'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.

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-

Violence and Representation

My post is related to Yisa's suggestion that the artist must do violence to representation for "a kind of healing can occur, within the individuals who approach art either from the standpoint of the artist or from that of the audience."

In class the notion of "violence" in nationalistic poetry was brought up: the birth of the new nation state is forged through a poetry which "does violence" to existing language: in this way, the colonisers language is now re-arranged to speak of the native's experience, or the native's language breaks out of its traditional form/content and addresses issues of modernity and the nation. The old laws in the state of representation are broken; new laws are formed, and the state of poetry is symbolic of the nation state.

In this sense, violence is not only destructive, but also productive; nonetheless what it produces does not transcend violence, merely re-arrange it. Fanon's act of writing/narrating "On Violence" comes to mind, it is a violent gesture turning the colonisers Hegelian dialectic and the language back against them.

I suggest that Forster's "A Passage to India" also does violence to representation, but in a different way: through a process of “erasure”, which problematises any mode of representation’s hold on reality. In the novel, events which are described off-handedly become significant (Mohammad Latif’s bribing of Antony), events that seem central are then made to seem trivial (Mrs Moore’s epiphany in the caves), actions that reconcile also further division (Aziz’s collar stud).

What does this violence produce? I suggest it opens the possibility for a state of interpersonal relationships that is immediate and somehow beyond language (or at least, the rhetoric of coloniser/colonised). One glimpses this inexpressible state in Aziz's affection for Mrs Moore/Ralph/Fielding, who resorts to a mere platitude: "You are an Oriental".

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.

Fanon and Forster- who's being more wretched?

Before I start, I just want to say that it’s quite amusing how as the weeks pass by, blog posts are beginning to look more and more like mini-research papers. (“,)

Anyhow, let’s break down the person who is currently the wretched of my life, Frantz Fanon. I first encountered Fanon in my South Asian lit class last semester, albeit a shorter version, and I must say what struck me most was the difficulty I had in mapping Fanon onto Forster. Because Fanon mapped perfectly onto many of my texts in that module, including more recent works like Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Salman Rushdie’s Fury. I remembering being taken aback by his writing style because the brother was so fierce but I also remember being persuaded by him, as in, I believed that violence was the way to go if the colonized wanted freedom (no offense to Mr.Gandhi). But somehow, I felt like his binaries could not be imposed onto Forster’s novel all that readily thanks to characters like Mrs Moore and Fielding. Furthermore, I can’t completely swallow the idea of doing violence onto colonist characters in the novel, including people like Mrs. Turton and even Major Callendar who is rumoured to have tortured a native in the novel.

Is it because its fiction and Mrs Turton is so obviously caricatured while what Fanon talked about were real people, like that creep Lacoste, stepping over others? Or is it because Fanon wrote by aligning himself with the oppressed while Forster wrote standing outside both camps and as a neutral party? Maybe the neutrality comes to him easy precisely because he himself had to never endure such oppression. Because what we get in Passage is not violent colonization, or violent decolonization for that matter. The riots are mentioned in passing- in short, violence is relegated to the background in Passage. Is Forster imposing his own kind of violence by not fully elaborating the struggles the colonized went through?

In Passage, we get to see relationships, we get to see interaction, motives and presumptions about each community formed by the other. In this sense, I could map Fanon onto Forster but even then I feel like the former falls short. Fanon talks about how the colonist fabricates the colonized subject. But I believe that fabrication or stereotyping, can be expected of anybody. All of us do it, we judge a person on looks, on the kind of community he hails from, his friends, his grades, etc. And that is what Forster shows, how both sides fabricate each other.

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....

“You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse”

[I thought this quote from Caliban - typically thought to be Shakespeare’s figure for the native – was kind of apt because cursing = a violence against language]

It seems to me that Fanon’s polemical chapter stands not only as an exposition on the physical violence endemic in colonialism; on a more meta level, it performs violence of another sort – the (re)writing of narrative with the intention of usurping existing ones.

I would particularly like to consider this violence of narrative in light of Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s book when it was first published in 1961. On a basic level, Fanon is writing back to Empire, retaliating in much the same way as the natives physically do in his text. What I find interesting, though, is the way in which he does it: he literally sets out a historical narrative, a semi-detached observation of the flow of events in the interaction between settler and native (which later evolve into the capitalist West and the Third World). It is a mode of narrative highly reminiscent of Marx and Engels - the opposition of dialectics, the progression of society from capitalist to Communist - and I think it is a deliberate move on Fanon’s part. Besides his clear socialist and anti-capitalist slant, he is hijacking the Marxist narrative of violent revolution, change, and historical progress and moulding it to fit the colonial context. These connotations would not have been lost on the Western audience. Sartre says: “Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day” (13), and indeed by presenting his argument as “history” Fanon clearly places the days of settler-native in the past. Now is the time of change and native violence, the time when colonial narratives get rewritten or erased to prepare the way for the tabula rasa of the new nationalist narrative.(Again to quote Sartre: “…in the past we made history and now it is being made of us”.)

