Multiple Narratives

The way in which Lord Jim is narrated is rather fragmented, even with Marlow as the principle narrator of the story.  There is the omniscient narrator who introduces the story, for one, and within Marlow's own storytelling there are several narrators too with their own viewpoints and stories to tell, not least Jim himself.  Beyond that, Marlow's narrative is split up further by the letter to the unknown sympathetic listener; the perspective in the letter is arguably different from that offered in Marlow's earlier speech, since it happens later in time, taking into account the events that happened since then.

All the narrators have their own viewpoints, though Marlow acts as the mediating and interpretive agent through which they expound their tales.  But Marlow is also mediated by the omniscient narrator of the novel, who in turn can be said to be mediated by Conrad himself.  Yet we trust all of them to be telling the truth - at least, their version of the truth, for Conrad makes plain the biases in each of the voices. Even the omniscient narrator takes sides in the novel, notably when he paints an unsympathetic picture of Jim in the introduction.

But since the viewpoints clash with each other, the end result is that we never get an authoritative picture of Jim, the main subject of the discourses.  Differing perspectives, pawing away at the truth, but not quite getting there; this is one of the hallmarks of modernist technique.  Looking back at Passage to India, we find different perspectives on the caves and on India itself that never resolves into a neat whole; Lord Jim, though written earlier, takes this a step further, on the midway point between PtI and something like To The Lighthouse with its streams of consciousnesses.

- Yingzhao (296 words)

regardless of race, language or religion

Much has already been said about how the modernist aesthetic re-enacts a form of violence upon narrative and textual means of representation and understanding. I’d just like to point out a further relationship between violence and aesthetic systems that struck me while reading Fanon (and thinking about Auerbach). Fanon writes that colonized masses “intuitively believe that their liberation must…and can only be achieved by force” (33).

Inhabiting as they do a pervasive structure in which colonial dominance (in economic, cultural and political fields, as described by Fanon) prevent the subject from confronting the coloniser as an equal, the outright rejection of such structure seems to be the only means available for levelling the playing field. In PI for example, Aziz knows the result of his trial has already been foretold; his legal, social and cultural standing are more than enough to ‘prove’ his guilt. On the other hand, physical violence, in all its bloody reality, represents not only a rupturing of these oppressive structures, but also allows the battle between coloniser/colonised to be fought in a kind of primordial state of pure physicality, a kind of lacanian Real where social constructions and the (false) inequalities that they bring are abolished. An oblique reference to this can be seen in Adela’s observatin of the punkah, whose “strength and beauty…[and] physical perfection” is likened to a go’ d in contrast to the “cultivated, self conscious and conscientious” Assistant magistrate opposite him (205). Physical violence, in other words, provides the interface where men can meet as equals and reverse the stifling hierarchies that colonialism spawns. ( I was actually thinking of Pahlanuik’s Fight Club, which might help demystify what I think has been a rather convoluted paragraph)

The idea of equality drew my thoughts back to Auerbach, who also described the aesthetics of modernism as possessing an equalising impulse. I posted earlier that I disagreed with Auerbach regarding modernism’s ability to represent an unprejudiced and universal sort of “common humanity. But it strikes me now that the modernist aesthetic, like violence, attempts to locate a space that is free from imposed systems and representational biases. Thus, modernism too promotes a sort of equality: Not only reexternal differences in individuals disregarded in favour of ‘common’ interior processes, but also, ordinary and nondescript people are seen as being equally worthy of representation. My grammar goes awry – a sign of sleepiness – and shall just end by saying that equality provides a common thread by which violence and modernist aesthetics can relate to one another

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…

Violence

The problem I have with the advocacy of violence in decolonization is that there is something inherently primal, chaotic and mad in the use of force. This can be seen in the story by Cesaire, where the rebel describes the night where the slaves murdered their masters – “We were running like lunatics; fiery shots broke out…We were striking. Sweat and blood cooled us off. We were striking amidst the screams and the screams became more strident and a great clamor rose toward the east…” (Fanon 46) Also in Passage to India – the mob rise up against the English during the trial with a kind of irrational fervor, as they begin chanting “Esmiss Esmoor” – and after the trial they start a riot, “entirely desirous of [Major Callendar’s] blood, and the orderlies were mutinous and would not let him over the back wall…” (222)

