1 Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome, London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1996, p.36. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

2 Tabish Khair discusses Ghosh’s challenge to the rhetoric of Western science in general terms, but does not analyse his intertextual re-writing of Ross’s discovery, the essay being more concerned with subaltern agency: Tabish Khair, “The Example of Amitav Ghosh: (Re)Establishing Connections”, in Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels, New Delhi: OUP, 2001, pp.302-32. John Thieme concentrates on the novel’s challenge to artificial “shadow lines”, tracing its allusions to Manichean philosophies and relating this to postcolonial theorists’ arguments that colonial discourse characterizes “East” and “West” in terms of Manichean binaries: John Thieme, “The Discoverer Discovered: Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome”, in A.L. McLeod, ed., The Literature of Indian Diaspora: Essays in Criticism, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2000, pp.274-90. Martin Leer provides an interesting account of the novel’s use of trains and the railway in his paper “Odologia Indica: The Significance of Railways in Anglo-Indian and Indian Fiction in English”, in Nanette Hale and Tabish Khair, eds., Angles: On the English-Speaking World: Volume 1: Unhinging Hinglish: The Language and Politics of Fiction in English from the Indian Subcontinent, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, 2001, pp.41-61.

3 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

4 Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, London: Methuen, 1980, p.11. I find Parrinder’s definition of the “premise” in science fiction useful, but do not wish to imply that Ghosh employs “rigorous realism” in his transformation of science fiction. On the contrary, he intermingles realism and “hard” science fiction with elements of the supernatural and the fantastic, just as he mixes up “fact” and “fiction” in the novel. We need only examine the eerie ghost story about the stationmaster of Renupur towards the end of the novel (pp.255-82) to realize that this is no straightforward example of science fiction.

5 Writing on their decision to publish the full correspondence between Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson, for example, Bynum and Overy indicate that in the Memoirs Ross’s selection from among these letters is highly selective and can be misleading: W.F. Bynum and Caroline Overy, eds., The Beast in the Mosquito: The Correspondence of Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, p.v. Nye and Gibson more bluntly call the Memoirs a “prejudiced account” of the discovery of the malaria vector: Edwin R. Nye and Mary E. Gibson, Ronald Ross: Malariologist and Polymath: A Biography, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p.214.

6 Ronald Ross: Malariologist and Polymath, p.279; emphasis mine.

7 The quotation indicates in passing Ross’s decision to exclude family letters from the archive. The historian of science Gordon Harrison has made more of this, commenting that Ross’s wife was entirely written out of his own history: “Ross has hidden his wife and family almost completely from history with a reticence unusual even in a Victorian officer of the British Army [...] In his published memoirs and in his surviving papers Rosa Bloxam is utterly silent and undefined”: Gordon Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities since 1880, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978, p.20.

8 Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land, London: Granta, 1992, p.17.

9 References to Lutchman are made in Ronald Ross, Memoirs: With a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution, London: John Murray, 1923, pp.157, 165, 240, 279, 320, 322 and 360. The first reference concerns the trials made on Lutchman, who is laconically described as “a native” by Ross. He is given water with mosquito dust in it and his condition is monitored, and this passage is quoted in The Calcutta Chromosome, p.73. The Memoirs comments (p.165) that he is a dhooley-bearer, and this is also cited in the novel on p.73. He is not mentioned again until, Ross describes his move from Secunderabad: “I left Secunderabad [...] with the smallest possible ‘kit’ - but with my microscope and my faithful Lutchman” (p.240), a passage which is slightly misquoted in The Calcutta Chromosome (p.76). Later in the Memoirs (p.279), he is mentioned in passing as accompanying Ross on another move; cf. pp.320 and 322. Finally, Ross refers (p.360) to his departure from India and his attempt to find Lutchman through an advertisement years later (see note 10). After that, he disappears from the narrative.

10 “On the quay we said good-bye to our faithful servants, Lutchman and Berlisi. We never heard of them again, though I advertised for the former in 1911”, Memoirs, p.360.

11 ibid., p.165. This passage is quoted in The Calcutta Chromosome, p.73.

12 The Beast in the Mosquito, p.xiii.

13 Neluka Silva and Alex Tickell, “Amitav Ghosh in interview with Neluka Silva and Alex Tickell”, Kunapipi, 19, 3 (1997), 171-7, 176.

14 “He knew little about mosquitoes [...]; he had never heard of Romanowsky’s stain; and he had to teach himself how to dissect the insects”, Beast in the Mosquito, p.xii.

15 Memoirs, pp.221-2; emphasis in original.

16 ibid., p.225.

17 ibid., p.226; emphasis mine.

18 ibid., p.227.

19 ibid., p.239.

20 David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, p.8.

21 ibid., p.13.

22 See Gyan Prakash, “Science between the Lines”, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Subaltern Studies 9, New Delhi: OUP, 1996, pp.59-82.

23 Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, London: Phoenix, 1993, p.493.

24 Quoted in Michael Worboys, “Manson, Ross and Colonial Medical Policy: Tropical Medicine in London and Liverpool, 1899-1914”, in Roy McLeod and Milton Lewis, eds., Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, London and New York: Routledge, 1988, pp.21-37, p.24.

25 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Mankind from Antiquity to the Present, London: HarperCollins, 1997. Porter explains that in 1957 the World Health Organization announced that the eradication of malaria would be an attainable goal within an optimistic six years. The pesticide DDT and the drug chloroquine were heralded as potential breakthroughs and the US Congress poured vast sums of money into their use worldwide. Hopes were short-lived, however, due to unanticipated ecological damage caused by DDT and, even more worryingly, the capacity of the lethal plasmodium to mutate and develop resistance to drugs. When the US Congress’s attempt to eradicate malaria by the hoped-for date of 1963 proved unsuccessful, funds were stopped. From then on cases of malaria in India climbed steadily and alarmingly from the 1961 low point of less than 100,000 cases to an estimated six million cases in 1977. Porter concludes his study with the words: “[g]lobally, as wonderdrugs produced superbugs, there were three times as many cases of malaria in the 1990s as there had been in 1961” (ibid., p.472).

26 See Gordon Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities since 1880, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978, p.111.

27 Here, the fact that another of Wagner-Jauregg’s scientific interests was eugenicism, and that towards the end of his life he became a member of the Nazi party, further illustrates the fact that scientific disciplines are provisional and that an examination of their history reveals many embarrassing tendencies.

28 “Manson, Ross and Colonial Medical Policy”, p.23.

29 Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man, p.67.

30 Memoirs, pp.285-6; emphasis in original.

31 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge, 1989, p.4.

Postcolonial Science Fiction: Amitav Ghosh’s the Calcutta Chromosome

Abstract