The Epistemological Question

Dear all,

Hello! This post'll discuss further the point I brought up in the previous class- how an example of a modernist feature of Forster's text is the relentless questioning of the knowability of things.

Here're some (and not even all!) quotes I underlined pertaining to this point:

'I'll thank you this evening, I'm all to pieces now,' said the girl, forming each syllable carefully as if her trouble would diminish if it were accurately defined.' (Adela, 200)

'The aims of battle and the fruits of conquest are never the same; the latter have their value and only the saint rejects them, but their hint of immortality vanishes as soon as they are held in the hand.' (narrator, through Aziz's point-of-view, 245)

'I wish I had lived in Babur's time and fought and written for him. Gone, gone, and not even any use to say "gone, gone," for it weakens us while we say it.' (Aziz, 253)

'Did it succeed? Books written afterwards say 'Yes'. But how, if there is such an event, can it be remembered afterwards? How can it be expressed in anything but itself? Not only from the unbeliever are mysteries hid, but the adept himself cannot retain them. He may think, if he chooses, that he has been with God, but, as soon as he thinks it, it becomes history, and falls under the rules of time.' (narrator, seemingly omniscient, 273)

(All page numbers from Penguin edition)

These quotes speak of the fleeting way in which one experiences an 'event' (273). I find these lines extremely self-reflexive of Forster. As a modernist writer, he attempts to capture experience and immortalize it in words- only to be thwarted by the inadequacies of words which 'weaken [even as one] say[s them]' (253). Forster doesn't merely show his stark awareness of the impossibility of accurately re-creating one's experience- he goes beyond this to enact it by writing a novel which never points us to the 'real India', never tells us what really happened in the Marabar Caves, never lets the reader (nor his own characters) trust any one character fully. The attempt and indeed pretense of acquiring perfect knowledge is hence desisted.

In addition, Forster points us not only to the falseness of the assumption of the knowability of things, but also to their transcient nature. Diction that implies loss, severance and the failure of memory are used: 'diminish' (200), 'vanish' (245), 'gone' (253), 'cannot retain' (273), 'history'(273). These serve to emphasize the impermanence and singularity of experience- again a modernist trait of Forster's novel.

I leave this post wondering aloud, is it not ironic that, in spite of Forster's acute sense of the limitations of 'rememb[rance] afterwards' (273), he continues to choose to write not just fiction but diaries- even after knowing that writing diminishes the value/meaning of and can never accurately reflect an event past?

Thanks!

-Kelly Tay

Fractured Identity and the Road to Partition

Levine's Britain in India reflects the historical fact that the Indian population in British India was as diverse as the Princely States on the Indian subcontinent before the East India Company annexed them and ruled them with a one-size-fits-all governance. In Forster's Passage to India, the diversity of cultures between Indian Hindus, Indian Muslims, Indian Sikhs and more are simplistically categorised as "Indians" by the British, especially the British women accompanying their husbands to colonial postings in British India. Not being in touch with the administration of the settlements, the women's aversion to contact with the Indians (Forster 39) show the rift of understanding between the colonised and the colonisers. With such insentivities and the trial of Aziz for the attempted rape of Adela as a catalyst, the riot in the subsequent acquital of Aziz brings to the foreground the previously simmering undercurrents of interracial tensions. These tensions do not merely exist in the plane between the British and the Indians, but with the the Indian population, the Indian Hindus and the Indian Muslims. The majority-Muslim mob that riots outside the courtroom and the hospital show the fragmented Indian culture. Suspicions between the ethnic groups within the Indian population can be seen when the mob confronts Dr Panna Lal, an Indian Hindu doctor, outside the hospital and demands the release of Nureddin (238).

The interracial tensions are true historical facts and are very much alive in the present day. While the setting for Passage to India maybe fictitious, there are two links to the present geography of India. Chandrapore's nearest similarity in name, Chandragarth in the northwestern edge of India, is located close to the border clashes with Pakistan in the present day, and the state of Bihar where Forster is said to have based his narrative on, suffers prejudice from the people of more centralised Indian states. In the historical and geographical sense, Forster chronicles the history of British India's development up to 1924, the publication date of the book. What Levine describes in Britain in India supports the larger facts of government policies and history in Forster's narrative, and Forster's zooming-in on the everyday life of the community in Chandrapore gives the history more human and emotional description.

