'Burmese Days' and 'Passage to India'; A Caricature

As people have already pointed out, there are many similarities between Burmese Days and A Passage to India.  The former book was published a decade after the latter, so it is not inconceivable that Orwell read PtI and was influenced by it.  In both cases, a picture of the Anglo-Indians is being painted, and there is a friendship between the eccentric Englishman and the Indian doctor, which leads the Englishman to stand up on his friend's behalf.  These similaries, however, serve to highlight the contrasts.  Aziz and Veraswami are almost polar opposites of each other in their attitutes to the British Empire.  Adela and Elizabeth arrive with opposite expectations of India/Burma.  Flory is much more insecure than Fielding... the list goes on.  Where Forster painted a more realist portrait of the Anglo-Indians and their world, Orwell paints a caricature, despite him terming Burmeses Days a 'naturalistic novel' in his article 'Why I Write'.  By doing this, Orwell is perhaps stripping his novel down to its basic agenda - as an expose of the folly of imperialism, much as PtI was oft cited as a reason why the British should leave India.

Native-Colonial Friendships

What struck me as interesting of Orwell's Burmese Days was the seemingly similar relationship between Forly and Dr. Veraswami, and Forster's Fielding and Dr. Aziz in A Passage to India (Hey. They're both doctors.. interesting. Not.)

To me, these two native-colonial friendships reveal the inevitable strain between people of different races during the colonial period. As A Passage to India aptly ends with the notion that it was a matter of 'wrong time, wrong place' (316).

In Burmese Days, Flory and Dr. V share a close intimate relationship which is strangely 'allowed', unlike an "alliance, partisanship" (Burmese Chap. 6) which was forbidden. (Why so?) This, to me, is rather odd. And as much as Flory disses the colonial enterprise he "lack[s] the small spark of courage" (Chap. 5) that is required to make the right choice. He gives in to the immense pressure to act like a sahib (Chap. 13), this calls to mind Shooting An Elephant.

Similary, in A Passage to India, this pressure is summed up by the line, "The English always stick together!" (235) and that Fielding has once again abandoned Aziz for Miss Quested (236).

I think this native-colonial relationship presented in Burmese Days highlights an interesting point that not all the Englishmen were nasty buggers, some were under immense pressure to conform to both colonial and native expectations. To an extent, I actually find Shooting An Elephant and Burmese Days slightly sympathetic of the plight of 'certain' Englishmen.

P.S.: Am using the online text for Burmese Days so no page numbers! Pardon!

Shooting the heart

Reading Orwell’s Shooting An Elephant provides a refreshing insight into the difficulties of the imperialist. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but most of the times when I read colonial texts I tend to align myself more with the colonized as the victimized rather than with the colonizer. But here in SAE, it is not so simple. Orwell’s presentation of the dilemmas he face, in being both an imperialist and seemingly sympathetic attitude towards the Burmese, makes him one of the most humane characters. The way he is caught between the imperialists and the Burmese reminds me of Ronny in A Passage to India: how they have to change their attitudes and wear masks just so as to fit into their prescribed space. As Orwell highlights, ‘Feelings like these [hatred towards both the imperialists and the Burmese] are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty’. We are not presented with as much insight into Ronny’s mind, but I don’t think he buys entirely into the whole colonialism business but rather succumbs to the motion because he’s stuck in it; hence his constant parroting of the “wiser” senior imperialists.

Yet for Orwell, when the opportunity was presented for him to remain true to himself, he is pressurized to act otherwise. Despite how much he says he wants to let the elephant go, he can’t. He not only has to save his own face and act like a proper White man (‘A sahib has got to act like a sahib’), he is answerable to the Burmese themselves. It’s like a circus act: You want to see me shoot an elephant? Well, then you’ll see it! Ultimately, we come to the realization that neither the imperialist nor the colonized are truly free.

300 words

*As an aside, when I saw that we’re going to read this work on the course, I wondered if it was the same as the comprehension passage I did in secondary school. It was the same, although the one I read back then was a shorter edited version. And I remember my teacher tearing when she read aloud the part where Orwell just kept shooting the elephant…somehow, that memory just kept replaying itself when I was reading this again.*

-Yuen Mei-

Lord Jim , the bane of my essaying life

In the midst of essay-writing time, Lord Jim comes trotting along. Things would be much easier if it was a short text or it was written in a more comprehensible style, but no, Conrad had to make my life even more miserable by frequently losing me in the course of the narrative. And so, I am thus compelled to write a post about this horribly confusing choice of multiple narratives that render readers like me confounded.

