Categories and labels

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

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

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

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

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