If modernism is about consciousness, then violence as something senseless and totalizing seems to go against the principles of modernism, for violence also indicates a complete erasure of rationality and reason, and a perhaps a return to primeval chaos, to un-consciousness. Another disturbing thing is the necessity of annihilation in the practice of violence. Violence does not only destroy the colonizer, it also implies an annihilation of the colonized “self”, as how Fanon puts it, a cleansing force. “[Violence] rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude.” (Fanon 51) But again, annihilation of “self” could be a destruction of consciousness and of ridding oneself of any sense of values and moral reasoning. The ironic twist, of course, is that violence is the language of colonialism. And if violence indicates an erasure of reason, then the entire colonial project of spreading reason and civilization collapses.

[Finally, when I think of Fanon’s argument that in decolonization, one must be “determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered”, I am reminded of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It’s not exactly related to decolonization, but during this period, the Khmer Rouge were calling for complete change, abolishment of foreign influence, all cities were emptied and people moved to the countryside, all forms of traditional art were destroyed and replaced. It was basically, annihilation, and starting things from ground zero. The sense I get is that, to “smash every obstacle”, and to find ways and means of annihilating the colonized ruler, will only lead to massive and disastrous consequences, like that of Khmer. ]

Of Violence and Friendship

Fanon states that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world” in which the colonists and colonized are fundamentally divided by race. The colonists impose their superiority through violence and intimidation in the form of the police or through education which instills acceptance of their subjugation. However, the compartmentalization of a country does not seem to be simply about race. In Passage, India is presented as fragmented and unknowable even within the natives. The Hindu-Moslem divide as seen in Aziz’s reference to “Slack Hindus . . . Nothing Sanitary” (p 63); the subtle but distinct caste divide when Aziz shares a game with “a stray subaltern”. Aziz’s comment that “nothing embraces the whole of India. . . that was Akbar’s mistake”, suggests India’s disunity even before the colonists arrived. The difference here is that Indians are united in their shared experience of a common oppressor and all other religious and caste differences are pushed beneath the surface of this overpowering tyrant.

If we see colonization as the rape of a country, and the country that emerges in the aftermath of colonialism as the ‘bastard-child’ of the offence/crime, this ‘child’ signifies a new life - a beginning. I’m not suggesting that it is possible to start anew on a clean slate, no, that is impossible. The ‘child’ carries with it the legacy of violence and trauma of the ‘rape’ but nevertheless, there is a future that awaits negotiating between absolute rejection of its colonial past and etching out a future that benefits the ‘child’ best. Which is the better life? The “primitive” pre-colonial days or the industrially/educationally more advanced post-colonial future, we do not know, but what we do know, is that we can never return to the ‘untainted’ pre-colonial days of the past. The dream of meeting the oppressors on a level playing field seems rather pessimistic seen from the perspective of Passage.

Aziz appears to think that violence is necessary towards achieving an even field in which the English and Indians can co-exist in peace. This supports Fanon view’s that violence is the only possible solution towards decolonization and the rehabilitation of the oppressed man.

“. . . we shall rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then . . . you and I shall be friends” (p306)

Fielding and Aziz, the only hope in bridging the gap between the colonists and colonized, inevitably part and in fact become increasingly incompatible. They can never achieve true friendship as the imbalance between colonists and colonized is too great. The humiliation from the violence of colonization is too deeply ingrained to be eased by two individual’s affections for each other.

“. . .socially they had no meeting-place. He had thrown in his lot with Anglo-India by marrying a country-woman, and he was acquiring some of its limitations, and already felt surprise at his own past heroism. . . . Aziz was a memento, a trophy, they were proud of each other, yet they must inevitably part.” (p303)

To the question if Aziz and Fielding can ever be friends. . .

“No, not yet”
“No, not there”

No, not ever? . . .

Convergences in Fanon’s and Forster’s anti-colonial sentiments

Although both Forster and Fanon were thinkers from distinctive cultural backgrounds and drastically different socio-historical contexts, their anti-colonialist sentiments with regard to the relations between the colonizers and the colonized seem to converge.