First, let me clarify what I mean by ‘multiple narratives’ in Lord Jim. Yes, the novel is written mostly from the point-of-view of Marlow, who interestingly functions as a third person narrator retelling the story of Jim to an audience – both the listeners and us readers. Yet, within this retelling, he refers to other characters that give their own perspectives of the events that occur or of Lord Jim himself. The result is we have differing readings of the character of Lord Jim, and we never really know (or at least, I don’t know, till the part I’ve read up to) who he is. Which reminds me of the issue of the real ‘India’ in A Passage to India: no one is able to give us a definitive representation of his character. In a way it kind of reflects real people: we have multiple sides to ourselves that no one reading by any person, including ourselves, will produce an apt presentation of who we are. Just like Lord Jim, our real selves will never be quite fully understood, nor aptly represented by others. In the process of telling Jim’s story, Marlow and others bring in their own ideas of who he is, and these are ultimately tainted by their own impressions of and interactions with him.

-Yuen Mei-

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial...

I'd really like to find and read "Notes on the English Character" because I think it would shed a lot of light on A Passage to India at least in terms of ethos. I think this essay's included in the collection Abinger Harvest but I can't even find snippets of it online, alas.

So uh, I actually had a chunk to post before I realized, thanks to your posts, that I'd read Fanon's "The Negro and Language" as opposed to "On Violence". Brilliant. Anyway. Violence is specular rather than diffuse. This polemical tract wasn't enlightening as much as it was refreshing; I think it reaffirmed what we already knew/studied/suspected, without mincing words. The act of consuming (or consummation, even) is central: the colonists want to possess and perpetrate while the colonized masses want to eradicate and replace. Nietzsche, Wagner and Hitler all had something in common: they looked upon leadership as sexual mastery of the "feminine" masses. This rape, I think, underpins the reading. Colonization or decolonization: it is merely a power struggle. Reading A Passage to India throws up various parallels: 'You're superior to them, anyway. Don't forget that. You're superior to everyone in India except one or two of the ranis, and they're on an equality.' You can't deny the racism inherent in colonialiam by corollary, the violence inherent in colonialism. In Zadie Smith's article, Furbank calls Forster the "great simplifier". Both the text and the reading assigned this week ARE simplified; let's recall Fanon's easy dismissal of the colonial world as a "compartmentalized" world. He proceeds to divide that world into two to (I really think) better facilitate his theory that the colonial world is "a Manichean world" in which, of course, violence reigns. There is a certain implicit violence in smashing the colonized to smithereens, by laying their moral code flat on a rock and taking a hammer to it. That is what Fanon means by absolute evil, that values are, in fact, "irreversibly poisoned and infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized." We see this stain rearing its ugly head in A Passage to India. Best example for me? "Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession." Seriously, this made me sad guys.

I think it was Fielding who persisted in wanting to see Adela, citing the reason that 'on the off-chance of her recanting before you send in that report and he's committed for trial, and the whole thing goes to blazes' to the Police Superintendent. Fielding wanted to ask her himself, because he believes in Aziz, because she is "among people who disbelieve in Indians." Just a few lines before, the Police Sup had paternalistically said "when an Indian goes bad, he goes not only very bad, but very queer" and proceeded to remind Fielding that the "psychology here is different." Ergo, Fanon's binary system is at play in Forster's novel too, in addition to the babel that association with the Other invariably produces.

I think it was Nadia who posted on the aesthetics of violence. It is both ironic and intriguing to me that we're essentially debating how the relation of masters and slaves should be consciously aestheticized this week. Forster wrote, using a character as a mouthpiece that there is no such person in existence as a general Indian. I really liked that line, and though I find him no Naipaul, I think A Passage to India really reaffirmed the sentiment that all representations of India are ultimately autobiographical. There wasn't anything particularly Indian in the text (colonial and racist, yeah), even the nationalist struggles were shunted in the back, but a lot of Forster shone through. In conclusion, violence induces ruptures, entices with the promise of transgression of boundaries, and when inflicted, paves the way for modernist aesthetics, because modernism was a response to the chaos of our world, our answer after having been exposed to reinterpretation and acceleration and existential, dare I say it, angst to alienation, loss, absurdity and meaninglessness. Individual subjectivity tends to glomp to solidarity and the intimacy of violence is a primal bond. This revolutionary consciousness is present in both Fanon's reading and Forster's (albeit muted/incarnated in another form as evinced by the ending) novel.

On Fanon and Forster

I don’t know if I’m the only one not at all impressed by the overtly “brimstone and fire” tone Fanon employs in his essay, propounding “On Violence” so violently and definitively. I found his essay quite a pain to read in fact, in part due to the awkward direct French translations in the essay, but largely because of his ironically dictatorial, absolutist tone that I feel would not have been out of place in the dialogue of Foster’s colonial officials as they discussed Indians and why they act they way they do. I think what this essay really lacks is substantiation and examples, particularly in the first part to back up his claims, so it makes it hard to trust and agree with. But in fairness and not to quibble too much, I did feel that he did raise some thought-provoking issues that served as a springboard in my process of thinking about the novel.

