On Machines and Mosquitoes: Neuroscience, Bodies, and Cyborgs in Amitav Ghosh's "The

Calcutta Chromosome"
Author(s): Christopher A. Shinn
Source: MELUS , Winter, 2008, Vol. 33, No. 4, Alien/Asian (Winter, 2008), pp. 145-166
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

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On Machines and Mosquitoes: Neuroscience,
Bodies, and Cyborgs in Amitav Ghosh's The
Calcutta Chromosome

Christopher A. Shinn
Georgetown University

Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delir

ium and Discovery (1995) traces the hidden dangers of modern science,
exposing the constant threats that surround a futuristic world of new tech
nology and postcolonial cybernetic warfare. The book magnifies concerns
about the power of advanced technology to absorb into its fateful design
all the nightmarish horrors that surround the spread of global terrorism,
crime, disease, war, and empires. Suspicion about the Internet's potential
to do massive harm increased during the mid-to-late 1990s, causing many
to be concerned that, as James Saynor observes in his review of the book,
the World Wide Web would "swallow us up?minds, personal identities,
credit-card numbers and all?in a manner more scary than anything the
electric brains managed in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' or '2001.'"1
Reminiscent of the experimental writings of Umberto Eco, Gabriel
Garc?a M?rquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, The Calcutta Chromosome
defies easy categorization, being equal parts medical mystery, historical
novel, ghost story, and postcolonial thriller.2 In this cosmopolitan narra
tive, Ghosh tells the story of a displaced Egyptian immigrant, Antar, who
remains secluded in a rent-controlled apartment building that conceals
everyday violence and murder in the New York metropolis.3 Behind the
closed doors of each lonely apartment, many uprooted Asian and Middle
Eastern immigrants are hidden and marginalized by a world of transitory
existence, where they live in quiet desperation and die in relative obscu
rity. Antar spends his days working for and being monitored by a global
mega-corporation, the International Water Council, where his pay has
"been docked because of 'declining productivity'" (5).
The International Water Council attempts to make world history in
much the same way that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as
epitomizing globalization's resurgent forms of empire: structural hege
monies perpetuate the neo-imperialist ambitions of multinational cor
porations, turning the so-called natives into docile, subservient laborers.
The International Water Council aims to privatize access to the world's
water supplies, advancing a broader corporatist vision to control all life.
However, since the nineteenth century a secret society of Indian mystics
MELUS, Volume 33, Number 4 (Winter 2008)

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 146 SHINN

led by the shadowy, slightly deranged, syphilitic figure of M?ngala has

been quietly pursuing its own experiments in the science of immortality.
M?ngala and her Indian subjects operate through secrecy, rumor, and
silence; denied access to official lines of communication, they continue to
advance their own politically insurgent ends. Ghosh suggests that British
bacteriologist Ronald Ross, whose scientific experiments in malarial
research garnered the Nobel Prize in 1902, was prompted by M?ngala
and her followers. Ghosh further depicts M?ngala and her followers using
the results of scientific experiments in the West to perform their own tests,
building on science and counter-science to perfect a more sophisticated
technology in "interpersonal transference" (107).
The key to the technology of transference?that is, to a scientific investi
gation into Hindu reincarnation?resides in the function of the host, which
evolves in the novel from past carriers such as the mosquito or the pigeon
to the present-day locus of the computer. As Claire Chambers explains,
the host transports the "soul" from body to body (58). The "soul" has been
isolated and named by scientific analogy as the "Calcutta Chromosome."
L. Murugan, one of Antar's former coworkers in the International Water
Council, comprehends just how global M?ngala and her followers have
become as they look for new chosen carriers and hosts to develop ongoing
experiments. Murugan disappears, yet he reappears to Antar in his New
York apartment as a startling holographic projection, informing Antar that
he will be called to participate in the next and perhaps final experiment.
Antar will need to enter into virtual reality and migrate back to Calcutta
to join M?ngala and her followers, all of whom are now living around the
globe but eventually will be united in cyberspace.
Ghosh employs the dominant trope of the malaria virus circulating and
mutating in the body as a means to allegorize the basic cellular functions
of the Calcutta Chromosome, which uses the immune system to catalyze
certain biological processes in human evolution. The discovery of this
chromosome, however, represents more than scientific advancements
in the history of medicine; it also has great importance for human des
tiny. Antar's computer "Ava" connects all these colliding events within a
borderless world, aiming to conjoin the earthly and ethereal existence of
the human race.
Ghosh's novel promotes an alternative conceptual possibility for an
understanding of our post-human futures; it posits that the human system
computes the machine?not vice versa?into its own evolutionary design.
Through the human-computer interface (HCI), the computer acts as a cata
lyst and a carrier to set in motion a process that furthers the growth of
biological and organic life. Ghosh's novel therefore emphasizes the pri
macy of evolutionary organicism rather than the quest for cyborg ontology.

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 147

The manipulation of digitized images in turn becomes "newly embodied,"

as Mark Hansen puts it, in a "body-brain achievement" that reflects the
unique spatial dynamics of virtual reality (15). Elements of virtual reality
operate in The Calcutta Chromosome alongside a series of recurring digi
tal images that churn in endless mutation, circularity, projection, and fan
tasy; the digital image itself thus becomes a means to govern the deploy
ment of sexuality?life, reproduction, and population growth in modern
society. The circulation of such repeated images, however, stimulates the
brain's centers in order to respond to a specific concrete form of sensory
embodiment.
In light of this fact, we might reconsider what Foucault has called "bio
power"; we might view biopower not as a useful and distinct biological
category, but instead a significant reversion to organic life. According to
theorist Donna Haraway, cyborg ontology implies the end of the "organic"
as we have previously understood it; thus we are now in a post-human age.
However, through the analogy of the Calcutta Chromosome Ghosh sug
gests that the computer only serves a catalyzing function to bring about
evolutionary change in humans. Biopower is not a managerial process
in which sexuality is taken over by technology, scientific discourse, and
corporate power, resulting in the "end" of the human. Instead, biopower
refers to larger evolutionary processes in which technology does not con
trol nature but nature controls itself; technology acts as an instrument
or catalyst for human evolution and facilitates a significant reversion to
organic life. Rather than the end of the "organic," Ghosh's novel ultimately
reaffirms the importance of the organic in a "post-human" world.