The idea of conflicting and rewriting narratives is not new – one could say it marked the ‘soft’ side of imperialism: rewriting the rules, the history, the understanding of the East to fit Western frames. This is clear in Passage to India, in which Adela’s original narrative of what happened in the Marabar caves clearly trumps whatever narrative Aziz or his lawyer can weave in his defence. Yet at the same time, what happens in the caves is immaterial; what matters is the divergence of narratives that Forster can give us, for in the end the micro-narratives of the text are woven into a macro one by Forster with India as his main narrative. Interestingly though, Forster’s India narrative is essentially an unknowable (to repeat the point from last week), empty one for him to fill, like a blank canvas for him to paint or the empty echo of ‘boum’.

I think it may be too reductionist to say that this is Forster’s way of still imposing a (white) master narrative on his text (despite the multi-faceted view he presents), but you could draw a parallel with what Sartre does in his preface. While he seems to be trying to take Fanon’s point of view, the fact that he feels he has to explain Fanon’s points and make an appeal to his Western brethren turns his preface into an enwrapping, paratextual narrative for a reader of Fanon’s text. Pick up the book and you are reading Fanon first filtered through Sartre, as Passage to India becomes India filtered through Forster.

However, my question is: is it only in the nature of colonial-colonised narratives to be violent? Or is narrative in itself violent in the sense that it can be rewritten, taken apart, re-angled? I think modernism emphasizes this point best in the way that it fragments narrative (a form of violence against the unitary narrative) and breaks it up; in the same way, then, perhaps Fanon’s opposition and fragmentation of Western/historical narrative makes it deeply modernist – in spirit if not in form.

Boumshead Revisited

Last week, I was highly ambivalent about A Passage to India, in part because of Forster's sweeping generalisations of both the white administration and the natives despite that "there is no such person in existence as the general Indian." (XXX, 232) Reading Fanon this week, it dawns upon me that perhaps if I apply his fundamental tenet, that "the colonial world is a Manichaean world," (6) to Passage, I might be able to alleviate my "echo," as it were. Fanon's colonial world is a "compartmentalised world, this world divided in two," (Fanon, 5) and it is this world that Forster writes of, a world of binaries for which generalisations thus must hold. For the natives, "he too generalised from his disappointments - it is difficult for members of a subject race to do otherwise;" (II, 6) for the colonisers (and this is already a kinder view), "all unfortunate natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30." (XVIII, 143) Mrs Moore's "Christian tenderness had gone" (XXI, 172) in the face of "boum, it amounts to the same," (XXIII, 180) but as she leaves India, "'I have not seen the right places,' she thought," the "untouched places," (181) and "longed to stop" at even Bombay, "the huge city which the West has built and abandoned with a gesture of despair" (182) - India's final words to her are "'So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as final? They laughed, 'What have we in common with them, or they with Asirgarh? Good-bye!'" (182) Perhaps India is right, there are "a hundred Indias," (I, 8) India is itself irreducible; then perhaps Fanon is too right, it is colonialism that reduces it to "a world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified." (15) Then, too, Forster is right: his generalisations are by definition truth in a Manichaean world, and the Westerners of whom I complained defy his stereotypes merely "new-comer[s]" not yet "fatigued" by that "hostile" Indian soil (II, 11) - thus it is that the Western "Oriental" Mrs Moore must go mad, Adela must depart, and even Fielding must eventually cease to be "the renegade" (XXIV, 192) and "thro[w] in his lot with Anglo-India by marrying a countrywoman." (XXXVII, 279) The Manichaean world that colonialism creates is what makes it so that Fielding and Aziz "must inevitably part," and it is only when colonialism and the Manichaean binaries of coloniser and colonised are "driv[en]…into the sea" (282) that "[Fielding] and [Aziz] shall be friends." (282) Problem solved! Except not, for "my echo has come back again badly." (XXIV, 184)

