Eruptions of Funk in Priya Chabria's Clone: Ruminations on Bio-Ethics and Human Consciousness in Posthuman Transgenetic World

Priya Sarukkai Chabria in Clone explores the historical dimension of imagined possibilities in the distant future of twenty-fourth-century India. This distant society of the future is a systematic Utopia/Dystopia named Global Community based on hierarchic organisation with little room for divergence and the population classed as – Originals, Superior, Zombies, Firehearts, and Clones. This posthuman world becomes a space for examining what constitutes human nature. The thrust of the premise in Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Clone is the nostalgia for the humanist subject, a subject that is undermined by bio-engineering which attempts at erasing human ‘consciousness’ by bio-engineering and transgenetic cyborgization. The moral and ethical dimensions of bio-engineering are problematized and the text questions whether the de-coupling of mind-body can erase the constraints of human consciousness, for, after all, consciousness is the essence of human subjectivity. This paper would adopt a Cultural History approach and interpret the text as a matrix interspersed with diverse discourses to interrogate the ideological foundation which gave form, function, and content to the idea of Utopia/Dystopia.