Postcolonial Fantasies

The scene that actually begins the novel is in fact its final one; a feedback
loop attributes narration to the simulated effect of a computer that down
loads the plot for the reader. As Antar allegedly enters into the computer
through virtual reality, we are left to wonder if the story itself has been fed
to us by the International Water Council, the multinational company that
owns the computer Ava; or perhaps, as is the case in the Matrix trilogy, the
"world is a computer and everything in it a simulation" (Hansen xv). In
this strange new digital habitat, cyberspace may appear to be "contiguous
with geographical space," but the globe it creates, as Martin Dodge claims,
remains primarily informational and relational "with no weight or mass"
(118). At the same time, cyberspace actually generates new material forms
of embodiment, evident, for example, in the literal mapping of DNA in the
Human Genome Project or, more pointedly, in the cutting/splicing of DNA
as a means to combat the AIDS pandemic.4 This mapping uses math

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 148 SHINN

ematical and abstract computations to discover the keys to the workings of

the immune system and to maintain a primary and essential physiological
connection to the world.
The novel focuses on a holographic projection that ultimately places
an Indian American researcher, Murugan, into the middle of Antar's room.
Murugan has stumbled on what purports to be the most ground-breaking
scientific discovery in DNA mutation. DNA is the closest analogue in
The Calcutta Chromosome to a "biological correlate," a mysterious, pre
viously unknown neural-type substance that produces human traits and
can be manipulated technologically and transferred to other bodies (251).
The essence of an individual?human personality, the soul, and subjec
tivity?can migrate from one body to another body when brain chemis
try is altered or stimulated by the implantation of a viral-type substance
into the body; this transforms the body into a conductor for "interpersonal
transference." Murugan disappeared in 1995, and the International Water
Council presumes him to be dead. However, when he appears to Antar as
a holographic image, he seems to be deranged; a "blanket of matted, ropy
hair hung halfway down a swollen, distended belly," his hands are "bound
together by a pair of steel handcuffs," his thighs are "caked with mud and
excrement," and maggots crawl in his disheveled hair (294). To limit the
macabre effects of seeing repulsive and decaying matter, Antar decides
to alter the vectors of the digitized image to remove the torso and the rest
of the lower body, leaving only the head, which turns "vastly enlarged,
much larger than lifesize, blown up to the scale of a piece of monumental
statuary" (295). This facialization of the newly cropped image symbolizes
both Murugan's living corpse and his virtual decapitation; Antar thinks
that the head "was startlingly like a vision that often recurred in his worst
nightmares; an image from a medieval painting he had once seen in a
European museum, a picture of a beheaded saint, holding his own drip
ping head nonchalantly under his arm, as though it were a fresh-picked
cabbage" (295). This image also suggests the many creative possibilities
of the "digital facial image" (DFI) in "deterritorializing" the body and
generating a range of emotions on the epidermal surface of the face, as
Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari have proposed (181).5
The image of Murugan's decaying body comes to life around cyber
netic states of fantasy and aversion. Claudia Springer refers to such dis
tinct virtual and visceral tension as the "pleasures of the interface," noting
the dispersal of sexual boundaries that previously "separated the organic
from the technological" (485). The malaria virus and the disease of syph
ilis have allegedly generated this strange perversity in Murugan's body,
allowing him to mutate and merge into a newly perfected body by means
of Ava's complex digitized manipulations. In the late stages of the disease

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 149

(syphilitic paresis), madness sets in; hence, the body becomes ready for
mutation as the brain softens, becoming "ripe" for its next biological
transformation.6
Participating in this scientific process by adding his own aged body to a
chromosomal exchange with Murugan's decaying body and another char
acter named Tara, Antar snaps on a Simultaneous Visualization Headgear
in order to experience the emerging spectacle of his own metamorphosis.
Murugan and a tenant named Urmila Roy (who is actually Tara in another
body) have been infected by the malarial virus through sexual contact.
Antar migrates into the world of cyberspace, entering into Ava's con
sciousness specifically to join the others (310). Ava (short for "avatar" or
divine incarnation) represents the boundlessness of computerized knowl
edge Antar hopes to acquire through the HCI. The computer's all-seeing
consciousness, though, surpasses even the desire of the human subject
for self knowledge according to the limits of visual perception, allegedly
exceeding what is "human" by absorbing the subject.
Given the sexual overtones that accompany and amplify the HCI, Ava
and Antar appear to forge a strange sexual coupling by means of the vir
tual image, the machine, and the human body. Indeed, Antar speaks of
"Ava's heart," while she exhibits a "controlled frenzy" around accessing
information, an extension of a computerized knowledge-pleasure nexus.
She seems almost to tease Antar in a flirtatious acquisition of knowledge:
"Once she'd wrung the last, meaningless detail out of him, she'd give the
object on her screen a final spin, with a bizarrely human smugness, before
propelling it into the horizonless limbo of her memory" (4). Although
Antar stares at images that appear on Ava's screen, she looks at him with
her "eye," a "laser-guided surveillance camera, swiveled on him while the
screen misted over with standby graphics" (7). Apparently Ava draws the
human into her circuits of computer graphics and complex digitization.
Moreover, she often tries to impress Antar with her knowledge and speed
and spurns his curious interest and advances by affirming her independent
and tempestuous spirit. Antar's community finally becomes almost entirely
virtual, which suggests that his perceptual framework has deepened the
strong affective bonds he intimately shares with Ava; he then applies these
bonds to the few humans with whom he still has any lingering "human"
contact.
In terms of sex, however, virtual reality supposedly causes further dis
embodiment, abstraction, and simulation. Michel Foucault argues in The
History of Sexuality that sex becomes situated in discourse; this parallels
how sexualized bodies are digitally "placed" into the computer. Discourse
becomes synonymous here with a series of digital computations. As mod
ern technologies of power take "life" as their object, computerized modes

