulting him. Ghosh pulled out
of the contest on the grounds that ‘‘‘the Commonwealth’’ can only be a
misnomer so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural
and literary lives’ of the countries that once formed part of the British
Empire, a rationale, as we shall see, that is of no little relevance to my
argument about the place of non-Anglophone literatures in the field of
postcolonial studies. Fourthly, there is the intriguing case of The Calcutta
Chromosome itself, for which Ghosh bagged a prize reserved for a literary
niche that we rarely associate with South Asian Anglophone writing: the
Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British prize given to the best science fiction novel
to have been published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.
If we want to explore the state of postcolonial literary studies today,
prestigious prizes become not just appropriate, but urgent topics of discussion.
Postcolonial scholars have already subjected the Booker Prize, which has
increased both the global public’s awareness and consumption of world
Anglophone literature, to especially close critical scrutiny. Writing with
particular reference to the Booker, Graham Huggan (2001) explains that,
since the 1980s, this prize has channelled Britain’s growing impetus to embrace
a multicultural society whose members actively interrogate and challenge the
nation’s imperial past. On the one hand, Huggan notes, the Booker rewards
authorial attempts to ‘‘‘write back’’ to a literary Empire whose centre can
obviously no longer hold’, thereby upholding the corrective spirit upon which
NOT JUST PROSE 425........................Shital Pravinchandra
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postcolonial literary studies was founded (110). On the other hand, however,
the award’s overwhelming impact on book sales relies on a ‘commodification
of glamourized cultural difference’ that undermines the efforts of postcolonial
scholars to counter the objectification of cultural otherness (110).
Huggan further observes that authors placed on Booker long- and shortlists
dominate not only the front pages of the media and the front windows of
bookshops but also the syllabi and research of postcolonial literary scholars
(119). His comments alert postcolonial scholars to a rather embarrassing
problem: our field, whose scope is potentially large (and daunting) enough to
encompass the cultural production of most of the decolonized world,
overwhelmingly chooses, instead, to focus on a handful of contemporary
Anglophone writers. Neil Lazarus best sums up the issues:
The field of postcolonial studies is structured in such a way that it is much more
likely to register the presence of writing in English and, to a lesser extent, French or
Spanish, than writing in such other languages as Chinese, Arabic, Yoruba, Zulu,
Amharic, Malay, Urdu, Telegu, Bengali, Sinhala, Tagalog, or even in the
metropolitan and formerly colonial languages of Dutch and Portuguese. Similarly,
it is much more likely to register the presence of writers who adopt the generic and
modal conventions readily assimilable by Euro-American readers than of writers
who root their work in other conventions. (Lazarus 2004: 428)
Nor is this simply a problem about the restricted body of work to which the
field makes continual reference. As Lazarus points out, postcolonial studies
risks becoming a methodologically stagnated field in which ‘the same
questions [are] asked, the same methods, techniques and conventions used’
in order to muse over tired observations on imagined nationhood, hybrid
identities and history as a narrative of domination (424).
Like most of Ghosh’s oeuvre, The Calcutta Chromosome, as we shall see
shortly, responds well to this sort of postcolonial critical treatment. Yet The
Calcutta Chromosome is nothing like Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, which
Lazarus lists, along with Salman Rushdie’s ubiquitous Midnight’s Children
and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, as one of those over-invoked texts that
postcolonial criticism repeatedly and formulaically uses in order to sustain
would-be authoritative discussions of nationalism. The Calcutta Chromosome
is intriguing because it sees Ghosh try his hand at science fiction, a mode of
narration that is absent from his own fiction, and, indeed, from postcolonial
literature at large. Speculative fiction not being one of the generic modes that
postcolonial scholarship is accustomed to dealing with, we might expect some
signs of trepidation as to how exactly to approach The Calcutta Chromosome.
And yet, much of the scholarship on the novel confidently hails it as a rare and
exciting example of ‘postcolonial science fiction’.1 The phrase, to be sure,
assumes that science-fiction is a category whose stability is only shaken by the
1 Chambers’ (2003)
article on the novel is
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adjective ‘postcolonial,’ thus bypassing the weighty problem of defining the
exact properties of science fiction and the very dilemma that has plagued and
enriched science-fiction studies since its inception.2 My own concern,
however, is with the term ‘postcolonial’: how, according to critical readings
of the novel, does The Calcutta Chromosome manage to modify the genre of
science fiction in a specifically postcolonial manner?
Before we consider this question, however, a brief synopsis of this unruly
novel is in order. Its events transpire in three separate geographical regions
and time periods: New York City in the unspecified near future; Calcutta in
1995, the date of the novel’s publication; and, finally, the various
laboratories of late nineteenth-century colonial India, where malaria
research was under way. The different years notwithstanding, all the events
occur over the course of the same two calendar days, 20�21 August. The
20th of August, as we learn along the way, was designated as World
Mosquito Day by Ronald Ross after he discovered the role that mosquitoes
play in the spread of malaria. The narrative relentlessly shuttles us from one
time period to another through recollections and embedded narratives, but
one figure is present throughout: Murugan. Part historian of science, part
detective verging on conspiracy theorist, Murugan eagerly relates his own
views on Ross’s discoveries about malaria to anyone willing to listen. In
short, Murugan is convinced that Ross’s breakthroughs would have been
impossible had he not, unbeknownst to him, been guided through his
research by his two untrained Indian laboratory assistants, Lutchman and
Mangala. According to Murugan’s conjectures, Lutchman and Mangala’s
unconventional experiments led them to the discovery that the malaria
parasite can be used to reverse the effects of the last stages of syphilis. In the
process of treating syphilitics, the unlikely scientists stumble upon a
biochemical component � the Calcutta chromosome � that allows certain
biological and personality traits of the malaria-infected blood donor to be
transferred to the syphilitic patient. What the Calcutta chromosome permits,
in other words, is a scientifically controlled reincarnation of sorts.
Far-fetched and unscientific as his theory might seem, the novel’s structure
encourages the reader to believe that Murugan is on to something. The
narrative is littered with references to certain recurring figures who seem to
be reincarnations of each other. A host of characters with a malformed hand,
for example, circulate in the text. In addition, one particular youth seems to
appear in all spatiotemporal coordinates of the novel, his name undergoing
slight mutations (Lutchman, Laakhan, Lucky) each time we encounter him.
