Unraveling Misconceptions: A New Understanding of Em Forster’S a Passage to India

By Nirmala Sharma

Both India and E.M.Forster have recently been discovered, so to speak, by the Columbuses of Western popular culture, the makers of British films and television serials. Mrs. Sharmas interest in both these subjects is of much longer standing and is less interested in scenic details than in hard intellectual essences. She has written a thoughtful and a thought-provoking book about the author of A Passage to India, one which givers Forster full credit for his large-minded tolerance but is uncompromising in pointing out where that tolerance fails and what are the short-comings of the background which caused the failure.
Mrs. Sharmas book might well be subtitled The Limits of Liberalism, and she is especially illuminating when she traces the sources of this movement of nineteenth-century thought and demonstrates how E.M. Forster, both through his education and his family background, was liberalisms disciple and inheritor. She shows, moreover, how the rational bias of the nineteenth-century political and intellectual mind set kept Forster free of the usual English middle-class prejudices regarding the so-called inferior races and different cultures and how it armed him to oppose the emotionalism of the barely-disguised race-hatred displayed by most of the English who were ruling in India. Mrs. Sharma agrees that Forster deserves much of his reputation as the man who exposed British hypocrisy regarding India and the Indians, especially Muslim Indians.
At the same time she demonstrates how Forsters total allegiance to the liberal creed of rationalism blinds him to the whole world of emotionalism and thus renders almost the whole of Hindu India a muddle to him. Forster is himself not entirely unaware of this limitation. He is after all the man who was capable of mustering only Two Cheers for Democracy. But he leaves the impression that the failure to understand India and to make a unity of things Indian is due to the gross size and complexity of the object to be studied and the narrow capabilities of the general Western mind. No Westerner, Forster implies, could ever hope to comprehend all the facets, contradictions, paradoxes, and mysteries of the Sub-Continent.
Mrs. Sharma will have none of this. She is well read in English and American literature and can show how what was closed to Forster was perfectly open to such Westerners as John Donne and Walt Whitman. The fault, one begins to understand, is not with the West, but with Western liberalism and its obsessive fear of the irrational.
Such a fear may indeed be shown to characterize Forster not only as a social critic but also as an artist. For instance, one of the chapters of his own though provoking book, Aspects of the Novel, deals with what Forster calls a conflict between plot and character. Characters, he recognizes, when fully conceived, sometimes have a way of taking on a life of their own, so to speak, and insist on behaving otherwise than the author had intended in his rationally coherent, preconceived plot. Since the plot carries the intellectual substance of a Forster novel, he advises novice writers, the readers of Aspects of the Novel, to put down these irrational rebellions of his characters with a firm repressive hand, to make them do what they were intended to do. A different sort of writer, one who trusted the irrational which Forster so feared, might have decided that the rebellious character might be leading the author to a new truth, one which the emotionalism of art, a opposed to the rationalism of logic, was capable of discovering. But not Forster, and thus when, returning to A Passage to India, his Mrs. Moore begins to understand what Forster, with his liberal background has pre-decided it is beyond her capacity as a Westerner to understand, he packs her off to England and kills her.
The Forster whom Mrs. Sharma has discovered for us is almost as great a paradox as he perceives India to be. He is a consummate artist who does not trust his art. His is a good mi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514475218

Nirmala Sharma

My early education was conducted at Dharma Samaj College, affiliated with Agra University, India from where I received my B.A. in Hindi and English Literature. After moving to the United States, I earned an M.A. in English from University of California, Riverside. It was here that I came into contact with the most erudite professors: Dr. Milton Miller, Dr. Edwin M. Eigner and Dr. John M. Steadman who were all exceptionally inspirational. My family has been very supportive throughout the creation process of this manuscript, especially my husband Ravindra. My daughters Banita and Amita have also been very supportive and I am extremely pleased that I have four grandchildren with whom I can share my academic pursuits. Publication of this work would not have been possible without the assistance from Dr JP Mishra, my beloved son-in-law who worked tirelessly towards this goal and I thank him so very much for his dedication and efforts.

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Copyright © 2016 by Nirmala Sharma.

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      Softcover      978-1-5144-7522-5

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Contents

Chapter One

Forster’s Background: A Passage to India

Chapter Two

The Emotional Nature of Aziz

Chapter Three

The Political Aspects of A Passage to India

Chapter Four

The Lowest and the Highest Caste in A Passage to India

Chapter Five

The Mythology behind the Caves and Its Effects on the Characters of A Passage to India

