Materiality and Mystification in "A Passage to India"
Author(s): Benita Parry
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue: II (Spring,
1998), pp. 174-194
Published by: Duke University Press
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Materiality and Mystification
in A Passage to India
BENITA PARRY
Discussion on the imperial project in British literary consciousness has customarily
been confined to the colonial novel, a category of convenience covering a
range of genres and qualities. More recently work disclosing the material and
psychic dissemination of empire in the metropolis has included detecting its
symbolic, reconfigured or displaced presence in canonical and popular writing.1
The preferred procedure of critics is to trace how colonial tropes and rhetorics
were brought by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers to their dramatizations
of dominant gender and class conditions within the imperial homeland.
Such work which draws attention to the larger if blurred horizons of the English
novel has also introduced into the discussion the problems associated with the
use of analogical strategies in criticism: by reiterating the fiction's unsecured
metaphoric linkages as constituting social knowledge about the ideological
coalescence of gender, race and class, these critics conflate the sites and temporalities
of different oppressions.2 In this way, such criticism collapses the distinctiveness
of the discourses and topoi that represent those oppressions.3
Theorists of the novel, however, who address the transcoding between
historical processes and textual practices, and perceive the effects of empire in
literature as mutable, locate these signs in form rather than figurative recastings.
Edward Said, who discerns the assertion of narrative authority as characterizing
the British novel during the age of imperial consolidation connects the emergence
of literary modernism with changes in metropolitan apprehensions of empire.
For Said the turn from "the triumphalist experience of imperialism ... into the
extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality and corrosive
irony ... which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in
Western society and culture, includes a response to the external pressures on
culture from the imperium" (Culture 227). In a different argument which all the
same intersects with Said's understanding of the correspondence, Fredric
Jameson maintains that the modernist crisis in the novel was intensified by
imperialism, the stylistic ingenuity of Conrad's novels providing "key
articulations of the increased fragmentation of individual consciousness in an age
of growing commodification and brutal colonization" (Political 17).4
My thanks to Derek Attridge, Laura Chrisman, John Fletcher, and Neil Lazarus for comments on a draft, and to Michael Sprinker for
his unshakable skepticism about my "too tender" reading of the novel.
See, for instance, Coombes, MacKenzie, McClintock, Pieterse, and Said.
2 As demonstrated in, for example, Ferguson, Fraiman, Heller, Lineham, and Meyer.
3 Stepan has argued that because interactive metaphors shape our perceptions and actions while at the same time neglecting or
suppressing information that does not fit the similarity, "they tend to lose their metaphoric nature and be taken literally" (52).
4 For an extensive and thoughtful examination of Said and Jameson in this context, see Chrisman.
BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
The relationships of historical moment to novelistic practice observed by Said
and Jameson suggest that if we are to decipher the always fluctuating and historically
inflected marks of empire on the body of British literature, then colonial
fictions should be regarded as a subset of the English novel, and inscriptions of
empire's overt and cryptic presence in this literature should be in turn studied as
constituting the same area of enquiry. Jameson, who is singular in defining imperialism
as the dynamic of capitalism proper and therefore in recognizing imperialism
as coextensive with the globalism of late colonialism, has proposed that the
"traces of imperialism" in modernist writing, must not be sought "in obvious
places, in content, or in representation." Rather they are to be found in the invention
of "forms that inscribe a new sense of the absent global colonial system
on the very syntax of poetic language itself" (Modernism 18). Thus when enlarging
on the aesthetic response to a universal imperial order, in which "internal
national or metropolitan daily life is absolutely sundered from this other world
henceforth in thrall to it," he chooses a domestic novel, Howards End, in order to
show how the representation of "inner or metropolitan space itself," becomes a
substitute for "an unrepresentable totality" (Modernism 17, 18).
A schema which restricts imperialism's signs in literature to "the stylistic or
linguistic peculiarities" particular to modernism and asserts that the specific
literature of imperialism is not modernist in any formal sense (Modernism 5), by
definition excludes those modernist novels like Heart of Darkness and Nostromo
which do negotiate "the representational dilemma" of the imperialist order and
refuse to map an itinerary of empire's ordered progress.5 How then should we
place a proto-modernist fiction in which another and distant world is manifestly
present and the disjoined spheres are brought into uneasy proximity, but which
also, pace Said, undermines imperial grandiloquence and offers a disenchanted
perspective on empire, registers a dispersed consciousness, and by reflecting
ironically and critically on its own project, manifests a waning of narrative
power?
The reputation of A Passage to India as conventional in form, language, and attested
value has inhibited discussion on an emergent modernism that is inseparable
from the novel's failure to reach the destination intimated in its title.6 Said
has remarked that for him the most interesting thing about the book is the use of
India "to represent material that according to the canons of the novel form cannot
in fact be represented-vastness, incomprehensible creeds, secret motions,
histories and social forms" (Culture 214). This judicious comment recognizes that
Forster's innovations were induced by an attempt to render India legible within
western fictional modes. It could be extended to observe that in the process, A
Passage to India construes the sub-continent's material world, cultural forms, and
systems of thought as resistant to discursive appropriation by its conquerors:
"How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have
tried, but they remain in exile" (Passage 148). This meditation serves to alienate
This is a proposition I advance in "Narrating Imperialism: Nostromo's Dystopia."
6
Against this trend, Armstrong contests charges of epistemological and narrative naivete, while the volume A Passage to India,
edited by Davies and Wood, seeks to reexamine the novel in the light of contemporary critical paradigms.
175
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
the Raj's belligerent claim to discursive power over the sub-continent, and it discloses
the inevitable frustration of the novel's own narrative ambition.
Neither stylistically nor syntactically does A Passage to India display that
"constitutive sense of creation through rupture and crisis" which has been described
as the vocation of an aesthetic modernism (Calinescu 92). All the same, a
fiction which moves between the mundane and the arcane, gives voice to the
contingency of the material world, and is haunted by the transcendent, exists at
the limits of realist writing, the affinities with modernism evident in the prominence
of its anti-referential registers. On the one hand, as an architecturally composed
text exhibiting that "vital harmony" Forster believed essential to works of
art-described by him as "the only objects in the material universe to possess internal
order" (Two 93)-the book augurs both the pleasures afforded by an elegant
design and the reassurance of lucidity. On the other, the perplexity with
which the novel reconfigures the distant, alien complex of cultures that is its ostensible
subject, signals an anxiety about the impasse of representation. Thus the
aesthetic closure, once hailed by critics as instigated by a rage for order that issued
in a coherent and integrated text, can be seen as a formal resolution to the
historical conflicts, cultural chasms, social dissension, cognitive uncertainties,
and experiential enigmas elaborated by a structurally, intellectually, and
discursively fractured fiction.