Of all these elements, it is Murugan’s conjectures about Ronald Ross’s
untrained laboratory assistants that critics in search of the novel’s
postcolonial elements often find most suggestive. As Thrall (2009) notes in
his reading, Murugan’s theory suggests that Ross only won the Nobel Prize
for medicine ‘because he was led each step of the way by the often nameless
entitled ‘Postcolonial
Science Fiction:
Amitav Ghosh’s TheCalcuttaChromosome.’Thrall (2009)
describes the work as
‘an example of theemerging subgenre of
postcolonial science
fiction’ (289).2 As Adam Roberts
explains in TheHistory of ScienceFiction (2005), thechief point of debate
in science fiction
studies has centred
on the question ofscience fiction’s
relationship to the
fantastic. While some
critics � mostnotably Darko Suvin
� are keen to
distinguish sciencefiction from fantastic
literature, others are
comfortable applying
the term ‘sciencefiction’ to texts
‘more normally
classified as magic
realist or fantastic’(2). Roberts opts to
define science fiction
as a specific (anddominant) branch of
fantastic literature
(3).
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native lab assistants who helped with and at times were the subjects of his
experiments’ (293). According to Thrall, the textual move of crediting
untrained Indians with this medical achievement allows Ghosh to ‘lodg[e]
ultimate agency [for the Nobel Prize] with figures most marginal to
European accounting’ (293). In the process, Thrall continues, Ghosh
questions ‘the precedence and even nature of Western modes of rational
inquiry’ (293). Similarly, Chambers (2003) focuses on the Indian lab workers
to argue that the novel ‘problematizes the universalist claims of Western
science’ to suggest that ‘science, technology and medicine were not conveyed
to India by the British in a one-way process of transfer’ (58). And Nelson
(2003) sees both the location of the laboratory and the race and gender of
Ross’s untrained lab workers as part of the novel’s argument against the
notion ‘that modern laboratories exist only in the ‘‘First World’’ and that
only rich white men ‘‘do’’ science’ (254).
These examples should suffice to indicate the dominant hermeneutic that
has crystallized around the novel: The Calcutta Chromosome successfully
creates a specifically postcolonial mode of science fiction because it provides
an alternative history that challenges the narrative presented in Ronald
Ross’s Memoirs. Ghosh’s novel attributes the breakthroughs in malaria
research to two unlikely local ‘scientists’ whose methods defy every rule of
western scientific practice. As Chambers (2003) puts it, Ghosh offers a
‘rewriting of the history of Ross’s discovery’ (57, emphasis added) by
focusing on Ross’s Memoirs and the telling, if infrequent, references that
Ross’s text makes to his Indian servants and laboratory assistants. Ghosh’s
technique places him firmly in the camp of postcolonially corrective writers;
thus, Chambers emphasizes that the novel ‘invites parallels with such
revisionist texts as . . .Wide Sargasso Sea, in that Ghosh takes a minor
character from the margins of a text and pushes him centre-stage’ (61). The
only difference, it would seem, is that Ghosh’s brand of postcolonial science
fiction necessitates ‘writing back’ not to western canonical fiction, but to
western colonial scientists.
So far, we are firmly ensconced in the postcolonial studies described by
Neil Lazarus, where familiar critical methodologies are rehearsed to remind
us, yet again, of how history � history of science, in this case � is a narrative
of domination. In response to Lazarus’s call for reinvigorated, renewed
approaches in our field, I suggest it is now time to put forward a somewhat
different reading of The Calcutta Chromosome. My first claim is that the
novel’s initial lesson to postcolonial critics is delivered by throwing us into
unfamiliar literary territory. Lesson number one requires us to wrestle with a
thorny issue that postcolonial studies tends to tiptoe around: genre.
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On Postcolonial Studies and the Problem of Genre
The predilection that postcolonial studies has shown towards the novel has
been much criticized. In 1990 Timothy Brennan reminded us that
under conditions of illiteracy and shortages, and given simply the leisure-time
necessary for reading one, the novel has been an elitist and minority form in
developing countries when compared to poem, song, television and film. Almost
inevitably [the novel] has been the form through which a thin, foreign-educated
stratum (however sensitive or committed to domestic political interests) has
communicated to metropolitan reading publics. (Brennan 1990: 56)
And yet the novel’s rule remains unchallenged. Its dominion persists even in
the turn towards world literature and ecocriticism. This should not surprise
us. As Jahan Ramazani (2001) has noted, our field’s bias towards the novel is
rooted in its approach to the literary text: postcolonial studies is ‘largely
grounded in mimetic suppositions about literature’ for which genres such as
poetry � even Anglophone poetry � are ill-suited. If poetry is so understudied
in postcolonial studies, he explains, this is because the genre cannot easily be
channelled towards ‘curricular expeditions into the social history of the
Third World; and consequently, it is harder to annex as textual synecdoche
for the social world of Nigeria, Trinidad or India’ (4). In a footnote to this
important observation, Ramazani offers a one-sentence summary of the
dominant genre-based associations that have shaped postcolonial literary
studies: ‘the novel becomes a sort of proxy for the nation’ (186).3
This legacy remains with us. Benedict Anderson’s canonical examination
of the process that links the novel to ‘print capitalism’ and to imagining the
nation, and Frederic Jameson’s much-disputed claim that all third-world
texts are ‘necessarily [. . .] to be read [. . .] as national allegories’ (69), both
date from the 1980s, and yet Erin O’Connor is still able, two decades later,
to authoritatively claim that postcolonial literary theory ‘routinely makes
‘‘narrative’’ into a figure for the textual dimension of nation-building’ (218).
In my view, to read The Calcutta Chromosome is to be reminded, as a
postcolonial critic, of the important limitations our field both contains and
produces. To summarize the problems I have already alluded to above, these
limitations include the dominance of Europhone texts; the prevalence of a
hermeneutic that sees postcolonial literature’s fundamental task as a
‘corrective’ (and hence reactive) one; the overreliance on mimetic readings
that mine the literary text for information about the sociohistoric context
from which it arises, and, therefore, on the genre most suited to this literary
treatment: the novel.