Some ideas I had while reading the essay: I was struck by the point made by Fanon on page 7 concerning the “use of zoological terms” (7) by the coloniser in order to “dehumanise the colonised subject” (7). I was instantly reminded of Forster’s descriptions of the English in the lead-up to the trial of Adela, where Forster subtly animalises them, hence turning the tables on the colonisers, particularly in the court trial scene, where Major Callendar “growls” (221) and where there is a cool contrast between the behaviour of the English who are less than dignified in their behaviour in court and that of the Indian barrister, Amritrao, to some extent Das the Magistrate and notably the Untouchable (proletariat figure) manning the punkah, who is likened to a “god” in that chapter. Rather than a clear-cut binary, Forster breaks down the Manichaean dualism that colonialism has built up through his portrayal of the “colonised subject”, “colonised intellectual” and the coloniser. Therefore, I would like to suggest that Forster’s text be seen as part of or in and of itself a decolonising force, in this rejection of the dualisms that colonialism thrived upon.

Another thing that struck me about Fanon’s essay was definitely his take on the issue of violence and retaliation of the colonised upon the coloniser. I found the perspective on the concerns of “bread and land” (Fanon 14) worthy of some attention as it reminded me what I’d learnt at A level history about the starving Russian proletariat in the aftermath of the Russian Rev, as “bread and land” became scarce and exorbitantly priced. From what I barely remember of A level history (4 yrs ago, so bear with me), the aftermaths of both the French and Russian Revolution were marked with economic disasters that disproportionately disadvantaged the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie as they continued to serve their own individual economic needs. Therefore, it could be said that it was a replacement of the monarchical/ imperial classes with another power-hungry class at the top and in fact really no revolution after all. I get this sense therefore that Fanon is implying the same idea for the colonialized intellectual classes and suggests therefore that physical violence is the only means for the repressed (psychologically, socially and economically) colonised subject to totally counter traces of colonialism. Mere anarchy is the answer for Fanon.

Side note: This also led me to think about Singapore as a post-colonial country. We did after all gain our independence from the "colonialist" via the negotiations and leadership of the "colonial intellectuals". The British colonisers left a legacy of many things in Singapore that have come to be historicised in our Singapore history as boons of our colonial past, global trade capitalism being one of them. And as we all know, this has been carried on by our political leaders, motivated by what else but economic prosperity. "...today the national struggle of the colonized is part and parcel of an entirely new situation. Capitalism..." (26) So concerning this "struggle", is Fanon then suggesting we take up our pitchforks (more like bbq skewers) to rid ourselves fully of colonialism? Hmmm....

Intellectual Violence

In "On Violence" Frantz Fanon writes that "during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized individual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed into smithereens. All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinket...Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul proved worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged." (11) It's clear that the process of colonization inflicts on its subjects violence of an intellectual nature, on top of the physical. To colonize is to impose the colonizer's value and ideological systems onto the colonized, so as to ensure a totality of control. Not only are subjects to be physically controlled and managed (with policing systems and violence) but they are to be persuaded into their own subjectivization through an interpellation into their colonizer's value systems. As such, the colonized subject both ensures and reinforces his own colonization--much as the Indian upperclass does in A Passage to India. They are to be convinced that the colonizer's ideals and values are superior to their own, and therefore a valid basis for colonization in the first place.

We see an example of the imposition and manipulation of values on an individual and not national scale with Fielding and Aziz, when the former tries to persuade Aziz not to sue Miss Quested for her money. Aziz persists in his irrational preference for Mrs. Moore over Miss Quested even when, as Fielding points out, "Miss Quested anyhow behaved decently this morning, whereas the old lady never did anything for you at all, and it's pure conjecture that she would have come forward in your favour." (209 of my Borders edition) Aziz responds with "'Is emotion a sack of potatoes, so much the pound, to be measured out? Am I a machine? I shall be told I can use up my emotions by using them, next.'" And eventually, Fielding is able to manipulate Aziz successfully by raising "a questionable image of [Mrs. Moore] in the heart of Aziz, saying nothing that he believed to be untrue, but producing something that was probably far from the truth." (215) Fielding believes that it is logical and fair to let Miss Quested off the hook for what she has sacrificed in telling the truth in court. But Aziz's feelings and actions are motivated by irrational emotional impulses, such as his love (and Orientalization--hence, idealization) of Mrs. Moore whom he had met only three times, and his lack thereof for Miss Quested.

My point here is, that there is clearly a mismatch in what is valued and upheld in the colonizer and colonized societies, and that colonization intends to bypass and totalize this difference as part of its mechanism in an act of violence. Certainly, value systems differ as a consequence of the standard of living and level of progress of the respective societies. While white societies look to values such as freedom, individual choice and so on, because they have attained a certain level of affluence which allows them to look beyond everyday bread and butter issues, colonies are usually in a backward stage of development which correspondingly impedes this development in value systems. (Although whether what works for white colonizers necessarily would work for colonized subjects remains to be seen of course.) I've often personally experienced this divide, when on my exchange in Canada, I'd have discussions with Europeans about how things like freedom of press and expression, individual will and political freedom can be insignificant in light of more immediate pressing needs such as the economic and social demands on the individual of living in a competitive and populous country such as China. Of course, they didn't get me and I didn't get them but at least I tried!

