By portraying India as hostile and unappealing, India repels and disgusts the reader. It is difficult to find praiseworthy descriptions of India, and the novel thus fosters a desire to distance oneself from the physical India. This distancing is compounded by unfavourable comparisons of India to Europe. “…and Fielding often attempted analogies between this peninsula and that other, smaller and more exquisitely shaped, that stretches into the classic waters of the Mediterranean” (65). Reversing the metaphor Forster used previously, English rule settles everything. The Indian city can do little, only feeble outbursts of beauty. But when the English choose, glory can run into the Chandrapore economy or a benediction such as a Bridge Party is manufactured. The English can do this because they are so strong and enormous. “The sun never sets on the British Empire” and the English draw strength from this fact. The size is formed by the bent over forms of its subjected lands and peoples. While such an interpretation is directly opposed to Forster’s message, he lays the foundation for such an interpretation with his physical descriptions and analogies.
Of course, this is a small phrase and such elaboration may seem ludicrous. However, this phrase is repeated in sentiment throughout the novel. If the English are perceived as proper and the norm, the Indians, who are not English, must be improper and odd. This is a further reproduction of the “other” and is, unfortunately, supported in many places. Regarding Aziz, Forster writes, “He too generalized from his disappointments – it is difficult for members of a subject race to do otherwise” (9). There is nothing wrong in the admission that Aziz is a member of a subject race, for that is truth. The English are portrayed throughout the novel as the dominators. Emphasizing Aziz’s membership with the subject group sets him as “other” to the dominating group of the readership. If Aziz is “other” than his concerns are not our concerns. Forster constantly compromises identification with Aziz through unfavourable comparisons and descriptions. Aziz is the “comparatively simple mind” (80) to Adela’s “well-equipped mind” (150). Aziz deserves his woes - “Trouble after trouble encountered him, because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tries to keep men in compartments” (140). Aziz is emotion to the British logic. Aziz is “other” to the English in the novel and becomes “other” to an Anglicized reader. Individually, the comparisons may be innocent, but taken as a whole, Aziz is made “other.” The character that, for Forster, represents the voice of India is alienated from the reader.
Aziz’s alienation and degradation is symptomatic of the alienation and degradation all Indians face in the novel, on both levels of plot and the level of reader/author discourse. Indians are physically weak in the novel. “Round they ran, weedy and knock-kneed – the local physique was wretched…” (59). Even the most educated of the Indians have “inferior and rough” intellects (114). They are incompetent and ridiculous at work, like “gardeners who were screaming at the birds” (74). With repeated descriptions of Indians, the reader wonders if colonialism should exist, if only to protect the average Indian from his own ignorance. After all, “There is no stay in your native. He blazes up over a minor point, and has nothing left for the crisis” (252).
Forster also resorts to colonialism’s dehumanization of subjected races. The Indians are often compared with animals. “[A]nd a crowd of dependents were swarming over the seats of the carriage like monkeys” (141). However, sometimes the comparison to monkeys is too good for the subjects. “Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed. Nor are the lower animals of England concerned about England…”(123). “Most of the inhabitants” are no better then the “lower animals of England” is the implication. The sheer amount of such references, the sheer volume of such dehumanization of the subject, the amount of colonial influence that pervades this critique of colonialism makes the Anglo-Indians’ unwanted rulership of India appear natural and necessary. Forster, despite his liberal humanism, has created an “other” so pitiable and incapable that he provides a justification for colonialism in an attack on colonialism.
The lens of Forster’s criticism reflects Forster’s own inability to overcome the gulf created by colonialism between “other” and self. The alienation of India as land and as people from England as land and people within the novel undermines the criticism, for it increases the attitudes towards the “other” which colonialism is founded upon. The realization of Forster’s limitations is necessary and paradoxically provides hope. Forster concludes in A Passage to India that East and West are irreconcilable, far too alien to understand and accept the other. The rift between East and West, English and Indian, Muslim and Hindu, self and “other,” exists only so long as we, like Forster, support and require it.
Works Cited
E.M. Forster. , A Passage to India. Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984.