By the time Forster wrote his novel, the romantic India of the eighteenthcentury
western imagination was dead and gone, buried under a library of
subsequent books itemizing the defects of a chaotic and degenerate sub-continent
mired in irrational beliefs and incapable of self-determination (see Parry,
Delusions). Recent studies have emphasized the contradictions and tensions
within British Indian texts (see Suleri, Moore-Gilbert). But while such discursive
instabilities are apparent to contemporary critics, the writings were delivered in a
declarative mode to the literate colonized as a preemptive reply to dissent, and
received in their own time by a metropolitan audience as a warrant for British
rule. If this literature included mythologizing a land of secret delights, hidden
truths, statically organic village communities, and intrepid "martial races," it also
construed a degraded population ruled by despots and given to thuggee, sati,
child marriage, zenanas, idolatry, temple prostitution, male debauchery and effeminacy,
female concupiscence, insensate violence, and pathetic contentment. At
stake was the creation and ordering of India's difference as deviations from
western norms of historical development, aesthetics, civil society, and sexuality
(see Metcalf).
Despite its emergence from within a literary tradition already sated with prior
configurations, Forster's fiction eschews both "the Scented East of tradition" and
the corrupt land of a febrile British imagination (233). Such a proposition does
not advance truth claims for an invention which remains wedded to the sensibilities
of the Mediterranean, never abandons its moorings in western structures of
feeling, and reiterates rumors of a recondite "India." Indeed the use of India as
an icon of the metaphysical derives from what has been described as a
"scholarship ... replete with preferences for the speculative, religious-minded,
idealist and/or Orientalist kind" (Ahmad 277). Hence alongside its many
176
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
material and sentient Indias, which act to estrange the time-honored topos of a
mysterious land, the novel also construes an obfuscated realm where the secular
is scanted, and in which India's long traditions of mathematics, science and
technology, history, linguistics, and jurisprudence have no place.
Since its publication in 1924, A Passage to India has been variously received in
the west as an existential meditation and a liberal criticism of politics and life in
British India. Its crafted thematic composition and polysemous symbolic resonances
once prompted critics preoccupied with literature's animations of the
timeless to explain the book as mythopoeic and wholly detached from history;
while its performance of a temporally-situated social drama was cherished as a
humanist affirmation of the sanctity of human relationships egregiously violated
by colonialism. If the first construct is indifferent to the specificity of the novel's
moment, the other overestimates its grasp of colonialism's charged interactions
during that moment. More recently the fiction's place in the rhetoric of empire
has been examined, and the novel read as yet another exercise in Orientalism.
Consequently praise for A Passage to India as a poised and sympathetic account of
the sub-continent's landscape, history, and culture which Indian critics of older
generations had offered, has since been repudiated by their descendants as
"emanating from a colonized consciousness" (Pathak et al. 198, 199).
Prominent amongst new glosses is a particular interest in demonstrating that
the book's sexual and gender representations are implicated in colonialist discourses,
and are determinant in the novel's version of a colonial relationship.7 I
will be offering my own understanding of how gender and the erotic are disposed
within a larger cultural, geopolitical, and epistemological canvas-and one
on which, contra Joseph Bristow and unlike Forster's private memoir, sexual
desire is uncolored by fantasies of imperial domination.8 Meanwhile, I want to
remark that ingenious commentaries preoccupied with the sexualizing of race
and the racializing of sexuality contract an orchestration of dissonant themes to a
single strain, by this overlooking that amongst the novel's many Indias is one
whose topography evades colonialism's physical invasion, and whose cognitive
modes elude incorporation within normative western explanatory systems. Were
a case for the novel's radicalism to be made, this would need to rest on the
recalcitrance of this "India," and not on its manifestly inadequate critique of a
colonial encounter.
See, for example, Sharpe, Silver, Suleri, Bhakshi, Lane, and Bristow. For Sharpe the racial significance of rape in the novel
requires that it be read "according to the narrative demands of the Mutiny reports," where "a discourse of rape" was used in
the management of anti-colonial rebellion (237-38). In Silver's view, the book's deployment of sexuality within a discourse of
power makes it possible to understand that to be rapable is "a social position" cutting across "biological and racial lines" (88).
Addressing the novel's attempt to reconfigure colonial sexuality into "a homoeroticization of race," Suleri argues that this
translation of an imperial erotic revises "the colonialist-as-heterosexual-paradigm," presenting instead an alternative colonial
model in which "the most urgent cross-cultural invitations occur between male and male, with racial difference serving as a
substitute for gender" (Rhetoric 139, 133). In more general terms, Bakshi has placed the fiction within a well-established
narrative mode of an Orientalism imbued with homoerotic desire, while Lane considers that Forster transposed the problem of
homosexuality onto race and colonialism, the shift in locale from England to colonial India alleviating his difficulty in writing
about same-sex relationships at home, and Bristow finds that for Forster "the desire for connection between colonial rulers and
subaltern peoples" is "indissociable from fantasies of dominative violence" ("Passage" 140).
8 Forster's shame at availing himself of sexual power over Indians is registered in his memoir, probably written in 1922. He was
at this time employed as Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, who in a gesture joining the abuse of his social
authority with the tolerance of a committed heterosexual for a friend's incomprehensible urges, procured servants of his court
to assuage Forster's lust, quaintly blamed by Forster on the heat. See the section "Kanaya," in The Hill of Devi. As Lane points
out, this memoir records Forster's disgust with those servicing his sexual needs; as evident is his self-disgust.
177
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
I.
The novel's cosmic reach and non-realist registers are inspired by an imagined
India whose infinite embrace offers vistas of a sphere more comprehensive than
the time-space world and intimates an ecumenical ethic admitting all animal,
vegetable, and mineral forms to its prospect. Such allusions to an atemporal,
ahistorical universe are underwritten by non-linear narrative movements which
interrupt the sequential recitation of quotidian events. Not only is the fiction's
itinerary spatial-from Mosque to Caves to Temple-but images recur in unrelated
situations: a wasp, flies, a stone, a pattern traced in the dust of Chandrapore
and repeated on the footholds of a distantly located rock in the Marabars;
marginal characters who make aleatory appearances at critical moments-Miss
Derek's providential arrivals, the presence of a young army officer on the maidan
and in the Club; and phrases which are echoed in unlike circumstances-the reiteration
of Godbole's petition to Krishna, his demurral of "Oh no," and the reprise
of invitations, both earthly and divine.