My ambivalence has spread to Fanon. In "On Violence" he too generalises - rather, if it is said Forster generalises, Fanon fairly dictates. His writings are as Manichaean as the colonialised world he speaks of - in his unyielding insistence upon the definitive thoughts and actions of 'the colonised', 'the intellectuals', 'the coloniser', 'the European nations', slowly but surely it becomes impossible to stave off uncomfortable comparisons to the blundering, insula, Western anthropological studies that Gikandi and Levine had raised, and indeed, McBryde's very own "Oriental Pathology, his favourite theme." (XXIII, 189) To compare thus nevertheless appals me - it seems to align Fanon with the very colonisers he raged against, to make of him an early-Aziz who at once seeks to "shake the dust of Anglo-India off his feet" (II, 10) and yet "felt important and competent" to have the English as "his guests." (XIII, 113) Somewhere, Fanon is spinning in his grave; I hastily attempt to rectify my trespass and grant the benefit of the doubt: of course, the world of which he speaks is a colonised one, Manichaean due to the colonialism, like Forster's, and of course his writings would too be thus Manichaean, how could it be otherwise in such a world? Treacherously I cannot help but continue to think perhaps to re-enact this Manichaeanism in his text makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy, as compartmentalising as the colonisers, as imperative as to which is the right - the only - way…Fanon still spins - enough. I cannot bear to accuse him of complicity, perhaps it would suffice to conjecture that the tone, the structure of his writing bears testament to his theory - colonialism stains the colonised; we are still brimming with anger, slowly smashing the barriers and statues of this psuedo-petrified world. This is my decision now, but perhaps by the end of this course, it'll be Fanon instead that I'm smashing. But now, yes, now I cannot bear it, and neither can I bear to smash Forster - which brings me to my next thought "On Violence." Forster's colonised India bears much resemblance to Fanon's Manichaean world, and yet the most important aspect of Fanon's colonialised world appears to be largely, as I mentioned in my last blog posting, elided in Passage - that of violence. Next to Fanon's 'manifesto,' the lack of outright violence in Passage seems ever more underscored. Fanon is of the colonised, Forster of the coloniser - even this alone would suggest that after all is said and done, Forster still writes through Western eyes, that he elides the political currents, the Indian violence, because - what? Any number of reasons, he did not think them significant enough, he did not want to give the Indians too much credit, it all boils down to the idea that he has "reduced" India in spite of his words. But as I said, I cannot bear to smash Forster now, and instead I will propound: I have not read much Forster but of what I have, I can barely imagine him writing directly of war. Maybe it's just not his "thing." Instead of colonialism, I see his elision of violence as more of modernism. Instead of reduction, I prefer to think of it as perhaps a kind of metonymy. There is, I think, much to thrash out and dispute if one were to read Forster through Auerbach, but nevertheless, to simplistically lift wholesale: "it is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light." (552) Rather than the bloodiness of the riots, Forster pins the crux of the novel and its Manichaean colonial tensions on perhaps such a (once again, relatively) random moment: an event that may or may not have happened, a trial that dissolves and an urge to violence that diffuses. "The Marabar caves had been a terrible strain on the local administration; they altered a good many lives and wrecked several careers, but they did not break up a continent or even dislocate a district." (XXV, 206) This, perhaps, more than the blood and thunder, is what (hopefully) displays to one that "the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled," (Auerbach, 552) so, perhaps, one day the coloniser and the colonised "shall be friends." Aziz's conclusion, after all, shows that Forster is not unaware of the need on the native's part for the violence of which Fanon speaks: "if it's fifty five-hundred years we shall get rid of you; yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea." (XXXVII, 282)

These blog posts are getting way too long for my rapidly disintegrating study schedule - the next one will (have to) be shorter, but I just have to finish off with (another) clarification. What I meant by stating in class that the novel takes pains to establish that the characters are "not-gay" was really, being the sort of person who can't bear to smash Forster, simply that, for a novelist who seemed to have taken pains to conceal his own orientation from the public audience all his life, I can't help but feel like we're rebuffing his pains in possibly concluding that Fielding and Aziz were friends largely because they're 'gay for each other' (you gotta admit that was taking over the entire discussion for a bit…). Not that I'm not saying it can't be a factor, especially considering the highly homosocial if not homoerotically charged conclusion with its "myriads of kisses," (279) just that I feel it mightn't have been supposed to be a factor so obviously and easily considered by the audience Forster intended, who weren't supposed to know about his homosexuality. Just a little consideration of the possible intention of the author - which, I know, I know, is an outdated concept…

Fanon, Forster, Violence

Fanon’s ‘On Violence” makes quite an exciting read. The never-ending violence between the colonizer and the colonized, the strategies they each employ against one another, and how the colonized undergoes a transformation (from “thing” to man) during the violent process of decolonization.

However, putting Fanon and Forster together, Forster’s A Passage to India is not as violent, but a rather nullifying experience. Forster has this knack of building up dramatic tension only to flatten it. The expected climatic experience after all that dramatic tension is not fulfilled. If we read Fanon into Forster, I would say that the trial of Aziz would have been the linchpin to the violent process of decolonization, but it was not.

“The Marabar Caves had been a terrible strain on the local administrations; they altered a good many lives and wrecked several careers, but they did not break up a continent or even dislocate a District” (223).

