The Annihilation of Cloning: Caste and Cloning in Generation 14

   “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting (4).”

- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“I am a fourteenth generation Clone and something has gone wrong with me. Not that my DNA is altered, not that I am a mutant. Not that any of my function need be eliminated. It’s nothing obvious. It’s terminal, and secret. Let me put it this way: I remember (11, emphasis added).”

Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Generation 14

If forgetting precipitates the contiguity of oppression, then memory resists it. Its fluidic epistemological underpinnings harbour the subversive potential to radically alter the present; memory also serves as an instrument of self-fashioning, a template (of and) to dream, and an internal river of time that aids in the comprehension of external reality. It emerges as a tool of appropriation and resistance, and even more so as a critical trait – and a vital consequence – of being human.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s dystopian Generation 14 (2008) foregrounds a human clone who – because of her genetic constitution – is denied the privilege of memory, and the novel traces her awakening within a discriminatory, oppressive and unjust society. By subtly connecting the disparate phenomena of caste and cloning in a sutra of oppression and resistance, it destabilises a Foucauldian framework where knowledge, power and domination intermesh in a hegemonic lattice. The novel views cloning as a division – and then a water tight compartmentalisation – of labourers graded one above the other a la the caste system.

This paper brings to bear Dr. BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste on Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14, and reads the organisational paradigms of caste and cloning as being co-planar. For Ambedkar, “caste consciousness has served to keep the memory of past feuds between castes green, and has prevented solidarity (248)”. Chabria plays with the idea of memory: the memories which clones harbour in her novel aren’t individual experiences, but more of a “programmed” collective consciousness (similar to caste consciousness) that reiterates, reifies, and reinforces “a hierarchy in which the divisions of labourers are graded one above the other (234).” Similar to caste consciousness, the clones in Generation 14 are conscious of their inferior status vis-à-vis other “classes”, and this not only prevents solidarity amongst them but also infuses servility.

The novel depicts how a cloning-based hierarchal setup can spiral downwards into a soul-crushing dystopia, and can prevent people from harbouring a “consciousness of kind” (243). Such a world dehumanises the damned de la terres and deprives them of mutual help, trust, and fellow-feeling (256). The consciousness of an individual in such a techno-scientific, gene-centric society is contingent on his clone-status (and gene template) alone – and not on his shared humanity. Thereby the constituents of such a social setup, in the words of Ambedkar again, “cannot be said to form a society or a nation (243).” Moreover, any internal reform to such a society would be virtually impossible. The division of labour brought about by the cloning system, it might be extrapolated, will not be a “division based on choice” as “individual sentiment and preference” would have no place in it since this system would be based on the “dogma of predestination” (235). It would be, ipso facto, a system that denies, negates and overrules the humanity of its sentient constituents.

“Now the first thing that is to be urged against this view is,” BR Ambedkar critiqued a similar – though a more tangible, vicious and real – institution by writing, “that it is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers (233)”. This random gradation of labourers – and the ensuing moral vacuum and socio-political repression of the subaltern – is indicted in Generation 14. It must be mentioned that Chabria “works across the four verticals of literature and re-imagines many traditional poetic forms” and “the redemptive spaces of imagination in Generation 14 is grounded on decades of practice (personal communication)”.

These spaces find an expression in SF – a genre/mode of diverging and terrifying speculations – which manifests societies and individuals in a state of unnerving flux. Almost every SF narrative becomes an extrapolation vis-à-vis the material realities (in an attempt to, quite often, critique the present). Indian writers in English often use the canvas of SF to foreground multiple socio-political issues that plague the present. I have argued in Science Fiction Studies that a “rapidly developing, chaotically prismatic, and mind-bogglingly polyphonic” India constitutes an “active battleground between the market forces of globalization and their consequent localizing politico-cultural responses (479).” The Science Fictional (p)retellings of India – whether in terms of geo-politics or geo-economics – activate the paradigms of caste, religion, gender, class, and nationality in the readers, even if with a view to indict them. Mainak Dhar (in Zombiestan), Manjula Padmanabhan (in Escape), Vandana Singh (in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories) and Anil Menon (in The Beast with Nine Billion Feet) – to cite just four texts – interrogate terrorism, patriarchy, chauvinism, and nature-bending global capitalism.