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 150 SHINN

of data and digital computations mirror a deeper political investment in

the body that situates organic and biological unions within the dominant
order of the machine. The merging of human and machine allegedly pro
duces new cybersexualities that reflect a radical technological union, mak
ing humans into cyborgs and transforming computers into anthropomor
phic creatures.7 Ghosh's novel proposes an alternative affective and neural
bond that hypothesizes the greater transmission of non-regenerative tissue
(that is, the brain) from body to body. This occurs not by means of sexual
contact alone, which merely establishes a necessary intimate connection
among hosts, but by catalyzing a primary body-brain connection so that
the human soul migrates from one body to another, mutating alongside
other human souls by means of the computer.
Because the HCI allegedly creates a new hybrid construction of human
and machine, prevailing critics of The Calcutta Chromosome interpret it
as affirming Haraway's theory of cyborg ontology. Haraway promotes the
evolution of the feminist cyborg as the symbol of a new form of "cybernetic
organism, a hybrid of machine and organism ... our most important politi
cal construction, a world-changing fiction" (149). Building directly on the
work of Haraway, Suchitra Mathur argues that the third-world woman has
been used as "malleable raw material" that transforms natives into "desir
able subjects for the dominant scientific-industrial complex," an interpreta
tion Mathur links to Haraway's critique of the racial and gender dynamics
of global capital and technology (Mathur 126). Indeed, Ghosh exposes
the ways that globalization extends the machinations of the Western colo
nial enterprise, exploiting the distinct labor of non-Western subjects in the
US, Britain, Egypt, and India?Tara, Antar, Murugan, Maria, Sonali Das,
M?ngala, and Lutchman/Laakhan. On the other hand, Mathur posits the
shadowy figure of M?ngala and her cult-like followers as key instigators in
the creation of a radical "postcolonial new human," a reincarnation of the
insurgent, subaltern woman who comes to power as the ultimate "Cyborg
Goddess" (133, 135). M?ngala functions in the novel as the ultimate sym
bol of postcolonial agency, perhaps transcending the problematic woman/
science dualism articulated by Haraway (181).8 As a result of Mangala's
cult of Silence and her attempt to catalyze a series of unsuspecting hosts
into her quasi-scientific experiments in biological mutation, Antar will
"cross over into the third space, into a community that transcends space
and time and promises the bliss of ultimate homecoming"; therefore,
"the woman and science question is . . . resolved" (Mathur 136). Barbara
Romanik makes a similar claim, contending that "colonized characters
subvert the binary of colonizer and colonized" and that they can undo the
"science/magic opposition," challenging "Western knowledge's authority"
(53). She further asserts: "Ghosh has convinced us that it is the people of

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 151

Calcutta (non-Western, lower-caste, female, and subaltern included) that

count" and that the people will ultimately return to a privileged and hon
orific place that is actually their "rightful one" (56).
By elevating M?ngala and her followers of Silence as postcolonial
symbols of a new post-human race that affirms the rightful sovereignty
of subaltern rule, Mathur and Romanik, among others, have in effect
turned the opposition to Western science into an idealized cyborgian com
munity that triumphs over historic oppressors. This construction enables
Haraway's cyborg "politics of hope" to contain both scientific and new
Utopian dimensions.9 In fact, M?ngala and her followers might simply
be in the lead in their quasi-religious and scientific quest; however, their
use of science and counter-science technologies gives them an advan
tage in the race for the future. Much has been left to conjecture, however,
and even M?ngala admits at one point, "[P]ray that all goes well for our
Laakhan, once again" (167), making his fate as Mangala's most sacrifi
cial and willing disciple provisional and uncertain. Even less clear are
the concrete roles Mangala's other followers must perform; for example,
Urmila Roy is caught up in "ways that were entirely beyond her own
imagining, and which she was powerless to affect in any way" (221). In
fact, Urmila appears as Tara, both of whom are perhaps the latest reincar
nation of M?ngala herself. The "Cyborg Goddess," as Mathur calls her,
accomplishes serious gains yet her achievement of her ultimate goals is
less apparent.
M?ngala and her followers also have conducted their experiments in
unethical ways, resorting to murder, sabotage, and human and animal
sacrifice; critics frequently neglect such incidents in order to emphasize
subversion of colonial and postcolonial power.10 M?ngala makes humans
into test tubes for her experiments, often without their knowledge or con
sent; this is similar to what British bacteriologist Ross did by infecting
his patients with malaria. Furthermore, M?ngala herself seems deranged;
she has been subject to the late stages of syphilis (even though she is now
'cured"), and she will stop at nothing to achieve her ends. We do not know if
she plans to use this new technology of reincarnation to benefit the "people
of Calcutta," as Romanik contends, or to create a small, secretive soci
ety to govern other humans and their souls and make them subject to her
absolute and supreme will (56). It may be that she brings a different sort
of brutal oppression reflecting the mirror of colonial relations; against this
mirror we might read the more idealized community of a hybrid "Third
Space" that represents the democratic and egalitarian spirit of the masses
and the so-called third-world woman. M?ngala and her followers (former
ly oppressed colonial subjects) subvert the triumph of Western knowledge
and science; less clear, however, are her exact purposes in developing this

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 152 SHINN

technology and what type of world she plans to create.