However, we do get a sense that decolonization is in its infancy. Aziz’s victory made the Indians “aggressive. They wanted to develop an offensive, and tried to do so by discovering new grievances and wrongs, many of which had no existence" (245). Also, the victory led to a unification of sorts between the Hindu and Moslem (251). There are several changes on the colonizer’s side too, such as the Political Agent no longer having as much power and influence as before (280)

Yet, it is always made clear that the violent decolonization process is not going to happen.

"British officialism remained, as all-pervading and as unpleasant as the sun; and what was next to be done against it was not very obvious" (245, 246).

The colonizer’s Repressive State Apparatuses are still in place, in the form of surveillance.

"The Criminal Investigation Department kept an eye on Aziz ever since the trial -- they had nothing actionable against him, but Indians who have been unfortunate must be watched, and to the end of his life he remained under observation" (279).

Although decolonization is not happening on a large social scale, we do see the character of Aziz develop from a “thing” into a semblance of a “man”. I say ‘semblance’ as Aziz did not become the radical and violent colonized rebel suggested by Fanon. Aziz merely affirms his cynicism of his oppression as a colonized subject. Looking back, he acknowledges that “[t]his pose of ‘seeing India’ which had seduced him to Miss Quested at Chandrapore was only a form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it” (292).

I think that Forster has presented a far more realistic account of decolonization as compared to Fanon. I quite agree with the possibilities that Fanon suggests with regards to the whole decolonization process, but it is unsatisfying as it is also reductive. Fanon’s decolonization process is like a step-by-step “An Idiot’s guide to Decolonization”, colonized and colonizer relationships are over-simplified as he views them both as items/objects/units (inflexible), rather than humans (flexible). What disturbs me most is perhaps that he does not consider the forging of friendships/relationships/love etc between the colonizer and the colonized possible other than a violent relationship. He argues that the colonized is always waiting for a chance to replace the colonizer, whereas Forster suggests to us the possibility of a union between the colonizer and the colonized.

"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.

Painting a Picture,well kind of.

(just a reminder, my page numbers are from some SUPER OLD edition )

Painting a picture:
A Passage to India for all its delving into religion, landscape, colloquialism and a myriad of description of clothes and culture still remains as a book of the West. In this sense, we see some resonance in Fanon’s idea that “the colonizer fabricates the colonial subject”(Fanon, 2). This seems to occur both within the book, where the British have a clear, set view of the Indians; “there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race” (CH8:80) as well as beyond the book, i.e. Forster as a British writing about India. This idea perhaps goes beyond just the question of Western exoticization of the East, or even of a possible skewered and/or inaccurate description, but leads us to ask the following:
(i) whether or not
(ii)and to what extent
we should question
(I)the validity of representing (II)and the right to represent
something/someplace/someone(s) that is not of the self in modernist fiction that ambitions to incorporate a certain mimesis.

Could the fact that Forster’s novel is a fiction be a certain cover under which to blur the lines between expression of feelings toward the whole colonialism/imperialism/empire building notion and a certain escapism on his part to express the other-worldliness of the East in that “licentious Oriental imagination”(CH31:267)?

In the later parts of the novel we see Aziz shedding a certain layer of his insecurity when he becomes a little more outspoken( possibly smarting from his ordeal) when he says “ ‘Discussion of the past is useless.’he said, with sudden sharpness in his tone”(CH30:262-263). This departure from Fanon’s suggestion that “the colonized subject is constantly on his guard and made to feel inferior” (16) suggest that in the later parts of the novel we see a very different India in terms of its inhabitants, both British and Indian. They perhaps, do not move any closer together nor any further apart, but grow increasingly different in their own realms. What I found very apt about Fanon’s “On Violence” was the description of “Atmospheric violence: this violence rippling under the skin”(Fanon 31) as reflecting Post-trial Chandrapole. While there is uneasiness, it is not overbearing and everyone moves on in their own roles; Adela leaves, Fielding retreats from his ‘middle ground’ between British and Indian to mingle more with English women and eventually marries, Ronny returns to his job. There is certain wariness and a general lack of goodwill to each other except for due course in civility and propriety, which rings a bell with Levine’s point on the British ‘law and government’ being ‘the noblest expression of humanity’(Levine 104).

I guess what I’ve been wondering about this week is the idea behind the idea of a place being about its people, in this case about India being about both the British and the Indians( and how they act/are portrayed/received). It struck me that when Fielding was asked about seeing the “Real India”, he said “ try seeing Indians” ( CH3: 27). Do people make a place, and does it only encompass the natives? Or is the idea that we are supposed to take away remain that of how and who treats the natives is what really matters?

*help me out, im abit confused!