A sceptical reader might well raise an eyebrow at this point. How could this
Anglophone novel, persuasively shown to revise and recast Ronald Ross’s
3 In this sentence,
Ramazani is citing
Leela Gandhi’s
Postcolonial Theory:A CriticalIntroduction (1998).
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Memoirs, possibly have anything to say about the future of postcolonial
studies? Let me explain. To begin with, there is the novel’s generic anxiety, a
discomfort with the genre it seems to have been forced to inhabit. For the
novel, perhaps at the behest of its publishers, curiously insists that it is a
novel: a surtitle on the cover of its first two editions helpfully informs us that
what we are about to encounter is ‘A novel of fevers, delirium and discovery’
(emphasis added).4 And yet, as critics such as James Thrall have discovered,
this novel that is determined to remind its reader that it is a novel, harbours
within it an episode that could perfectly well be extracted and read as a stand-
alone, self-contained (ghost) story. Thrall’s (2009) reading of the novel �which, we recall, he sees as an example of postcolonial sci-fi � forces him to
conclude that Ghosh’s unconventional inclusion of a supernatural tale into a
science fiction novel can only be a newcomer’s mistake: ‘Someone more
inured to even the broadest traditions of the trade’, he muses, ‘might not have
embedded an old-fashioned ghost story in the midst of his science fiction’
(300). Perhaps not. But someone who wished to gesture towards a non-
Anglophone South Asian literary tradition might do worse than embed a self-
contained short story within his novel. My own reading, in fact, hinges on this
inclusion: the ghost story jeopardizes our attempts to offer neat postcolonial
interpretations of the rest of the novel. Understanding its role in the novel is
simultaneously to realize the shortcomings of a postcolonial literary studies
that remains largely anchored within its Europhone comfort zone.
The stand-alone short story within The Calcutta Chromosome recounts the
experiences of a minor character in the novel, Phulbone, who is himself a writer
of short stories. Phulbone is employed by a British soap company known for its
reach into even the smallest of Indian towns and villages. His job thus takes him
into remote, rural areas of India. On one of these expeditions Phulbone is
stranded in the deserted railway station of Renupur. Despite warnings to the
contrary, he decides to spend the night there, and in the dead of night
encounters the ghost of Renupur’s former stationmaster, Laakhan.
Critics familiar with the South Asian literary tradition, most notably
Bishnupriya Ghosh, have picked up on the echoes of non-Anglophone South
Asian fiction within the episode. Bishnupriya Ghosh (2004) explains that the
fictitiously named station of Renupur is a thinly veiled allusion to the Hindi
writer Phanishwarnath Renu, known for his interest in rural characters and
for fashioning a literary language that reproduced the patterns and rhythms
of village speech. Citing The Calcutta Chromosome’s allusions to what she
terms ‘original vernacular literary fare’ (215), Bishnupriya Ghosh informs us
that, in a personal interview, Ghosh confirmed her hypotheses when he
revealed that the novel had been influenced by two South Asian regional-
language short stories: Renu’s ‘Smells of a Primeval Night’ and Rabindranath
Tagore’s ‘The Hungry Stones’.5 She concludes that this ‘stalking of the novel
4 The 2011 edition
of the book no longer
sees need for thissurtitle, and replaces
it with a note
reminding the
prospective readerthat this is a work by
‘the bestselling
author of Sea ofPoppies’.
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in English by vernacular Indian fiction’ (197) constitutes a call for reforming
our reading practices as postcolonial critics:
Such a grafting of vernacular paradigms onto a literary tradition that character-
istically, and often problematically, references only its Anglo antecedents is a
polemical refiguring of postcolonial literary practice. Now any postcolonial
criticism of the novel in English must recuperate a vernacular archive to make
good its promise. (Ghosh 2004: 218)
I could hardly agree more with Bishnupriya Ghosh’s reading. I echo both her
call for a postcolonial studies that pays more critical attention to non-
Europhone, vernacular literary traditions, and her claim that The Calcutta
Chromosome needs to be read alongside its vernacular intertexts. My own
argument, however, is that we need to further explore the fact that the
specific vernacular archive that The Calcutta Chromosome draws on is that
of the vernacular short story, an archive, in other words, that leaves us no
alternative but to reckon with the vexed question of genre.
In fact, the short story offers a particularly suggestive entry point into a
discussion of the shortcomings of postcolonial studies. The genre remains
under-discussed in the field, having no vocal spokespersons for it (such as
Jahan Ramazani for poetry and Helen Gilbert for drama), a fact probably
attributable to the notable language-based imbalance in the practice of the
genre. The short story is an especially important genre in most regional
languages of the formerly colonized world. Speaking of Indonesian literature,
where Dutch was never consolidated as a literary language, Will Derks (2000)
tells us that ‘the novel, with its dependence on the printing press and the
solitary individual (as author and reader) is but a marginal phenomenon,
whereas the poem and the short story are omnipresent because they can be,
and are meant to be, performed’ (330). Speaking of the popularity of the short
story in all regions of the African continent, F. Odun Balogun (1991) laments
the lack of scholarly attention bestowed upon it in the subtitle to his own
pioneering study of the African short story: ‘a literature in search of critics.’
South Asia, the region with which Ghosh’s novel is concerned, is another
case in point. While many of the major writers working in the subcontinent’s
regional languages are prolific short-story writers, this is notably not the case
for Anglophone South Asian writers. So, celebrated regional language
writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand and U. R.
Ananthamurthy are acclaimed novelists, but they are equally well known
for their short stories (and, in the case of Tagore, of course, their poetry).6 In
contrast, some of the towering figures of the postcolonial literary canon,
South Asian Anglophone writers such as Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry
and Vikram Chandra, are known primarily as novelists despite the fact that
all three of these writers have published a collection of short stories.7
5 Chambers (2009)
identifies yet another
possible intertext for
The CalcuttaChromosome:
Charles Dickens’
ghost story ‘The
Signal-Man’ (1894).My own focus,
however, is on the
novel’s relationshipwith its non-
Europhone
intertexts.