Although Ghosh's novel leads some critics to assume that the book
heralds the creation of a new idealized community of postcolonial cyborgs
who are being led by the Cyborg Goddess, Mangala's own "rightful"
place in leading the silent revolution remains obscure and deeply disturb
ing. Ghosh's novel, however, proposes a far more radical possibility to
this interpretation, namely that M?ngala is not the Cyborg Goddess at all.
Mother Nature, as it were, continues to be the one in charge of a complex
generative process of constant mutation. The HCI thus does not bring us to
a cyborgian future but instead returns us to a new state of biological organ
icism. By using the term "organicism," I call attention not to the pure,
untouched forms of nature, but rather to certain biological processes that
occur prior to the effects of discourse and representation in our perceptual,
sensorial, and precognitive experience. As Hansen argues, "Perception?
or better sensation?takes place in the body, as a spacing of the embodied
organism"; what we perceive in the image expands the realm of percep
tion beyond the visual to "the organismic or bodily basis of the absolute
survey [i.e., the broader experience of sensation, which is not just visu
ally oriented]" (164). In fact, Ghosh's novel seems to suggest a working
hypothesis about the nature of technology as a catalyst for bodily mutation
and transformation within what Hansen calls a "body-brain achievement."
The novel can be viewed as its own epistemological experiment concern
ing the HCI, its biotechnical effects, and the wide range of its scientific
and metaphysical possibilities. Building upon Haraway's reconfiguration
of knowledge itself as a technology, Diane M. Nelson, for example, con
tends that the entire speculative nature of the exchange between humans
and machines fosters a new "postcolonial connectivity" that requires us
to understand Ghosh's novel as a "laboratory of modernity," one that
turns science fiction into "social science fiction." What is artificial, fic
tional, and speculative actually builds on the disciplines of social science
itself, which allows Nelson to contend that while we tend to configure
the "human" as being outside of technology, it is always already placed
within technology. She also claims that new forms of the human emerge
from two kinds of meshing between humans and machines: the "body
may provide the wetware in a Terminator-style cybernetic feedback loop
between the wetware pilot and the hardware of computers and bombs, or
(in a less obvious cyborg connection) the body may be organically repro
grammed through vaccination, through chemical or genetic interventions"
(246).n Instead of seeing humans as cyborgs, which become in Haraway's
unique configuration no longer simply "organic" but "biotic," we might
observe how The Calcutta Chromosome offers the more radical possibility
of reading machines as essentially catalyzers, carriers, and hosts (much as

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 153

mosquitoes can be "technologized" to induce interpersonal transference),

according to an evolving form of "organic reprogramming" that down
plays the body as a type of "wetware" that only merges with the computer
ized objects of machine "hardware" (Haraway 209).
Haraway's critical investment in the cyborg makes the hybrid replica
tion of the human-machine wholly different from organic reproduction.
She states, "[C]yborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction"
(150, emphasis added). What is "postbiological," then, effaces the dis
tinction between humans and technology by means of a new cyborgian
hybridity, which she idealizes as the end of gender itself as a biologi
cal category (181). Haraway, though, retains the authority of the cyborg
as a "feminist embodiment," yet without claiming to offer any kind of
return to biological organicism; cyborgs are rather a new form of politi
cal ontology (the emergence of "pure" politics in which "everything is
political"). N. Katherine Hayles likewise connects her critical position on
the cyborg to the political language of "embodiment," which subjects the
cyborg to the linguistic and to the codes, semiotics, and materiality of the
text (2). In both cases, cyborgs are synonymous with knowledge, technol
ogy, and discourse?all of which can be strategically deployed biopoliti
cally, especially in Haraway's constructivist framework. Hence, Haraway
reads Foucault's biopolitics, despite its limits in terms of explicit gender
analysis, "as a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field"
(150). Foucault, however, employs the term "biopolitics" not as a means
to foment political resistance in a dialectical synthesis between bodies and
technologies, as Haraway does, but to characterize the totalizing abstract
micro- and macropolitical organization that governs "life" and "popula
tions" in modern society. Biopolitical management is neither emancipa
tory nor paradigmatic of the strategic uses of power towards newly engen
dered forms of postcolonial resistance. As we return to the "organic" as
the contested political site over the control of the human, the cyborg as a
productive concept nonetheless tends to obscure the importance and pri
macy of bodies (and pleasures). Bodies interact with technology not so
that they can be simply consumed by or merge with technology, but rather
to catalyze their own internal processes and facilitate biological mutation.
Discussions surrounding virtual reality, the digital image, the body, and
cyberspace have led critics such as Jonathan Crary, William Mitchell, and
Paul Virilio to suggest that human subjects have been increasingly dema
terialized and disembodied (Crampton 19).12 Tim Lenoir observes: "The
fear that technology developments associated with computer technology,
artificial intelligence, robotics, and more recently nanotechnology will
succeed in displacing humanity through an evolutionary process leading
first to a cyborg/human assemblage and ultimately to the extinction and