Intellect and the Violence Capital

Reading the last ten chapters of Forster’s Passage to India and Fanon’s On Violence, I could not help but notice that even after minor triumphs and victories in the resistance of the colonized against the colonizers, the intellectuals relapse into a mode of complicity with the oppressors. Escaping the direct rule of the British in Chandrapore to a state of autonomy, Mau, ruled by a Rajah and advised by the British, Godbole and Aziz remain shackled to the whims of British “advice” on developing education and administration.

Fanon explains how the educated Native traverses the “good versus evil” space of the Manichaean colonial world. This “colonized intellectual” does not make intellectual gains by assimilating the oppressor’s culture and education, but merely “pawn[s] some of his own intellectual possessions”(13). By having the colonizers’ intellectual training, such a colonized individual moves upwards into a middle-ground between the colonizers and the colonized. Aziz and Godbole likewise perform such a role as described by Fanon. They find their existence incongruent with the masses, and yet not really British. Aziz thinks “I am an Indian at last”, but at the riverside celebrations he finds himself detached and watching afar with Ralph Moore. Godbole experiences a collective belonging with the Indian masses at the Temple’s ceremony of Shri Krishna’s birth, yet reverts to a sense of an “individual clod”(282). Both characters’ sense of individualism is described by Fanon to be the effect of hegemony by the colonizer (11).

Does such intellect then give the educated Native a false sense of representation? In his angry ranting throughout On Violence, Fanon seems to be aware of such a painful truth that the end of it, he is representing the rights of his land and his people in the language of the colonizers. The fact that he can only put through his argument eloquently in French is another violence that is within his own class, within himself. While Fanon describes the colony as a “compartmentalized world” that is “divided in two” and inhabited by different species”(5), this may be the linguistic violence that sets the educated Native apart from his brethren, apart from the cultural and physiognomical differences dividing the colonized space into three general compartments of the savage Native, the educated Native and the White man.

This then leads on to how the middle compartment of the educated Native acts as a damper to the resistance of the savage Native against the colonizers. Fanon describes the educated Natives to be opportunistic and self-preserving. Yet, such capitalist leanings are less evident in Aziz and Godbole. Sure enough, Aziz has to mind the upbringing of his children Godbole has to earn his keep, but their bourgeoisie ambitions and the need to represent the colonized become a violence in the Self of the educated Native.

But one thing is for sure, that the fragmentation of the colonized social strata prevents the pooling of resources for resistive violence. Fanon describes the capitalist colonizers’ vast violence capital to be overwhelming and seemingly infinite, as compared to the Natives’ primitive and puny violence capital. Short of an all-out attrition war, the resistances of the colonized by violence seem doomed before any action. The mediating, negotiating educated Native class functions to prevent that apocalyptic attritional suicide, as well as the continued pipeline to the siphoning of violence capital from the colony to the metropolis. This leeching is described by Fanon to be how “Europe’s well-being nad progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians and Asians”(53). The tax collection and trade in Forster’s colony space serve as the parallel to such transfers of capital.

Thus, the control and usage of violence capital and hegemonising of educated Natives can be seen as a form of capitalist enterprise. In fact, more important than the economic measures to derive the dollars and cents from the colonies, colonial powers are seen to be economizing the values of the violence capital to retain the power politics of the colonization machinery, as such strategies ensure the continued profitability of controlling the colony.

- Weiquan

Response to: Aesthetic of Violence

What I understand to mean by the term “aesthetic of violence” is giving form, shape and meaning to violence, which in turn, attempts to rationalize and intellectualize what would otherwise be considered an irrational and intangible act.

Irrational because violence begets violence. There is a sort of senselessness in the cycle of violence in Fanon’s essay; “Terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence”. (47) An endless chain of reactions with no end in sight. This irrationality of violence is further reiterated when Fanon states that “colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.” (23)

The intangibility of violence arises from its close alliance to the almost primal instincts of Man- “the colonized’s way of relaxing is precisely this muscular orgy during which the most brutal aggressiveness and impulsive violence are channeled, transformed and spirited away.” (19) Here, violence is seen as a raw impulse that escapes the bodily confines.

Modernism, in its attempts of representations and re-presentations, proceeds in a similar fashion with the aestheticizing of violence, in the sense that both seek to give form to something, which ultimately, lies beyond our grasp. There are countless blog posts about polyphonic voices and the “knowability” of things which touch on this particular aspect of modernism adequately. What I would like to add, is perhaps for us to consider Plato’s Theory of Forms (my very basic understanding of the theory, might I add, through past class seminars) into our discussion on Modernism. This is particularly so, when dealing with Forster’s A Passage to India and the notions of a “real” India (interestingly enough- all countries start with a capitalized letter). Simplifying his theory- it basically states that all objects that we see are mere copies/imitations/shadows of an original. This implies that what we perceive are mere representations of the Real- which is precisely why the “real” India eludes Adela or Mrs Moore.

