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