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 154 SHINN

replacement of the human altogether has been with us at least since the
writings of Leroi-Gourhan in the 1960s" (xv, emphasis added). Lenoir fur
ther states, "[B]y 2099, according to [Roy] Kurzweil, human thinking and
machine intelligence will have merged with no meaningful distinction left
between humans and computers" (xv-xvi). According to this interpreta
tion of the cyborg, the new posthuman subject exhibits "no essential dif
ferences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer
simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleol
ogy and human goals" (xvi). It is precisely this posthuman subject that
Antar threatens to mutate into within the realm of postcolonial cyberspace.
Behind the notion of the emergence of the new posthuman cyborg lies the
Shannon-Weaver Theory of Information, initially advanced in the Macy
Conferences, circa 1943-1954. As Lenoir explains, this theory argues that
all computerized data proceeds "independent of context, [having] a prob
ability function with no dimension, no materiality, and no necessary con
nection with meaning" (xvii). In short, despite the posthuman cyborg's
claim to being a new form of "embodiment," this entity instead depends
on the abstract and disembodied transformations that define and radically
recontextualize it. Even in its most radical forms, the idea of the cyborg
privileges the overarching technological force of the machine.
Haraway derives much of her cyborg manifesto from a cultural studies
framework that locates the human subject within discourse and represen
tation; in this framework, knowledge also becomes a critical technology of
gender. Her sense of embodiment, however, connects the cyborg explicitly
to the cultural field of discourse and representation as biopolitics and has
no existence apart from it. By contrast, as Lenoir explains:

[Mark] Hansen's aim is to offer a positive program for embracing the rich
materiality of technology that frees it from being embedded in discourse and
representation. The position he stakes out draws deeply on Henri Bergson's
defense of the affective, prediscursive body as the active source of meaning.
... From Hansen's perspective technologies alter the very basis of our sensory
experience and drastically affect what it means to live as embodied human
agents. They accomplish this by reconfiguring the senses at a precognitional
or even paracognitional level (not to privilege one level over the other) prior to
conscious perception and assimilation into language.13 (xx, emphasis added)

Using neuroscience, Hansen defines embodiment as "inseparable from the

cognitive activity of the brain" (3). His study of the "concrete life of the
body" focuses on embodied perceptions, which he derives from Bergson
(4). This approach differs from a general consensus that virtual reality
"provides an alternative reality where 'being' somewhere does not require
physical presence and 'doing' something does not result in any change in

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 155

the physical world," often imagining, as Springer does in her analysis of

popular culture, that we "experience sexuality by losing our bodies and
becoming pure consciousness" (491,487). Cyberspace becomes a "purely
mental and nonphysical" realm in which visual perception and cognition
create forms of disembodiment (Hansen 13).
By contrast, Hansen claims, the "body enframes information." Infor
mation circulates digitally in a formless state and must achieve an "appre
hensible form" in sensory images in order for it even to be perceived
(11). In the process of transposing information, the body selects, filters,
and creates images through the mechanisms of its own perceptual fram
ing, involving, above all, the dynamic cognitive activities of the brain. As
Hansen explains:

When the body acts to enframe digital information?or, as I put it, to forge
the digital image?what it frames is in effect itself?its own affectively expe
rienced sensation of coming into contact with the digital. In this way, the act
of enframing information can be said to "give body" to digital data?to trans
form something that is unframed, disembodied, and formless into concrete
embodied information intrinsically imbued with (human) meaning. (10, 13,
emphasis added)

Hansen focuses on the body-brain functions in order to explain how the

brain renders digital information into a distinctly concrete and material
form?the digital image?and induces "affectively experienced sensa
tions" in the body itself. Insofar as these sensations represent for Hansen
an "embodied" experience, virtual reality?among the most heightened
forms of a simulated and allegedly "disembodied" experience?can be
understood not as a spatial and formless void but as the creation of a
"bodily space for sensation" and a catalyst for a "body-brain achievement"
(15). Virtual reality catalyzes the brain in order to produce diverse and
concrete sensations in the body that by no means render the user into a
digitized technological abstraction; rather, there is the possibility that the
user becomes in fact newly embodied.

Catalyzers and Carriers

If we extend Hansen's discussion to The Calcutta Chromosome, it

would be reductive to claim that Antar becomes a mere computer simu
lation of the body or that the HCI creates a new species of the human
cyborg or a post-human machine. Rather, Ghosh speculates on the sys
temization of biological mutation and human evolution that the computer
merely catalyzes. According to the novel's key medical allegory, the com
puter functions much as the mosquito does in becoming a primary carrier

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 156 SHINN

in the transmission of the malarial virus. Much as the mosquito has

"recombinatory powers," Ava has the ability to transpose information and
data, merging with Antar and other subaltern subjects. Like the mosquito
that merely channels and redistributes the malarial virus, the computer
unleashes a potent biological force that it aims to control while maintain
ing its autonomy (251). Virtual reality does not just affect human percep
tion; it drives human reaction and biological impulses and instincts at a
more basic organic level.14
As bodies are brought together by the HCI, colliding and merging in
cyberspace, the computer transmits digital information from one source
to another, serving as a single stimulus that provokes different embodied
reactions. The theory of the Calcutta Chromosome builds on the extent to
which this process of embodied reaction can be technologized. Murugan
conducts an experiment with Antar and a waiter in a Thai restaurant when
he shouts at both of them suddenly; each individual stumbles backwards
and recoils, but the eyes of the waiter dilate while Antar brushes his hand
across his face. Murugan illustrates how bodies can react differently under
deliberately induced stress situations. After shocking and angering his
unsuspecting subjects, he states:

"See . . . [s]ame stimulus, different response: he says tamatar and you say
tamatim. Now think, what if the 'im' and the 'ar' can be switched between you
and him? What would you have then? You'd have him speaking in your voice
or the other way around_Now what would you say, Ant, if all that informa
tion could be transmitted chromosomally, from body to body?" (107)

