Calcutta’s Chromosome, Hidden in Plain Sight
Sir Ronald Ross Memorial. Photo: Soham Basu
Ronald Ross was once immortalized in Amitav Ghosh’s historical novel. Nivedita Dey rediscovers a memorial dedicated to Kolkata’s forgotten, Nobel laureate physician.
In 1996, the acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh published the medical thriller, The Calcutta Chromosome (Picador), a historical fiction tale partially-based on Nobel Laureate Ronald Ross’s 1923 memoir. The novel’s plot wove together a sci-fi story about the discovery of the malarial parasite, Ross’s historic research, and a fictional mysterious cult.
The Calcutta Chromosome remains one of the best works of contemporary science fiction, and in 1997, received the prestigious Authur C. Clarke Award. It opens with the epigraph:
This day relenting God
Hath placed within my hand
A wondrous thing; and God
Be praised. At His command,
Seeking His secret deeds
With tears and toiling breath,
I find thy cunning seeds,
O million-murdering Death.
Sir Ronald Ross
(Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1902)
This epigraph is fragment of Ross’s poetry, one that should’ve been much familiar to every Kolkatan. But Ross’s story is one that is often forgotten even in his adopted hometown.
On every bustling, busy weekday in Kolkata, endless traffic from both Alipore Road and Harish Mukherjee Road overflows the AJC Bose Road. Amidst this noisy and overcrowded junction stands the Presidency General [PG] (or Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial) Hospital. The hospital is one of the oldest medical facilities from Colonial India, established by the British in 1707, and its use was strictly permitted to Europeans until 1770. It remains one of the busiest medical institutions in the country. Here, the first postgraduate medical institute in Eastern India was inaugurated in 1957 by then-Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru, as the Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education & Research [IPGMER]. In 1998, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation along with the West Bengal government declared it as a heritage building.
However, as innumerable pedestrians ply to and fro the pavement along the northern walls of the hospital every day, many remain oblivious to a particular historic structure of extreme significance both to medical science and the history of India, situated right in the white walls circumventing the famous red brick building: the Ronald Ross Memorial.
The memorial is an arch flanked by two pillars on its sides and a locked iron gate built into the outer wall of the PG Hospital on the AJC Bose Road. On it are found a medallion displaying Ross and two marble plaques, the left one declaring “In the small laboratory 70 yards south east to this gate Surgeon Major Sir Ronald Ross IMS in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by mosquitoes.” On the right-hand side plaque is inscribed the first three stanzas of a longer poem penned by Ross himself, the first two used by Ghosh as his epigraph for The Calcutta Chromosome, and the third reading:
I know this little thing
A myriad men will save,
O Death, where is thy sting?
Thy victory, O Grave?
The complete life cycle of the malaria parasite was discovered right here, in the City of Joy, and its researcher has been duly memorialized at the same location. Ghosh’s book goes to great lengths to describe Ross’s role —albeit with many fictional elements added to historical facts.
The complete life cycle of the malaria parasite was discovered right here, in the City of Joy, and its researcher has been duly memorialized at the same location. Ghosh’s book goes to great lengths to describe Ross’s role —albeit with many fictional elements added to historical facts.
Sir Ronald Ross was born in Almora, India in 1857, to Sir Campbell Claye Grant Ross—a general in the British Indian Army—and his wife, Matilda Charlotte Eldertoin. After many disinterested efforts at education in England, Ross finally cleared his examinations from the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1879. In 1881, he also completed his four-months training at the US Army Medical School, Washington, D.C. Upon returning to England, he received his appointment as a surgeon in the Indian Medical Service [IMS] and was sent away to serve in British India.
In 1894, Ross returned to London on leave and it was then he first met Sir Matrick Manson, the British parasitologist and ‘Father of Tropical Medicine’, who became his mentor. Manson shared his own malaria blood slides with the latter and convinced him to return to India to further pursue finding a mosquito vector of the disease.
