A Passage to Multiplicity: Forster and (Colonial) Reality:

Forster’s novel was indeed an intruiging and lovely read for me; the arrest of Dr. Aziz and his subsequent trial reminded me greatly of Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird: similar issues of racial prejudice and social and ethnic tensions are probed in these two novels. What was intriguing for me in the novel was Forster’s positioning of “India” as the centre of a social and cultural nexus foregrounding the condition of multiplicity that very often proves refractory to any classification and codification. Forster reminds us early on that the entity “India” is in all actuality “a hundred Indias” (12); and later on, Aziz reminds Adela that “[n]othing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing” (160). Levine’s chapter on British rule in India also reminds us that India “was not a single country or entity… [and there] was no single Indian language or religion” (61). As against the colonizer’s need to categorize India for the sake of efficient administration and to impose a hegemonic language and value-system on the natives, (with all its, following Foucault, concomitant issues of power and subordination), Forster’s novel shows up the hypocrisy of this very discourse of the colonial administrators by demonstrating their shocking lack of empathy towards the natives, borne out through their artificial generalization of the “native condition” that obviate the need for genuine understanding and indeed, responsibility for the colonized.

Indeed, what Forster’s novel depicts is nothing less than a whole assembly of, to use Louis Althusser’s term, ideological state apparatuses (i.e. colonial administration, railways, the court, the school) that seek to clamp down and impose a form on the multiplicity of India that seeks to resist this violence as such. Levine’s chapter thus delineates several colonial implementations that get subverted simple because they “failed to take into account” (72) the deep divisions and multiplicities that pervade “Indian” society and identity/identities. Forster’s description of the untouchable who pulls the punkah in the courthouse thus achieves significance: the facticity of the almost naked body of the Indian proves “to society how little its categories impress” (241) nature that refuses to be codified. Franco Moretti, in his book Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998) makes the intriguing claim that metaphorical language increases in the European novel’s description of the “unknown”, or the Other because they “simultaneously express the unknown” (47) through an unexpected semantic association and also “contain it” (47) through codifying otherness in familiar linguistic territory. Read in this light, Mrs. Moore’s experience in the Marabar Caves where even “poetry” (165) as the most intensely metaphorical of Western literary genre is reduced to utter incoherence betokens this ultimate failure of European language to thematize and give shape to an Indian reality that nonetheless forcefully intrudes into the colonial consciousness.