Portrait of the Artist in India

A Passage to India fascinated me with its numerous references, both veiled and overt, to the figure of the artist producing art in both British and Indian contexts. This echoes, I feel, Forster’s own position as an artist trying to write the unknowable, subjective human consciousness – and more than that, the alien human - into his art. At the same time, he raises the question of the voice of the native artist: is there such a voice, as the Western artist understands the term?

In this way I guess you could see this novel as speaking in counterpoint to Gikandi’s rather damning account of the artistic interaction between West and East. Passage shows the complexity of this process; or rather, the struggle that Forster – bearing in mind his deeply humanistic (“only connect”) bent – faced in trying to connect, or create a literary passage, as it were, to India.

On the one hand, Forster seems to be saying that in this age of empire and modernity when contact with the East is inevitable, it is pointless and in fact ossifying to keep up the pretence of clearly demarcated boundaries between pure Western art and the influence of the East. A clear example of this is the faintly ludicrous affair of staging Cousin Kate with the British sweating it out manfully in order to keep the “windows…barred, lest the servants should see their memsahibs acting” (17, Penguin edition).

However, this doesn’t mean that Forster is all for placing India (in every sense of the word as a semiotic and artistic cipher) on an equal pedestal as the West; through his descriptions of India/ns vs the West (an observation: Forster tends to like to set up East-West comparisons in his expository sections, as in this passage that I found very poetic, notwithstanding: “In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but here the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful”), the overwhelming impression one gets is that Indian art is still inferior to Western because it is formless; formless in the sense that Forster’s India is depicted as so mercurial and volatile – as in Aziz’s quick change of moods, the many faces of the Marabar Caves – and ultimately shapeless. And to Forster’s European mind, form is the measure of aestheticism – to quote Fielding as he leaves India: “He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty?” (250) In fact, to continue the earlier quote comparing Europe and India: “Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them."

Yet one can say that India appears formless to Forster because it eludes his grasp. Just as Indian society cannot be reduced to the colonizer’s classifying gaze (as Levine discusses), Forster cannot truly understand the mindset of the Indian artist and Indian art, even when these make use of European elements. I am thinking here of transmutation, of the native breaking down and appropriating European symbols for their own use, as when Mrs Moore’s name is transmuted into the chant and cause of Esmiss Esmoor, or the Indians’ raucous celebration of “God si Love”. Subversively, this breaks the form of European-ness and reshapes it according to Indian form, and in so doing Othering it to the Western mind.

More than that, ‘native’ Indian art resists the understanding of the Western mind. Godbole’s song of the milkmaid (as Xinwei has pointed out) and Aziz’s Persian poetry at the end of the novel can be read as examples of the Indian artist’s voice, evading Western comprehension. The deeper metaphysical implications of incomprehensibility are evident in the “ou-boum” echo of the caves: frightening, even shocking the Western mind out of its comfort zone. (Did anyone else see a similarity between “ou-boum” and Kurtz’s cryptic “the horror, the horror” in Heart of Darkness?)

As a closing thought on Forster’s quandary of how to deal with the Other in art, Godbole’s song also brought to mind Forster’s posthumously-published novel Maurice. In that novel, the protagonist makes a similar plea of “Come!” to the night; and since it is set in Forster’s artistic comfort zone (in terms of country and class), he is able to tie the novel’s ends together neatly – Maurice’s lover comes, and he is able to give the artist’s gift of a (somewhat) happy ending to the couple. Western artifice triumphs.

In Passage, however, Godbole says, “I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come.” (68) And indeed the mystery of the heart of the book remains – Forster has to end the book on an uneasy note: ne’er East nor West shall meet in unity, “no, not yet..no, not there.”