6 Tagore’s most
acclaimed novelsinclude The Homeand the World(1916) and Gora(1907); he also wrote
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In accounting for this discrepancy, we must acknowledge the role of
literary markets, of the publishing industry and of the reading publics of each
region. These factors, in turn, bear upon the literary criticism generated in
each respective region. South Asian literary criticism abounds in volumes
dedicated solely to discussions of the short story, which is unsurprising given
that entire literary movements in South Asia have, in some cases, hinged on
the short story form.8 Postcolonial critics in the western academy, on the
other hand, frequently write about Europhone novels because, quite simply,
there are more Europhone novels published there than short story collec-
tions. What interests me, however, are those rare occasions when these two
trajectories intersect. What happens, in other words, when the postcolonial
critic takes on the non-Europhone short story?
The matter of the hierarchical relationship between the novel and the short
story has been addressed by Mary Louise Pratt (1981) in her canonical article
on the short story. That both genres are not held in equal regard, she argues,
is made quite apparent in the countless critical attempts to define the short
story, all of which repeatedly allude to the novel in order to distinguish the
short story from it. The reverse, of course, is not true; when advancing facts
about the novel we are rarely expected to first clarify some facts about the
short story (180). Pratt also points out that the short story is often seen as
lacking in artistic merit, a fact she attributes to the genre’s reputation as a
‘training genre’ for those lacking in appropriate experience: aspiring fiction
writers � whose ultimate aspiration is assumed to be the publication of a full-
length novel � must first prove their mettle by writing short stories, and
apprentice readers � understood to be as yet unskilled to take on a lengthy
novel � are often introduced to literature through short stories (180).9 But
when the field of postcolonial studies, long accustomed to the novel, takes on
the non-Europhone short story, the asymmetrical relationship between both
genres becomes doubly apparent.
A trend was set in the early days of postcolonial studies, when Frederic
Jameson laid down his infamous dictum regarding Third World texts.
Jameson (1986) obliterates all generic distinctions between short stories and
novels, effectively asserting that, in terms of the cultural labour they
perform, they are indistinguishable. Thus, he subjects Lu Xun’s short story
‘Diary of a Madman’ to the same reading as he performs on Ousmane
close to one hundred
short stories, mostly
during a particularly
prolific period in the1890s. As well as
writing some of the
most popular short
stories in Hindi-Urdu, including ‘The
Chess Players’ and
‘The Shroud’,Premchand is the
author of one of the
most highly regarded
novels in Hindi-Urduliterature, Godaan(1936). Kannada
author
Ananthamurthy’smost acclaimed novel
is Samskara (1965);
he has also published
more than five shortstory collections, the
most famous of
which are Prasne(1963) and Mouni(1973).
7 It was only in
1994, once he hadbeen acclaimed as
one of the world’s
salient contemporary
novelists, thatRushdie published
his volume of short
stories, East, West.Mistry initially rose
to prominence
thanks to his short
story collectionsTales from FerozshaBaag (1987) and has
since gone on to
consolidate hisreputation as a
novelist with Such aLong Journey(1991), A FineBalance (1995) and
Family Matters(2002). Chandrafollowed a slightly
different trajectory,
first emerging as a
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Sembene’s novel Xala: both emerge as equally potent national allegories for
‘third-world culture and society’ (69).
In thus sentencing Third World texts, Jameson at least does not
discriminate between the ability of all genres to operate as national
allegories. An article on acclaimed Urdu short-story writer Sadaat Hasan
Manto, however, sees Aamir Mufti (2000) making the claim that generic
choice itself is conditioned by one’s relationship to the nation-state. Mufti’s
attentiveness to genre and the care with which he situates Manto within
Urdu literary history make his piece, on the one hand, an exemplary text on
which to model an alternative postcolonial criticism. Yet, what is interesting
about Mufti’s foray into the South Asian, non-Anglophone short story is
how heavily he relies on that ubiquitous critical manoeuvre that postcolonial
studies has so accustomed us to: in his reading, the literary text emerges
primarily as ‘a figure for the textual dimension of nation-building’
(O’Connor 2003: 218).
Mufti’s article explores Urdu literary practice during the 1930s and 1940s
� the years immediately preceding independence and partition, which saw
Urdu becoming the principal language of Pakistan and an increasingly less
popular literary language in India � and to discuss the effect that these years
had on subsequent Urdu literature.10 In Mufti’s eyes, Manto’s practice of the
short story form is somehow exceptional, for he succeeds in articulating a
relationship to the nation not through a ‘major’ genre � the novel, of course
� but through the ‘minor’ genre that is the short story: ‘Manto turns the Urdu
short-story � itself a ‘‘minor’’ genre that is made to do the work in Urdu . . .of
a ‘‘major’’ one � into a means of dislodging the resolutions of . . .nationalism
from within’ (Mufti 2000: 3�4).
Mufti then expands his claim. It is not just Manto but the linguistic�literary tradition to which he belongs that is in fact exceptional. ‘Urdu’,
states Mufti, is ‘unique among the major literatures of South Asia in the
emphasis it places on the short story as the primary genre of narrative fiction,
even over the decades after Partition. In Urdu, the more common
hierarchical relationship of the novel to the short-story form is reversed’
(9). The accuracy of this assertion can, of course, be disputed, both with
reference to numerous important Urdu novels since 1947, and by reminding
ourselves that the short story has played an incredibly important role in all
South Asian non-Anglophone literary traditions.11
As Mufti (2000) would have it, however, the short story needs to be seen
in its relationship to nation-building. ‘Urdu literature’s foregrounding of the
short story at the cost of the novel is to be understood in terms of the
ambivalent relationship of Urdu to the discourse of Indian nationhood’, he
claims, adding that ‘the privileging of the short-story in modern Urdu
literature is a function of [the] problematic of minoritization’ (10�11). The
bias towards the novel and towards discourses of nation-building is so
novelist with RedEarth and PouringRain (1995),
following up withthe short story
collection Love andLonging in Bombay(1997), andreturning to the
novel with SacredGames (2006).8 Pragativad, or the
Progressive Writers’
movement of the
1930s, was areformist movement
that aimed, as stated
in the group’s 1935
manifesto, toproduce realist
literature that would
‘deal with the basic
social backwardnessand political
subjection’ that these
writers saw in Indiansociety. In the 1950s
the nayi kahani or
New Short Story
movementchallenged existing
literary conventions
with formal
innovations thatemphasized
subjective experience
and interiority withthe use of flashbacks,
interior monologues
and a rejection of
plot. For a briefsurvey in English of
the pragitavad and
nayi kahanimovements, seeBhatia (1996).
