Critical aesthetics

Fanon’s article, which centralizes on the issue of violence and how violence is both a purifying and a destructive force, is not only contained within the physical exertion of violence by the colonialists against the colonized, but can be applied to an aestheticizing of violence in Modernism itself. By ‘aestheticizing of violence’, I am referring to how modernists, by ‘forcing’ the colonized Other into a fixed and essentialized framework, reduces the heterogeneity and pluralism of the Other; I see this reduction as an act of violence – the colonialist has the power to represent the Other according to what he thinks/perceives/imagines the Other to be, even if it may be a simplified understanding or representation of the Other. In other words, as Said says, “Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient” (882).

Forster, I feel, is guilty of putting India and the ‘natives’ into an Orientalist framework, a framework that associates the Orient with all the qualities on the more inferior side of the binary. While the West is seen as efficient, logical and rational, India is seen as disorganized, illogical and spiritual. If we take as our example the first chapter of PI, we can see this in more detail. In this chapter, the description of India is one that is chaotic and messy: “houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life” (5). In contrast, the Civil Station is “sensibly planned…bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles” (6). Surely, right from the start of the novel, Forster has already neatly categorized India and the West into opposing sides of the binary.

Even if Forster decides for his novel the choice of India as his subject matter, versus other colonial novelists who might have rigidly only focused on the West, Forster colludes with colonial representations of the Orient as the exotic Other. Rather than being seen as rational and logical, the ‘natives’ are seen as doing “not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct.” India becomes a “muddle…a frustration of reason and form” (270). Indeed, the word ‘muddle’ is repeatedly used in describing India; the effect of this is not only to emphasize the distance between the Occident and the Orient but that there is no definite word to describe the ‘chaos’ of India. In fact, ‘muddle’ becomes the signifier for India, whether it is used to describe the ‘muddle’ at the Marabar Caves, whether Adela sees a snake or stick from the train or whether a ghost or an animal caused the car accident.

In the third part of the novel, although one can see Forster as a novelist who appreciates the religious festivities of India, I posit that this view is compromised by the fact that Forster seems to be an observer rather than active participant. In other words, Indian religious festivals are put on display for Forster’s Western readers to consume. “Seeing India…was only a form of ruling India” (291-292) as Aziz remarks. By observing the Indian religious festival, Forster is also putting India and its ‘native’ participants under surveillance, and by extension, if I may bring in Foucault, surveillance is a form of power. This power is one that the Western ethnocentric observer cum anthropologist has over the observed. And it is this power that allows him/her to enact violence onto his/her subject matter, by imposing a system of binary classification that can only reduce the subject matter. So it is for Forster.

All these examples show that Forster has assigned an Orientalist framework to India. By doing so, Forster enacts violence onto his subject matter – India. Ultimately, all the heterogeneities and pluralities of India are repressed and contained within a binaric classification. What is equally important here is that not only does Forster contain India within existing colonial dominant categories, he also greatly simplifies India by decontextualizing it and not taking into account the ‘native’ attempts at resistance. So, for example, although Gandhi is a major political leader in Indian nationalism, he is written out of PI. Forster as Western artist, thus has the power and knowledge to decide which aspect of India is to be focused on and which parts should be duly silenced. Ultimately, Forster is representing India in PI to his readers at home in Britain. As such, India cannot be anything else than exotic. Certainly, India cannot be represented in PI as an upcoming nationalist force. The essentialized and timeless view the Britons had of India does no justice to the actual political history of India. In fact, this erasure and forgetting of India’s nationalist history in PI, is a form of violence enacted onto Forster’s subject matter.