(Forster was writing from an empowered position of a British colonial in the 1920s, a time when the British hold over India (although challenged) was still flourishing. On the other hand, Fanon (as a mixed “native” with African roots, from the French colony of Martinique) wrote his polemic in the 1960s as a disempowered colonized subject reacting to the turbulent process of global de-colonization and the then on-going violent Algerian struggle for national independence from French colonial rule.)

Fanon’s understanding of the inherently violent nature of relations between the colonizer and the colonized can be compared with Forster’s exploration of the possibility of a friendship between the British colonizers and the Indian colonized in A Passage to India.

Fanon argues that the relationship between the colonist and colonized is defined by violence, emphasizing the necessarily violent nature of decolonization, where the national liberation of the colonized from the Manichean colonial world cannot be achieved through a “rational confrontation of viewpoints” or any forms of “compromise”, but only through a total revolution driven by “absolute violence.” Fanon’s aggressive call to arms is evident when he proclaims that “the work of the colonized is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist. […] For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.” The violence expressed by the colonized in retaliation towards the colonist is warranted because colonization is a military enterprise in which “direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny and contained by rifle butts and napalm.” In retaliation to the regime of colonial violence which destroyed the pre-existing social fabric of the colonized country, the eradication of the colonial world has to be “unconditional, absolute, total and seamless.” Nothing short of an absolute and revolutionary demolition of the colonial superstructure will do.

Fanon’s call for the complete destruction of colonialism is echoed in Forster’s novel, which suggests that an English-Indian friendship is only possible when the process of decolonization is complete and India is liberated from the clutches of British colonial rule. The mutual violence that characterizes the relationship between the colonist and the colonized is evident in Forster’s novel. The colonial administrator Ronny emphasizes the need to employ force in the governance of India, asserting that India is not a drawing room and the English are not in India to be pleasant, because “[the English] have something more important to do.” I interpreted “something more important” to mean the “holding of this wretched country by force.” Fanon’s point about the metaphorical violence that the colonist inflicts upon the colonized through the dehumanization of the colonized subject is also evident in how Ronny regards the colonized as what Fanon terms the “hysterical masses, blank faces and shapeless bodies”-- objectified faceless masses without any individuality. This is most evident in the scene in which he “dropped in” on the tea party that Aziz and Professor Godbole invite Miss Quested and Mrs Moore to. Although both Aziz and Godbole address Ronny deferentially, Ronny systematically ignores them because the natives are to be neither seen nor heard. As the narrator wryly puts it, the relationship that Ronny has with the Indians “is an official one.” As private individuals, he always “forgets them.” Forster’s novel also highlights how the physical and metaphorical violence directed by the British provokes a similarly violent reaction from the Indians. Aziz’s bitter call for the complete demolition of the colonial enterprise is militaristic:

“Down with the English anyhow. […] if it is fifty five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea”

Similarly, Forster’s novel also demonstrates Fanon’s point about the irrational and violent retaliation from the colonized. Fanon argues that “the colonized is dominated but not domesticated. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and jumps on him. The muscles of the colonized are always tensed and ready to change his role from the hunted game to that of the hunter.” This is evident in how Aziz and the Indian community became “aggressive” after Aziz’s victory in the courtroom. The Indians plotted to “develop an offensive on the British”, and “tried to do so by discovering new grievances and wrongs, many of which had no existence. The narrator attributes this spurt of irrational violence as a natural corollary of the “usual disillusion that attends warfare” (between the colonizers and the colonized).

Forster’s novel also concurs with Fanon’s argument that it is not possible for an Englishman and an Indian to be friends in the context of British colonialism, due to the fundamental assumptions of racial inequality that the colonial enterprise is premised on. Although the initial friendship between Fielding and Aziz seems to epitomize Forster’s utopian vision of liberal humanism (they are apparently able to transcend racial prejudices and treat each other with respect and good will), Forster soon reveals their friendship to be unsustainable in the face of the harsh realities and inequalities endemic to colonialism. The friendship falls apart after Aziz is accused of attempting to rape Adela, and their estrangement is exacerbated by the external social circumstances and cultural prejudices perpetuated by the binaristic Manichean worldview that governs colonialism. Although there is mutual admiration and respect, their own respective communities pull them apart through mutual stereotyping. The end of the novel illustrates Fanon’s argument that a true friendship can only be established on grounds of egalitarianism and a thorough demolition of the inequity of colonialism. Although Aziz and Fielding desire friendship, the horses that they were riding took divergent paths, while the gloomy landscape of India symbolically rejects the possibility of a friendship before decolonization.