Each bodily response thus can be matched symptomatically according to

"variations in individual motor reactions" that in turn connect bodies to
each other; presumably, by means of a technology of genomic transfer
ence, these reactions can be chromosomally switched (108). With enough
genetic information about how the body has been naturally programmed
and with medical technology to mutate and transport this information, a
person can theoretically move from body to body. The computer triggers
certain neural transmissions but only in order to access what cannot be
regenerated by any cybernetic process of mutation. The catalyst merely
recombines a number of intersecting forces that affect the human in terms
of its own processes of biological mutation.
Because it cannot be sexually reproduced nor internally split into egg
and sperm, the Calcutta Chromosome can only be found in "non-regener
ative tissue, in other words, the brain" (250). Ghosh implies that the new
carrier of the virus is no longer the Anopheles mosquito or the pigeon, as
we saw in nineteenth-century colonial India, but now, in the postmodern
era, the computer. Ava holds power to recombine digital images, data, and

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 157

DNA and force a viral mutation that introduces totally new transpositions
in the body-brain nexus, yet she aids only in "organic reprogramming"
(Nelson 248). Power thus circulates through the HCI, which calls atten
tion instead to the management of biopolitical technology that can manip
ulate the brain and locate within its own dense folds and surfaces that
which mysteriously controls life and ultimately immortality?the "soul."
M?ngala, the International Water Council, Antar, and Murugan, then, all
seek to possess the global circulation of biopower; the first to obtain this
technology will be able to seize the "soul" of the people, granting as well
as taking away life, sacrificing and killing to achieve the advances of
human progress and a grand mystical union of postcolonial subjects in
cyberspace.
Although Ghosh admittedly exacerbates the fear that the Internet will
swallow us whole and that the computer will take over human life to the
point of extinction, his purpose is to have us question the act of sexual
deployment in the HCI while at the same time exploring what is still bio
logically possible. Computers neither threaten nor liberate the user; rather,
power circulates through technology. The exchange between the human
and the computer in the HCI becomes akin to Foucault 's notion of the way
we understand sex itself in its imaginary element:

the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articu
late it in discourse, to formulate it in truth ... the desirability that makes us
think we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power, when in fact we
are fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within
us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected?the dark
shimmer of sex. (156-57)

To extend this idea in terms of the deployment of sexuality and the HCI,
the human body takes the place of sex as that which we desire to repos
sess. Conversely, the computer becomes the source that liberates us as
it becomes synonymous with sex and remains that which we desire, the
primary element in which "we see ourselves reflected." We might do well,
though, to turn away from "desire" as such in a Freudian sexual repres
sion model towards what Foucault refers to as the locus of resistance in
bodies and pleasures themselves: "The rallying point for the counterattack
against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire but bodies
and pleasures" (157). Even though Ghosh tantalizes us with the collective
fears and fantasies that accompany a range of new experiences, sex does
not bring the fascination or obsession with locating bodies and pleasures
in the libidinal desires produced by the HCI. Rather, bodies and pleasures
in fact potentially precede the genealogy of sex, leading us to gain access
to a force in biological life that resists this cooptation through the direct

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 158 SHINN
stimulations of the brain.
In the transmission of the malarial virus, the Anopheles mosquito plays
a unique and vital function because it acts as a carrier and a catalyzer of
disease that directly affects the brain. According to the scientific definition
of the term, a catalyst brings "an action or reaction between two or more
persons or forces provoked or precipitated by a separate agent or force,
especially by one that is essentially unaltered by the reaction" (Gove 350).
Because the Anopheles mosquito serves as a catalyst and carrier, it is nei
ther synonymous with the malarial virus nor ravaged by the disease and
can perform multiple and conflicting operations, ones that can even facili
tate a cure or effect a precise genetic mutation. In Mangala's scientific
experiments, the pigeon also becomes a carrier of the malarial disease,
functioning much like the Anopheles mosquito to become a "test tube" for
her explorations in genetic and blood transmission. M?ngala uses various
bodily injections in order to incite sexual contact and reproduction in a
variety of living organisms. Her series of controlled experiments intro
duce a strain of malaria to render the carrier pigeon a host that transports
genetic information from one body to another by producing changes in
the chromosomal structure. As Murugan explains to Antar concerning
Mangala's secret experiments to transmit the malarial bug from body to
body, "From what we know of her technique, it sounds like she was work
ing with some weird strain of malaria?that is, by some kind of primitive
horsebreeding method she has developed a strain that could actually be
cultivated in pigeons. My hunch is that she found some way of making
the bug cross over, so that the bird could be used like a test tube, or an
agar plate" (249).15 However, in the spread of the disease the carrier must
reproduce exponentially and survive vicious attacks against it, thus allow
ing for mutation in its own genetic structure as a means to preserve the
disease within its own body without being destroyed by it. The Anopheles
mosquito in fact reproduces quickly and develops new strains resistant to
DDT and other chemicals through natural selection; these strains protect
it from eradication. This resilience, change, and adaptability render the
Anopheles mosquito and, to a lesser degree, the pigeon, useful species that
can reproduce and transmit DNA material by pushing forward a special
evolutionary process in which biological mutation occurs in the host as
well as the designated recipient.
The carrier has been chosen for the specific purpose of transporting
genetic material and provoking biological mutation, so it allegorizes the
way information flows more generally. All the characters become "a suc
cession of host bodies" as they serve the mission of bringing together a
series of forces that precipitate a catachresis of information through a chain
reaction (Kich 10). M?ngala has allegedly designed this unique "poste?lo