Divided into seven parts, and a prologue, Chabria’s Generation 14 can be linked with the realities of production and consumption, but this paper deals solely with those sections which are set in a dystopian, futuristic “Global Community” of the 24^th century. The stratification of sentient beings in Generation 14 is formulated around genetic factors, and the narrative, to quote Ambedkar, is a classic example of how “virtue has become caste-ridden, and morality has become caste-bound (259).”

The catchphrase “The Global Community is always right. Long Live the Global Community” is self-explanatory about the ethos of this civilisation. It is in this repressive milieu that Clone 14/54/G becomes self-aware, develops a sentience different both from its clone-self and original-ancestor, and ultimately joins the resistance to overthrow a world order where clones are regarded as little more than animalistic, quasi-mechanical sub-humans. The hierarchal society is divided into four “classes” – the Originals, Zombies, Firehearts and the Clones, and the power dynamics between these groups is summed up in the text thus.

“We are Originals, we’re the Best.
We’re kind, we rule at others’ behest.
Firehearts are liars we suppress…
Strong zombies we keep in check…
Clones are those we guide and shield…
The mutants too we put away…
This we do for the common good,
And not from hatred, it’s understood!” (236)

Creation of the ‘other’ primarily revolves around cloning, where the Originals use clones as both “hands” (proletariat) and “organs” (donors) – a much used trope in dystopian SF. The Originals in the text tinker with the genetic structure and create Zombies (who maintain law and order), the intellectual-class of Firehearts and the clones (who exist at the bottom of this pyramid). Ranging from “Z category clones…terror bearers…lobotomized clones acting on robotic commands (16)” to worker clones like 14/54/G, the prima facie reaction is to view the clones as the ultimate downtrodden.

Writing about this division of labour – and labourers – in his doctoral thesis Other Tomorrows, Suparno Banerjee insightfully notes: “In Generation 14 the two different concepts of social class and Hindu caste converge. The social divisions are rigid, based on each group’s role in the system of production; each group is even allotted separate habitat area. But this division is not a fluid one; rather it is genetically engineered at birth, which the groups cannot undo. The Clones are made for the purpose of menial work, the Zombies are made for fighting, the Firehearts are made for intellectual labor, and Originals control all of these species and reap the benefit of their labors (80, emphasis added).”

This is a division which cannot be undone, and any movement between groups is impossible. Based on birth – much like the caste system – this four-tiered society is reminiscent of the Arya Samajists’ “Chaturvarnya, or the division of society into four classes instead of four thousand castes (263)”. However, while Chaturvarnya based itself on guna (worth) and not birth, the taxonomy of Generation 14 nuances this understanding as it conflates worth and birth, in a kind of de facto operationalisation of the caste system (and not merely the de jure perspective of the Arya Samajists): the four classes in the text are, after all, based on (genetically engineered) birth, which is directly proportional to worth.

The novel narrates the struggle of a clone – and those who think like her – against those who believe in this neo-Chaturvarnya of the twenty fourth century. The erring Clone 14/54/G – the fourteenth copy of an ‘Original’ – begins having ‘visitations’ in the text, and past memories flood her brain: times which she, as a clone, never witnessed. This aberration is noticed by the authorities but the clone escapes termination because the dominant classes realise that this may help them consolidate their power since the Original to this clone died during an event called ‘The Great Celebration’ moments before she was to make a path-breaking announcement. These powers believe that they could somehow make this clone have an epiphany about her Original’s discovery – knowledge which can then be used to ensure their everlasting hegemony over the masses.

Also, this leadership matrix is not without its foes; a resistance movement contacts this clone – she realizes the terror, exploitation and inequality prevalent in the name of order and joins the rebels in their fight. The novel ends with a motley crew of survivors – bloodied but unbent – escaping to the dark side of the moon, promising to return one day to take down the oppressive Global Community.