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

A Passage to India: My Scattered Thoughts

A Passage to India resists a definate interpretation, as other posters before me have already noted. Despite the omniscent narrator, there are a multiplicy of interpretations possible, even at the level of basic plot (namely, what exactly happened in the caves?). All the characters in the novel strain to attain their own interpretation of India, but as the narrator notes, there is "no one India". In this sense, the novel fits the modernist mould of the instability of meaning, and the search for meaning that goes on anyway. But the search for the 'real' India is not the primary focus of the novel; rather, it ultimately hinges upon the relationship between Fielding and Aziz, which up to the end is everchanging, unpinnable, and destined never to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

As for the book's relation to imperialism, it has been cited in several places as one of the reasons the British pulled out of India with a sense of 'having washed their hands of a disagreeable affair'. Is it an anti-imperialistic book, then? Certainly, the Anglo-Indians are portrayed in a negative light, again as other posters have already noted. And yet there is more than a trace of Orientalism evident in Forster's portrayal of the various Indian characters. Even Aziz, the most 'rational' of the Indians portrayed, does not escape the stereotype of the irrational, mysterious Oriental... but the Anglo-Indians are behaving just as irrationally. In fact, it turns out that none of the characters are quite rational in their thoughts. After the shock of the First World War, perhaps it is starting to sink in that the colonizers are not as superior to the colonized as they first believed... and from here, one can speculate that modernism as a literary movement sprang at least in part from just such a realization and interaction. Seen in that light, Modernism and Imperialism are more tied together than one might had thought.

My thoughts are rather disjointed this week, so apologies if this comes off as just so much rambling.

-- Yingzhao

Gender and empire

I think that there is always going to be something to say about gender whenever one discusses empire and imperialism. For instance, I’ve always known that India was the crown jewel of the British Empire, “a symbol of Britain’s overseas power” for other colonial cultures to see, but after reading chapter 17 to 20 of Passage, I came to see it as a site of British anxieties as well, particularly in their attitudes towards the white European woman. All the hullabaloo made after Adela was ‘assaulted’, particularly the lack of rationality used in dealing with the situation (the extinguishing of the “lamp of reason” in place of “emotion”, the use of the phrase “women and children” with growing hysteria etc), suggest to me that the British were conscious of their women as signifiers of a greater domestic culture.
This is how my logic follows: children are the future of the nation --> women care for the children --> British customs and values are transmitted from a mother to a child --> women are therefore seen as guardians of British domestic culture and the future of that heritage --> the protection of women is thus paramount to maintain this great culture. Since the native has, to a majority of the British, become a site of corruption and debauchery (indeed, there are many snide throwaway remarks made about Mohammedans and their 4 wives), the white European female must then be kept away from the vile beasts lest they be infected by native impurity. The heavy emphasis placed on white female virtue objectifies the female because she has become more of a national emblem than a fellow human being. We see how the treatment of Adela reveals this—“their kindness was incredible, but it was her position, not her character, that moved them.” This symbolic position is made more demeaning because it is a symbol which confers importance to the bearer only for a little while—“The wife of a small railway official...with her abundant figure and masses of corngold hair, she symbolized all that is worth fighting and dying for; more permanent a symbol, perhaps, than poor Adela...”
I wonder if the vehicle status of colonial women does not then mirror the status of the colonized women in some sense. Levine mentions the traditional practice of sati or “suttee” as she terms it, where the wife of a deceased Hindu was compelled to die upon his funeral pyre “in recognition of his centrality to her existence”. Not seen as an individual of her own right, she is but a signifier of the male-centred system, a blank slate on which Patriarchy inscribes whatever it wishes.
Different culture, same condition.

friezes and spirits

“She and Ronny would look minto the club like this every evening, then drive home to dress; they would see the Lesleys and the Callandars and the Turtons and the Burtons, and invite them and be invited by them, while the true India slid by unnoticed. Colour would remain…—and movement would remain…But the force that lies behind colour and movement would escape her even more effectually than it did now. She would see India always as a frieze, never as a spirit”

I would like to use this quote, taken from pg 43 of the Penguin edition, as the focus of my post. Throughout the novel I found Adela an intriguing character, and her repeated desires to look beyond the unseeing stereotypes perceived by other Anglo-Indians (as named in the quote) seemed, at first, an attempt to more positively represent the relationship between Empire and its Indian subjects.