9 While the issue of
how we teach
postcolonial studiesexceeds the scope of
this essay, I think it is
important to notethat the short story is
also a fundamental
genre in which to
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dominant that when the non-Anglophone short story is discussed at all, its
predicament is to remain a ‘minor’ genre that becomes the logical choice
with which to express minority status within the nation.
Other discussions of the South Asian short story, alas, fare no better.
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) reading of Rabindranath Tagore and his
Bengali oeuvre perpetuates this tendency of pressing literary texts into the
service of nation-building. A chapter in Provincializing Europe provides an
extensive discussion of Tagore’s short stories. The chapter is tellingly entitled
‘Nation and Imagination’, thereby foregrounding the nation as analytical
category. Like Jameson, Chakrabarty does not doubt that all literary genres
can equally be read against the framework of nationhood. Like Mufti,
however, Chakrabarty pays considerable attention to the issue of genre and
to the different kinds of work that a given genre is best suited to perform. To
address this last question, Chakrabarty turns to late nineteenth-century
colonial Bengal, where he explores a very particular dilemma plaguing the
Indian nationalist: the need to reconcile ‘two different and contradictory
ways of seeing the nation’ (2000: 151). He explains that if the nationalist
possesses a critical eye needed to find faults and propose necessary national
reforms, he also possesses a loyal and patriotic eye that sees the nation as
already beautiful and sublime. According to Chakrabarty, Tagore was able
to develop a unique strategy with which to cure this double-vision.
Examining Tagore’s work, Chakrabarty concludes that between 1890 and
1910 the writer’s preferred solution was to create ‘a division of labour
between prose and poetry’ (151).
Thus, Chakrabarty tells us, on the one hand we find Tagore’s prose pieces,
‘in particular the short stories about Bengali rural life in the collection
Galpaguchha, in which a trenchant critique of society and a clear political
will for reform were visible’ (151). Noting that these ‘prosaic writings’
offered trenchant critiques of the practice of dowry and the oppression of
women, Chakrabarty compares these stories to Tagore’s poetry (152). There,
by contrast, we find depictions of the same subject matter � rural Bengal �that hail the region as ‘a land of arcadian and pastoral beauty’ (153).
There are two things of note in Chakrabarty’s treatment of genre. Firstly,
we should observe that he defines genre, in the broadest possible terms, as
comprising the distinction between poetry and prose. The use of the blanket
term ‘prose’ glosses over all further particularities of genre, paying no
attention to the fact that the ‘prose’ of Tagore that Chakrabarty discusses
consists not of novels but of short stories. Secondly, there is an elision of
‘prose’ and of ‘the prosaic’ here that becomes all the more suspect when we
consider that in this same twenty year period between 1890 and 1910, along
with the numerous short stories critiquing child marriage and the unequal
treatment of women, Tagore also wrote several ghost stories that are
anything but ‘prosaic’. ‘Skeleton’ (1892) recounts the tale of a young man
train languagelearners. I find this
fact to be extremely
suggestive in order tothink through the
pedagogical realities
of forging a
postcolonial studiesthat remains
attentive to non-
Europhone texts.Perhaps this is an
interesting
pedagogical space
from which todevelop a much-
needed dialogue
between postcolonial
studies and non-western language
literatures, a
dialogue that might
centre on this veryquestion of genre.
10 I lack the space
to further explicatethe rich and complex
history of the
relationship between
Hindi and Urdu. Irefer the reader to
Shackle and Snell
(1990) and Rai
(2001).11 In her response to
Moretti’s
‘Conjectures onWorld Literature’,
Francesca Orsini
(2002) observes that,
over and above thenovel, other genres
have done more to
shape the
subcontinent’sliterature: in South
Asia, she notes, ‘the
major nineteenth and
twentieth-centuryforms have been
poetry, drama and
the short story’ (79).Urdu has also been
the language of
production of several
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who is visited, in the dead of night, by the coquettish female owner of a
skeleton that was once used to teach him anatomy but now lies in the house,
unused. Then there is ‘In the Middle of the Night’ (1894) in which a village
doctor is forced, night after night, to listen to an unwanted, guilt-ridden
patient recount the tale of his remarriage after the death of his first wife, only
to be repeatedly visited by her ghost and haunted by her mournful cry of
‘Who is she? Who is she?’12
What interests me about these ghost stories is that they unsettle the neat
generic division of labour that Chakrabarty proposes. They are neither
prosaic in their call for reform, nor poetic in their invocation of a beautiful,
pastoral Bengal. Rather, these ghost tales call for a reading that transcends
the critical association of literary output to the demands of nation-building.
That the story embedded within The Calcutta Chromosome should be a
ghost story partially modelled on a ghost story that Tagore wrote during this
same time � ‘The Hungry Stones’ of 1895 � is therefore something that I find
highly instructive. My second claim is that the novel compels us to find a
suitable, non-reductive reading for the stories embedded within it. Lesson
number two of The Calcutta Chromosome, then, might be expressed as a set
of interrogations: when confronted with the fact that the literary texts of
formerly colonized spaces do not significantly figure, let alone foreground,
the colonial enterprise within its plotlines, what do we do as postcolonial
critics? How, to put it slightly differently, might we critique that which we
might feel we are ill-equipped (and therefore unentitled) to interpret?
On Relearning How to Read
It is through its allusions to two South Asian short stories by Tagore and
Renu that The Calcutta Chromosome’s ghost story opens a window from
which to interrogate the tendencies that dominate postcolonial studies. A
postcolonial studies scholar who recognizes these allusions � and those of us
acquainted with South Asian literary traditions might well do so � finds
herself suddenly challenged to reckon with texts that she is not usually
drawn to writing about: non-Europhone short stories that do not always
offer easy entry-ways for our postcolonial probings. To track down these
short stories is to realize how important a genre this was for both writers:
prominent Tagore translator William Radice (1991: 1) informs us that
Tagore wrote more than ninety short stories, and Kathryn Hansen (1986: 6),
Renu’s translator, notes that he published three anthologies of short stories
during his literary career. To read the Phulbone story together with Tagore’s
‘The Hungry Stones’ and Renu’s ‘Smells of a Primeval Night’ is to puzzle
over what might possibly link them.
important novels
since Partition, such
as the historical
novels of NaseemHijazi, Muhammad
Khalid Akhtar’s
acclaimed satirical
novel ChakiwaraMain Wisaal (1964),
or more recently,
Mirza Ather Baig’sGhulam Bagh(2008). I thank
Taimoor Shahid for
his help in compilingthis brief list.
