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