Speaking mathematically, caste and cloning emerge as similar, if not congruent, models of societal organisation. Apart from a hierarchal society, division of classes/castes/groups, and the universal resistance to any oppressive model of organisation, and even the responses of people are similar. I asked Chabria if Clone 14/54/G had read Annihilation of Caste, and whether the resistance would have liked to read it. She responded: “I don’t think 14/54/G read it. Before the visitations she was kowtowing Worker Clone. She instinctively hated what she had been put through. The Resistance would however found in it an approximation of their situation and would want to read it…When Generation 14 was published I was told it was excessively dark.  I think the book was perhaps prescient. Because of passionate concern one hears alarm bells that ring faintly, but will become shrill in the future. The novel was therefore somewhat ahead of its time.”

The novel is, indeed, ahead of its times in ways more than one. The future in it is technologically advanced, ideologically internationalized and politically unified, no doubt, but much less human than the present – for example, memory is forbidden and sexuality is taboo. Emotions, individuality, decision-making, self-fashioning and creativity are regarded as the property of soi-disant guardians of the Global Community, ‘the Originals’, who in turn exercise total and utter control over the rest of the masses. In fact, “The colony of Originals is kept segregated and pampered for the purpose {of mating} so that fresh Originals and their blueprints are available for societal betterment (15)”. The total dependence of the clones on the Originals, the ostensible fountainhead of all good – and on the zombies (for their law enforcement, bureaucratic and systemic needs) and on the firehearts (for their literary, scholarly and creative needs) – underlines a system where the lowermost are wholly dependent on the three classes above it.

The parallels between these two societies are striking. Ambedkar writes;

Why need the Shudra trouble to acquire wealth, when the three higher Varnas are there to support him? Why need the Shudra bother to take to education, when there is the Brahmin to whom he can go when the occasion for reading or writing arises? Why need the Shudra worry to arm himself, when there is the Kshatriya to protect him? The theory of Chaturvarnya, understood in this sense, may be said to look upon the Shudra as the ward and the three higher Varnas as his guardians.” (272; emphasis added)

If one were to replace “shudra” with “clone”, “brahmin” with “original”, and “kshatriya” with “zombies”, there emerges a direct correlation between the conditions of existence of these four groups, and the relations of production spawned thereof. Just like the shudra, who is wholly dependent on the castes above him, the clone is also wholly dependent on the classes above – for command, control and communication. However, rather than merely adopting the four varnas from the caste system, Chabria’s clone system problematises it. Suparno Banerjee points out,

While the Clones are undoubtedly the Shudras (the untouchables), the other three groups exhibit mixed characteristics. The Originals, who are on the top of the pyramid, correspond to the Brahmins (the priests and the scholars); yet as controller of all the actions in the practical world, they also correspond to the Kshatriyas (the rulers and warriors). The Zombies are obviously warriors and supervisors in small matters, which relate them to the Kshatriyas; yet, they lack any self will and real ruling capabilities to be identified as real Kshatriyas. The Firehearts in their capacities as poets and scholar share the qualities of Brahmins; but, they are constantly controlled by the Originals and in some cases by certain Superior Zombies. None of the groups practically correspond to Vaishyas (the traders and craftsmen). This again points out the lack of a market based economy. However, such anomalies with present social divisions only indicate estrangement and the propensity of the future forms of oppression. (124, emphasis added)

While I fully agree with Banerjee’s reading of caste in Generation 14, I see the clones more as Shudras but not the untouchables, who are, by definition, avarna. This is a group which exists outside the structurality of caste – the untouchables (dalits and the aboriginals) – and thus, is even more marginalised. In the novel, this group corresponds to the mutants. Unlike the (farmer/worker) shudras who at least had a place, no matter how demeaned, within a pernicious system, the mutants are denied every last shred humanity, since they are the ultimate other.