However, I find myself questioning now if Adela’s attitude towards India is a counterpoint to the prevailing one expressed by such men as Ronny (“We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly”), or if they are merely two sides of the same coin. For all her desire to see the “real’ India and her apparent interest in meeting Indian people, she assents to Fielding’s observation that “The first time I saw you, you were wanting to see India, not Indians” (245). Her desire to see the “spirit” behind the “frieze” of colour of movement too can be read in colonial, essentialising; while the frieze suggests a superficial and static apprehension of one’s surroundings, the desire for an essential and transcendental ’’spirit’ takes one away from direct experience and subsumes it beneath the search for a general and totalising essence.

Thus, while Ronny and his compatriots have essentialised India into an absence that is to be ‘avoided’ as far as possible and is spoken about only in utilitarian, or otherwise derogatory terms, Adela seeks an exoticism in India marked by its difference from the Empire and, and finds it best answered by the cold beauty of a moonrise reflected in the mirror (She isn’t really happy most other times, not even when she gets taken around ‘real’ Indian caves by the ‘real’ Indians Azia and co). For all her interest in native customs and fair treatment of Indians and so forth, Adela, it seems, cannot help but perpetuate the imperial gaze that she wants to hard to avoid.

What, then, is one to do if both interest and disinterest in the reality of India can be equally read as colonialist and oppressive? What sort of attitude is there left for a foreigner – an Anglo India – to take? To me, Forster’s novel complicates the easy binary of self and exotic other, perhaps by suggesting an impossibility of perceiving the world otherwise.

Lynnette

Fractured Identity and the Road to Partition

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

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

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

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

The "real India"

Adela’s quest for the “real India” is interesting because it brings us to the question: what is India? Is there a real India? As Levine states, India is not a single country but a collection of states differing in languages, religions, and customs. The notion of “India” then exists only as an ideological construct, as a result of the British rule. Colonialism brings centralization to India, but also seeks to contain the overwhelming-ness of India i.e. by having a central rule, India can be posited in a non-threatening space, and even of familiarity (resembling the environment left behind in Britain); in addition, the land is affixed to a point, a name, “India”. There is the mistaken (though convenient) perception that one Indian represents all Indians, as Ronny remarks, “Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pins to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar-stud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to details; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race.” (71) Or the idea that one Indian represents the whole of India, as seen in Adela’s behavior towards Aziz. It’s also funny to note how the British women ask Adela if she wants to meet one or two Indians, to get a sense of what India is like, as though the Indians belonged to a circus show, or as though one or two Indians could possibly represent India.

It’s hard to talk about India without merely scratching the surface or simply digressing! But the point I would like to make is that India seems to be of such complex nature, that the only way for the British colonizers to talk about India (and rule India), was to generalize, based on some assumptions, and to give India some sort of singular quality, not “a hundred Indias – whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one” (13). However, this construction of India also crushes the possibility of seeing India as a multilayered country of different cultures and meaning, and even suggests the need to "cleanse" India. This notion of one India ironically conveyed in the way Aziz describes the city: “The roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India. He felt caught in their meshes.” (14)

Yet, doesn't the Marabar Caves, left untouched by the British, pose a threat to any attempt to contain India into a single entity? Hmmm...

