A Postcolonial Study of

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Dr. Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati

Assistant Professor at Islamic Azad University
Loaded
Literature

• Edward Said rightly contends that literature cannot be

politically innocent.
• E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India is loaded with
colonialist ideology of superiority and presents India,
Indians and their culture as lesser and inferior.
Inherent Biases and Prejudices toward Indians
• In A Passage to India, the
British officials in India
invariably considered and treated
Indians as stereotypes.
• Forster has represented India
and Indians from the colonialist
perspective and has used the
stereotypes constructed by
Western Orientalists about
Indians to contain them and to
perpetuate the empire.
 Colonizer’s Point of View
• The opening chapter of the novel prepares the reader
towards the portrayal of India and Indians as lesser and
inferior “Other.”
• The choice of words to describe the imaginary Indian
town, Chandrapore, and its climate, its landscape and its
people, is derogatory and humiliating. This conveys the
idea that the writer belongs to the colonialists, who look
down upon India and its people and have no love or
sympathy for them.
Colonizer’s
Point of View

• Forster’s portrayal of Aziz and the Indians is from the

perspective of a colonialist, synecdochal and reductive.
• Forster does not say anything about the spicy Indian
cuisine or the celebrated hospitality of the East. The hooka
gives out the smell of cow dung, as does the Indian bazaar,
which Aziz passes through.
Setting

• The river Ganges deposits rubbish freely in the vicinity

of the town. The streets of the town are “mean”, the
temples are ineffective.
• The town is devoid of any work of art, in the form of
painting or carving. The town is summed up as an
embodiment of excrescence.
Setting

• The Indian hot weather is never forgotten. By May, a

barrier of fire falls across India and the sea. Whereas the
British novelists and poets celebrate the beauty of their
countryside, here, the narrator laments that India is the
country of “fields, fields, then hills, jungle, hills and more
fields”.
 Setting

• The narrator in the novel describes India as an eternal

jungle infested with rats, bats, wasps and jackals without
any discrimination of home or forest.
The Indian landscape is described as poor, trees are said to
have a poor quality. The English people are presented as
calm at the time of crisis, while the Indians are shown
raving about impotently. British India is portrayed as an
example of reason and orderliness, while the native India
is irrational and superstitious.
 Setting
• The dawn of India brings in its wake no miracles, but
failure and disappointment. It is more than that. It is
described as failure of the virtue in the celestial fount. The
sun rises devoid of any splendor. India is only a horrid,
stuffy place. The sun of India is treacherous; the month of
April spreads lust like canker. In contrast, a Pakistani
writer Zulfiqar Ghose in preface to The Murder of Aziz
declares the Indian landscape to be the most beautiful
landscape in the world. At the sight of picnic, the presence
of elephant attracts villagers and “naked babies”.
 Setting

• The Indian soil is “horrible”. It is unpredictable,

unreliable and treacherous. The gate of the Muslim
mosque is ruined. Its courtyard is paved with broken slabs.
The Indians are portrayed as suffering from the habit of
exaggeration.
• The towns of “blasted” India are the malaise of men, who
cannot find their way home. India in the eyes of Forster is
not a promise but only an appeal, indirectly justifying the
Raj.
Indian Women
• Forster, instead of sympathetically
illustrating the Indian values and
culture, celebrating the spirit of
sacrifice and devotion for the family,
shown by the Indian women, shows
the fate of Indian women worse than
men. The wife of Hamidullah is in
purdha. She cannot take her dinner
before it is taken by men. She
believes that women have no possible
life and existence without marriage
and men. The narrator describes the
fate of the Indian women as mere
wedlock and motherhood.
Indian Women
• Mrs. Turton describes the Indian
ladies as if they were
commodities. Some Indian lady is
described only as a “shorter lady”
and the other one is called the
“taller lady”. She hardly treats
them like living individuals, with
their respective personalities and
identities, “All the Indian ladies,
were uncertain, cowering,
recovering, giggling, making tiny
gestures of atonement or despair”.
Lazy
Animals

• The Indians are portrayed as lazy, with parasitic

tendencies. Latif has never done a stroke of work; he lives
off the generosity of Hamidullah. His wife lives
somewhere else in similar circumstances. Latif hardly
visits her.
Irresponsible
Non-Humans

• The Raj officials invariably describe Indians as incapable

of responsibility. The picnic arrangements are described as
“odd”, the purdha carriage is made fun of as “comic”, the
Indians are shown not familiar with the idea of traveling
light, a pet word with Fielding. On top of this confusion,
the Indian cook is shown making tea in the lavatory. Mrs.
Moor makes her comment, “a strange place to make tea.
 Dr. Aziz