But as Forster noted elsewhere and with regret, a novel tells a story, and in
this aspect A Passage to India uses the language of realism to chronicle a tragicomedy
of cultural discord and political conflict, observing shifts within the fabric
of Indian societies and the power relationships of British India. Youths are
seen "training" (75); with Aziz's arrest, the sweepers stop work in protest, and
Muslim women, perceived by the Anglo-Indians as invisible, go on hunger
strike, inducing in the European community the fear that a "new spirit seemed
abroad, a rearrangement, which no one in the stern little band of whites could
explain" (218); a Hindu-Muslim entente is forged, and in the association between
Aziz, the descendent of the Moghuls who had fought the British invaders, and
Godbole, whose Mahratta ancestors had defended an independent Deccan
against the foreign onslaught, the novel alludes to the growth of an Indian
nationalism attracting protagonists who share different memories of armed
struggles against the British conquest.
A Passage to India, then, remains of interest for its evocations of a phase in the
Raj, registering the growing disaffection of a population increasingly disinclined
to collude in its own domination, and commenting on the demeaning effects
which complicity with their rulers had on India's hegemonized elite. But although
the indirections of its aversion to empire separate Forster's book from the
self-justifying contemporaneous "problem" novels which set out to account for
Indian discontent while reinstalling the British ideal of disinterested service, as a
novel of manners performed in a colonial context, A Passage to India now appears
circumscribed.9 The alternately gentle and irascible reprimands of Indian unreliability,
obsequiousness, and evasiveness, as well as the mimicry of Anglo-India's
ignorant beliefs and foolish self-regard, are dependent on sardonic reiterations
and parodies of the stereotypes and cliches that were the stuff of British writing
about India. Nor is the version of a colonial relationship played out in a low key
between British officials and members of an Indian middle class adequate to the
The foremost exponent was E.J. Thompson, whose A Farevell to India was at the time of its publication (irrelevantly) compared
to Forster's novel.
178
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
fraught transactions of an encounter which initially met with military resistance,
subsequently generated widespread and continuous insurgency from peasants
and laborers, and earned the militant opposition of both the educated and the
illiterate.?1
To observe the limits on the novel's heterodox version of life and politics in
the closing decades of the Raj is not to ignore that the novel also sabotages recurrent
themes in Anglo-Indian and British writings about India. These subversive
reworkings, which include ruining the notion of empire's functionaries as ethical
and altruistic Stoics, focus on Adela Quested's misprision of rape. In this event
where an Englishwoman already disquieted by India is infected by a nervous
community's fantasies of cultures charged with erotic intensities and dangers,
there still persists a heterosexual model of the colonial relationship which is
elsewhere displaced.1 To the Anglo-Indians, Miss Quested is the victim of the
infamous lust of Indian men; and in the story of her derangement, the Indian
landscape figures as a violent male principle-the rocks of the Marabar Hills
appearing to rise "abruptly, insanely," and her body pierced by the spines of
cactuses growing on the hillside (137). Much that is important to the
understanding of the novel has been written about the articulations of sexualities
in an imperial situation, and I will be returning to the many meanings adhering
to the circulation of homoerotic affect in the text. What concerns me at present is
another aspect of the fiction's sexual and gender politics as this intersects with an
ingrained political liberalism and deflects from an overt censure of the Raj.
Kenneth Burke has suggested that the social and political relationships which
the novel draws into its texture are expressible in terms of personal associations
dramatized either as sexual and filial bonds, or as friendships. Of these the only
one to be consummated across the colonial divide, and that ceremonially, is
between Aziz and Mrs. Moore. This nexus traverses generations and comes to
imitate the never-existing but idealized union of benign imperial motherland
with grateful colonial dependency fabricated by empire's ideologues. The figure
of this imagined parent-child symbiosis was Queen Victoria, Empress of India, of
whom Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali speak affectionately when lamenting the
impossibility of friendship with the chilly Anglo-Indians. Such an exemplary
imperial matriarch is incarnate in the elderly Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore has many
avatars in the novel: she is a tolerant but commonplace middle-class
Englishwoman well-disposed to the National Anthem and a banal West End play
performed at the Club; a sibyl and seer, and a spokesperson for an idea of empire
which unlike a Raj that rests on fear, would be based on "good will" (71). It is her
displeasure at the uncivil conduct of Anglo-Indians which is the occasion for the
fatuous narrative comment, "[o]ne touch of regret-not the canny substitute but
the true regret from the heart-would have made him [Ronny Heaslop] a
different man, and the British Empire a different institution" (70). Furthermore, a
10 On this history of insurgency, see the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, a selection of which appears in Guha and Spivak.
Silver's reading misconstrues Adela Quested's charge of rape as an act of resistance against the silencing of women and
Indians. It proceeds from conflating distinct and specific forms of oppression in the interest of appropriating all discourses of
discimination, as well as the counter-discourses these engender, to a feminist critique. Hence Silver privileges Quested's
exercise of female autonomy over Quested's exercise of white authority, a move which seriously distorts the fiction's exposure
of Anglo-Indian racialized sexual anxieties.
179
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
sentiment absurdly inappropriate to a colonial situation is, without benefit of
irony, ascribed to Aziz before he turns his back on British India and ceases to
conduct himself as a toady: "Mr. Fielding, no one can ever realize how much
kindness we Indians need.... Kindness, more kindness, and even after that more
kindness. I assure you it is the only hope" (128).
Mrs. Moore enters India through Mosque, passes into accidie in Caves; she is
redeemed by the enactment of universal salvation in Temple, buried in the Indian
Ocean, transmigrates into a demi-goddess, and bequeaths her benign powers to
her children, Stella and Ralph, whose presence moves the now disaffected Aziz
to "want to do kind actions all round and wipe out the wretched business of the
Marabar for ever" (312). Thus does a mother-figure of "good empire" permit the
staging of an act of formal reconciliation within the unreconciled and irreconcilable
conflicts of an imperial relationship. Perhaps a symbolic accord which simulates
the skeptically narrated ritual of universal harmony performed during the
Hindu Gokal Ashtami Festival is similarly calculated to invite disbelief, since it is
countermanded by the parting of Aziz and Fielding, for whom "no meetingplace"
exists in British India. Yet the gesture to a rapprochement effected within
the conflictual conditions of the Raj undermines an already attenuated criticism
of empire, its admonition of colonialism addressing the cruelties large and small
inflicted by Anglo-Indians, but omitting to summon either the western impulses
to colonialist dispossession or the ideology of imperial domination, for explication
and demystification. In this aspect, the silences in A Passage to India rehearse
the lacunae of British Indian texts, from which all traces of base interests-India
as a source of raw materials, cheap labor, markets and investment opportunities,
and India as a linchpin of Britain's wider imperial ambitions-were erased.