In A Passage to India, we do see a reverence or at least a respect for the Indian culture and what its people value. The message of the novel seems to amount to a compromise, that peoples and societies differ and while we may never reconcile these differences, we can agree to disagree. It's very clear in both the novel and Fanon's essay that colonization is a propagator of conflict, division and violence that would never allow such compromise.

Forster and colonialism

Where does Forster stand in the issue of colonialism? This was one of the questions that was brought up during the seminar last week and after reading the novel, I think Forster maintains a very ambivalent stand in the issue of colonialism throughout his novel. He takes sides with neither the colonized nor colonizer but rather, maintains a more neutral stance in portraying the issue of colonialism. Hence neither side is vilified nor valorised totally. This is evident for example in Forster’s oscillation between painting the colonized Indians in a more unfavourable light and painting them in a more sympathetic light. For example in Chapter XIX, the readers witness how Godbole wishes to return to his birthplace to “start a high school there on sound English lines, that shall be as like Government College as possible” because “at present there is only vernacular education” (165). Here, what is implicit in Godbole’s decision is that he deems “vernacular education” as being inferior to the supposedly “sound” English education and to further compound matters, he even wants the school to be named after Mr Fielding or “King-Emperor George the Fifth” (166)! Not only does Godbole (unconsciously or not) view his country as being subordinate to the coloniser’s, he even wants to acculturate his own people to become part of the coloniser’s country rather than to his own! Here Forster paints the Indians in a more negative light, showing how they too are complicit in their own colonisation; Forster adopts a more nuanced view in showing which party is culpable in perpetuating colonialism.

However, despite this more negative depiction, Forster later swings to portraying the Indian society in a very redeeming light, and this is particularly evident in Chapter XXVII. Forster writes, “Civilization strays about like a ghost here, revisiting the ruins of empire, and is to be found not in great works of art or mighty deeds, but in the gestures well-bred Indians make when they sit or lie down. Fielding, who had dressed up in native costume, learned from his excessive awkwardness in it that all his motions were makeshifts, whereas when the Nawab Bahadur stretched out his hand for food, or Nureddin applauded a song, something beautiful had been accomplished which needed no development…When the whirring of action ceases, it becomes visible, and reveals a civilisation which the West can disturb but will never acquire…” (236). In this short paragraph, Forster effectively undermines the association of the coloniser with civilisation and instead shows how the colonised can in fact be more civilised than the coloniser with his “excessive awkwardness” (236). This nuanced portrayal of the colonised is also evident in Forster’s portrayal of the coloniser and all these are suggestive of Forster’s ambivalent stand in the issue of colonialism. He depicts the issue in all its complexities and does not risk reducing the issue of colonialism into a binary of neat but oversimplified compartments.

As opposed to Forster, I think Fanon is more absolute in how he depicts colonialism. While I agree that to a very large extent, the colonised have been victimised by the colonisers, I think Fanon overly victimises the colonised while vilifying the colonisers such that the binary between coloniser and colonised becomes too stark. When readers read of how the colonised have “to work themselves to exhaustion while a contemptuous and bloated Europe looks on” (55) or how Fanon calls for the European masses to “wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty” (62), it becomes all too apparent which side Fanon is on and which side he condemns. This lack of grey areas (something very intrinsic to reality) makes me question if Fanon has perhaps been too absolute in his portrayal of the issue of colonialism, while failing to acknowledge that not everything can be seen simply in black and white.

-sarah

Impulses of Modernism and Imperialism

I can't help but wonder if modernism itself can't also be seen as part of, or rather an outgrowth of, the same impulses that gave birth to imperialism, given that others have already noted, with the aid of Fanon's polemic article, the violence inherent in both systems/ideologies. The impulses being those of modernity; a willful questioning of and destabilizing of the status quo in the case of modernism, and out-and-out economic exploitation in the case of imperialism. In fact, on could say that modernism is in large part a result of the fruits of imperialism (one thinks back to Gikandi's article on Picasso and his relation with African art), and by playing on those motifs, modernism does violence to the representations of the colonized.

Folks complain of their posts getting longer; mine keep getting shorter. Way to buck the trend, me?

- Yingzhao

Violence against an absolute

For me, as i continued to finish off Forster's novel, the thing that struck me the most was the breaking down of the absolute- an absolute colonizer, an absolute colonized subject, and thus an inability to clearly substantiate or define anything. Largely differing from Fanon, who seems to present us with binaries, and manichean aesthetics which "compartmentalise" the whole colonial context very neatly, Forster continues to wage war against such a representation. When the narrator so knowingly admits in the novel, " and the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by the gleams of day that leaked up round the edges of the earth, and by the stars", to me this is symbolic of the breaking down of the whole notion of a whole or absolute; that any sense of englishness or indianness will always never be constant or definable simple because it is constanly being translated and mediated through various different tongues and representations.

