The present article reads the social and cultural afterlives of a particular marginalised group in colonial Calcutta in Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel The Calcutta Chromosome, and seeks to examine how these reconstructions of afterlives are linked with the ancient Indian philosophy of rebirth and reincarnation. This study seeks to understand the significance of body and ghost in reconstructing the afterlives and analyse the role of cultural memory throughout that process.peer-reviewe