Calcutta Chromosome Themes

The Calcutta Chromosome was published in 1996. It is generally considered as a science fiction, a medical thriller that has won the prestigious Arthur C. Clark Award in 1996. Gabriele Salvatores, director of Mediterraneo has made a movie on it. The novel has two parts ‘August 20: Mosquito Day’ and ‘The Day After.’ It revolves around Ronald Ross’s discovery of the life cycle of malaria mosquito—Anopheles, and the mysterious background events that led Ross to the final conclusion. “It has science, religion, myth, nihilism, transcendental philosophy, Indian superstitions, logic, rationality and what not” (Tiwari 51). “The literary assets of the book lie in its delving deep into the mysteries created by bio-physical, meta-physical, geo-physical and trans-temporal images and Ghosh gives credibility to our world that contains the voice of logic and illogic, matter and anti-matter, science and anti–science” (Banerjee 125). Martin Kich finds the striking similarity between Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome and Dan Simmons’ first novel The Song of Kali. Simmons’ novel tells us the story of American poet who comes to Calcutta

It is basically an odyssey to eternity. The mysterious character, Mangala keeps experimenting to attain eternity. ‘Eros’ is the power that facilitate this eternity. According to Freud, the function of ‘Eros’ is “to form living substance into ever greater unities so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development” (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 134, qtd. in Lear 83). This is the main theme of the novel, which is finely balanced with the ‘death drive’—a fundamental force for death, destruction and decomposition. The four main characteristics of drive—its pressure, its aim, its object, and its source—are present in the novel. The pressure is ubiquitous, its aim is eternity, its object is overcoming death and its source is