Summary
Novelist whose A Passage to India Edward Said reads in Culture and Imperialism both in Chapter Two — Aziz’s trial as a “fantasy” compromising British power with impartial justice — and at the opening of Chapter Three, as the liberal European’s encounter with India on common, disputed cultural terrain (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.102 / printed p.75; PDF p.227-228 / printed p.200-201).
Details
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Forster, Conrad, Malraux and T. E. Lawrence take narrative from the triumphalist experience of imperialism into the extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality, and corrosive irony that Said identifies as hallmarks of Modernism (PDF p.215 / printed p.188).
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In A Passage to India it is Forster’s great achievement to show with remarkable precision (and discomfort) how the moral drama of contemporary Indian mysticism and nationalism — Godbole and Aziz — unfolds against the older clash between the British and Mogul empires (PDF p.215-216 / printed p.188-189).
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Forster is too scrupulous an observer to leave India unrepresented: the novel returns to the habitual domestic resolution of marriage and property, yet Fielding and Aziz ride together and remain apart (PDF p.227-228 / printed p.200-201).
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Fielding’s inherent opposition to British rule cannot be put in political or philosophical terms; he makes only local objections to local abuses (PDF p.228 / printed p.201).
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In Chapter Three, I’s completion, Forster is evasive and more patronizing than Kipling: his India is so affectionately personal and so remorselessly metaphysical that his view of Indians as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain is not politically very serious, or even respectful, and his committee of notables passage dismisses nationalism as wire-pulling and fear (PDF p.231 / printed p.204).
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How a resisting nationalism can be represented by a sympathetic British writer is a problem Forster does not explicitly take on; Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal (1926), two years after A Passage to India, studies it through misrepresentation (PDF p.233 / printed p.206).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, A Passage to India, Modernism, Imperialism