Gift Unpossessed: Community As 'Gift' in the Calcutta Chromosome‪.‬

Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery presents an alternate history of Ronald Ross's research on the transmission of malaria. The novel juxtaposes empirical, western science with a different epistemology of folk medicine. At the same time, Ghosh's invocation of the Nobel Prize Ross historically received in connection with this work suggests a homologous gap between the monetary reward (and international recognition) of the Nobel and the uncredited scientific discoveries of a silent, economically poor community. Ghosh uses Ross--an Englishman in India working with western scientific methods to investigate a disease impeding the colonization of India--as a springboard from which to launch a postcolonial interrogation of the scientific method. Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, particularly his intertextual reading of Martin Heidegger's essay on "The Anaximander Fragment" and Hamlet, offers a way to read the small community which comes together at the end of The Calcutta Chromosome: community as a representation of justice and the invitation into that community as a gift. (1) Wendy Brown's assertion that "Derrida's formulation of justice entails the present generation's responsibility for crafting continuity" (147) captures this shifting of the focus on the practice of justice. A justice that entails community is not one of economic or political balance sheets. The justice community represents makes it possible to set aside zero-sum contexts and to pursue justice on a "win-win" basis. Justice as gift does not measure but rather offers a joining of what there is--of "whatever lingers awhile," Heidegger writes, perhaps suggesting a reward for endurance (41). In this spirit, I address the community which lingers in the closing pages of The Calcutta Chromosome: Antar, left behind by so many people who had once been connected to his life; Mangala, pursuing a means of enabling "relations between generations" by extending the temporal reach of each generation; Tara, holding out in New York largely through assistance (not only financial) from friends; and Murugan, the lingering traces of whose life carry Antar forward toward a return to community life. By interrogating the postcolonial and technologically mediated community formed at the close of this novel, and the context that was subverted in the formation of this community, I intend to demonstrate that community building not only enacts the Heideggerian justice of "Being as presence" but also furthers the Derriddean justice of "jointure of the accord: the proper jointure to the other given by one who does not have it" (Derrida 27).