While working in Secunderabad, in 1895, Ross took much interest in the works of Charles-Louis-Alphonse Laveran, a French military physician, who while serving in Algeria in 1880, had discovered the plasmodium parasite in the blood of an infected soldier. The additional studies and guidance under Manson gave Ross the idea of the malaria parasite being spread through the mosquito bite, and he began his extensive search for Laveran’s plasmodium in the same. However, due to his transfer to various other stations, his experiments were not progressing satisfactorily.
Then in 1897, he was back to Secunderabad. He first raised twenty units of a kind of “brown” mosquitos from their larvae stage. At this point, their species or ganus was unknown to him. Then, Ross used a paid volunteer, historically known as one Husein Khan, whom he exposed to bites by these mosquitoes. Ross collected the infected man’s blood and began searching for the malarial parasite inside the mosquitoes’ stomachs.
Ross finally concluded his experiments successfully in that very laboratory situated in Hyderabad—now known as Sir Ronald Ross Institute of Parasitology—and declared his findings to the world: the malarial parasite was found not only living but growing inside the “brown” specie mosquito. This groundbreaking finding was first published in the Indian Medical Gazette that year, and later in the British Medical Journal. Today the whole world observes World Mosquito Day on 20th August, the same day Ross publicly announced his findings in 1897.
In 1898, Ross was transferred to the Calcutta Presidency of British India and joined the PG Hospital as a surgeon. Here, determined to continue his research on malaria. he set up his workstation in Surgeon-Lieutenant-General Dr. D. D. Cunningham’s laboratory located inside the hospital perimeter.
The Calcutta Chromosome focuses on experiments conducted on the sacrificial blood of infected pigeons as a ritual for transmigration of the human soul. In reality, during his tenure at the PG Hospital, Ross found it difficult to lay hands on human samples of infected blood. It is then that Manson persuaded him to use birds for his research. Thus, Ross began experimenting on sparrows.
In his novel, Ghosh expertly wove historic facts into fiction, and included many famous real names related to Ross’s research, including Manson, Laveran, Robert Koch, Vassily Danilewsky, Dimitri Leonidovitch Romanowsky, Dr. D.D. Cunnigham, and more.
By July 1898, Ross had found the significant role of culicine mosquitoes both as a host and vector in avian malaria. He also found close resemblance of avian malarial parasites to the human malarial parasites. While historically it is known that Ross was known to have purchased each of his bird sample out of his own pocket, The Calcutta Chromosome fictionalizes this instance, with Ghosh mentioning a mysterious “Lutchman, (who) was Ross’s right-hand man. He used to breed the pigeons that Ross used for his research right over there.”
Soon, Ross’s research with the avian malaria revealed to him that the salivary gland of the mosquitoes acted as the storage of malarial parasites. Upon further investigation, Ross correctly concluded that through mosquito bites the malarial parasites were getting released from their salivary gland and entering the bloodstream of the bitten subject. He then successfully demonstrated the method of mosquito bites to transfer the malarial parasite from an infected sparrow to healthy sparrows. Thus, in that small, inconspicuous laboratory inside the PG Hospital Ross both discovered and demonstrated the complete lifecycle of the deadly malarial parasite. His finding was peer reviewed and endorsed by Manson and Sir John Bland-Sutton.
Once acquainted with Ross’s tale, I found myself echoing Urmila, a central character of Ghosh’s novel, when she says, “It’s strange … I’ve changed buses here hundreds of times. I can’t even begin to count how often I’ve walked past this wall. But I’ve never noticed that inscription up there.”
Ross went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in 1902 for his contribution to the research of malaria, making him Calcutta’s very first Nobel Laureate, besides also being the first British Nobel laureate born outside Europe. In his Nobel lecture on malaria, Ross said, “The exact route of infection of this great disease, which annually slays its millions of human beings and keeps whole continents in darkness, was revealed. These minute spores enter the salivary gland of the mosquito and pass with its poisonous saliva directly into the blood of men. Never in our dreams had we imagined so wonderful a tale as this.”
About a decade later, another man from Bengal—the poet, writer and song-writer, Rabindranath Tagore—would be granted the Nobel Prize, too. Yet, while Tagore is celebrated and memorialized in Kolkata (and around the nation), Ross remains almost forgotten for his Nobel-winning groundbreaking research conducted in the same city.