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 159

nial connectivity" by means of her unorthodox and secretive cult, though

Silence itself seems to be the mysterious power behind her divine-like
authority, the force that organizes and brings together subaltern populations.
M?ngala and Laakhan begin to work in D. D. Cunningham's laboratory in
India in 1893, when Cunningham discovers Alphonse Laveran's mistake:
movements of granules in malaria-infected cells are not excrement but
sperm. As Ross grows closer to the truth that malaria has been transported
to humans through the mosquito, Lutchman mysteriously arrives to offer
himself as a case study for Ross's experiments, though he later stays on
in Ross's lab as his attendant. Lutchman suggests to Ross that the species
of mosquito matters; shortly thereafter a hospital attendant provides a spe
cial jar full of Anopheles mosquitoes to study. Ross makes the discovery
of the malarial parasites in the stomach of the mosquito, thus learning
how malaria is transported through the Anopheles mosquito and earning
the Nobel Prize. Cunningham disappears but reappears as C. C. Dunn at
Madame Saminen's s?ance; apparently, he too has been used to transport
information but is no longer needed. The same goes for other "host bodies"
such as Phulboni and Murugan that serve a precise function but are not
brought into the secret cult beyond what Silence allows. Characters gradu
ally come to realize their roles in the quest for knowledge of immortality.
At first many of the participants are unwilling or reluctant to participate in
the experiments, but eventually they come to desire to know the truth, no
matter what the cost, even when they are no longer "chosen."
The description of the mosquito as a carrier of disease holds theoretical
import in understanding the novel's claims about mutation, reproductive
growth, and biotechnology, yet without making the Anopheles mosquito
itself the primary source of the disease or the prime mover of biological
evolution. Humans and mosquitoes remain distinct organisms and do not
merge into one life form, though both are connected as unwilling carriers
of the malaria virus. The Anopheles mosquito has the inherent capacity
to resist attacks against its own immune system, transporting but not suc
cumbing to viral infection and disease. As Michael Finkel explains, the
female Anopheles mosquito "is the only insect capable of harboring the
human malarial parasite. And she's definitely a she: Male mosquitoes
have no interest in blood, while females depend on protein-rich hemoglo
bin to nourish their eggs." The mosquito transmits the malarial virus into
another body by means of its own saliva, using its proboscis, which func
tions as a "sheath of separate tools," to inject one-celled malaria parasites
known as plasmodia.16 The Anopheles mosquito transmits the breeding
parasites by means of the circulation of the blood, yet it passes them on to
its newest host while neither acquiring the virus nor being eradicated by
attacks against it; in fact the virus strengthens its own elaborate system of

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 160 SHINN

immunity. The mosquito serves as a carrier of the malarial virus, facilitat

ing its sexual reproduction, while protecting itself for its own survival;
this is similar to how the computer works in producing digital images to
transcode genetic information. It recombines data and absorbs a series of
images to generate new ones by affecting gradual, but dramatic, micro
scopic change. The computer functions like the Anopheles mosquito?it
carries "disease" in order to induce a "cure" of death by modifying and
recoding DNA material. The Anopheles mosquito thus becomes more
than just a medical allegory in the transmission of genetic information
from body to body; instead it describes a broader use of hosts as carriers
and catalysts of biological processes, of which the computer is one. Ava,
therefore, transports and transforms genetic codes and information, just
as the Anopheles mosquito serves as the designated vector for the malaria
parasite in nature.
Hansen asserts that our "post-human futures" may in essence reflect a
turn not toward the machine but toward the "biological potential of human
beings" (qtd. in Lenoir xxiv). If the HCI brings us to a cyborg future that
determines human destiny by means of artificially induced replication, it
does so to return us to the sphere of the biological?to life as the propaga
tion of the species in the advanced stages of human evolution. Given the
fact that the computer functions as a carrier and a catalyzer of the brain's
neural transmissions, the flow of information of all kinds?from genetic
codes to occult signs?circulates in and through discourse and digital data
but also comes to inhabit the powerful regions of biological and organic
life. The Calcutta Chromosome considers how genetic material can be
transferred and transformed from body to body, facilitating what Murugan
describes as an "interpersonal transference" that mutates and reproduces
distinct human personality traits from one host to another. Ghosh alle
gorizes this transference and mutation of bodies to locate and technolo
gize the "soul." Insofar as bodies are the primary site in this process of
transformation and operate in a wide, often disparate network of relations,
we can begin to speak of what Foucault might have called, in relation to
the art and technology of the self, an entire "government of souls" (Best
and Kellner 68). It would be incorrect to assume, then, that the chosen
subjects of M?ngala, and M?ngala herself, are becoming cyborgs; rather,
the computer assists them in further becoming themselves, or what they
will mutate into as a society of interconnected, newly transformed neural
beings. The relations of bodies and pleasures are bound together intimately
in a world of colliding and collective feelings, instincts and sensations that
emerge from the brain's own critical functions and reactive stimuli that
have been advanced, but not absorbed into, the carrier.
The specific details that define how this biological technology works

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 161

remain a murky and, at times, frustrating mystery in The Calcutta

Chromosome. At times the novel seems close to the metaphysical Hindu
concept of Brahman as encompassing both good and evil, as when
M?ngala and her followers seek to discover and possess Ultimate Reality.
However tempting it would be to attribute to M?ngala and her follow
ers the power to control nature, technology, and the body according to
an insurgent subaltern politics, Ghosh instead suggests that M?ngala and
her followers are not the ones controlling nature. Their bodies merely act
as receptors for technological experiments in body-to-body transmissions,
and they themselves are neither the primary source of knowledge nor the
sovereign subjects with a single collective will that charts the course of
history. Instead they function as relays and carriers that technologize and
process the neural and cognitive functions of bodies. At the same time,
however, the possibility of collective resistance to the attacks of Western
imperial power remains present in the spontaneous and active mutation of
bodies, rather than in the emergence of a willful militant political move
ment. The agency of postcolonial subjects against the "repression" of the
West is not privileged; instead these subjects become multiple and con
flicting carriers who are willing and unwilling catalyzers of complex evo
lutionary processes.
M?ngala wishes to control the force of biopower as much as or more
than the British and Americans do, and her purpose may exceed their drive
for world domination. As a postcolonial novel, however, Ghosh's The
Calcutta Chromosome does to a certain degree privilege the work of radi
cal subjects in the race for the future. Their opposition to the nineteenth
century bacteriologist Ross and to the late-twentieth-century multinational
corporation the International Water Council confronts the assumed author
ity of the colonizer. Ghosh situates the reader in close proximity to the
novel's non-Western subjects to critique the multiple uses of biopower in
the calculated global management of life. Bodies have always been dis
continuous sites where fierce battles between colonizer and colonized are
waged. In Ghosh's novel, resistance can be found in the massive experi
mental neural connections that exist in continual tension between the
forces of biopower and the politics of life.