II.
The novel's dissident place within British writing about India does not reside in
its meager critique of a colonial situation, however, but in configuring India's
natural terrain and cognitive traditions as inimical to the British presence. When
discussing Georges Bataille's text on "the language of flowers," Pierre Macherey
explains that it served as
a starting point for his reflections on the natural logic of existence, which he terms
"the obscure intelligence of things." The principle behind this logic is a fundamental
clash of values governed by a polarity of above and below which testifies to "an
obscure decision on the part of the plant world." The decision is expressed in a sort
of pre-linguistic language: the language of "aspect," which exists prior to the
language of words, introduces "values that decide things." (118)
The notion of evaluations which are "the judgments of reality itself as it asserts,
primitively and immediately, its basic tendencies," is suggestive for reading the
semiotically saturated physical landscape of Forster's India as "a direct expression"
of "the truth of things" which exists "prior to symbolization" (Macherey
118). The eloquent stones, boulders, rocks, and caves of an awesome and ancient
180
BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
geological formation, the animate fields and ambulant hills, the inhospitable soil,
the importunities of a prominent inarticulate world, the creaturely power of the
sun, these speak a defiant material presence which is both a scandal to the invaders'
epistemological categories, and a threat to their boast of possessing India:
"The triumphant machine of civilization may suddenly hitch and be immobilized
into a car of stone, and at such moments the destiny of the English seems to resemble
their predecessors', who also entered the country with intent to refashion
it, but were in the end worked into its pattern and covered with its dust" (215).
As a novel which orbits around a space which is unrepresentable within its
perceptual boundaries, A Passage to India is impelled to obfuscate that of which it
cannot speak, a self-declared incomprehension that issues in fabrications of contradictory
Indias. Hence the evocation of India's pre-linguistic language of obduracy
towards the conquerors spoken by its physical structures must compete
with intimations of India as a civilization hospitable to the unseen; while its
fluency in the meta-linguistic could signify either an intelligence of things
obscure, or that which the novel is unable to render intelligible. In response to a
question about what had happened in the Caves, Forster indicated that India had
enabled his venture into the realms of the unfathomable:
My writing mind is ... a blur here-i.e. I will it to remain a blur, and to be uncertain,
as I am of many facts of daily life. This isn't a philosophy of aesthetics. It's a
particular trick I felt justified in trying because my theme was India. It
sprang straight from my subject matter. I wouldn't have attempted it in other
countries, which though they contain mysteries or muddles, manage to draw rings
round them. Without this trick I doubt whether I could have got the spiritual reverberation
going. I call it "trick": but "voluntary surrender to infection" better
expresses my state. (Letter to G. Lowes Dickinson, qtd. in Stallybrass 26)
It is therefore not accidental that disquiet about the limits of syntactic
language are explored on a fabricated Indian space that is simultaneously
rendered as palpable and emblematic. On approaching the Marabar Hills, "a new
quality occurred, a spiritual silence which invaded more senses than the ear ...
sounds did not echo or thoughts develop.... Everything seemed cut off at its root,
and therefore infected with illusion" (152). This sensory and intellectual
detachment from the empirical world is translated into the severing of words
from their referent:
What were these mounds-graves, breasts of the goddess Parvati? The villagers ...
gave both replies. Again, there was a confusion about a snake, which was never
cleared up. Miss Quested saw a thin, dark object ... and said, "A snake!" The
villagers agreed, and Aziz explained: yes, a black cobra.... But when she looked
though Ronny's field-glasses she found it wasn't a snake, but the withered and
twisted stump of a toddy-palm. So she said, "It isn't a snake." The villagers
contradicted her. She had put the word into their minds, and they refused to
abandon it.... Nothing was explained. (152-53)
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
On arriving at Caves, the narrative encounters meanings, sensations, and
events that escape exegesis in its available language. Their reputation "does not
depend upon human speech" (138), and their echo-"'Boum' is the sound as far
as the human alphabet can express it" (159)-is not the resound of any utterance
the fiction can identify. This untranslatable murmur deprives Mrs. Moore, accustomed
to "poor little talkative Christianity" (161), of a trust in language: "'Say,
say, say.... As if anything can be said.' ... in the twilight of the double vision a
spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found"
(205, 212). Thus a novel which cherishes the names of the marvelous places "that
had sometimes shone through men's speech," and which discerns in "the bilingual
rock of Girnar" the transformation through language of a physical object
into a cultural artifact, also contemplates things both benign and ominous which
cannot be spoken, or of which it cannot speak (214). When trying to communicate
the attraction Hinduism holds for Stella and Ralph Moore, the rationalist Fielding
confesses, "I can't explain, because it isn't in words at all" (313). In attempting to
render comprehensible the unexplained or inexplicable significance of the imitations,
impersonations, symbols, and images invoked during the all-embracing
Hindu festival of Gokal Ashtamti, the narrative admits its inability to transcribe
an event which cannot "be expressed in anything but itself" (285).
Such allusions to the aphonic must be distinguished from the book's many
hints of the supernatural, which reiterate a predilection for mysteries also evident
in Forster's other novels.'2 Perhaps we are invited to understand experiences of
the meta-linguistic as emanating from "the part of the mind that seldom speaks"
(111), and therefore as an existential condition: on undertaking to describe the
caves, Godbole retreats into silence, just as Aziz's mind had sometimes been silenced
by "a power he couldn't control" (92). On the other hand, the many and
diverse inscriptions of the unspoken and the inexpressible can also be read as
echoes of the "spiritual reverberation" induced by an India whose religious pursuits
and eloquent landscapes provoke intellectual doubt and promote noumenal
anxieties in the novel's western protagonists: Fielding, who is a "blank, frank
atheist" (254), muses that "[t]here is something in religion that may not be true,
but that has not yet been sung.... Something that the Hindus have perhaps
found" (274), while the Indian scene troubles both him and the logical Adela
Quested with rumors of things they did not know, and a universe they had
"missed or rejected" (272).