Hence, to fanon, this binary is very clear, and he presents a very homogenised colonial and colonized community, where the colonized are always "reduced to the state of an animal" by the colonizer, and the colonizer is always feared or looked up to with envy by the colonized. Yet, Forster challenges this with his characters like Fielding and Aziz, who do not readily fit into Fanon's theories and conventions. So perhaps violence in modernism is really a violence against simple generalisations, and an attempt to represent communities, but which are made up of very distinct individuals who who do not necessarily conform to what is expected of their community. However then the problem arises when we also realise that any act of violence projected onto a community only strengthens it, like Fanon suggests. Similarly, any attempt of Forster's to break down definitions seems to. on the contrary define and attribute very specific qualities to the very things he claims transcend definition.

"mankind and flowers": a passage to violence

(this is a fairly ambitious post, please bear with me)

Aziz's interest in religious poetry appears to be a throwaway characteristic of the bourgeois intellectual. Yet this emphasis on aesthetic experience is one of the central intertwined strands of the novel, along with friendship, religion and nationalism. There is a moment early on in the novel where Aziz while ill, with Haq, Hamidullah and Syed Mohammed gathered around bed, recites lines from Urdu poet Ghalib. The narrator notes the effect, that "[l]ess explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved" (IX). Note the shift in the use of pronouns: it appears Forster identifies with and also wishes his readers to simultaneously grasp with him how Urdu poetry, in the scope of its aesthetic effects, is appreciable by all humans who should have universally felt that existential loneliness, that dismal solipsism that besets each human being. And furthermore, how does Muslim poetry stand as a call to a rival Hindu deity?

I think, unlike Fanon who felt African colonial subjects could be united on "the grounds of nation and sometimes race" (10), Forster might be suggesting art as a means for resisting heterogeneity; aesthetic experience as coterminous with religious experience, a transcendental means of galvanizing mankind towards something greater than ourselves. But art and its effects are never as straightforward as we might like it to be, else all of India, nay, all of the world, would have been united by poetry recitals. Later on in the same passage in IX, Aziz notes that sometimes poetry "only increased his local desires" for women. At the heart of this aesthetic experience is the desire to fully know, and to be fully known by, another person. Yet Forster, throughout his novel, seems to be underscoring the difficultly of this, with the cryptic echo, the ninety-nine names of God, the breakdown of Adele's and Ronny's romance, and the failure of Aziz's and Fielding's friendship. Poetry, given its elliptical nature, expresses itself in terms of an omission, a kind of meaningful void that at first appears meaningless (like the Marabar Caves). Wallace Stevens said that "the nobility of poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without", and I think Forster, in leveraging upon Urdu religious poetry to expose the longings and desires of the soul, consciously resists that violent call to arms that is central to Fanon's essay, and batters the inner self in search of redressal from all the schisms and divisions that keep man and man apart.

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

Pandering and Performing in A Passage to India

--Leong Hui Ran

A thing that struck me as I read through the first part of the book was the recurrent references to plays. We are introduced to Adela and the rest of the Anglo Indians at the club, during and after the staging of a play, Cousin Kate. I found it interesting that other than the regular staging up plays, the Club generally is this utterly un-arty bunch. It seems to me that their reasons for performance, other than amusement were those of reinforcing their identity as the British, the civilised and cultured. So here we see not just a performance on stage, but that of a performance of identity for the British. References to plays crop up from then on. Take the scene in Chapter 7, where Fielding comes back from his walk to the college and sees the 2 Indians, a Moslem and a Hindu, Adela and Ronny. “A scene from a play, thought Fielding.” Moreover, Fielding’s living area is a 3-walled structure, suggesting a stage. Aziz, can be seen as a highly performative and pandering character in this scene, a highly sensitive character who acts and bends his words and actions to suit the characters around him, undermining Adela’s hope that he is the key to finding the “real India”. However, he is not the only one we find. Ronny himself is likened to a public school boy, an impressionable “the red-nosed boy” who acts out what his more experienced counterparts direct him to do. Thus, the suggestion that the Self is rather a series of performances manifested. There is in fact no one essential “self” and also no one “essential India”. Thus, Professor Godbole’s song I found was poignant in its enigmatic and non-intelligibility. In its nature, it transcends the ability to be essentialised into any one genre and sentiment, it transcends “essential-isation”.

On another note, just a thought I had about the significance of Miss Quested’s name. “Miss Quested, what a name!” remarked Mrs Turton (Chapter 3). I’m struck by the past tense in her name. As some of my classmates have suggested, Miss Quested is unable escape perpetuating the imperial gaze in her “quest” to discover the real India. I readily concur and it is my opinion that the past tense in her name is significant in relation to this. Miss Q’s “quests” are ends in and of themselves as she is unavoidably interpellated and “pre-disposed” to know and discover India in her English, middle class manner. In that case, the question that arises as well is the question of the knowledge and representation of the Other. Can one ever represent or discover the “Real India”? Or is the quest rather, futile, as we as readers of books, people, reality already have made and ended the “quest” in being who we are, interpellated social beings? I think so and I think that’s what the modernist aesthetic in this novel has raised for me, especially through the narrative voice, which I feel is symptomatic of the modernist movement, showing a plethora of subjective voices and psyches and sometimes (for eg. In the case of Prof Godbole) unable to be omniscient and all-knowing of the character’s psyche. Therefore, the idea that all that one sees and interprets is fragmentary and subjective

PS: I’m not using page numbers as my edition’s some obscure Reading Classics edition. BTW, speaking about Miss Quested. On a fun note, does anyone remember this cartoon, Jonny Quest? It was my favourite cartoon growing up. The theme song kept ringing in my head as I read. Regressive and digressive moment for me, LOL!