A passage to India

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

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

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

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

The Unbearable Triteness of Boum and Other Problems

A Passage to India fills me with ambivalence - similar to my ambivalence over Kipling's Kim, and it is notable that twenty years separate them and my ambivalence does not wane (though admittedly twenty years is but a short span in history, literary or otherwise). Indeed, Forster is sympathetic towards the natives, indeed the white administration is portrayed far worse than the locals, but indeed it is nevertheless still a white man's sympathy. If there is a 'hero' in this polyphonic text, it is Fielding. Generalisations (on the part of the seemingly objective narrator, laying aside the generalisations made by characters whose viewpoints are incorporated into the narration) about India and Indians are made sweepingly even as Aziz points out "there is no such person in existence as the general Indian' (XXX, 232) - when Fielding reali[ses] "the profundity of the gulf that divided him from them. They always do something disappointing," his point is constantly being proven by the irrationalities and cruelties of every Indian character, no matter how likeable. In contrast, the generalisations too made about Westerners in India are often disproved by Fielding and to an extent Adela, the only characters in the book who always follow the path of truth without prompting. The capper is Ralph Moore, who descends during an Indian holy festival and directs the native Aziz to the uncanny image of the Rajah, prompting Aziz to "[feel] that his companion was not so much a visitor as a guide" (XXXVI, 274) - even if Aziz had declared him an "Oriental" (XXXVI, 272), it is still a white man who performs this ultimate messianic act. It struck me as a hypocrisy of sorts, the hypocrisy - conscious or otherwise? - of an English intellectual who can quite rightly lambaste the white administration but can too seem not to think it presumptuous to declare "there is something hostile in [Indian] soil" (11) and just about conclude with a white messiah. Dr. Koh's Ashis Nandy quote actually helped to quell my ire here; "all representations of India are ultimately autobiographical," and I tried to remind myself so too is Forster's. Even if his Indians indeed "always do something disappointing" and "there is something hostile in that soil," "a hundred Indias…whisp[er] outside beneath the indifferent moon" and the thought that "India seem[s] one"(I, 8) is merely illusion, whether for his Indians or him.

And yet, still ambivalence, for though "a hundred Indias…whisper" - "boum, it amounts to the same." (XXIII, 180) What am I to think of Mrs Moore's existentialist crisis? In Part III, we perhaps come to see that "boum" is hardly a problem for India as it is for Mrs Moore and Adela, for "it amounts to the same" is celebrated: "they loved all men, the whole universe…to melt into the universal warmth." (XXXIII, 249) Could it be a sign of the irreconcilability of the Eastern and Western mind, that the Caves, as the sky, say "no, not there" (XXXVII, 282) in "boum," so that Mrs Moore in her proclaimed Orientalness can "know" (XXIX, 228) but as inevitably a Westerner cannot cope with? The Western mind that "hope[s]" Shri Krishna will "[come] in some other song" where the Indian mind cannot "[understand the] question [of whether he comes in some other song]" and accepts that "he neglects to come," (VII, 66) that "God is not born yet - that will occur at midnight - but He has also been born centuries ago, nor can He ever be born." (XXXIII, 247) But then, if "Boum, it amounts to the same," what of the fact that the "hundred Indias" are not the same, and Sri Krishna is of the Hindu and Aziz is Moslem? Do Forster's contradictions have a point, or is he too struggling with India and "boum?" So for now, more ambivalence. I look forward to discussion, and while there are several other issues that seized my interest greatly, I'll save them for next week's blog post, just in case. One last point, to raise my dear Levine (whom, I have too noticed, seems oddly significantly less polemic in "Britain in India" than in "Ruling an Empire"), "Britain in India" illustrates that the India of which Forster writes was subject to a great many tensions, and often violent action. In Passage, I see little of chronicled widespread movement, and instead a strong focus on a singular and relatively trivial matter, that even when the community is moved to action, it is an easily subdued affair. Even the violence during Mohurram is all but elided, and defused with comedy. "It amounts to the same," Auerbach's (relatively) "random moment," (552) or something else altogether (such as lingering colonial sentiment, which I hesitate to suggest)? I cannot presume Forster's intentions, but I struggle to judge if I consider it a feature or a flaw.

And a clarification on Levine (er, outside of my two legitimate passages): contrary to what I fear might be popular opinion, I don't have a problem with her content in "Ruling an Empire" - there is not a lot she says that I don't agree with to one extent or another. What I have a problem with is that either 1. she takes it for granted that I would agree with everything she says, or 2. she is desperate to convince me that I should agree with everything she says. If it is 1, I take offence that she presumes me, the audience, so presumptously (as Dr. Koh conjectured in class), if it is 2, I am aghast at how blatantly she goes about her convincing, that I can see so clearly that what is intended to be read as fact is a desperately argued argument. It's just sloppy. Of course every "objective" historical article is really a subjective persuasive argument, but I consider it the hallmark of a successful(ly masquerading) historian to be able to couch the latter as the former. But you may also consider me a history prude, and it is only one person's opinion.