12 All of these
stories feature in
Radice (1991).
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Tagore’s is a framed ghost story, whose unnamed narrator is a train
passenger on the way to Calcutta. The narrator relays a tale he has heard
from a likewise unnamed fellow-traveller, a Bengali Babu whose dress is
misleading, for the narrator initially thinks he is ‘a Muslim from Northern
India’ (Tagore 1991: 233). At the junction where they must change trains,
they learn their train is late. The Babu tells a story to pass the time in the
station waiting-room until they can resume their delayed journey. The
Babu’s story is a recollection of the events that transpired while he was
employed as a collector of cotton-taxes in a remote rural village, Barich. On
the outskirts of Barich stands an abandoned white marble palace built some
three centuries before by Mahmud II to serve as his private pleasure dome.
Finding himself strangely drawn to the ‘hungry stones’ of the building, the
tax-collector begins spending his nights there, in spite of repeated warnings
to the contrary by Barich’s inhabitants. Every night, two visitors descend on
the palace. The first is the village madman, who circles the gardens with the
constant refrain of ‘All is false. All is false’ (241). The second is the ghostly
presence of a mysterious, sensual Arab woman, who seems to have ‘come
floating [in] from One Thousand and One Nights’ (238). Infatuated and
intent on seducing the woman, the collector gives up his distinctive hat and
uniform and dons the attire of a Persian prince, waiting for her next visit. His
fantasies turn sour, however, when, one night, the woman appears to him
with wild hair, breasts exposed and a gashed forehead. He learns from the
locals that she was once a ‘Persian slave-girl’ and is about to reveal her
terrible tale to our narrator. But the Babu’s story is cut short at this point; the
delayed train pulls into the station, and the narrator watches as his
interlocutor, hailed by a British acquaintance, climbs into a first class
carriage with him. The narrator, who travels in second class, brings the tale
to a close by revealing that he has never seen the Babu again, and is
convinced that he has been made a dupe of. We, the readers, cannot but help
feel similarly, as we are left to make what sense we can of the decidedly
inconclusive short story we have just read.
Renu’s ‘Smells of a Primeval Night’ (1967) is no ghost tale. Like much of
Renu’s fiction, it is set in rural Bihar, and offers us a glimpse into the lives of
the region’s inhabitants. The story counters the multiple unnamed figures
of Tagore’s story with a veritable proliferation of names, both of people and
places. Its protagonist is a young boy named Karma, a name given to him by
Gopal Babu, the relief stationmaster who found him as a baby, abandoned in
the carriage of a train, and took him in. In the twelve years since, Karma has
never ventured far from the railway line, moving up and down its different
stations, living the lifestyle of the rural relief stationworkers that he
accompanies and cooks for as they arrive in a station only to be called
away within a month or two to replace sick or off-duty permanent
stationmasters. As Karma muses, ‘wandering ascetics, flowing water and
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relief stationmasters’ are all alike in that they never stay in any one place for
long (110).13
The story unfolds through Karma’s reminiscences of previous station-
masters and stations. The gentle, slow pace of the narrative is only
interrupted when we hear of Karma’s nightmare, in which he finds himself
glued to a train track, unable to move as a train thunders towards him and
severs his head and feet, which are clad, mysteriously, with the rubber boots
of one Anthony Sahib. Later in the day, Karma walks to the nearest village to
learn more about his current whereabouts. Once there, he meets a local
farmer, who takes him to his house for some food and friendly conversation.
Karma cannot help noticing the farmer’s young daughter, Sarasatiya. A
fortnight later, when the permanent stationmaster returns, Karma is
expected to move on with his current carer. Just as their train is ready to
leave, Karma jumps off, deciding for the first time in his life to stay put. As
readers, we suspect, though this is never stated, that Karma will return to
Sarasatiya and her family.
The obvious trope linking all three of these stories is, of course, the
(remote) railway station and the railway network. How tempting, then, to
read the railway line, that most pervasive of metaphors for western
technological might that thrust the subcontinent into modernity, as a figure
for the colonial legacy that links together colonial (Tagore), post-indepen-
dent (Renu) and postcolonial/diasporic (Ghosh) literature. But The Calcutta
Chromosome actively prevents us from succumbing to a reading where the
railway functions ‘as a kind of moving theatre that stage[s] first a colonial,
then a national, and finally a global identity’ (Aguiar 2010: xii). This
interpretation ignores, once more, the problem of genre that The Calcutta
Chromosome enjoins us to confront by couching its references to Tagore and
Renu’s short stories in a section of the novel that itself functions as a stand-
alone short story.
The railway does indeed function as the trope linking these stories, but it
does so by making explicit associations between the railway and the very
genre of the short story. If The Calcutta Chromosome as a whole deals
with the transmission of malaria and of genetic and personality traits, then
the short stories embedded and encrypted within it figure the railway as a
place for the transmission of stories. It is the train, and the chance encounters
it gives rise to, that generates the production of all three of these short
stories.
The association between India’s railways and its short stories can be dated
to India’s first passenger train in 1853. As Bond (2003) points out, railway
booksellers pioneered publishing in India, and as Leer (2001) reminds us,
Kipling’s short stories were first published by A. H. Wheeler and Co.’s
Railway Library.14 The Tagore and Renu stories that The Calcutta
Chromosome refers us to clearly figure the railway as a space from which
13 All translationsof Renu’s story are
my own. A published
translation can be
found in Renu(1986).
14 India’s firstpassenger train ran
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short stories are generated: the narrator of ‘The Hungry Stones’ hears the
ghost story from a fellow train-traveller, and its frame-tale structure is
mirrored in the reference to perhaps the most famous of all framed short
story collections, The Thousand and One Nights. Like Ghosh’s ghost tale,
then, the collector’s story opens onto yet more stories, stories which in this
case signal to a historical, political and literary relationship between India
and Persia that pre-dates the arrival of the British.