Forster's title is borrowed from Walt Whitman's visionary poem, "Passage to
India" (1871), and the contemplation of an esoteric India may have been further
influenced by his friend Edward Carpenter, who had known Whitman and
shared the poet's conviction in India's spiritual vocation.'3 But although Forster
does juxtapose a mystified to a material and historical India, he did not follow
1 The telepathic Mrs. Moore "knows" that the accident to the Nawab Bahadur's car was caused by an apparition, "[b]ut the idea
of a ghost scarcely passed her lips" (111); Adela hears what has not been spoken affirming Aziz's innocence (209); in the
interstices of a chant to Krishna, Aziz recognizes "the syllables of salvation that had sounded during his trial" (308); the
punkah-wallah is perceived as "a male fate, a winnower of souls" (221), and Ralph Moore is manifest as "a guide."
In an essay on Carpenter, Forster wrote: "As he had looked outside his own class for companionship, so he was obliged to look
outside his own race for wisdom" (Two 207). Bristow has remarked that "[A]lthough Whitman's 'Passage to India' has
frequently been mentioned in commentaries on A Passage to lIndia ... the dissident homosexual politics implied in this choice of
title have generally gone unrecognized (Effeminate 86).
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BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
the utopian writers in affirming India as the Wisdom-land of Carpenter's expectations,
or in designating it as that farthest destination "where mariner has not
yet dared to go" (Whitman 328). For when the novel invokes the quest after transcendence,
this is for its psychological truthfulness, rather than its arrival at
Truth, for the passion of its aspiration, and not its always deferred achievement:
the calls to Krishna or the Friend who never Comes; the longing for "the eternal
promise, the never-withdrawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness" (127);
the faith that confers grace on the believer during "the moment of its indwelling"
(282); the substitutions, imitations, scapegoats, and husks of the Gokal Ashtami
Festival, which are signs of "a passage not easy, not now, not here, not to be apprehended
except when it is unattainable" (309); the hope that will persist
"despite fulfillment" (299). If the novel transfigures the religious sensibility as
desire born of discontent, what it does not validate is the victory of "the human
spirit" in "ravish[ing] the unknown":
Books written afterwards say "Yes." But how, if there is such an event, can it be
remembereda fterwards?H ow can it be expressed in anything but itself? Not only
from the unbeliever are mysteries hid, but the adept himself cannot retain them. He
may think, if he chooses, that.he has been with God, but, as soon as he thinks it, it
becomes history, and falls under the rules of time. (285)
Such skepticism about India's access to gnosis registers an agnosticism that
abates the novel's modulated and questioning iterations of an Orientalism spellbound
by the fabled East.
III.
Amongst the many resonances of the title is a reference to cartography, and consequently
to the colonial topos of a voyage into unknown territory. About the
book's map of India's geography, we can ask: does A Passage to India reproduce
what John Barrell has described as the East's entry into the western European
imagination "as an unknown, empty space-empty of everything ... except its
appropriable resources, imaginative as well as material," its objects "covered
with decoration and imagery not understood and not thought worth understanding
discerned as "blank screens on which could be projected whatever it was that
the inhabitants of Europe, individually or collectively, wanted to displace, and to
represent as other to themselves"? (7-8). Is the major source of friction in the
novel, as Bristow argues, "the enduring contradiction between the thematics of
'friendship' ... and the sexual violence that we find at its centre, a form of violence
that does everything it can to sever East from West"? ("Passage" 147). Can
Forster's India be received as yet another textual act inflected by imperial and/or
sexual aggression, and reiterating as Said has written of Orientalism, the will "to
control, manipulate, even to incorporate what is manifestly a different (or alternative
and novel) world"? (Orientalism 12). Said was subsequently to ask "how
one can study other cultures and people from a libertarian, or a non-repressive
and non-manipulative perspective ... how knowledge that is non-dominative
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
and non-coercive ... [can] be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with
the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power"
("Orientalism" 15).
Despite misgivings about Forster's reified India, I want to suggest that the
novel approaches Indian forms of knowledge with uncertainty, without asserting
the authority of its representations, and unaccented by a will to enforce an ontological
schism.14 The book's triadic structure has been variously glossed as corresponding
to the Indian seasonal cycle (Cold Weather, Hot Weather, and
Monsoon), the movements of a musical score, the Hegelian dialectic of thesisantithesis-
synthesis, the recurrent process of birth, destruction, and re-birth
recited in Hindu mythology, and as metonyms of Muslim India, Anglo-India,
and Hindu India. In the reading I am proposing Mosque, Caves, and Temple are
perceived as figures of three Indian philosophical-religious systems. The
association of Mosque with Islam in India, and Temple with a particular
performance of Hindu devotions (bhakti), presents fewer problems than the
polysemous connotations of Caves. When the magistrate Mr. Das points out that
"[a]ll the Marabar caves are Jain" (225),15 he is disputing their official
identification as Buddhist, his disagreement having earlier been confirmed in the
narrative commentary which dissociates Caves from this tradition: "even
Buddha, who must have passed this way down to the Bo Tree of Gaya, shunned
a renunciation more complete than his own, and has left no legend of struggle or
victory in the Marabar" (138). If we take Das's designation seriously, then Caves,
although rejected by Buddhists, can be understood as inhabited by and
signifying the world-rejecting precepts of the Jain's non-deistic cosmology, its
uncompromising atheism and asceticism surpassing the austerities of Buddhism,
a related system also rooted in ancient India (Parry, Delusions).
Since the route of the novel's attempted journey becomes more arduous as it
moves from Islam through India's more speculative traditions, a puzzled version
of Hinduism's ecstatic spiritual observances is invoked, and the tenets of the
Jain's quietist stance are obliquely enunciated. If aligned with ontological goals
that are respectively daring and awesome, the monotheistic system of Islam necessarily
appears as limited: "'There is no God but God' doesn't carry us far
through the complexities of matter and spirit; it is only a game with words, really,
a religious pun, not a religious truth" (272). Instead Islam, by way of an elite
segment of the Muslim community, is manifest as a culture rather than a profound
creed. When its religious temperament does feature, it is in a mode transformed
through long residence in India, where its misshapen shrines appear as
"a strange outcome of the protests of Arabia" (293), its "symmetrical injunction
melts in the mild air," and mystical Sufi tendencies are privileged over theological
severities: just as the ragas of the Hindu Godbole invite a Krishna who always
1
Although Forster was not a scholar of Hindu philosophies, he was familiar with the myths, epics, and iconography of India's
varied cultures, and he found the dialectical style of Hindu thought congenial. On re-reading the Bhagavad-Gita in 1912 before
his first visit to India, Forster observed that he felt he had now got hold of the structure of its thought: "Its division of states
into Harmony Motion Inertia (Purity Passion Darkness)" (qtd. in Furbank 216).