Chapter Six

The Satiric Treatment of the Mythology of Krishna behind Temple

Chapter Seven

A Passage to India: Similarities to Other Works and to The Valley of the Kings

Chapter One

Forster’s Background: A Passage to India

Though Forster declares his alliance to liberalism: I belong to the fag-end of Victorian Liberalism,¹ he does not adhere to liberalism as a movement. He belongs to the minority of liberals, not the majority who refute collectivism and humanitarianism. Forster associates himself with the liberals who rejected laissez-faire economics while preserving and reinterpreting the liberal ideal of individualism.² Liberty to Forster is a condition which occurs in human society, and the more of it there is, the more will each individual be able to do what he likes.³ It is from this position that he develops his particular conception of culture: When a culture is genuinely national, it is capable, when the hour strikes, of becoming super-national and contributing to the general good of humanity.⁴ Forster deplores the industrialism and commercialism that threaten the harmony of men with the countryside. He reproaches the scientists for living in their ivory laboratory⁵ and calls for the combination of old morality and new economy. He believes in Moore’s ethics, which regards friendship as an exacting discipline and art of great value.⁶ Forster also maintains that the best goods for human intercourse result from personal affections: What is good in people—and consequently in the world—is their insistence on creation, their belief in friendship and loyalty for their own sakes.⁷ This is the liberal view that underlies Forster’s censure of the British imperialists and high castes in India in A Passage to India.

The infinite wealth and the aromatic spices of India have always captivated the British. Even the English poets and dramatists have made stray references to them. In Compleynt of Mars, Chaucer alludes to the riches of India: So ful of rubies, and stones of Inde.⁸ In the Knight’s Tale, he refers to King Emetrius (perhaps derived from his knowledge of King Demetreus, who conquered Emetrius): The grete Emetreus, the Kying of Inde.⁹ Spenser, in his Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, also brings up the jewels and gold of this country: Pearles of Ynde, or gold of Opher …¹⁰ And in The Faerie Queene, he makes a mention of spices: Daintie spices fetch from furthest Ynd.¹¹ Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus has his heart set on India for its gold, pearls, and spices; and his Tamburlaine has an overriding passion for ruling opulent Oriental kingdoms. He aspires to voyage to India around the cape, the new route opened by Vasco da Gama. His brother Cosroe complains:

Men from the farthest equinoctial line

Have swarm’d into the Eastern India,

Lading their ships with gold and precious stones,

And made their spoils from all our provinces.¹²

Allured by the riches and spices of India, the English founded the East India Company for commerce in the seventeenth century. In the beginning, the company imported Indian manufactured goods, textiles, and spices to Europe. Soon, however, the British legislation demanded that the British market be closed to India and the Indian market be opened to Britain.¹³ Each renewal of the charter of the company transformed it from the commercial corporation to the ruling power of the empire. The profits of this commercial enterprise were incalculable. There was no margin between trade and plunder.¹⁴ Montgomery Martin, who made a conservative estimate of India’s wealth dispatched to England, writes:

The annual drain of £3,000,000 in British India has amounted in thirty years, at 12 percent (the usual Indian rate) compound interest to the enormous sum of £723,900,000 sterling … So constant and accumulating a drain, even in England, would soon impoverish her. How severe then must be its effect on India where the wage of a labourer is from two pence to three pence a day.¹⁵

Lenin writes: There is no end to the violence and plunder which is called British rule in India.¹⁶ Even the outbreak of famine in the eighteenth century did not deter the East India Company from collecting a revenue larger than the year before.¹⁷ So the English, who went to India for commerce, took the reins of this country into their hands and continued with their pillage.

Besides draining the country economically, the English authorities in India used oppression as their tool. Indians were mistreated, humiliated, and even murdered. Theodore Morrison points out the following:

It’s an ugly fact, which it is no use to disguise, that the murder of the natives by Englishmen is no infrequent occurrence. In one issue of the Amrit Bazar Patrika of this month (August 11, 1898), three contemporary cases are dealt with, in none of which have the prisoners paid the full legal penalty for murder … . Juries in European cases are impanelled from towns; this is the very class in which the arrogance of conquering races is most offensively strong, and their moral sense does not endorse the legal theory that an Englishman should atone with his life for killing a nigger.¹⁸

When the number of such assaults increased, they were brought to the attention of the viceroy of England, who issued the following warning: The consequences of such illegal and violent acts are not only that injustice and hardship are inflicted on individuals, but that the character of the government itself suffers from tyrannical and oppressive behaviour of its own officers.¹⁹

English literature on India does not reflect upon the imperialists’ loot of India and their inhumane treatment of the natives. Rather, it harps upon the moral turpitude of the Indians and the rectitude of the English. It exaggerates the poverty, fatuity, indolence, and crime in India and reveals its prejudices toward Hinduism. It extols the altruism, diligence, and integrity of the English in improving and uplifting the colony of India. In short, English literature describes India as a burden to maintain.