• Aziz is presented as a typical Asiatic, as invented by

Western Orientalists, a mimic man. He believes that his
social link with a white sahib can make him a complete
man.
• The Indians are shown obsessed with the past, “their
departed greatness”. Major Callender is in the habit of
degrading and humiliating Dr. Aziz, Mrs. Callender and her
friend take the tonga of Aziz without even bothering to talk
to him.
• Aziz is described only as a little Indian.
 Dr. Aziz
• The Indians are portrayed by Forster as a race who seek
or invent grievance. Aziz is shown as savoring his
unhappiness. “He had breathed for an instant the mortal air
that surrounds Orientals and all men”.
• Dr. Aziz wrenches off his golden collar stud to supply the
same to Fielding. In spite of the mimicry and imitation on
the part of educated Indians; they are still not accepted as
fit and suitable to dine at an English man’s table. The
British are shown especially hating the Indians with
modern ideas.
 Dr. Aziz
• Dr. Aziz is constructed as a man, who has assimilated the
Western culture to the extent, that he has developed an
Orientalist vision, leading to self-pity and self-hatred. To
escape from the possible embarrassment, he invites Miss
Quested and Mrs. Moor at the Marabar caves. Dr. Aziz is
presented as an immature person who invites his guests to
the Marabar caves, without having ever seen or visited
himself that place beforehand. Ronny calls Dr. Aziz as the
spoilt westernized type, in other words, a mimic man.
Mimicry and
Assimilation

• Chapter two ends with the declaration that Indians are not
allowed into Chandrapore club, even the educated ones, in
spite of their mimicry and complete assimilation of
imperial culture.
 Mimicry
and
Assimilation

• Ronny points out the mimicry among the Indians, a direct

result of imperialism. The Indians have mimicked the
manners, the life style and the dress code to the extent, that
Ronny does not regard them as Indians. They flash their
pince-nez, European shoes and costumes. “European
costumes had lighted like leprosy. Few had yielded entirely,
but none are untouched”.
Homi Bhabha

• The entire postcolonial literature exhibits mixed feelings

towards the inevitable dichotomy that has been brought out in
this novel. Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry,
ambivalence and in-betweenness lay emphasis on the aspect of
the colonial other.
• Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable
other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but
not quite. (Bhabha, 2001: 381)
 Dichotomy

• The distance and division between Anglo-India and the

India of the Indians is emphasized by the fact that windows
are shut to prevent the Indian servants from looking at their
mem-sahibs, while they act in the musical Cousin Kate.
The objective behind this narrative is to contain India and
Indians.
• The cruelty of the British towards Indians is revealed by
the remarks of an ex-British nurse, “the kindest thing one
can do to a native is to let him die”.
Orientalist
Construction

• Ronny’s description of the Indians is reductive and

synecdochal, as discussed by Said, a repetition of Orientalist
construction of stereotype. Ronny is unhappy that the educated
Indians no more cringe in front of the Raj officials. Said
describes British officials like Ronny as a young English man
sent to India who would belong to a class whose national
dominance over each and every Indian, was absolute.
 Stereotype: Race
• The Indians, as a community, are represented by Forster,
as the people, who don’t care about their commitments,
another stereotype. Hindus are described as slack,
unpunctual and without any notion of sanitation. Said
refers to the use of this stereotype for the Hindus in the
imperial narratives, “the Hindu is inherently untruthful and
lacks moral courage”.
• The Indians are portrayed as ashamed of themselves and
of their culture. This reflects the impact of imperial culture
upon the native culture and identity. Dr. Aziz is also
portrayed as ashamed of his house, which he regards as a
shanty. It is infested with black flies.
 Stereotype: Race
• The narrator paints the Indians as indifferent to morals
and individual responsibility. The bedroom of Aziz is
squalid, the people there are busy in intrigues and gossip
and their discontentment as shallow. The minds of the
Indians are said to be inferior and rough. Dr. Aziz, an
educated Indian, instead of cleaning his house is shown
only grumbling. His house is a place of squalor and ugly
talk. The floors are strewn with fragments of cane and nuts,
spotted with ink, the pictures crooked upon the dirty walls
without a punkah. His friends are described as third-rate
people.
Stereotype:
Race

• The ability of the Indians to fabricate and invent stories,

which do not exist, is another construction of the
Orientalists. It is maintained that the Indians don’t bother to
verify the fact and can invent a snake out of a stick to
create a sensation. The Oriental fool Aziz, cannot see the
difference between hospitality and intimacy.
 Stereotype: Race
• McBryde, the British police officer, has an Orientalist
doctrine about the Indians. All natives who live south of
latitude 30 are criminals at heart. The psychology of the
people, McBryde tells Fielding, is different in India. The
collector declares India to be a “poisonous country” and its
people as jackals.
• The Indians are called as niggers and nothing is too bad
for them. For one alleged crime against a white woman, the
ruling white community wants the whole of India to crawl
up to the caves. The Indians ought to be spat at, they need
to be ground into dust.
 Politics

• Forster shows that educated Indians like Dr. Aziz would

avoid politics at all costs. This is what the empire wanted.
Forster also wanted to cultivate the politics of the empire.
Fielding represents his point of view, “England holds India
for her good”, an echo of the construction of Kipling,
“White man’s burden”. Haq, Aziz and others admit their
inadequacy and inferiority at all levels. This is meant to
justify the presence of the British in India forever and
forever.
 The Ugly Colonized
• Everything associated with India is bad and ugly; April is
a month of horrors. Indian sun, instead of having any
beauty and glory, is sinister. Aziz, under the influence of
colonial ideology, does not regard his late wife as beautiful.
• The Indian children are shown like monkeys. The Indians
are represented as dirty, ugly people, who are associated
with smell, tobacco and the sound of spitting. Their lack of
etiquette is frightful. They put their melons in their fez,
guavas in their towels. The description is ironically
summed up as, “the celebrated Oriental confusion”.