1 A post-Vedic heterodoxy of the fifth Century B.C. but like Buddhism, with which it has historical and theoretical affinities,
rooted in the ancient metaphysics of Dravidian India.
184
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
fails to arrive, so do the adherents of Islam voice "our need for the Friend who
never comes yet is not entirely disproved" (119).16
Without asserting that the ontologies and theisms enunciated by the novel
should be read as authoritative expositions of Indian knowledge, I am suggesting
that the fiction, far from rendering India as epistemologically vacant, reconfigures
the sub-continent as a geographical space and social realm abundantly
occupied by diverse intellectual modes, cultural forms, and sensibilities. This
perception is not shared by critics who find that Forster's India is an empty space
and the symptom of an amorphous state of mind, its principal landmarks
Mosque, Caves, and Temple functioning primarily as cavities to contain western
perceptions of that which is missing from the East, its symbolic terrain a hollow
site which the narrative, parodying an act of rape, violently penetrates (Suleri,
"Geography"). Nor does it conform with the inference of Francesca Kazan's
rhetorical question: does not Forster in his ambitious task of representing the
Orient, also seek to control it by fixing it and rendering it mute?
When Forster is charged with representing India as null and void, Caves are
invariably offered in evidence. For Suleri the novel should be read "as an
allegory in which the category of 'Marabar Cave' roughly translates into the anus
of imperialism"-an infelicitous choice of imagery when conducting a discussion
of the novel's "engagement with and denial of a colonial homoerotic imperative"
(Rhetoric 132, 147). In Kazan's view Caves are a figure of absence and silence
which replicates the inscrutability of the East within the western structure of the
surrounding text; while Zakia Pathak, Saswata Sengupta, and Sharmila
Purkayastha, who contend that caves are described as without a history, jointly
undertake to disperse their "primordial miasma":
What we read into the representation of the caves is not the absence of history but
the suppression of history which marks the paranoid response of the Orientalists
to processes which they could not understand, since ... this knowledge was withheld
from them by the natives. "Primal," "dark," "fists and fingers,"
"unspeakable,"f earsomely advancing to the town with the sunset-these phrases
signal the fear and insecurity the imperialists experienced, confronted with what
they could not master; to reduce it to stasis was to contain that fear and hold that
threat at bay. (200)
That Caves are a symptom of what the novel is unable to comprehend intellectually,
accommodate within its preferred sensibility, or possess in its available
language, is abundantly inscribed in a fiction which adumbrates both the nonverbal
expression of a physical space and the doctrines of an exorbitantly
transcendental philosophy, circuitously, elliptically, and with perplexity. But as
the site of a cosmology incommensurable with positivism, humanism, or theism,
and as the most potent figure of an India which challenges the west with its
irreducible and insubordinate difference, the representation of Caves is neither
circumscribed by dread of a maleficent essence ("Nothing evil had been in the
cave" 159), nor is their "history" suppressed.
1 Dellamora has noted the coded homoerotic inflection which the word friend carried for Forster (159).
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
To accept Mrs. Moore's reception of Caves as a primordial miasma and the
dissolution of ethical meaning is to be deaf to the valences of the "Nothing" emanating
from Caves. Elsewhere the reiteration of negatives-no, not yet, never,
without, meager, mean, abased, ineffective, indifferent, renunciation, relinquish,
refuse-invokes a diversity of connotations reverberating themes elaborated by
the novel. In configurations of the Indian landscape, negatives mark a deviation
from English and Mediterranean scenes, and with this a disturbance of western
perceptions; when brought to events that do not happen, invitations that are neglected,
omissions which are social solecisms ("[I]t's nothing I've said ... I never
even spoke to him" is Ronny Heaslop's obtuse reassurance to a Fielding concerned
about Aziz's evident discomfiture in the company of his English guests
[94]) they register the poverty of colonial relationships. But with Caves, negatives
take on affirmative resonances whose import is anticipated by the circumlocutions
of the opening paragraph: "Except for the Marabar Caves ... the city of
Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.... There are no bathing steps on
the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no
river front ... In the bazaars there is no painting and scarcely any carving" (31).
Thus to learn that there are neither sculptures in the Marabar Caves nor ornamentation
(92), that they are not large and contain no stalactites, and that the
Brahmin Godbole necessarily refrains from describing the site of another beliefsystem
as "immensely holy" (92), is to be alerted to the possibility that negation
has alternative significations: "Nothing, nothing attaches to them.... Nothing is
inside them ... if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would
be added to the sum of good or evil" (138, 139).
In Burke's reading, the use of negatives in the novel is a "partly secular variant
of what we encounter in 'negative theology"' where God is described as
"incomprehensible, unbounded, unending, etc." (224). This understanding conforms
with the tenets embraced by Godbole for whom good and evil "are different,
as their names imply. But ... they are both of them aspects of my Lord. He is
present in the one, absent in the other.... Yet absence implies presence, absence is
not non-existence" (186). But it is the Jain tradition, which unlike Islam and
Hinduism has no sentient protagonists in the book, that has written its antique
Indian philosophy of renunciation over a material space already in possession of
a language without syntax and expressive of abnegation. As the incarnation of
Nothing doubly charged with semantic content, Caves engender the epigram
"Everything exists, nothing has value" (160), a gnomic phrase compressing the
Jain recognition of the physical world as abundantly corporeal and verifiable and
its assignment of merit to detachment from all things secular-a construction in
which nothing has value. This paradox is condensed in the mismatch between the
adamantine concreteness of the stone, rock, granite, boulder, and bald precipice
of a looming and grotesque land mass and the "internal perfection" of a cave's
sublime emptiness.17
Neither Godbole's nuanced understanding of negatives, nor the Jain version of
negation as a deliberated abrogation of the all too solid and degraded empirical
Godbole encounters the recalcitrance of stone during his religious observances when, in imitating God, he attempts and fails to
impel it to "that place where completeness can be found" (283).
186
BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
universe, is available to Mrs. Moore. After (mis)recognizing the voice of Cave as
speaking of nullity and (mis)translating the echo which she hears as "entirely
devoid of distinction" into a proclamation effacing discriminations, she subsides
into moral and psychic torpor: "Pathos, piety, courage-they exist, but are identical,
and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value" (158-60). To an
Englishwoman familiar with the landscape of "dearest Grasmere" everywhere
domesticated by human labor, a geological stratum that is "older than anything
in the world ... without the proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere
... bear[ing] no relation to anything dreamt or seen" intensifies her dislocation
within an epistemologically inscribed physical environment that infringes on her
expectations and escapes her comprehension (137).
