Rajarshi Mitra
This morning,
while listening to Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The
Gene: An Intimate History (2016) on BBC Radio 4, I couldn’t but get
nostalgic about my research days in Hyderabad. Medical Humanities – an
interdisciplinary method of learning about medicine and disseminating medical
knowledge – had started attracting us Humanities researchers in Central
University of Hyderabad. In 2009, when I went there first, academia was
celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, one of my
favourite natural historians. There were
lectures on Darwin and his method of analyzing natural pheonomena. We watched a movie Creation (2009), where Darwin, while
obsessed with his thesis, was crumbling inside as Scarlet Fever destroyed his
eldest daughter Annie.
Mukherjee’s book
on gene begins with a chronicle of hereditary mental illness in his family in
Kolkata. The family had explained recurring symptoms of manic depression among
individual members as pathological fear triggered by partition experience.
Those who have studied and researched partition in Bengal would know what this
meant. Partition had released an inner violence, wounds of which we Bengalis
carry even today. I never experienced partition, neither was my family ever
affected by it, but for those belonging to families torn by partition, memories
of loss and melancholia occur chronically.
When Mukherjee’s
paternal cousin Moni, who is not a partition child, is diagnosed with
schizophrenia and admitted to a mental facility, heredity comes under scanner.
Mental illnesses can be linked to our genetic make-up. With advances in medical
science, very soon we’ll be able to read our genetic map. What might happen to
us then as human beings? How would we define ourselves?
Mukherjee asks
what we might now consider post-human questions. It’s dizzying to think how
many among us are asking post human questions now. Probably, it was Darwin,
trying to amalgamate Malthus and the biological world, who had inaugurated this
post human era. More I read Darwin (and today as I am listening to Mukherjee’s
commentary on Darwin), I feel, he had dealt a deserving blow to “being human”.
Naturally selected, variations massacred, humans had risen to spawn more
variations. Humans are not unique creations of God, but like all other
biological creations they’ve arrived organically to the present shape. No biological
form is stable. Evolution proves that we are born shapeshifters.
All these madness' Mukherjee talks about could as well be variations! Horror and Sci-fi movies
have speculated the rise of newer forms of human beings – cyborgs, zombies,
super-humans and the list goes on. What about the Indigo phenomenon in the U.S.?
American parents often announce their children are differently abled Indigos, who
are hypersensitive and hyper-talented. The
society, their parents argue, do not realize the importance of their
superior-minded children. Are the new variations in human beings about to
appear?
As the present
generation in India gradually becomes cyborgs (man-machine complexes), it
remains to be seen what new variation they will spawn. Beyond Darwinism, I believe,
the new generation, especially the one I teach in IIIT Guwahati, might help us
understand how we are coping with knowledge networks. They have not inherited
this knowledge network, yet they immerse in this and create newer forms of
social bonding. I would be eager to know how the genetic map of this
generation might look like. What new diseases would the new generation have to
deal with? And, more importantly, how might we help them combat these diseases?
