E.M. Forster and The Politics of Imperialism

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E.M. Forster and the Politics Imperialism Mohammad Shaheen

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E. M. Forster and the Politics of Imperialism

10.1057/9780230597631 - E.M. Forster and The Politics of Imperialism, Mohammad Shaheen

Also by this author and published by Palgrave Macmillan


THE MODERN ARABIC SHORT STORY


Mohammad Shaheen




© Mohammad Shaheen 2004

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–74136–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaheen, Mohammad E. M. Forster and the politics of imperialism/Mohammad Shaheen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–74136–6 1. Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879–1970 – Political and social views. 2. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 3. Political fiction, English – History and criticism. 4. Imperialism in literature. I. Title. PR6011.O58Z8415 2004 823.912—dc22

2003060860

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Patrick Parrinder


Forster, ‘Three Countries’ What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different places, both human and historical. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture



And my patriotism which is very steady is loyalty to the place where I happen to belong. It doesn’t go further. The idea that my nation is better than someone else’s never occurs to me.

Foreword

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Abbreviations and References

xiii

Introduction

1

1 Person and Persona in the Portrait of Imperialism

9

2 ‘Hassan in England’: a Western Room with an Oriental View

23

3 Forster’s Debate on ‘Kipling Is Not Literature’

31

4 Forster Writes to the Empire and Salutes the Orient: a Passage through Egypt

58

5 Beyond the Mediterranean Human Norm: the Politics of Liberal Humanism in Retreat

75

6 Burra’s Introduction and Beyond: a Detour Round the Floods

113

7 Forster’s Politics in Said’s Culture and Imperialism: a Modern Debate

134

Conclusion

159

Appendices 1 The Government of Egypt

171

2 Forster’s Fictitious Letter to Mohammed El-Adle

184

3

188

‘The horror, the horror’

4 Unpublished Conversation with E. M. Forster

191

vii



Contents

Notes

193

Bibliography

202

Index

206



viii Contents

During the twentieth century, the reputation of E. M. Forster varied between the very favourable reception accorded to his early novels and an attitude, still current, in which his novel A Passage to India is seen as head and shoulders above the others – and regarded by many as being his masterpiece. At the same time, Forster’s achievement in that novel has been a matter of disagreement. When it first appeared, in 1924, it was thought of by most readers primarily as embodying a political statement and for that reason was met both by vilification from supporters of the British Empire and by approval from those who questioned the legitimacy of Britain’s role there. With the publication of further criticism, however – especially Peter Burra’s – readers began to appreciate further qualities in the novel, including its imagery, its symbolism and even its ‘rhythm’. Such new approaches were endorsed by the fact that Forster himself voiced approval of Burra’s account, with the result that the political element was in danger of being ignored. Yet that continued to attract attention from writers such as G. K. Das (in E. M. Forster’s India) and Benita Parry (in her Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination 1880–1930). The question of the exact nature of the achievement remains moot. In presenting his new approach, Professor Shaheen, who himself met Forster on various occasions during his stay in King’s College, Cambridge, some years ago, brings further considerations to bear. He draws attention to the way in which the Muslim element in A Passage to India tends to be ignored or played down, in spite of the fact that the first section is entitled ‘Mosque’ and that the novel as a whole was inspired by, and dedicated to, Forster’s Muslim friend Syed Ross Masood. He also draws fuller attention to the years that Forster spent in Egypt between his two periods of work on Passage, which were of considerable importance for his own thought and attitudes, and the extent of his anti-imperialism during that period. While sympathetic to some statements in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, he dissents from Said’s inclusion of Forster among those

ix



Foreword

Foreword

with imperialist attitudes and believes that if he had access to the Egyptian writings he might have reconsidered this judgement. It is pleasing that Said should be given this estimation, since his other great interest, in music, has given him an almost instinctive sympathy with the similar preoccupation in Forster’s makeup. Among other things, Professor Shaheen points out that Said’s perspective on the novel helps to explain the attention to sounds and silence in it and in general points to the attitude of reconciliation between political and cultural viewpoints that he feels to be needed if Forster’s mind is ‘elusive’, but deplores any view of this as negative. To be elusive is not the same as to be evasive; on the contrary, Shaheen argues, the word ‘elusive’ captures well the subtlety of Forster, indicating the sense in which his critique of imperialism is superior to that of, say, Conrad, the other writer most often appealed to in this connection. Forster is sometimes criticized for not having voiced his criticisms of British rule more directly. At the time when he was writing, however, it was extremely difficult to foresee the events which would in time make it inevitable for Britain to give up its rule, so that he might readily have been dismissed as a dangerous and foolish subversive. Instead, he displayed his shrewdness in making criticisms of a more subtle and humane kind: ‘One touch of regret – not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart – would have made Ronny a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.’ That is the note he chose to adopt, and it is there that criticism or praise of him should be focused. There is still more work to be done in assessing the sources and nature of the Muslim element in Forster’s novel. Partition has led to the attention being directed more exclusively to the Hindu elements; yet if a lastingly peaceful solution for the sub-continent is eventually to be found it will involve a fuller understanding of all the elements involved, as Forster understood better than some of his contemporaries. Professor Shaheen’s sympathetic account helps the reader to appreciate still further a harmonizing aim that was sustained in spite of all that the horrific history of the twentieth century across the world could do to undermine it. JOHN BEER