Since Fielding, the only other English person present, is "unimpressed" by
Caves, the phantasmagoric experience known by Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore
appears as a gendered vulnerability to India's difference, manifest to them in different
registers as an assailant. A related but different event is restaged in Picnic
at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir's film of a novel by Joan Lindsay set in late nineteenth-
century Australia, where four European women-three of them virginal
school-girls, and one, a teacher possessed of a "masculine mind"-are mesmerized
into offering themselves up to the phallic rock of a land in which they are
colonizers and strangers. As with their disappearance, the catastrophic entry of
Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested into an untranslatable sphere is inseparable from
the cultural constraints on their capacity to confront the otherness of meanings
both immanent in and attached to India's material spaces and forms. That these
same restrictions are also apparent in a rhetoric at once convoluted, ambiguous
and opaque, is testimony to the novel's admission of its own incapacity to bring
this alien realm into representation.
IV.
In referring to those studies concerned with recuperating the novel's hitherto
hidden "sexual politics," I suggested that representations of gender and the
erotic should be understood as written across the multiply inscribed script of
Forster's India. This proviso is not unmindful of the extent to which homoeroticism
circulates within the text, inverting the contempt for an androgynous and
pederastic India prominent in British Indian writing (Sinha, Drucker, and Parry,
Delusions). The novel's overt homophilia is apparent in the presence of three
superb and marginal Indian male figures: the naked gatherer of water-chestnuts
who, as he listens to Godbole's song, parts his lips with delight, "disclosing his
scarlet tongue" (95); the splendidly-formed, physically perfect punkah-wallah,
viewed as a "beautiful naked god" (233); and the broad-shouldered, thinwaisted,
naked servitor officiating at the Gokal Ashtami Festival, exhibited as an
icon of "the Indian body again triumphant" (309).18 All who are of "low-birth"
and, unlike the loquacious elite Indians, have no lines to speak are offered as
18 See Bakshi on Carpenter's preoccupation with the nakedness of natives: "Repeatedly in the Ceylon section of From Adam's Peak
to Elephanta, the narrator dwells on the physique and nakedness of the natives.... Again, a yogi in Benares is approvingly
described as 'a rather fine-looking man' with 'nothing whatever on but some beads round his neck and the merest apology for
a loin-cloth"' (62).
187
NOVEL I SPRING 1998
sources of a voyeuristic excitation to be surveyed as captive objects of desire
without the expectation of a gaze returned. But although their muteness does
signify the exercise of a homoeroticized cultural power by the narrative's seeing
eye, the novel's language registers not violence but affect, and the silence
ascribed the figures has resonances other than the scopophiliac-to which I will
return.
Because the libidinal is woven into an intricate narrative web, a discourse in
the tradition of homosexual Orientalism is inseparable from the fiction's meditations
on friendships within colonial conditions. In what Suleri calls "the most
notoriously oblique homoerotic exchange in the literature of English India," a
multivalent transaction within a relationship overdetermined by colonialism is
staged when Aziz inserts his stud into Fielding's collar (Rhetoric 138).'9 If, as
Suleri maintains, this scene belongs with a discourse where "colonial sexuality"
is reconfigured into "a homoeroticization of race" (135), then it also meets with
other stagings of homosociality which impinge on both the novel's performance
of cross-cultural interactions, and its contemplation of other cultural modes. It is
noticeable that in a memoir published after his death, Forster recorded his reluctance
to use the sexual services available from Muslims in the princely state
where he was employed, because of their "general air of dirt and degradation"
(Hill 311). But fiction does not imitate life, and the Muslims in the novel are
gracious figures whose cultivated sociality is suffused by the homoerotic. The
accounts of easeful male associations to which Fielding is admitted, resonate the
courtly same-sex eroticism of the Arab-Persian-Islamic literary tradition and
fulfill a fantasy of unconcealed homosexual associations still forced into secrecy
in Britain (Drucker 81-82). At such gatherings, where guests recite the poetry of
the Muslim-Indian Ghalib alluding to intimacy amongst men, the homosocial
shades into the homoerotic. As certainly, intonations of homophilia pervade
Forster's wistful glances at his Muslim protagonists who accomplish "something
beautiful" when they stretch out their hands for food, or applaud a song. (250-
51) But in celebrating a society which accommodates homoerotic love, the novel,
which also observes the refined deportment of Aziz's wife and the Begum
Hamidullah, registers a romanticized appreciation of a cultural sensibility:
The banquet, though riotous, had been agreeable, and now the blessings of leisureunknown
to the West, which either works or idles-descended on the motley company.
Civilization strays about like a ghost here, revisiting the ruins of empire, and
is to be found not in great works of art or mighty deeds, but in the gestures wellbred
Indians make when they sit or lie down.... This restfulness of gesture-it is
the Peace that passeth Understanding, after all, it is the social equivalent of Yoga.
When the whirling of action ceases, it becomes visible, and reveals a civilization
which the West can disturb but will never acquire. (250-51)
1 For Bristow this transfer which represents Aziz's sexual potency and erotic power also represents his servility within an
exploitative imperial situation: "This incident assuredly points to the ambivalent manner in which homophile longing and
dreams of empire meet and part. Without doubt, Aziz's body provides the template for the highly conflicted desires
experienced by the European liberal author whose homoeroticism often must have felt uncomfortably close to the dominative
violence meted out by imperial rule" (Effeminate 87).
188
BENITAP ARRY I FORSTER'DSI SORIENTEIDN DIA
A similarly coded display of sensual desire situated in the context of a stranger's
bemused esteem for Indian cultural forms also marks the representation of the
Gokal Ashtami Festival. Although described as "[n]ot an orgy of the body," the
ceremonies are invoked in a scarcely veiled vocabulary soliciting the presence of
a homoerotic content (285). Amongst the celebrations of Krishna's birth, which
also include enactments of the merry and polymorphous God sporting with
milk-maidens, are "performances of great beauty in the private apartments of the
Rajah ... [who] owned a consecrated troupe of men and boys, whose duty it was
to dance various actions and meditations of his faith before him.... The Rajah and
his guests would then forget that this was a dramatic performance, and would
worship the actors" (299). But this yearning to discover an untroubled absorption
of homosexual love into religious devotions does not exhaust a narration which,
albeit from a distance of disbelief, also animates a hunger for the sacred.