Susan Howe writes: Novels of India provide more vicarious discomfort than any one is entitled to. They are among the unhappiest books in the language. They are long on atmosphere, but short on humor and hope.²⁰ These novels consist of devices to play upon the sympathies of the reader. For example, those of Maud Diver and Pamela Hinkson dramatize emotions of homesickness, and those of Makepeace Thackeray to Edmund Candler make their main appeal by presenting the selfless devotion of social workers, teachers, medical officers, engineers, administrators, nurses, doctors, missionaries, and military officers. The novels of Walter Scott, William Browne Hockley, and Colonel Meadows Taylor contain sensational scenes of blood and thunder, heroic adventures, and the cult of thugee.²¹ The works of Rudyard Kipling overemphasize poverty, crime, and inequity among the Indians and denigrate their culture, traditions, and religions. Overall, these works have done a great service to the Empire in publicizing the heroic efforts of British soldiers and administrators to root out the criminals.²² They have been a talking point for the advocates of British rule as a pacifying and purifying force in its dominions.²³

One English writer who slightly strays from this trodden path is William Arnold, the brother of Matthew Arnold. Although consistent with the stereotyped themes of homesickness of the English and the false-heartedness of the natives, in Oakfield; or, Fellowship in the East, William Arnold questions the morals of English society in India. However, the novelist who resists following the crowd of English writers on India is Edward Morgan Forster. He goes to great lengths to draw an impartial picture of the imperialists in relation to their colonial subjects. An advocate of the liberal ideal of individualism and personal affectations, he exposes the English officials’ mistreatment of the natives. But Forster’s liberalism does not help him appreciate the essential nature of Hinduism. His persistent derision of Hindu religion and philosophy in the Caves and Temple of A Passage to India is identical to those of the earlier works about India.

The liberalism and illiberalism underlying Forster’s disapprobation of imperialism and Hinduism respectively appear to be the result of his age, lineage, and friends from the University of Cambridge. Forster possesses the liberal-mindedness of the Victorians, whom he considered humane, intellectually curious, and philanthropic. These Victorian Englishmen were un-prepossessed and believed in free speech and social progress. Their flaw, however, was their inability to recognize the economic exploitation of the backward races abroad and the poor of their own country.²⁴

Forster seems to have inherited the trait of free thought from both his maternal and paternal grandparents. His mother’s mother was a witty woman who had ten children. Her whole family was averse to piety and quick to detect the falsity sometimes accompanying it.²⁵ Forster adored his grandmother: We played for hours together. In late life I became high-minded and critical, but we remained friends and it is with her — with them that my heart lies.²⁶ On the paternal side, Forster was related to the Thorntons. Mariann Thornton, Forster’s great-aunt, was the daughter of Henry Thornton, banker and member of parliament.²⁷ Henry Thornton was also considered a lover of mankind.²⁸ He had attempted to improve the conditions of prisons in London. In 1813, he introduced a bill for the relief of the poor debtors confirmed in King’s Bench, Fleet, and Marshalsea, asking that countries be made to contribute a part of the support.²⁹

Henry Thornton was an important member of the Clapham Sect. The Clapham Sect was a group of evangelical reformers that presented a new crystallization of power: parliament, the Established Church, the journals of opinion, the universities, the City, the civil and fighting services, the government of the Empire. Clapham found a place in them all, not infrequently a distinguished one.³⁰ The Clapham Sect was also noted for its advocacy of the abolition of the slave trade.³¹ Forster’s essay Henry Thornton tells of the prosperity and philanthropy of this sect: The Clapham Sect listened, rose from its knees, ate, and then made money — made as much as it ever could, and then gave as much as it could away.³²

Besides Forster’s family, his friends and traditions at Cambridge also appear to have influenced Forster. Harold Victor Routh says, Forster is one of the new novelists influenced by university life. He came up to Cambridge in 1898 at one of the most interesting stages of its history, when the traditions of the Victorian era seemed to blend with the dawn of the twentieth century.³³ Forster fervidly speaks of his love for Cambridge: What I am prepared to bequeath the place which I have loved for forty years, and where I have made my best friends?³⁴ In 1897,³⁵ Forster joined the Cambridge Conversazione Society, satirically called Apostles.³⁶ The Cambridge Conversazione Society was a group of fellows who were zealous, genial, and democratic in spirit. Forster pays homage to them in his biography of Lowes Dickinson. He writes: Their influence, when it goes wrong, leads to self-consciousness and superciliousness; when it goes right, the mind is sharpened, the judgment is strengthened, the heart becomes less selfish.³⁷ This society possessed a spirit of intellectual free masonry, a tendency of bright wits who recognize each other and to drift into sodalities more or less informal and undefined.³⁸ Their procedure was first to strip tegument from tegument, until the very heart of their subject was laid bare: next to reveal to the world their secret scalpels had brought to light.³⁹ After 1897 to 1901, the leading Apostles at Cambridge were Alfred and Frederick Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, F. D. Maurice, Connop Thirlwall, Mocnkton Milnes, John Kemble, and William Whewell. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Roger Fry, J. M. E. McTaggart, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Nathaniel Wedd, and Alfred North Whitehead were also dons and fellows at Cambridge during the time of Forster.⁴⁰ Apostles had a tendency to jeer at his country, patriotism, the queen, and war. Nathaniel Wedd was "cynical, aggressive, mephistophelian, wore a red tie, blasphemed and