Unpinnable India.

Unpinnable India.

I know “unpinnable” is not even a ‘proper’ word, but you get the drift.
“Unpinnable” – that which cannot be pinned (or rather pinned down in this case)

Reading / consuming the text does not in any way enable one to know India, as revealed in the text in multiple instances - "no one is India" (p.89). India cannot be defined. And I found myself noticing several other instances where this similar notion of the “unpinnable” is evoked:

"while the true India slid by unnoticed" (p.66) – How then do you notice the “true” India when nothing and “no one is India" (p.89)? Is it just impressions that you glean from texts?

“he desired to remember his wife and could not... He had known that she would pass from his hands and eyes, but had thought she could live in his mind, not realizing that the very fact that we have loved the dead increases their unreality, and that the more passionately we invoke them the further they recede" (p.74-5)

"The mere fact of examination caused it to diminish" (p.101)

"But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else" (p.101)

"Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing" (p.156)

"She was only recommending the universal brotherhood he sometimes dreamed of, but as soon as it was put into prose it became untrue" (p.156)

I was wondering if this might in anyway relate back to the inability of words / poetry to capture the essence of a place / emotion / experience. I find Aziz’s frustration with his poetry congruent to this idea.

But at the same time, there are all these labels and racial stereotypes tossed about in the text. How do these smaller issues fit into the big picture?

“It matters so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides” (p. 126)

Somehow this makes it all seem so insignificant, Aziz often refers to the skies and his Moslem religion as something more than all of this, which seems to me to be a search for something more significant / a Truth beyond the material.


Perhaps, this text is really just a passage to India. Not a story about India, just a passage leading up to what India might be, and in passing by we glean an impression of what India is like.

Angel.

The polyphonic voices in A Passage to India

At first glance, Forster seems the omniscient narrator revealing all the various characters and following the conventional plot driven novelist. However, as we read on, there is also a sense of the polyphonic voices emerging as characters reveal their subjective understanding of the awkward relationship between the British and Indians. Although Forster seemed to present the British rather negatively in their interactions with Indians (with the exception of Fielding, Mrs Moore and maybe even Miss Quested), I did not think that the narrator is steering our opinions towards a bias for or against either the Indians or the British. What Forster comments on is the problematic social, political and religious conflict that inevitably occurs when two cultures meet, let alone at an unequal playing field.

Perhaps the modernist aspect lies in the subjectivity of the novel? Reality is presented as subjective as the characters reveal multiple perspectives based on their limited understanding of what they see and experience in their interactions with each other. India is perceived by the British as a “muddle” because of their inability to ‘box-up’ India and understand its culture, for “no one is India”. The multiplicity and complexity of Indian culture varies too widely within its peoples that even the natives cannot provide easy classification (consider the caste system, religion and level of education) that “no one is India”.

“In her ignorance, she regarded him as “India,” and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate, and that no one is India.”

Similarly, the text does not allow us to label and assign its characters - Aziz, Mrs Moore and Miss Quested, into definitive categories since they are constantly evolving and developing. This perhaps hints at the ‘unfinalizability’ of the self; that the self cannot be completely understood and known as we recognize that people change as they gain new perspectives and understandings. Therefore the individual can never be fully revealed just as India can never be fully understood.

The hierarchy of A Passage to India

Hello :)

The hierarchy between British and Indians—thus the coloniser and colonised, which can be read symbolically as the male and female—mirrors the gender dynamics in the British community. The British community features various characters that make it seem fuller and more complete compared to the representation of India which is ‘muddled’ and symbolically represented by one single, and somewhat flat character, Dr Aziz. This elevates the political condition of Britain ruling over India because it adds the social and intellectual dimension to Britain’s superiority.

Let’s start with Fielding the teacher. As the teacher Fielding represents a father figure in India. There is a parallel between the father-like colonial Britain, and the English father, Fielding who teaches Indians. Juxtaposed to the logical and knowledgeable father Fielding is Dr. Aziz, who admires Fielding and in a way infantilises himself to be a child-like figure to Fielding. Socially, Aziz is the symbol of the ‘muddled’ and infantile India. He represents the disorder and dishonesty of Indians (‘There is no harm in deceiving society as long as she does not find you out’ 94). The way he does not seem to analyse facts, but follows his intuition also makes him intellectually inferior to the British father figure. Amongst the major characters in the novel, only Aziz is Indian. So, the novel indirectly critiques the fact that India is not given enough symbolic space for representation in English literature and that the British tend to stereotype Indians as an easily categorised or identified nation. I say that the novel is a critique because Forster does acknowledge the impossibility to contain or represent ‘India’ (‘no one is India’ 65).