Hence I suggest that the evocations of the homoerotic, as well as the heterosexual
disturbance assailing an Englishwoman, should be read as scenes within
the fiction's larger drama. This returns me to the further significance of the naked
and voiceless figures who, although the objects of western libidinal surveillance,
elude its narrative grasp. To the authors of a radical critique of the book's
complicity with Orientalist discourse, it is Godbole's silence when asked about
the caves which registers a refusal on the part of the colonized to impart
knowledge to their rulers, thereby constituting an instance of resistance (Pathak
et al.). As it turns out, this provocative contention is not sustainable, since on
other occasions a garrulous Godbole readily provides his European audience
with a detailed explanation of a song summoning Krishna's presence and presses
an exegesis about Hindu notions of good and evil on a distracted Fielding (96).
Whatever can be inferred from Godbole's withholding information about the site
of beliefs remote from his own, I would suggest that the import of silence within
the novel resides rather in the lowly Indians, whose aphonia alludes to their
habitation of a realm beyond the ken and the control of western knowledge, and
who join India's material being and cognitive traditions in resisting incorporation
into a western script.
V.
For Said, the novel's ending is "a paralyzed gesture of aesthetic powerlessness"
where "Forster notes and confirms the history behind a political conflict between
Dr. Aziz and Fielding-Britain's subjugation of India-and yet can neither recommend
decolonization nor continued colonization. 'No, not yet, not here' [sic]
is all Forster can muster by way of resolution" ("Representing" 223). As I read
the open-ended closing act, all the novel's reflections on social and perceptual
failure are rehearsed, but now there are gestures to a still deferred post-imperial
condition which temporally the novel has not the means to articulate-"No, not
yet"-and which in the space the fiction occupies, cannot be realized-"No, not
there" (316). For with the "Not yet" first spoken by Ralph Moore in response to
Aziz's lament that "the two nations cannot be friends" (306), and repeated in the
last lines of the book, the negatives pervading the novel's rhetoric come to
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NOVEL I SPRING 1998
intimate not only a philosophical category and the prevailing constraints on both
inter-cultural associations and displays of consummated same-sex intimacy, but a
time when the existential discontents, social divisions, cultural chasms, and
perceptual restraints which the novel configures will be superseded.20
This postponement is itself a utopian greeting to an always unrepresentable
future, and is positioned within a rhetoric of the gulf between illimitable desire
and the circumscriptions of existence: "[t]he revelation was over, but its effect
lasted, and its effect was to make men feel that the revelation had not yet come.
Hope existed despite fulfillment" (299); "a passage not easy, not now, not here,
not to be apprehended except when it is unattainable" (309). The reconciliations
and separations of the closing pages happen during the monsoon, named by
Aziz as "the time when all things are happy, young and old," and which the
novel bathes in a magical aura (306-07). At Aziz's meeting with Ralph Moore, the
rains "made a mist round their feet" (297), and when Aziz rides with Fielding,
"aware that they would meet no more" (310), "myriads of kisses" surround them
"as the earth drew water in" (313). But after Aziz has completed his conciliatory
letter to Adela Quested, "the mirror of the scenery was shattered" (314), and the
symbols of harmony give way to the chasms of the quotidian: "the scenery,
though it smiled, fell like a gravestone on any human hope" (315). As earth and
rock, temple, tank and palace, horses, birds, and carrion-the material and cultural
forms of an India resistant to British rule-intercede against a premature
concordance. "No, not yet.... No, not there" now signifies in a political as well a
cognitive register the impossibility of the journey promised by the novel and
withdrawn in the narration.
When Forster is relegated as a bloodless liberal, whose understanding of and
opposition to empire was circumscribed, or whose affection for the East is suspect
because it provided him with opportunities for sexual adventures, his
considerable distance from the prevalent ideological positions of his day is
occluded. For although his deviations were performed with discretion, his
transgressive sexuality at a time when homosexuality was officially outlawed
and publicly disapproved in Britain, his socialism in a period of bourgeois
hegemony, and his anti-colonialism in an age of residual imperial enthusiasm
converged in a stance, which if not radical was dissident21 It is often forgotten
that in 1935 Forster attended a meeting in Paris of the International Association
of Writers for the Defence of Culture organized by the Popular Front to unite
communists, socialists, and liberals in defense of "the cultural heritage." In
retrospect it is possible to be cynical about the conciliatory politics which the
Congress opportunistically advocated, and to observe that Forster would have
2 Lane contends that "the ending refuses to develop or curtail Aziz and Fielding's intimacy; geography intervenes, bringing
their contact to a provisional halt without irreparable damage. The novel's closing sentences foreground a drama about the
men's sexual intimacy and the abstract forces that keep them apart" (155). See also Bristow, who traces the novel's tension in
striving to realize homophile intimacy while acknowledging "how comradeship-between men and between nations-can
only come about with the end of empire" (Effeminate 86).
21 In "The Birth of an Empire" (1924), an account of a visit to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, Forster mocks the
rhetoric of "a high imperial vision" (Abinger 44-47); and in "The Challenge of our Times" (1946), he applauds the colonial
people kicking against their masters (Two).
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BENITA PARRY I FORSTER'S DISORIENTED INDIA
been quite at home in such a gathering. Yet his participation was surely an act of
political integrity by an untheoretical socialist demonstrating his opposition to
fascism and commitment to internationalism.
In his address to the Congress, Forster used the vocabulary of liberalismjustice,
culture, liberty, freedom-and conceded that the times demanded
another and more inclusive language which he could speak:
I know very well how limited, and how open to criticism, English freedom is. It is
race-bound and it's class-bound ... you may have guessed that I am not a
Communist, though perhaps I might be one if I was a younger and a braver man,
for in Communism I can see hope. It does many things which I think evil, but I
know that it intends good. (Abinger 62-63)
Forster's nonconformist dispositions enabled him to write a self-reflexive fiction
where the recourse to received themes and rhetorics is sublated in an engagement
with a colonial world as an agent of knowledge and an adversary to
imperial rule. The complex registers of a metropolitan novel, whose emergent
modernism is inseparable from its unreached narrative destination in a colonial
world, require that critics writing in a post-imperial era go beyond castigating its
vestiges of orientalism, whether sexually or culturally accented, and recognize
also the extent to which both the textual India of British writing and the empire
of British self-representation are disorientated.
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