Heidelberg University Publishing

ABSTRACT “Modernity was not a ‘virus’ that spread from the West to the rest of the world,” Amitav Ghosh writes in his treatise on literature and climate change, The Great Derangement. It is, rather, a “global and conjec­tural phenomenon,” and what is unique about Western modernity is only “its insistence on its own uniqueness” (2016, 95). Throughout Ghosh’s work, his plots unearth the disparate roots and entangled trajectories of multiple modernities. This includes Ghosh’s science novels, The Hungry Tide and The Calcutta Chromosome, which demonstrate that the notion of science as a uniquely Western form of knowledge production is a colonial construction. At first glance, both novels seem to position indigenous, colonial subjects as preter- or even supernatural sources of knowledge: in The Hungry Tide, an illiterate fisherman’s intimate understanding of river dolphins and their movements through the Sundarbans delta occasions a scientific breakthrough for the novel’s cetologist heroine; and in The Calcutta Chromosome, a cult-like conspiracy of Indian “counter-scientists” are portrayed as the puppet masters behind Roland Ross’s discovery of the transmission of malaria in colonial India. However, on closer inspection, in both novels, the positioning of colonial subjects as the Other of scientific knowledge production is subverted: The Hungry Tide’s illiterate fisherman is not a font of ancient local knowledge, he is a patient observer who looks at the dolphins with scientific precision; The Calcutta Chromosome’s shadowy conspirators are not keepers of occult knowledge but are working within and through the laboratories of colonial scientists to do their own original research. Like modernity, then, science has many roots and entangled trajectories in Ghosh’s fiction.

KEYWORDS Amitav Ghosh, science, subaltern knowledge