Chapter 5 - Rewriting the Bite

Summary

The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of medicine in colonial India informs Amitav Ghosh’s 1995 science-fiction novel The Calcutta Chromosome. This chapter argues that the novel 'rewrites the bite' by reimagining Ronald Ross’s malaria experiments through the lens of twenty-first century Calcutta and New York. First, the chapter analyses fin-de-siècle Gothic literary tropes related to blood and blood science in Dracula in order to demonstrate that Ghosh uses these tropes in order to highlight the ways in which mosquitoes transgress bodily bounds. In Calcutta Chromosome, he then reallocates agency to subaltern subjects by giving them power over the moment of puncture, both via needles and via mosquitoes. His work shows the connection between contemporary practices of stigmatizing contagious racial others and the ideological legacies of colonial medicine. Further, Ghosh also adapts the mutational patterns of malaria within his fictional forms in order to deconstruct Western scientific rationalism itself. He thus 'writes back,' not only to colonial medical history, but also to the neocolonial strain of malarial imagery in contemporary biomedical fiction. By focusing on the insistent corporeality of malarial bodies in the text, one may avoid pushing the postcolonial body itself to a marginal position in contemporary readings of global health.