Our other protagonist, Karma, provides us with countless stories about all
the previous relief stationworkers he has lived with. Some even function as
bedtime stories, as on the occasion when Karma hears his companion
snoring in the middle of his narrative and regrets that his ‘story about Gopal
Babu remained unfinished’ (Renu 1986: 137). The word Renu uses to allude
to Karma’s multiple narratives � qissa � leaves less room for the semantic
ambiguities contained in the English term ‘story’. As Frances Pritchett
clarifies in her authoritative study of the genre:
The word qissa means ‘story’ in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu; its Hindi form is kissa.
Qissa is also used as a generic term in Hindi and Urdu, for a kind of non-religious
entertaining prose narrative, usually a traditional romance or fairy tale. Once
primarily oral, qissas now commonly take the form of cheaply printed pamphlets;
these are widely popular and are sold all over North India. (Pritchett 1981;
emphasis added)
And, bringing us back full circle, Rupert Snell’s (1988) review of
Pritchett’s work supplies some relevant information about where this
particular genre of fiction can most easily be purchased: this genre of
‘popular story-literature’, Snell says, ‘is alive and well and available at
railway bookstalls throughout the Hindustani language area’ (155). Liber-
ated from familiar readings that would seize upon it as a cipher for colonial
rule and the advent of modernity in the subcontinent, the railway suddenly
emerges as a vehicle that transports us into the unfamiliar and understudied
genre of the short story that is practised by so many of South Asia’s writers,
and consumed, of course, by so many of its readers.
On a Future Postcolonial Studies
It would of course be ridiculous to suggest that, as postcolonial critics, we
cease to be concerned with colonialism. That is neither my own argument,
nor The Calcutta Chromosome’s final lesson to us. Instead, lesson number
three asks us to contend with a gesture that is consummately postcolonial:
rewriting.
from Bombay to
Thana, a distance of
some 34 miles. Leer
(2001) discusses TheCalcuttaChromosome and its
multiple references to
railway stations,which he reads as
sites where
‘characters andstories appear from
and disappear into’
(55).
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As we know from his correspondence with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ghosh
himself reads ‘The Hungry Stones’ as a narrative that offers insight into the
psyche of the colonized Bengali man. Ghosh explains that ‘straining across
the smooth surface’ of Tagore’s story is the anguish of a man struggling to
repress the fact of his subordination to the British (Ghosh and Chakrabarty
2002: 162). For, ‘how else’, Ghosh adds, ‘is it possible to assimilate
subordination except by refusing to represent it to oneself?’ (161). The
repressed sentiment, however, finds subliminal echoes in the madman’s
refrain of ‘All is false. All is false’, as well as in the collector’s frequent
changes of clothing, which, to Ghosh, represent a desire for ‘switched
identities’ (162). Lending further support to Ghosh’s observations, of course,
is the plot device with which Tagore’s story concludes: the collector fails to
complete his ghost story not because the train arrives, but because he climbs
into a first-class carriage with an Englishman and not with his initial travel
companion, the narrator.
Once we are familiar with Tagore’s story, it is easy to see how Ghosh
encodes its tropes into his own work. Switched identities are refigured as the
transmission of identities and pseudo-reincarnation enabled by the epon-
ymous Calcutta chromosome, and Phulbone, the protagonist of Ghosh’s
ghost story, shows many similarities to the collector figure in Tagore’s
narrative: both work for the British, both their jobs take them to remote
rural areas, and both spend the night in haunted places, stubbornly
unheeding of the local villagers’ warnings.
These allusions to Tagore establish him as a literary model and precursor
for Ghosh; that the intertext should be a Tagore short story, of course,
further underscores the importance of this genre in the South Asian literary
tradition. Here, contrary to the process described by Pratt (1981), it is the
novel that must be explained with reference to the short story. But this does
not amount to the process of rewriting that I allude to above. To see that at
work, we must turn to the novel’s reworking of Renu’s story.
It is hard to detect references to colonial anxieties in ‘Smells of a Primeval
Night’. The story revels in the multiple regional accents and sounds that one
is exposed to in a rural railway station; it is rife with onomatopoeic words
that allude to the sounds of the train’s whistles and rhythms, and packed
with references to small rural stations and descriptions of the sights, smells
and local inhabitants that one encounters there.15 In the figure of Karma, the
story celebrates mobility and the itinerant lifestyle of relief stationworkers,
but the protagonist’s ultimate preference for a fixed home also underscores
the importance of stability. The anguish Ghosh finds in Tagore’s story,
however, might be subliminally detected in Karma’s nightmare, which
pictures him wearing boots that belong not to him but to an Englishman, an
act for which he is punished when the train cuts off his legs.
15 Consider, for
instance, Karma’sruminations on the
links between a
station’s name and
its characteristics:‘What a great name
Lakhpatiya
[millionaire] station
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Chapters 38 and 39 of The Calcutta Chromosome provide a thinly veiled
reworking of Karma’s nightmare. In this case, however, the protagonist,
Phulboni, who has spent the night in an abandoned railway station, is very
much awake when he discovers that ‘he [is] lying on the siding, across the
tracks, on a mattress’ (Ghosh 1995: 280). Barely managing to throw himself
off the tracks and survive, Phulboni later learns that he has been the victim of
the ghost of Laakhan, a stray teenage orphan whose description instantly
recalls Karma: Laakhan made his home in Renupur’s abandoned signal room
and was allowed to remain there because he made himself useful to the
guards and stokers who pass through there.
Ghosh also reworks the short story’s obsession with names into his own
narrative. At the outset of Renu’s story, the sleepy, unnamed stationmaster
asks the boy whether his name is Karma, Karamchand or Karmu. ‘People
have a thousand tongues, and so I have a thousand names’ is Karma’s
response. ‘Nitay Babu called me Korma, Ghose Babu used to say Karima,
Singhji always called me Kama and Asgar Babu always said Karam’ (Renu
1986: 107). The permutations on Karma’s name recall, of course, the
permutation on the name Lakshmana (Laakhan, Lutchman, Lucky) that
occur in Ghosh’s novel. Back in Renu’s story, however, the stationmaster is
still curious. He now wants to know where Karma’s home is. When Karma
does not respond, the stationmaster continues, ‘Your home must be in some
village near Santhal Parganas or in the Ranchi-Hazaribagh area. You must
have been born on the festival of Karmaparv and that’s why you were named
Karma. And I can tell [where you come from] by the shape of your forehead,
head, lips and body’ (Renu 1986: 107).