(Side note: I find the idea of echoes within Forster's text particularly interesting with regards to this. An echo is a reflection/mimicry of the original sound. The echoes made in the Marabar Caves are however, unrecognizable as it sounds nothing like the original- a resounding "boum". This makes it all the more disconcerting to Mrs Moore and to me as well. And yet, I can't wrap my mind around the idea of why Forster makes the echoes as such- existential anxieties aside?)

Is it safe to suggest then, that it is with a certain sense of self-awareness that modernist writings take to only presenting traces of that which lies beyond our perception in the first place?

Critical aesthetics

Fanon’s article, which centralizes on the issue of violence and how violence is both a purifying and a destructive force, is not only contained within the physical exertion of violence by the colonialists against the colonized, but can be applied to an aestheticizing of violence in Modernism itself. By ‘aestheticizing of violence’, I am referring to how modernists, by ‘forcing’ the colonized Other into a fixed and essentialized framework, reduces the heterogeneity and pluralism of the Other; I see this reduction as an act of violence – the colonialist has the power to represent the Other according to what he thinks/perceives/imagines the Other to be, even if it may be a simplified understanding or representation of the Other. In other words, as Said says, “Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient” (882).

Forster, I feel, is guilty of putting India and the ‘natives’ into an Orientalist framework, a framework that associates the Orient with all the qualities on the more inferior side of the binary. While the West is seen as efficient, logical and rational, India is seen as disorganized, illogical and spiritual. If we take as our example the first chapter of PI, we can see this in more detail. In this chapter, the description of India is one that is chaotic and messy: “houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life” (5). In contrast, the Civil Station is “sensibly planned…bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles” (6). Surely, right from the start of the novel, Forster has already neatly categorized India and the West into opposing sides of the binary.

Even if Forster decides for his novel the choice of India as his subject matter, versus other colonial novelists who might have rigidly only focused on the West, Forster colludes with colonial representations of the Orient as the exotic Other. Rather than being seen as rational and logical, the ‘natives’ are seen as doing “not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct.” India becomes a “muddle…a frustration of reason and form” (270). Indeed, the word ‘muddle’ is repeatedly used in describing India; the effect of this is not only to emphasize the distance between the Occident and the Orient but that there is no definite word to describe the ‘chaos’ of India. In fact, ‘muddle’ becomes the signifier for India, whether it is used to describe the ‘muddle’ at the Marabar Caves, whether Adela sees a snake or stick from the train or whether a ghost or an animal caused the car accident.

In the third part of the novel, although one can see Forster as a novelist who appreciates the religious festivities of India, I posit that this view is compromised by the fact that Forster seems to be an observer rather than active participant. In other words, Indian religious festivals are put on display for Forster’s Western readers to consume. “Seeing India…was only a form of ruling India” (291-292) as Aziz remarks. By observing the Indian religious festival, Forster is also putting India and its ‘native’ participants under surveillance, and by extension, if I may bring in Foucault, surveillance is a form of power. This power is one that the Western ethnocentric observer cum anthropologist has over the observed. And it is this power that allows him/her to enact violence onto his/her subject matter, by imposing a system of binary classification that can only reduce the subject matter. So it is for Forster.

All these examples show that Forster has assigned an Orientalist framework to India. By doing so, Forster enacts violence onto his subject matter – India. Ultimately, all the heterogeneities and pluralities of India are repressed and contained within a binaric classification. What is equally important here is that not only does Forster contain India within existing colonial dominant categories, he also greatly simplifies India by decontextualizing it and not taking into account the ‘native’ attempts at resistance. So, for example, although Gandhi is a major political leader in Indian nationalism, he is written out of PI. Forster as Western artist, thus has the power and knowledge to decide which aspect of India is to be focused on and which parts should be duly silenced. Ultimately, Forster is representing India in PI to his readers at home in Britain. As such, India cannot be anything else than exotic. Certainly, India cannot be represented in PI as an upcoming nationalist force. The essentialized and timeless view the Britons had of India does no justice to the actual political history of India. In fact, this erasure and forgetting of India’s nationalist history in PI, is a form of violence enacted onto Forster’s subject matter.

Forstering Modernism

The question of how Forster is a modernist is not easily answered, not in the least within the confines of this blog post. But my sense is that while Forster is not a modernist in style and technique, in his thematic concerns and outlook he might be considered one. Allow me to explain.

Largely speaking, there is not a great deal of formal divergence of the kind we previously saw in Woolf with her use of free indirect discourse. Forster does not fracture time in the representation of the inner psychologies of his characters; there are flashbacks and excursions and echoes(!) of the past, but there is always a singular authorial voice that coheres the individual experiences of each of his characters. However, given the symbolic import of the Caves, of the echoes that resonate within the minds of Adele, Aziz, Fielding and Moore and of the religious imagery throughout the book one could make a argument aiming to strengthen Forster's relationship to modernism, for symbolism as a literary stylistic allows for the creation and expansion of an externalized objective significance within an interiorized subjective conciousness, which is what Woolf achieves in her fragmentary stream-of-conciousness.