The dichotomised sense of womanhood is a metaphor for the subordinate position of the female characters, which then mirrors the symbolic relation between the coloniser and the colonised. Mrs Moore and Adela represent dichotomised womanhood in the text. Moore represents the woman with the heart while Adela the woman with the mind. Despite the fact that they both want to see the ‘real India’, they are not complete and full characters because they are fragmented into either having the heart or the brain. This treatment of females draws an interesting parallel to the treatment of the colonised. Aziz, who is the most prominent Indian character in the novel, does not seem to be ‘full’ or with both the heart and mind. He seems affectionate (he is described as ‘tender’ 64) but he seems more emotional than logical. And if he is the symbol of India, then India is somewhat feminised and portrayed as emotional and bordering illogical.

Ronny Heaslop, to me, is the instrument for Forster’s critique of British officers/sahibs in India. He is ‘dictatorial’ (27) and extremely suspicious of India and Indians (‘[Aziz] had some motive in what he said’ 29). It is as if all that he learnt in England is inadequate compared to the ‘wisdom’ he has gained in India through the years. This leads to how the coloniser is schizophrenic in its beliefs. On one hand, there is the Western thought of justice and equality taught in England (also, ‘where [Ronny’s] compatriots were concerned he had a generous mind’ 77), while the sahibs ‘hold this wretched country by force’ (45) and are proud of it because ‘the British were necessary for India’ (88). The way he expects his wife to give in to him (‘now that Adela had promised to be his wife she was sure to understand’ 88) is also similar to his complacent attitude towards India’s obedience to Britain.

Sorry for being lengthy :)

The contaminated, India and history

In light of the Gikandi and Levine readings that we did last week-- about how the colonized could be Westernized but the colonizers, in adopting the culture of the colonized, are seen as contaminated – doesn’t it seem particularly applicable to Passage to India and in particular, Fielding?

Consider the British’s reaction towards him: there is this distance between Fielding and his own people because he isn’t like them. In choosing to keep company with the Indians, the English, in particular the women shun him. ‘He had found it convenient and pleasant to associate with Indians and he must pay the price’ (VII 53). Fielding is an example of one whom the colonizers see as ‘contaminated’; in desiring to indulge in his relationships with Indians, he has become a misfit, one who neither fits-in with the British nor with the Indians. But Fielding isn’t the only one. How about Mrs. Moore, and Ronny’s reaction to her friendship with Aziz? Certainly it is frowned upon, as is Miss Derek because, as Ronny puts it, ‘[…] how a decent girl like Miss Derek can take service under natives puzzles me…’ (VIII 83). It makes one think about the kind of danger these ‘contaminated’ pose to English culture: what fear do the British have? They desire to keep and retain what they can of home in an alien land, yet they can’t avoid not coming into contact with the Indians. The only thing the British can do is to take precautions and ensure that their culture doesn’t become interchanged. Forster wrote that the British in India were like the exiled – I think for them to ensure that they don’t become further exiled, they have to preserve what they can of their own culture and essentially, their own identity.

I also find it particularly interesting how Adela keeps insisting on seeing the ‘real’ India. Many classmates have already asked in their posts, ‘what IS the real India?’ I don’t think we’ll ever know. The British, by colonizing India, has already changed what India was. For Adela to see the real India, she has to first see through the British, to see beyond the anglicized Indians, and even then what she sees may not be an accurate representation of what India is. Her surname itself is worth analyzing: Quested, as in questing for what India is, and yet the past tense of the name suggests that she has already decided what ‘real’ India should be before even reaching India (I hope I’m not pushing it too far). Why else will she keep rejecting the India that she’s shown and keeps insisting to see something else, something that comes closer to what she perceives the ‘real’ India to be? Then again, Forster also presents the idea of perceptions, how we always perceive things and tend to be biased towards our own perceptions. Aziz has his own romanticized image of India, so does Fielding, so does Ronny and every other character in the novel. Who is right and who is wrong? Or are they all correct? It’s like saying, “let us show you the real Singapore!” but what is the real Singapore? Adela is essentially a tourist in another country. She has been conditioned by her own country’s value systems and beliefs and has adopted her own views on India. Her perception is, in other words, already coloured. People tend to see what they want to see, and for Adela, Ronny, Mrs. Moore, Aziz etc., we’re presented with what they want to see their environment as. It’s like us being tourists to another country – we each have our own notions of what we want to see in that country, and what the ‘real’ country is about.

In a way, I think history is also like this. History is after all, ‘His Story’, and as stories go, they tend to be told by someone. And since it is told by someone, the story tends to have biasness that reveals the storyteller’s own conditioning and beliefs. Like how Levine could be said to be biased in her “Ruling an Empire”, I think all historians are biased, even if they strive not to come across as one. History is a story that is told from the point-of-view of someone who believes in his or her version of the history – much like how Adela believes in her own idea of the ‘real’ India.

