A passage to India

The text’s treatment of the character of Ronny seems ambivalent. On the one hand, it satirizes his character as being an unthinking colonial administrator who simply apes the prevailing racial prejudices of the time. This is evident in his status as an Anglo Indian who exhibits stereotypical bigotry towards the colonized. However, the text also seems to avoid falling into the trap of reducing Ronny into the stereotype of the overbearing and evil colonial master by sympathetically attributing his prejudiced racial attitudes to be a detrimental result of colonial social conditioning and the overwhelming political pressures exerted on him in his role as a colonial administrator. (My argument is limited to the representation of Ronny, because it seems to me that Forster’s text does fall back into essentializing Indians in some parts of the novel).

As a stereotypical Anglo-Indian, Ronny possesses an arrogant sense of British superiority and perpetuates a series of received “second-hand”, reductive and stereotypical generalizations about Indians that ignore their heterogeneity, complexity and humanity. The text mocks the way in which Ronny imitates the views of previous colonial administrators that he looks up to, simply by virtue of their length of service in India, which he perceives as a factor that lends authority and wisdom to their colonial capacity to subjugate an inferior race. Ronny’s mindless conformity and his uncritical acceptance of received wisdom about British superiority is parodied in the passage where he argues with his (initially) kind and inclusive mother Mrs. Moore about what she perceives as his “improper treatment of natives”. Although Ronny projects a false “macho” bravado in expressing his convictions about the innately depraved natures of Indians, the text reveals that he is nothing but a mere parrot who quotes verbatim second-hand opinions, phrases and arguments (that he is not even sure about) from older colonial officials. Ronny seems to be a naïve and unquestioning servant of the British Empire, who accepts received knowledge unquestioning without challenging the moral validity of the colonial enterprise and the racial assumptions that it is premised upon. He buys into the whole colonizing rhetoric/grand narrative of “justice and keeping peace” and believes fervently that British rule is essential for the “good” of India. He is condescending when he stresses the childlike qualities of Indians, citing their innate irresponsibility, volatility, and propensities of violence (amongst other inferior flaws) that in his opinion, justifies the need for British rule. For instance, Ronny believes that both the Muslim and Hindu Indians are innately belligerent, and cites their nature to engage in violent religious antagonism as a justification for British rule. The constant rivalry between the two religious groups “proved that the British was necessary to India; there would certainly have been bloodshed without them. His voice grew complacent again; he was here not to be pleasant but to keep the peace.” Ronny also engages in cultural essentialism when he stereotypes Indians as possessing “inattention to detail, a fundamental slackness that reveals the race.” However, the text reveals his assumption to be flawed because Dr. Aziz had only exhibited such slackness in his attire as a result of his self-sacrificial act of kindness in salvaging Fielding’s wardrobe predicament at the expense of his own convenience and tidiness.

However, the text does not present Ronny in a completely unsympathetic light. It does not discount Ronny’s humanity by presenting to us a Ronny “before the fall”, as his mother reminisces about a pre-lapsarian time when Ronny possessed a “young man’s humanitarianism.” He used to possess a greater sense of cultural sensitivity towards music and the arts (he played the viola and had better taste in plays), and he used to possess unique opinions and morally sound judgments that were untainted, un-circumscribed or unconstrained by social pressures or “convention”. Thus, the text argues that Ronny’s bigotry arises neither from inherent evil, ill-breeding or a deliberate malicious intent to give offence, but rather due to the dehumanizing power of his position that has since corrupted him. Ronny’s racial worldview is stressed by the text to be the overwhelmingly normative attitude that colonial administrators were inculcated and pressured to conform to. In his confrontation with his mother (who demands he treats Indians with more humanity and respect), he rails against the political backlash he would face from his own Anglo-Indian community if he “behaved pleasantly” to the Indians. It is in his own beneficial self-interest and self-preservation if he conformed rather than rebelled against the status quo. The allure of social status and political power has corrupted him, as evident in how he pronounces his “predicament” in a “self-satisfied lilt”:

“Oh, look here, he broke out, rather pathetically, what do you and Adela want me to do? Go against my class, against all the people I respect and admire out here? Lose such power as I have for doing good in this country because my behavior isn’t pleasant? You neither of you understand what work is. […] I am not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental literary man. I’m just a servant of the government […]”