Back from the verbosity of it all - I would think that one would find a greater justification for Forster as modernist and A Passage To India as a modernist text if we examine its thematic concerns. I put it to you that Forster depicts in this novel various individuals grappling with their own individuality and autonomy over and against the prevailing socio-cultural onslaught of a modernity shaped by the imperial enterprise. We see Adela struggling with the expectations of becoming a betrothed wife to an Anglo-Indian, Fielding dealing with a mid-life crisis of sorts as well as his own ambivalent relation to the Empire and India, and Aziz having to bear the weight of expectation of the British and Indians in addition to his incarceration, and so on in other characters as well. It is this emphasis of the individuals at odds with a received socio-cultural heritage which perhaps marks Forster and this novel as modernist. At the end of Chapter XXVI, Fielding considers that "we exist not in ourselves, but in terms of each other's minds" (234), evincing a kind of reverse solipsism, where the individual can never fully reckon himself or herself. This dismal internal void, which the Caves are metonymic for, underscores perhaps Forster's engagement with "modernist mode", and also points to modernism's relation with the Empire and the Orient, how this literary movement looked upon the colonized Other and reflected on the horror, the horror of its inner void.

Yet I would call Forster, at best, a marginal modernist, for while the emotional, spiritual and epistemological crisis that beseiges the characters in A Passage To India is what typifies much of modernist literature, much of the novel unfolds conventionally, in accordance with the norms of earlier nineteenth-century literature, where authorial authority and social critique are hallmarks of such texts. One should also bear in mind the connotations borne by "modernism" as a taxonomic classifier. Must any great work of the twentieth century necessarily be called modernist? Is the term, as a generic marker, normative and does it bestow some inherent prestige among its canonical works, that we may lay open such assumptions to contestation?

(I would have like to have touched on Aziz's concern with poetry and the emphasis on aesthetic experience, and the connections with the mythic, but I've run out of space. In class, perhaps?)

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-

Portrait of the Artist in India

A Passage to India fascinated me with its numerous references, both veiled and overt, to the figure of the artist producing art in both British and Indian contexts. This echoes, I feel, Forster’s own position as an artist trying to write the unknowable, subjective human consciousness – and more than that, the alien human - into his art. At the same time, he raises the question of the voice of the native artist: is there such a voice, as the Western artist understands the term?

In this way I guess you could see this novel as speaking in counterpoint to Gikandi’s rather damning account of the artistic interaction between West and East. Passage shows the complexity of this process; or rather, the struggle that Forster – bearing in mind his deeply humanistic (“only connect”) bent – faced in trying to connect, or create a literary passage, as it were, to India.

On the one hand, Forster seems to be saying that in this age of empire and modernity when contact with the East is inevitable, it is pointless and in fact ossifying to keep up the pretence of clearly demarcated boundaries between pure Western art and the influence of the East. A clear example of this is the faintly ludicrous affair of staging Cousin Kate with the British sweating it out manfully in order to keep the “windows…barred, lest the servants should see their memsahibs acting” (17, Penguin edition).

However, this doesn’t mean that Forster is all for placing India (in every sense of the word as a semiotic and artistic cipher) on an equal pedestal as the West; through his descriptions of India/ns vs the West (an observation: Forster tends to like to set up East-West comparisons in his expository sections, as in this passage that I found very poetic, notwithstanding: “In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but here the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful”), the overwhelming impression one gets is that Indian art is still inferior to Western because it is formless; formless in the sense that Forster’s India is depicted as so mercurial and volatile – as in Aziz’s quick change of moods, the many faces of the Marabar Caves – and ultimately shapeless. And to Forster’s European mind, form is the measure of aestheticism – to quote Fielding as he leaves India: “He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty?” (250) In fact, to continue the earlier quote comparing Europe and India: “Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them."

Yet one can say that India appears formless to Forster because it eludes his grasp. Just as Indian society cannot be reduced to the colonizer’s classifying gaze (as Levine discusses), Forster cannot truly understand the mindset of the Indian artist and Indian art, even when these make use of European elements. I am thinking here of transmutation, of the native breaking down and appropriating European symbols for their own use, as when Mrs Moore’s name is transmuted into the chant and cause of Esmiss Esmoor, or the Indians’ raucous celebration of “God si Love”. Subversively, this breaks the form of European-ness and reshapes it according to Indian form, and in so doing Othering it to the Western mind.