In response to my question about the ideatic framework behind the four varnas, their watertight compartmentalisation and similarity with the caste system, Chabria writes: “There seems to be an obvious connection but it is, in fact, oblique. Being an Indian I have experienced the caste system – and loathed it as barbaric… Let’s remember vertical social hierarchies – of caste, class, colour, gender – persist in every society, and thinking about this in the form of imagined utopias or dystopias has been around for millennia. So, yes, there are similarities but I don’t think the creative process is opaque to the writer. I basically abhor the hierarchies we homo sapiens create.  I also firmly believe that plurality of expression, admitting a profusion of differences and creative freedom is essential for the growth of the nation and the individual. The freedoms I enjoy or seek should be available to all.”

Moreover, while Banerjee reads the novel as fusing two paradigms – a capitalistic mode of production based on class (where utility/productivity is honoured above all) and a Vedic society based on Caste (where birth/genes are paramount) – I can identify a third intersecting paradigm: a Soviet-style state where the “Global Community” is above everything else, and its foes and friends keep on changing.

“Children, repeat the lesson you have learnt today,” she said.
“Yes, Teacher,” they called in unison.
“The only truth is…”
“What the Global Community says.” The children shouted
“Everything else…”
“Must die, die, die!”  (236)

The emphasis on “purging” the unwanted is inbuilt in the Global Community. The novel, through such a portrayal, emphasises on the need to be human first – not just in the ‘original’ self, but as a fraternising impulse that cuts across race, species and birth. This attack on (genetic) identities based on (scientific) predestination within an oppressive world order forms the nucleus of Generation 14; the underlying leitmotif is to secularise, humanise and equalise the society of tomorrow. “Each one of us is human; we shall have the capacity to live as humans… Remember with me: I am a human being; I claim my birthright to be human (272)”.

This birthright to be human is a much sought after – and almost romantic – claim, since the dystopian material realities necessitate such an obvious assertion. The scientific framework of cloning, coupled with its Foucauldian matrix, creates a society that is not only vehemently anti-humanist, but also, in a way, fascist. When the clone 14/54/G wants to know more about the ‘others’, this is how the Fireheart Couplet responds: “Anyone—or any group—they designate as ‘The Others’. There are no markers to identify The Others. It’s arbitrary, and keeps changing with each victory and each Celebration (269-270).” The others (and mutants) are, clearly, an epistemological construct, and not an ontological, monolithic entity.

Where there is oppression, there is also resistance. Generation 14’s futuristic world of genetic engineering and prismatic societal organisation also attempts to understand and reinterpret the mechanics of power by assuming that all ideologies seek to dominate but also that resistance to any given ideology is a part of being human. Since most ideologies seek to predict, control and dominate human responses, this novel, based on a study on the behavioural patterns of the Clone 14/54/G, also states that resistance to domination and hegemony is also natural; a fact borne out by human history, individuality and the desire to be oneself. The text, thus, manifests a desire to unify those speaking against injustice. Chabria isn’t portraying any of the other three classes as the sworn enemy of the clones. There are firehearts in the resistance, for example, and this movement is led by an Original (who might have been killed towards the end but not before impregnating the rebel clone, ensuring hope lived on). Interestingly, “the real remedy for breaking Caste,” Ambedkar had argued, “is intermarriage. Nothing else will serve as the solvent of Caste (285).” While conjugality between various classes may not have been practised, the clone in question does enter into a romantic relationship with an Original (the leader) who is seen as a traitor by other Originals.

Generation 14, with its narrative, moves from the specific to the general, from ideographic to the nomothetic, and seeks to interrogate how oppressive power regimes function fundamentally. Ambedkar, too, is a radical from this perspective: after encouraging people to break the barriers erected around them, he makes them ponder about their ideatic bulwark.