Likewise, the memorial—unveiled by Ross himself in 1927—goes almost completely unnoticed to this day, even as thousands of city dwellers pass by it daily. It was perhaps not until the publication of The Calcutta Chromosome that this iconic heritage site even received its due recognition among a small portion of the local population.
Ghosh’s novel begins with the protagonist Antar chancing upon a hologram of an old, tattered, and almost unreadable ID card of Murugan, who the super-computer AVA reports as “Subject missing since August 21 1995… last seen Calcutta, India.” Chapter five of the book gives a detailed description of the memorial that stands even today, which begins:
Walking past St Paul’s Cathedral, on his first day in Calcutta, August 20 1995, Murugan was caught unawares by a monsoon downpour. He was on his way to the Presidency General Hospital, on Lower Circular Road, to look for the memorial to the British scientist Ronald Ross. He had seen pictures of it and knew exactly what to look for. It was an arch, built into the hospital’s perimeter wall, near the site of Ross’s old laboratory. It had a medallion with a portrait and an inscription that said: In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this gate Surgeon Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by Mosquitoes.
Until I had read The Calcutta Chromosome, I remained ignorant of this historical memorial, like innumerable others in the heart of my own city. Once acquainted with Ross’s tale, I found myself echoing Urmila, a central character of Ghosh’s novel, when she says, “It’s strange … I’ve changed buses here hundreds of times. I can’t even begin to count how often I’ve walked past this wall. But I’ve never noticed that inscription up there.”
Sir Ronald Ross Laboratory. Photo: Soham Basu
Inside the perimeter of the PG Hospital, on one end lies the historic red brick structure that to some eyes may hardly resemble a laboratory. Ghosh describes this structure as he writes, “He (Murugan) came to a stop at a dilapidated red-brick outhouse, built so close to the ground that it was almost completely hidden by the boundary wall.” Today, part of the laboratory is reconstructed, as Ghosh further writes, about a
complex of boxy new buildings all painted a drab, municipal yellow. None of those was here when Ronnie was doing his malaria research in Calcutta. It was just trees and bamboo and greenery around here – except for a couple of labs and outhouses where the servants and attendants lived.
Now christened Sir Ronald Ross Laboratory, the entry to it displays a third plaque that reads, “In this laboratory Surgeon Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898 made the great discovery that malaria is conveyed by the bite of a mosquito.” Currently, the building is used as a malaria testing centre. Both the memorial and the laboratory from the outside are accessible to public.
According to G. Covell, once the Director Malaria Survey of India, and author of Records of The Malaria Survey Of India Vol III (1932-1933), Calcutta is the birthplace of Malarialogy, and Ross is assuredly the Father of Malarialogy. Accepting an appeal from Dr. Ranen Dasgupta, Department of Endocrinology, Nil Ratan Sarkar Medical College, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation declared PG (SSKM) Hospital as a Heritage precinct and Sir Ronald Ross Laboratory Building as a Heritage Building in January, 1991.
Kolkata is a major tourist destination, with at least about 50,000 tourists per annum. In 2021, the city attracted more than 3.2 per cent of all foreign tourist arrivals into India. Popular heritage walks or city tours are regularly conducted by eminent and popular tour operators, covering diverse destinations including the popular Victoria Memorial, the Indian Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, New Market, Esplanade area, Writer’s Building, the several ‘ghats’ on the branch of river Hooghly, and lesser-known sites around the city, too. The Ross Memorial, however, is often overlooked by the endless throng of both the city pedestrians and the tourists.
Murugan, in The Calcutta Chromosome, says, “'No one notices poor Ron any more.” Like Ghosh’s book, perhaps it’s time to offer this local-born Nobel laureate the attention he deserves.
***
Nivedita Dey is a poet from Kolkata, India. Her poetic philosophy is one of hope and transcendental humanism, and her debut poetry collection was Larkspur Lane: Branched Labyrinths of the Mind (Notion Press, 2022). Dey holds post-graduate degrees in English and Psychology. She can be found at niveditadey.com, Twitter: @Nivedita_Writes, and Instagram: @niveditadeypoetry.
