Convergences in Fanon’s and Forster’s anti-colonial sentiments

Although both Forster and Fanon were thinkers from distinctive cultural backgrounds and drastically different socio-historical contexts, their anti-colonialist sentiments with regard to the relations between the colonizers and the colonized seem to converge.

(Forster was writing from an empowered position of a British colonial in the 1920s, a time when the British hold over India (although challenged) was still flourishing. On the other hand, Fanon (as a mixed “native” with African roots, from the French colony of Martinique) wrote his polemic in the 1960s as a disempowered colonized subject reacting to the turbulent process of global de-colonization and the then on-going violent Algerian struggle for national independence from French colonial rule.)

Fanon’s understanding of the inherently violent nature of relations between the colonizer and the colonized can be compared with Forster’s exploration of the possibility of a friendship between the British colonizers and the Indian colonized in A Passage to India.

Fanon argues that the relationship between the colonist and colonized is defined by violence, emphasizing the necessarily violent nature of decolonization, where the national liberation of the colonized from the Manichean colonial world cannot be achieved through a “rational confrontation of viewpoints” or any forms of “compromise”, but only through a total revolution driven by “absolute violence.” Fanon’s aggressive call to arms is evident when he proclaims that “the work of the colonized is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist. […] For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.” The violence expressed by the colonized in retaliation towards the colonist is warranted because colonization is a military enterprise in which “direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny and contained by rifle butts and napalm.” In retaliation to the regime of colonial violence which destroyed the pre-existing social fabric of the colonized country, the eradication of the colonial world has to be “unconditional, absolute, total and seamless.” Nothing short of an absolute and revolutionary demolition of the colonial superstructure will do.

Fanon’s call for the complete destruction of colonialism is echoed in Forster’s novel, which suggests that an English-Indian friendship is only possible when the process of decolonization is complete and India is liberated from the clutches of British colonial rule. The mutual violence that characterizes the relationship between the colonist and the colonized is evident in Forster’s novel. The colonial administrator Ronny emphasizes the need to employ force in the governance of India, asserting that India is not a drawing room and the English are not in India to be pleasant, because “[the English] have something more important to do.” I interpreted “something more important” to mean the “holding of this wretched country by force.” Fanon’s point about the metaphorical violence that the colonist inflicts upon the colonized through the dehumanization of the colonized subject is also evident in how Ronny regards the colonized as what Fanon terms the “hysterical masses, blank faces and shapeless bodies”-- objectified faceless masses without any individuality. This is most evident in the scene in which he “dropped in” on the tea party that Aziz and Professor Godbole invite Miss Quested and Mrs Moore to. Although both Aziz and Godbole address Ronny deferentially, Ronny systematically ignores them because the natives are to be neither seen nor heard. As the narrator wryly puts it, the relationship that Ronny has with the Indians “is an official one.” As private individuals, he always “forgets them.” Forster’s novel also highlights how the physical and metaphorical violence directed by the British provokes a similarly violent reaction from the Indians. Aziz’s bitter call for the complete demolition of the colonial enterprise is militaristic:

“Down with the English anyhow. […] if it is fifty five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea”

Similarly, Forster’s novel also demonstrates Fanon’s point about the irrational and violent retaliation from the colonized. Fanon argues that “the colonized is dominated but not domesticated. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and jumps on him. The muscles of the colonized are always tensed and ready to change his role from the hunted game to that of the hunter.” This is evident in how Aziz and the Indian community became “aggressive” after Aziz’s victory in the courtroom. The Indians plotted to “develop an offensive on the British”, and “tried to do so by discovering new grievances and wrongs, many of which had no existence. The narrator attributes this spurt of irrational violence as a natural corollary of the “usual disillusion that attends warfare” (between the colonizers and the colonized).

Forster’s novel also concurs with Fanon’s argument that it is not possible for an Englishman and an Indian to be friends in the context of British colonialism, due to the fundamental assumptions of racial inequality that the colonial enterprise is premised on. Although the initial friendship between Fielding and Aziz seems to epitomize Forster’s utopian vision of liberal humanism (they are apparently able to transcend racial prejudices and treat each other with respect and good will), Forster soon reveals their friendship to be unsustainable in the face of the harsh realities and inequalities endemic to colonialism. The friendship falls apart after Aziz is accused of attempting to rape Adela, and their estrangement is exacerbated by the external social circumstances and cultural prejudices perpetuated by the binaristic Manichean worldview that governs colonialism. Although there is mutual admiration and respect, their own respective communities pull them apart through mutual stereotyping. The end of the novel illustrates Fanon’s argument that a true friendship can only be established on grounds of egalitarianism and a thorough demolition of the inequity of colonialism. Although Aziz and Fielding desire friendship, the horses that they were riding took divergent paths, while the gloomy landscape of India symbolically rejects the possibility of a friendship before decolonization.