But Forster's narrative foreshadows many issues arising from the British India diaspora that the colonial offices in London would never have predicted. The insensitive handling of racial issues and the subsequent Partition of Punjab to Pakistan and India caused intercommunal violence and a huge displacement of Hindus and Muslims uprooted to cross the borders. There were many other displacement of the Indian population under the British's haste in drawing the boundaries for post-independence Pakistan and India. Such violence, in the tensions against the British in the mutinies and among ethnic groups in the civil wars, show the fragmented loyalties of the Indian population. There will be too many compartments if we were to categorise the identities of the "Indian" (which, in Passage to India, is shown impossible). From the basic ethnic groups, the Indian subcontinent has too many of them, as the Subaltern had got mixed up with in his entreaty to send in the Army (191). And then from these, throw in the categories of religion and the loyalties to British/Mogul Emperor descendancy/Hindu Prince descendancy. We get a seemingly infinite number of permutations that render India a complex web of identities from before Forster's writing to beyond our lives. The issue here is how the Modernist anxieties of the individual is equal in both the British and the Indian. Of course I would like to point out that at the outset the Indian has more to worry about since the flux to the cities (advanced to modernity by the British) would include more diverse racial and cultural differences than the British moving into any European city.

Forster's work, in my opinion, addresses all of us living in the postcolonial era, all the way back from 1924. Like Aziz and his compatriots, and any other historical being in this milieu of the Commonwealth, are our identities also manufactured by the British Empire to be this complex and subjective?

A passage to India

The text’s treatment of the character of Ronny seems ambivalent. On the one hand, it satirizes his character as being an unthinking colonial administrator who simply apes the prevailing racial prejudices of the time. This is evident in his status as an Anglo Indian who exhibits stereotypical bigotry towards the colonized. However, the text also seems to avoid falling into the trap of reducing Ronny into the stereotype of the overbearing and evil colonial master by sympathetically attributing his prejudiced racial attitudes to be a detrimental result of colonial social conditioning and the overwhelming political pressures exerted on him in his role as a colonial administrator. (My argument is limited to the representation of Ronny, because it seems to me that Forster’s text does fall back into essentializing Indians in some parts of the novel).

As a stereotypical Anglo-Indian, Ronny possesses an arrogant sense of British superiority and perpetuates a series of received “second-hand”, reductive and stereotypical generalizations about Indians that ignore their heterogeneity, complexity and humanity. The text mocks the way in which Ronny imitates the views of previous colonial administrators that he looks up to, simply by virtue of their length of service in India, which he perceives as a factor that lends authority and wisdom to their colonial capacity to subjugate an inferior race. Ronny’s mindless conformity and his uncritical acceptance of received wisdom about British superiority is parodied in the passage where he argues with his (initially) kind and inclusive mother Mrs. Moore about what she perceives as his “improper treatment of natives”. Although Ronny projects a false “macho” bravado in expressing his convictions about the innately depraved natures of Indians, the text reveals that he is nothing but a mere parrot who quotes verbatim second-hand opinions, phrases and arguments (that he is not even sure about) from older colonial officials. Ronny seems to be a naïve and unquestioning servant of the British Empire, who accepts received knowledge unquestioning without challenging the moral validity of the colonial enterprise and the racial assumptions that it is premised upon. He buys into the whole colonizing rhetoric/grand narrative of “justice and keeping peace” and believes fervently that British rule is essential for the “good” of India. He is condescending when he stresses the childlike qualities of Indians, citing their innate irresponsibility, volatility, and propensities of violence (amongst other inferior flaws) that in his opinion, justifies the need for British rule. For instance, Ronny believes that both the Muslim and Hindu Indians are innately belligerent, and cites their nature to engage in violent religious antagonism as a justification for British rule. The constant rivalry between the two religious groups “proved that the British was necessary to India; there would certainly have been bloodshed without them. His voice grew complacent again; he was here not to be pleasant but to keep the peace.” Ronny also engages in cultural essentialism when he stereotypes Indians as possessing “inattention to detail, a fundamental slackness that reveals the race.” However, the text reveals his assumption to be flawed because Dr. Aziz had only exhibited such slackness in his attire as a result of his self-sacrificial act of kindness in salvaging Fielding’s wardrobe predicament at the expense of his own convenience and tidiness.