…the enemy you must grapple with is not the people who observe Caste, but the Shastras which teach them this religion of Caste. Criticising and ridiculing people for not inter-dining or inter-marrying, or occasionally holding inter-caste dinners and celebrating inter-caste marriages, is a futile method of achieving the desired end. The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras. (286-287)

Before forcing people to inter-dine and inter-marry (to break the caste system), Ambedkar exhorts people to ask themselves why they do not inter-dine and inter-marry in the first place. The answer strikes at the root of the caste system: the sanctity of the Shastras. This also preordains power, luxury, comfort and status. He further adds;

Caste has a divine basis. You must therefore destroy the sacredness and divinity with which Caste has become invested. In the last analysis, this means you must destroy the authority of the Shastras and the Vedas. (289; emphasis added)

If caste has a divine basis, then cloning has a scientific basis. Except both caste and cloning do not exist in a vacuum, or in a neutral, sterile space where the processes of their respective deployment are sans the politics of domination, knowledge and power. By this position, the way ahead for Generation 14, it seems, is to question and destroy the belief in the “sanctity” of the Global Community, which is quite literally held together by “The Drug”: a compulsory supplement in the Chabria’s text that keeps the clones in check (much like religion, the opiate of the masses, on whose authority the caste system was erected and sustained). It is only when the clone stops taking The Drug (after being warned) that she develops human traits such as hair-growth, memory, and sexuality.

When I asked the author to comment on power, knowledge, and otherisation, Chabria responded thus;

Historically the privileged in each civilization, society, clan etc. chooses which group will be most beneficial for them to target. The trinity of power-greed-amnesia make good bedfellows. Humans have experienced this since the ‘dawn of civilization’. We continue to practice it to this day. But today the drive is towards greater disenfranchisement, segregation, oppression, perhaps even ethnic cleansing because we have the reach. After each great eruption of violence, there is cessation, even repentance. But we, as a species, don’t change and begin with gas lighting a community that’s helped by inventing fake histories and so on etc. and repeatedly violate fundamental human rights and trample on people’s dignity. This is why ‘The Others’ are not an ontological, monolithic entity.  Today it is you. Day after it could be me. Three days later someone else could be targeted. The authoritarian impulse is on the upswing, globally. (emphasis added)

The “trinity of power-greed-amnesia” is seen in Generation 14. The power exercised by the Originals is driven by the greed to conquer, control and consolidate – which can only be reified if the memories of those being subjugated are suppressed. Returning to the opening quotes by Ambedkar, it is clear that cloning is, much like caste, contingent on predestination: a subtle ideological indoctrination that renders the clones un-Originals. What religion did for the caste system, the Global Community (and the Drug) did for cloning.

I have argued, in a paper on Manjula Padmanabhan’s dystopias, how “SF emerges as a software that reprograms and recalibrates the readers’ mind so as to counter fundamentalism and parochialism by portraying the existence of a plurality of voices and viewpoints (103)”. Chabria’s Generation 14 seems to operate along similar lines. Her novel indicts not only caste, but also cloning (undertaken without keeping in mind its unethical dimensions and applications), and a hierarchal, parochial society it can lead to. Wouldn’t cloning lead to a new caste system in the future, where those with direct access to scientific advances, and/or purchasing power to buy the right genes for their gene-pool, are able to create a new societal organisation based again on birth, and not worth?

Quite probably.

 Works Cited

Ambedkar, BR. Annihilation of Caste. Navayana, 2014.

Banerjee, Suparno. Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction and India. Unpublished
doctoral thesis. Louisiana State University, 2010.

Chabra, Priya Sarukkai. Generation 14. Zubaan, 2008.

-------. Personal communication. 18 February 2018.

Dhar, Mainak. Zombiestan, Duckbill, 2012.

Khan, Sami Ahmad. “The Others in India's Other Futures.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 2016, pp. 479–495. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.43.3.0479.

--------. ‘“Sharing Air” with “Gandhi Toxin” during “Exile” in “2099” AD: Manjula

Padmanabhan’s short stories’, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 6: 2, pp. 91–104, doi: 10.1386/safm.6.2.91_1

Kundera, Milan. “Lost Letters”, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Faber, 1996.

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