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?