Notes

1. Multinational capitalism used the revolutionary computer technologies of the

Web, global communications, and cyberspace to "deterritorialize" the world by
achieving a penetration of the market and regulating the flow of capital. "Y2K"
fears centered on how these systems of exchange would be disrupted by the "fatal
flaw" that existed within the computers and their temporal programming. See
Woolley 58. At the level of how this fact affects the individual, Crampton argues:

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 162 SHINN
"Although we speak
wonder if it is inste
nologies (the Intern
have multiple outco
of subjectivities)"
2. For a discussion o
Bishnupriya Ghosh.
his own magisteria
inspired novel, The
national geographies
an Antique Land (1
and the ecological su
(2004). Although G
Asian American lite
the important criti
tion, post-national g
Palumbo-Liu, and ot
of Asian American
a critical moment in
the early 1990s; Gh
in genre fiction by
"Homicidal Tenden
3. For discussions o
Joy deep Banerjee,
Black, John Thiem
merging of the loca
a critical view that
Ghosh's literary and
Ghosh critiques "im
and Ania Spyra shar
ing whether "the id
the cosmopolitan" in
focus on cosmopolit
that this humanism
a "utopian humanism
emphasis on the str
nationalist and insti
Shadow Lines.
4. See Douglas Crimp for incisive discussions of the theoretical and cultural
impact of the AIDS pandemic, which Ghosh implicitly references as the most
recent example of the recurring fear of disease in the 1980s and 1990s.
5. Also see Hansen 130.
6. Murugan acquires syphilis when he is fifteen years old after wandering into an
alley along Free School Street in Calcutta and being led by a pimp to a brothel. He
subsequently experiences the late stages of madness and dementia as the disease
spreads to the brain (287-88).

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MACHINES AND MOSQUITOES 163
7. See, for instance, Jenny Wolmark, and David Bell and Barbara Kennedy.
8. Haraway, however, decouples the "cyborg" and "goddess" connection that we
find in Mathur's applications of Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto."
9. Back matter, Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.
10. Elijah Farley, for instance, disappears in Renupur with a man who matches
Laakhan's description and has presumably been killed because he stumbled on
the secrets of their actions. Lutchman attempts to murder the linguist J. W. G.
Grigson, and Phulboni is nearly run over by a train at Renupur, presumably once
again by Lutchman. Sonali Das observes M?ngala about to kill Laakhan with a
knife that is distinctly made to resemble an instrument used in a human sacrifice.
In turn, Laakhan may be "connected" to the high society man, Romen Haldar,
who may in turn have infected Sonali Das with malaria or syphilis as part of
the controlled experiment. All of the characters mysteriously contract a malarial
type fever or have had malaria in the past, and many of the characters have been
involved sexually and now display the symptoms of syphilis.
11. Diane M. Nelson uses the term "wetware" to describe a basic distinction
between computer or machine "hardware" and living tissues, cells, or organisms
(hence, the term "wet"), both of which can be "programmed" or "wired" together
according to a common code, involving, for example, the complex exchanges
among DNA, digital data, and the brain. The "machine" crosses over and feeds
into the "organism," and vice versa. Rudy Rucker defines "wetware" more pre
cisely as "the underlying generative code for an organism, as found in the genetic
material, in the biochemistry of the cells, and in the architecture of the body's
tissues." For Rucker the "wet" regions of the brain and the central nervous sys
tem send signals and codes to the body much like the ones that determine the
exchange between software and hardware.
12. Crampton discusses the work of Paul Virilio and William Mitchell and the
interventions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, among others.
13. As Lenoir notes, "Hansen finds empirical support for this Bergsonist program
and its relevance to our current concerns about posthumanism and digitality in
the work of cognitive scientists such as Francisco V?rela, Edwin Hutchins, Andy
Clark, Antonio Damsio, and others who have defended the notion of the extended
mind" (xx).
14. See Hansen 161-96.
15. Moreover, as Murugan notes, "I think that somewhere down the line M?ngala
began to notice that her treatment often produced weird side effects?what
looked like personality disorders but transpositions. She began to put two and two
together and found that what she had on her hands was a crossover of randomly
assorted personality traits, from the malaria donor to the recipient?via the bird
of course. And once she saw this she became more and more invested in isolat
ing this aspect of the treatment, so that she could control the ways in which these
crossovers worked" (249).
16. According to the World Health Organization, the most deadly kind of malaria
virus is known as Plasmodiumfaciparum, which causes ninety-five per cent of all
malaria deaths by corroding the brain. As the malarial parasites enter the host's liver
cell, they eat the cell's contents and multiply, replicating 40,000 times, causing

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 164 SHINN

the cell to explode.

into new red blood
ing massive cellular
to boil the blood, in
invading parasites,
vive. The infected c
themselves to the b
the process, because
spleen, which "clea

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