Levine, Forster and Ashis Nandy

Having done one reading by Levine last week and concurrently reading “A Passage to India” had an effect on how I read the Levine reading this week, for many things struck me at different points in the reading. For one, I felt like there was a noticeable change in Levine’s tone in this reading. In class last week, we were debating whether Levine was too pronounced in her disdain for the Brits. I did notice that disdain and it didn’t bother me then but, the lack of it in this reading, that overt disdain was surprising for me. However, the essay was nonetheless still enlightening for me because I have always read about how the British treated their colonial subjects generally but not what specifically India meant to them, for them. Without explicitly stating it so, Levine pointed out for me how the Brits’ decisions regarding India were manipulative, strategic, unscrupulous and hypocritical. Perhaps what bothered the person who blogged about Levine’s overt disdain last week, was how even when Levine mentioned the good plans that the Brits carried out, she quickly undercut it by mentioning the flaws within those plans—not giving them credit where they deserve it? The thought alone no more counts?

Whatever her intent was in always swiftly undercutting the Brits’ “good plans”, the article on the whole made one very important point or posed this one question for me--- did the Brits know their Indians? This was what connected Levine’s article for me to Forster’s novel. The reforms that the Brits undertook, though not completely useless or failures, demonstrate that the Brits were selective about who made up their India when it came to culture- the Brahmins. Looking out for “good” culture, the Brahmins who naturally practiced a different lifestyle from other Indians who had those “typically Indian behaviours or ideas”, would indeed appeal to the Brits’ elitist senses. So they actually did know their Indians, just that it was a particular class. Just like Adela who “in her ignorance, she regarded him(Aziz) as ‘India’, and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate, and that no one is India”. Just like Ronny who adopted what the Callendars and Turtons preached about the Indians because they “had been not one year in the country but twenty and whose instincts were superhuman”.

This is where I am compelled to agree that Ashis Nandy was spot-on when she(he?) wrote those wise words that “All representations of India are ultimately autobiographical”. Levine highlighted how the wives of the Brits by coming to India resulted in certain areas of India “resembling more and more the environment left behind in Britain”, a.k.a home. Mr Fielding in a similar train of thought muses how the increasing influx of their women, “made life on the home pattern yearly more possible”. This importing of their culture while refusing the Indians’ own, this keen desire to recreate a mini-Britain on Indian soil, this wanting to feel at home yet averting away from all that is Indian and remaining in their Clubs amongst their tennis and tea would indeed result in a certain representation of India that exudes dissatisfaction- because that will be their experience. Another person, another set of expectations, another type of experience. I think representation of anything becomes autobiographical. Yupyup.

- Shiva

In Difference

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

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

Within the community:

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

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

Other ideas of difference:

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

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

Why Forsterites are Forsterites...

Before this website, I had no idea there was such a thing as a "Forsterite"...

http://musicandmeaning.com/forster/why-tribute.html

It was interesting though! This post in particular:

E. M. Forster's A Room with a View saved me from a life of lonely bitterness. I had fears that seriously attaching myself to someone would somehow make me less.
One evening in college for no rational reason, I was kissed -- and returned the kiss -- of a young man I didn't know very well, on a hillside overlooking the town below, as Lucy had done in A Room with A View. The kiss was interrupted and I intentionally avoided him because I really didn't know what to do. As the elder Mr. Emerson would have stated, "I got into a muddle."
As some very awkward time passed, I convinced myself that I was not in love with this young man and that I should separate myself from him and my family, and travel come the end of the school year (I had even bought the ticket as Lucy had). I was planning a long car trip and wanted a story to listen to; I randomly bought A Room with a View on audio tape.
As I drove home from college, I was frightened by how much I found myself in the story. Listening to the elder Mr. Emerson scolding Lucy for deceiving herself was the most intimate connection I had ever had with a book -- he was scolding me. The result is that the young man who kissed me is now planning wedding vows with me and we intend to include Mr. Emerson's speech to Lucy in the wedding.
I have read the book over and over, as well as many of Forster's other works. I have come to appreciate his writing beyond my own personal revelation. But I will always be in debt to E. M. Forster.

Jessica
Shelton, Washington, USA
March 2004

Do any of you have similar reactions to Passage? Anyone feeling particularly like Adela, suffused in the darkness of the Marabar Caves? :D