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