Leonard Woolf considers E.M Forster’s novel A Passage to India to be a representation of ‘’the real life of politics in India, the intricacy of personal relations, the story itself, the muddle and the mystery of life’’ (Jay, 1998). Fosters novel has been the subject of literary criticism from many angles given the highly controversial subject matter which is called into question as to whether it is a genuine representation of India under colonisation written from an objective experience, and whether this attempt to represent India is successful or a failure. The question of how successful this representation of India and the British occupation of the country is will form the argument of this work. Forster makes it known to the readers of the novel that when he first began to compose A Passage to India he had felt that he did not know India well enough to continue in an accurate portrayal, therefore returned later to India before completing the novel. In the time of his second visit, Forster felt that he was able to understand the ways in which the Anglo-Indians behaved towards the natives and also that he became better acquainted with the Indian natives. This would suggest that his writing would be objective portraying both sides of the divide without prejudice towards either class.
A Passage to India is a portrayal of India during the control of the British Raj in the 1920’s. The narrative tells the story of a young British woman, Adela who falsely accuses an Indian Doctor, Aziz of attempted rape. When this progresses to a court, during the trial she withdraws her lawsuit and admits she was mistaken. As a result of her false accusation, the trial and the retraction of her charge there is a further and deeper divide created betw...
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...mud, the inhabitants of mud-moving’’ (Foster, 1968). It is questionable whether Forster is writing from an objective experience from the point of view of a Colonial English man. He carries the reader from one event to another in the novel however his reaction to his own personal experience seems to be portrayed as a social reaction placing almost exclusively middle class raised characters in the midst of a country falling.
Works Cited
Beer, J., 1985. A Passage to India: Essays in Interpretation. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.
Foster, E., 1968. A Passage to India. London: Aldine Press.
Jay, B., 1998. Icon critical guides- A passage to India. Cambridge: Icon Books ltd.
Page, N., 1987. Modern Novelists: E.M Forster. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.
Said, E., 1978. Orientalism. US: Vintage Books.
Washington, P., 2007. Kipling: Poems. New York: Everyman's Library.
One statement in the beginning of the book was especially poignant to any one who studies Indian culture, It is easy for us to feel a vicarious rage, a misery on behalf of these people, but Indians, dead and alive would only receive such feelings with pity or contempt; it is too easy to feel sympathy for a people who culture was wrecked..
Several different literary elements work in tandem to produce the magic seen in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Because this novel was presented to the world less than a decade after World War I, the fantastic and exotic stories of India seized the attention of the relatively provincial society of the day, and the novel's detailed presentation of Hinduism certainly excited the imaginations of thousands of readers. Benita Parry supports this assertion when saying, "Hinduism takes its place at the core of the novel just as it lies at the heart of India" (164).
Impact of British Colonization Exposed in A Small Place, A Passage to India, and Robinson Crusoe
The first perception discussed in the essay compares the way the Indians run their form of government to that of the English. He notes how the Indian are able to run a government without police, prisons, or punishment, and instead it is run on a sort of basis of respect with “great order and decency” (Norton, 477). When someone speaks in the Indian counsel everyone listens and remains silent, and once the speaker is finished the rest remain silent to allow time for th...
James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. Print.
[1] Stephen Land. Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E.M. Forster. New York: AMS Press, 1990 (165). Hereafter cited parenthetically.
Nicholas B. Dirks. (2011). Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton University Press
Silver, Brenda R. “Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in ‘A Passage to India.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.1 (1988): 86-105. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar. 2011. .
In British imperial fiction, physical setting or landscape commonly plays a prominent role in the central thematic subject. In these works, landscape goes beyond an objective description of nature and setting to represent “a way of seeing- a way in which some Europeans have represented to themselves and others the world about them and their relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social relations” (Cosgrove xiv). By investigating the ways in which writers of colonial ficition, such as H. Rider Haggard and E.M. Forester, have used landscape, we see that landscape represents a historically and culturally specific way of experiencing the world. In Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, the landscape is gendered to show the colonizer’s ability to dominate over native territory. However, while the scenario of the male colonizer conquering a feminized landscape reinforces a legitimizing myth of colonization, it is later overturned by Forester’s A Passage to India. In this novel, the landscape takes on a complex, multifaceted role, articulating the ambivalence of cross-cultural relationships and exposing the fragility of colonial rule. In contrast to King Solomon’s Mines, A Passage to India uses landscape as a tool to expose the problematic nature of colonial interaction that might have easily been left obscured and unacknowledged. We can read the landscape as a type of secondary narrator in A Passage to India that articulates the novel’s imperial ideology.
MacAulay, Rose. "A Passage to India." The Writings of E.M. Forster. New York: Barnes, 1970. 176-203.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
is not thatkind of book; it is one of the most inclusive and ranging novelsever written. It is hardly about homes, family life and peace; itis hardly in its central political and spiritual themes – old-fashioned. As adventurous it is in matter, so it is in technique.Forster’s stress in the work is that
The measured dialogue between Reader and Editor serves as the framework through which Gandhi seeks to discredit accepted terms of civilization and denounce the English. These principle characters amply assist in the development o...
Silver, Brenda R. “Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in ‘A Passage to India.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.1 (1988): 86-105. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar. 2011. .
Mishra, Vijay. "The Texts of Mother India." After Europe.Ed. Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989. 119-37.