-Yuen Mei-

Significance of The Caves

The 'Caves', both as a chapter and as a setting in the novel, represents an important turning-point for the characters. As a consequence of visiting, Aziz gets accused of assault and becomes disillusioned with the idea of forming personal relationships with the colonials, Mrs. Moore suddenly comes upon a fit of nihilism which she never recovers from and Miss Quested's marriage engagement and reputation is ruined. We see that at the end of the entire ordeal of his trial and its aftermath, Aziz concludes that "the earth...the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace...they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices: 'No, not yet,'" (267-8) to forming a friendship with Fielding. The novel shows that to the end, relations between the Indians and their colonials can never escape the implications of power and capitalist exploitation the colonizer-colonized relationship is always grounded in. (We are shown this by Aziz's inability to refrain from suspecting that Fielding has persuaded him not to sue Miss Quested, only to marry her and steal the money which was rightfully his.) We also see that the visit to the caves scarred Mrs. Moore irrevocably, as the echo "bou-oum" "began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life." (123) "Everything exists, nothing has value" (ibid) becomes the existentialist notion with which Mrs. Moore's heart is seized.

The Marabar Caves is a setting of darkness, violence and obscurity. In light of the effects of the visit on its visitors I have outlined, it almost seems to embody the country's meting out of penance for crossing the boundaries of propriety between the colonizers and colonized. We see that in itself it is not "an attractive place or quite worth visiting" (116), a geographical feature of the village which neither the locals (Aziz "had no notion how to treat this particular aspect of India" (117)) nor the foreigners could comprehend. And yet it has profound effects on them all, and "it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accomodates them to mankind." (123) This disillusionment with life, friendships and man's goodness is meted out by the caves as the land's punishment for these incursions into the boundaries between colonizers and colonized. It is as if there are to be no grey areas in this unnatural situation where the colonials have taken and exploited land which is not theirs to take. I would read the caves, especially in its presentation as a natural and untainted (by colonial exploitation) land, to signify what Forster believes is the country's protest to colonialization and any hypocrisies of friendship it might inspire.

--Charlene (using a Borders edition so page numbers might not match)

Categories and labels

Reading “A Passage to India” made me think about categories and labels as being particularly problematic in the dialectic between the colonizer and the colonized. I thought the text presented categories and labels as being problematic firstly because they run the risk of pigeon-holing people into inaccurate and restrictive classifications based on the characteristics they are SUPPOSED to have, rather than the characteristics they do possess. This is evident for example in Chapter VIII, when Ronny recounts how “Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar-stud”. He then proclaims that this was “the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals all the race” (75). The truth is Aziz had lent his collar-stud to Mr Fielding but Ronny conveniently attributes Aziz’s lack of a collar-pin to his “slackness” that was supposed to be characteristic of his race. Here, Ronny has wrongly judged Aziz just because of his belonging to a certain race category.

Colonizers were not the only ones guilty of this pigeon-holing. The colonized too, pigeon-holed their colonizers based on race too! This is evident already in Chapter II, where Aziz, Mahmoud Ali and Hamidullah broadly classified all Englishwomen as being “exactly alike” (9), and that granted the exceptions, “all Englishwomen are haughty and venal” (11). Again, the locals here have branded their colonial masters with certain characteristics based very loosely on their race and nationality and it is this labelling and categorising by both parties that create further misunderstandings between the colonizer and colonized and which widen the chasm between them. These categories only work to unite each nation while dividing both nations, and thus categories become particularly problematic in this colonizer-colonized dialectic.

Categories and labels are problematic also because they do not accommodate heterogeneity and difference between peoples. One example of this would be Mr Harris, who was Eurasian. Due to his mixed heritage, “when English and Indians were both present he grew self-conscious, because he did not know to whom he belonged. For a little he was vexed by opposite currents in his blood, then they blended, and he belonged to no one but himself” (84). Not being clearly European, or clearly Indian, Harris resists being classified and this places him in a state of limbo, belonging to neither race/nationality group. However, despite being in this state of limbo, I think that this is perhaps a more ideal space to exist in as it gives potential for Mr Harris to be seen as an individual, out of any narrow categories, as an individual who “belonged to no one but himself”. While not belonging to any group, Harris does not run the risk of being “mislabelled”.

While I recognise that these categories could have been deliberately drawn up by the colonial masters to differentiate themselves from the colonized, I think that these categories ultimately backfire because not only are the colonized and “in-betweens” subjected to being mislabelled or left behind, so too are the colonizers themselves. As Adela says on becoming labelled as an “Anglo-Indian” once she marries: “it’s inevitable. I can’t avoid the label. What I do hope to avoid is the mentality… Some women are so-well, ungenerous and snobby about Indians, and I should feel too ashamed for words if I turned like them” (135).

To end off, I thought this quote by Aziz quite apt—“Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing…” (135). Perhaps then, a people should be united by diversity and multiplicity rather than a universal label.