However, the text does not present Ronny in a completely unsympathetic light. It does not discount Ronny’s humanity by presenting to us a Ronny “before the fall”, as his mother reminisces about a pre-lapsarian time when Ronny possessed a “young man’s humanitarianism.” He used to possess a greater sense of cultural sensitivity towards music and the arts (he played the viola and had better taste in plays), and he used to possess unique opinions and morally sound judgments that were untainted, un-circumscribed or unconstrained by social pressures or “convention”. Thus, the text argues that Ronny’s bigotry arises neither from inherent evil, ill-breeding or a deliberate malicious intent to give offence, but rather due to the dehumanizing power of his position that has since corrupted him. Ronny’s racial worldview is stressed by the text to be the overwhelmingly normative attitude that colonial administrators were inculcated and pressured to conform to. In his confrontation with his mother (who demands he treats Indians with more humanity and respect), he rails against the political backlash he would face from his own Anglo-Indian community if he “behaved pleasantly” to the Indians. It is in his own beneficial self-interest and self-preservation if he conformed rather than rebelled against the status quo. The allure of social status and political power has corrupted him, as evident in how he pronounces his “predicament” in a “self-satisfied lilt”:

“Oh, look here, he broke out, rather pathetically, what do you and Adela want me to do? Go against my class, against all the people I respect and admire out here? Lose such power as I have for doing good in this country because my behavior isn’t pleasant? You neither of you understand what work is. […] I am not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental literary man. I’m just a servant of the government […]”

In Difference

In Difference
(I’m using an old Penguin Modern Classic edition, so page numbers here are of little aid! Sorry!)

The values of the Enlightenment; Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are clearly echoes in A Passage to India. Both the British and the Indians struggle with the construction of and adaptation to the meaning of these ideals , reflected in the many layers of differences that are exemplified in the book.

Within the community:

Within British society in Chandrapole we see restrictions on the very liberty to choose where and how to live in the way the playing of the’ Anthem of the Army of Occupation…reminded every member of the club that he or she was British and in exile.’(p26-27) [CH3] The struggle for equality within British society in Chandrapole is also seen in the difference in status of women vs men and even amongst families ( Turtons ,Lesleys, Callenders). The idea of brotherhood is perhaps one that is taken as a source of psychological comfort and strength to them; that idea of being British, that ‘India isn’t home’ (p34) [Ch3]

In much the same way, the rise of education among the privileged (wealthy) and the rise of urbanity that allowed for that ‘increasingly mobile’ (Levine p70)indigenous population saw a class of Indian professionals ( Aziz, Das, Panna Lal, Mahmoud Ali, Hamidullah) that were motivated by western enlightenment but never quite manage to attain its values. Equality within the Indian caste system throughout the novel remains an unsaid impossibility with separations between the Mohammedians and Hindus as well as between the servants/drivers and the professionals. Fraternity is perhaps seen through the wave of national fervour in support of Aziz that we see in the courtroom and in the uproar created after Adela’s revelation (one that is perhaps as much to herself as to the courtroom).

Other ideas of difference:

Affluence and access to resources is not only what separates the British from the Indians but perhaps a certain sense of unease with the departure from their former way(s) of life. The British, in their exile, or in company of their spouses in exile are displaced to not just a foreign land but a foreign way of life to which they must adapt even while clinging on to comforts of home( Whiskey, plays like ‘Cousin Kate’ and card games). The Indians being put under colonial rule are subjected to the authority of the British, even while (some are) being educated and given a chance to rise up in society through interaction with the very same foreign (intruders?) presence. For the Indians , they adjust to the unease of accession to new authority as opposed to the ‘collection of states’ ruled ‘by local dynasties’ (Levine p.61). In a slightly more vexing way, the new class of Indian professionals faced a rising social status, but a n existence in a limbo between Indian and British, never quite belonging to either side or necessarily wanting to.

Just scratching the surface(s) here, hope I didn’t muck it up!