More than that, ‘native’ Indian art resists the understanding of the Western mind. Godbole’s song of the milkmaid (as Xinwei has pointed out) and Aziz’s Persian poetry at the end of the novel can be read as examples of the Indian artist’s voice, evading Western comprehension. The deeper metaphysical implications of incomprehensibility are evident in the “ou-boum” echo of the caves: frightening, even shocking the Western mind out of its comfort zone. (Did anyone else see a similarity between “ou-boum” and Kurtz’s cryptic “the horror, the horror” in Heart of Darkness?)

As a closing thought on Forster’s quandary of how to deal with the Other in art, Godbole’s song also brought to mind Forster’s posthumously-published novel Maurice. In that novel, the protagonist makes a similar plea of “Come!” to the night; and since it is set in Forster’s artistic comfort zone (in terms of country and class), he is able to tie the novel’s ends together neatly – Maurice’s lover comes, and he is able to give the artist’s gift of a (somewhat) happy ending to the couple. Western artifice triumphs.

In Passage, however, Godbole says, “I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come.” (68) And indeed the mystery of the heart of the book remains – Forster has to end the book on an uneasy note: ne’er East nor West shall meet in unity, “no, not yet..no, not there.”

Reading this Passage aloud....

One of the things that caught my attention while reading the text was the multitude of voices- Hindus, Moslems, British women, British men, Government officials, Colonial teachers and the list goes on. You’d think that with a multiplicity of voices (and hence perspectives), one would get a real sense of “India”. Levine states that “India was not a single country or entity… There was no single Indian language or religion”. (61) One can argue then, to gain a grasp of India, one had to look at it from all sides.

The text denies me the satisfaction of understanding "India", partly because of Forster’s underlying authorial voice, which dictates how the story pans out. Even as one reads the satirical representation of the British in India, through the eyes of the locals (who incidentally don’t agree on whether they can truly be friends with the British), one cannot refute the fact that Forster writes the passages for us. It is one author’s voice that pervades the text, writing the words that Dr Aziz or Fielding utters on these pages.

An act of ventriloquism, if you will.

Which begs the question- can a text ever be written to truly represent a people? On whose authority do we rely on to get a representation of a people? As shown in the text, even the locals cannot be relied upon to give us a clue into the people- Ralph Moore “was not so much a visitor as a guide” as compared to Dr Aziz.

One attempt at mediating this issue is through a narrator or author who does not purport to fully understand each character in his text. It is precisely the characters eluding the reader’s grasp that stops the text from becoming a ventriloquist performance for readers. Ironically, it is this elusive nature that allows the readers a foothold on gaining an understanding of India.

Is there a resolution to the issues of representation? No, not yet.

Toes

The quote “[t]he man who doesn’t toe the line is lost … If you leave the line, you have a gap in the line” struck me as particularly meaningful when thinking about issues related to modernism and empire (160).

The statement was made by McBryde as a word of caution to Fielding for being on the side of the Indians. In McBryde’s opinion, Fielding’s disregard for conforming to the standards and rules established by the Anglo-Indian community in Chandrapore will result in his expulsion, hence “lost”. The second part of the quote is McBryde’s obvious hinting at Fielding’s obligation and duty to his own kind.

In the colonial enterprise where everyone is obliged to “toe the line”, there is certainly “no room for – well – personal views” (160). Everything is based on the collective, which in a sense erases unique individual identities. The “wife of a small railway clerk” who was “generally snubbed”, becomes a symbol of “all that was worth fighting and dying for” with her “abundant figure and corn-gold hair” (170). The body is idealized and transformed into a symbol that makes it “all worth fighting and dying for”. All sense of the individual is erased from the body. Leaving the “line” results in a “gap”, a space that can be exploited and used against the collective. The anxiety that the hegemony of colonial rule will be threatened is a significant concern for the colonists. This is certainly a direct opposite of modernism, which celebrates the individual and rejects any rigid categorizing. And it is in this polarity (Empire / Modernism), that I find interesting, albeit in a nebulous way for now.

If we view “the line” as (Victorian?) literary tradition, modernist writers are certainly the culprits that do not “toe the line”. In leaving “the line”, they created “a gap in the line”, which I see it as an opening up of a space for multiple perspectives and voices. To allow for “a close approach to objective reality by means of numerous subjective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions received by various individuals” (Auerbach). Yet, there is also a sense of “los[s]”, with no omniscient meaning to be derived and no conclusions to be arrived at.

Linking the two points I have tried to make, I see the employing of the modernist technique as a possible/adequate way of addressing the issues of colonialism. Rather than taking sides (imperialist vs anti-imperialist), it opens up a gap to engage readers in formulating their own viewpoints and opinions. The ambivalence in A Passage to India has been astutely commented on by Jean, which I think is the main point of the novel. It is a “passage”, rather than Destination India.