The South Asian Short Story and Amitav Ghosh’s “The Calcutta Chromosome”

As part of the South Asia Studies Council Colloquium Series, Shital Pravinchandra, Assistant Professor of English at Yale, will deliver a talk titled “Not Just Prose: Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Calcutta Chromosome’ and the South Asian short story”.

September 21, 4:30pm • Room 202, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

Shital Pravinchandrais Assistant Professor of English and a scholar of postcolonial theory and contemporary South Asian and Anglophone literature at Yale.  She is currently working on a book project, Inhuman Transactions?, based on her dissertation research which traces intersections between postcolonial studies and bioethics, exploring how contemporary Anglophone texts negotiate the complex ethical dilemmas posed by developments in human transplant technology.  Her future projects seek to extend postcolonial literary studies by examining two unexplored genres of writing: the short story, and 2) utopia and science-fiction.  The abstract of the paper follows:

This paper argues that it is crucial for postcolonial literary studies - a field highly dependent on the novel - to begin paying attention to the short story. This move is necessary not only because of the important role the genre plays in the literary production of most formerly colonized regions but also because the short story allows, indeed, requires, the postcolonial literary critic to ask of it an entirely different series of questions than those that would be appropriate for the novel. Thus, for instance, the short story provides an interesting counterpoint to the well-documented association between the emergence of nation-states and the rise of the novel. My talk will focus on the short story in South Asia, and show how the genre obviously troubles some of the oft-rehearsed themes in postcolonial studies. I will speak about ‘The Calcutta Chromosome’ by Amitav Ghosh in the context of the Indian short story, arguing that the novel thematizes the relationship between Anglophone novels and South Asian bhasha short stories.