In Ghosh’s novel the idiosyncratic method through which the station-
master arrives at an explanation of Karma’s origins is radically rewritten. In
one of its episodes we briefly encounter Grigson, a British colonial
administrator and smug linguist whose expertise lies in the very speech
patterns and dialects of Hindi that Renu’s story so vividly reproduces. On a
visit to Ronald Ross, Grigson becomes suspicious of the speech patterns of
his friend’s laboratory assistant, Lutchman. His curiosity is even further
piqued when he finds a railway signal lamp in Lutchman’s living quarters,
the object in question serving as yet another nod to the setting for Renu’s
story. I now quote at length from the scene in the novel where Murugan
imagines the uncomfortable conversation that takes place between Grigson
and Lutchman as the former tries to establish the latter’s origins by asking
him how he pronounces the word for this railway lamp. Though written in
English, the narrative specifies that the conversation transpires in Hindus-
tani, with Grigson deliberately speaking a ‘pidgin’ version of it because he
does not wish to disclose his linguistic expertise:
had! But you
couldn’t even buy a
grain of rice at the
station and there wasno village for miles
around . . . But
Kadampura � that
really was aKadampura [place of
kadam trees]. There
were thousands ofkadam trees all the
way from the station
to the village’ (Renu
1986: 113).
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‘What’s that?’
Lutchman plays possum. ‘What’s what?’
‘That lamp up there.’
‘Oh that: you know what that is.’
‘Yeah, but what do you call it?’ says Grigson.
. . .
‘What’s with these questions?’ says Lutchman. He’s speaking pidgin Hindustani
too, so Grigson’s having trouble drawing a bead on it.
‘I’m just curious,’ says Grigson.
‘Why?’ says Lutchman. ‘Did you come all the way out here to ask me these dumb
questions?’
‘No,’ says Grigson. ‘I’m just curious that’s all.’
‘Curious about what?’
‘About words.’
‘You mean you want to know what it’s called?’
‘Yeah,’ says Grigson. ‘That’s right.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’ says Lutchman. ‘It’s called a lantern.’
And that was when Grigson knew. He knew because Lutchman didn’t pronounce
the word as he should have if he really was from where he said he was. What he
said was ‘lalten.’
So Grigson gives him a smile, and says, speaking to him in his own dialect: ‘So your
name is really Laakhan, isn’t it? Isn’t that how they say it where you’re from?’
(Ghosh 1995: 93)
Armed as he is with the tools of scholarly linguistics, Grigson easily outwits
Lutchman. The obvious satisfaction with empirical classification and
rationally applied methodology that the British colonial official exudes in
the scene, however, is not just a contrast to the decidedly local form of
knowledge wielded by the stationmaster in Renu’s story. Ghosh’s rewriting
of the Hindi short story also represents an important shift from the
paradigmatic rewritings to which we are accustomed in postcolonial studies.
Not only does the novel present a non-Anglophone short story as the
‘master’ text to be rewritten. More importantly, the rewriting also
reinscribes into Ghosh’s Anglophone novel the typical preoccupation of a
postcolonial studies whose consolidation and institutionalization have been
largely forged through critical readings of Anglophone texts: the colonial
encounter. Ghosh’s reworking of Renu’s story chooses to foreground an
experience overdetermined by colonialism, where the colonial official, in this
scene at least, gets the better of the Indian laboratory assistant. To find in
Ghosh’s novel this element that we might typically expect to see in any
postcolonial novel is to realize simultaneously that such an element is
decidedly absent from Renu’s story. And if this absence stumps us as
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postcolonial critics, then we will have learnt yet another lesson that the novel
has to impart to us. For to respond to the novel’s injunction to be read
alongside Renu’s story is to be confronted with the realization that although
we all agree, in theory, that the former colony is most definitively not a space
constituted ‘by the singular experience of colonialism and imperialism’, it is
much harder to remain true to this maxim in our literary critical practice
(Ahmad 1992: 102).
A closer look at ‘Smells of a Primeval Night’ and ‘The Hungry Stones’
reveals that the short stories do not function in the novel as mere spectres of
a parallel, obscured literary tradition. Crucially, the novel enjoins us to read
them, thereby assigning to postcolonial critics the kind of text that, for many
of us, lies beyond our comfort zone. To embark on the comparative reading
that the novel challenges us to, then, is actively to curtail the ‘relational void’
between postcolonial literary studies and the non-Europhone texts it
overlooks (Quayson 2003: 20).
In his work on J. M. Coetzee, Derek Attridge (2004) warns us of literary
interpretations that move too quickly beyond the specificities of a given
literary text in order to find its significance elsewhere, and of treating the
text ‘not as inventive literary work drawing us into unfamiliar emotional
and cognitive territory but as a reminder of what we already know too well’
(43). To read the short stories that The Calcutta Chromosome references is
simultaneously to realize that, as postcolonial critics, it is a much simpler
task to offer a reading of Ghosh’s novel than it is to offer a satisfactory
reading of the regional-language short stories which it references. It is to be
drawn not just into new emotional and cognitive territory but also into new
linguistic and generic traditions. Both these stories resist the kinds of
readings that come so easily to us as postcolonial critics. They do not offer
us easily decipherable critiques of the colonial enterprise or of the
subsequent failures of the postcolonial project of nation-building. Instead,
they show us that despite hailing from the formerly colonized world, a
writer might have other concerns, or indeed seek to figure colonialism in
ways that we have yet to learn how to read. Through The Calcutta
Chromosome’s references to Renu and Tagore’s short stories we can begin
not just to define but actively understand the challenges a new postcolonial
studies must face if it is to be attentive to both Europhone and regional-
language literary traditions.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Valenzuela, Francesca Orsini and Wendy Lee
for their encouragement, suggestions and feedback on earlier versions of this
essay.
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