x

The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society of Authors as the Literary Representatives of the Estate of E. M. Forster for granting permission to quote from manuscripts of E. M. Forster. It gives me particular pleasure to acknowledge the Modern Archive Centre (MAC) of King’s College Library, and to the archivist Dr Rosalind Moad and the staff a special debt of appreciation. As I frequented the MAC in its early stages, I can but remember the help and support extended to readers by Michael Hall, once archivist of the Centre, whose contributions to research into Forster’s papers are always remembered with gratitude. We wish to thank Chatto & Windus and Granta Books for excerpts from Edward Said; and Routledge for excerpts from Literature & Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990, edited by Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi for the The Open University. An earlier version of the material of Chapter 3 appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature (Spring 1993), and I would like to thank Hopstra University for their permission to reproduce my essay published in TCL under the title ‘Forster’s Salute to Egypt’. Patrick Parrinder, John Beer and Mohammad Asfour read the manuscript with scrupulous attention and understanding, and I am very greatly indebted to them for this. I should like to acknowledge the friendship and encouragement of Flavio Centofanti and Vicky Pilly, and the patience and support of Emily Rosser and Paula Kennedy while seeing this book into publication. My thanks go also to Kelle Taha, Eileen Lundy and Rachel Wadele for their help in preparing the typescript of this project for publication.

xi



Acknowledgements



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Titles of Forster’s novels have been abbreviated in the text as follows (full publication details supplied in the references): HE KCLC LJ MPI PI RV

Howards End EMF lectures, essays and manuscripts at Kings College Library Cambridge – Modern Archive Centre The Longest Journey The Manuscripts of A Passage to India A Passage to India A Room with a View

Abbreviations for Forster’s non-fiction are: AH AHG AN AS GE GLD Ph TCD

Abinger Harvest Alexandria: a History and Guide Aspects of the Novel Arctic Summer and Other Fiction Government of Egypt Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson Pharos and Pharilon Two Cheers for Democracy

Symbols taken from E. M. Forster, The Manuscripts of ‘A Passage to India’ (1978) (in each case the three dots represent one or more words): \…/ … …\…/

[…]

[…?]

words between oboli inserted by Forster words within angle brackets deleted by Forster (a) words deleted, then reinserted, by Forster; or (b) words between oboli substituted by Forster for words within angle brackets words (or letters) conjectured to have been intended by Forster, and supplied by the editor; or – if italicized – interpolated editorial comment words (or letters) conjectured to have been intended by Forster, or to have been on a missing or mutilated sheet xiii



Abbreviations and References



This page intentionally left blank

In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire admits ‘that it is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds; that whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies’. Césaire adds: But then I ask the following question: has colonization really placed civilizations in contact? Or, if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best? I answer no. (Césaire 1972: 173) Forster would be in full agreement with such questions posed by Césaire, and he would probably see it as quite valid and authentic, at least within the historical context of European expansion overseas. Yet despite his clear attitude towards imperialism, Forster’s intricate mind does not allow him to formulate the question or to adopt the answer in such a simple and effective rhetorical formula no matter how appealing the simplicity of the question would be. Instead of the denotative ‘contact’ Césaire uses, Forster offers the connotative ‘passage’ which, ever since the appearance of the novel, has inspired as many approaches as we can see in the various critical accounts derived from the title. The ambiguity of the title provides a wide scope of reference extending from the overt reference to tourism to the covert implication of politics with myriad perspectives. A modification of Forster’s title, possibly made in the light of Césaire’s question, for example, would be illuminating: is this the right passage to India? Had Forster wanted to make us read his novel 1



Introduction


with a certain perspective, he would have simply added an exclamation mark (!) to make us sense, right from the beginning, the futility of the quest being itself rhetorical. An oversimplification of the narrative discourse of A Passage to India may be as follows: I really wonder whether colonization is the best contact left for civilization to make with India (Indians)! Forster, of course, develops the question into different formulas whose central one might be: is cultural intimacy (friendship between the colonized and the colonizer) able to make the best contact? Another major question can be derived from Forster’s dictum of ‘only connect’ as the best means of contact, practised with positive results in novels prior to A Passage to India. Forster’s complex of ‘only connect’, in comparison with Césaire’s simple ‘contact’, is quite ambiguous despite its simple wording. The structure of this phrase inspires us with endless queries: to connect what? How to learn and how to connect? Is the achievement of the former conditional for the realization of the latter? Is this a synonym for the ‘quest’ in Proust? And, more important, can this quest achieve any success with the dominance of imperialism? And so on. What makes the situation ambiguous enough is, I think, the open form of the moral force behind the structure, and only Forster’s practice in those novels makes us sense what Forster means by it. In A Passage to India ‘only connect’ is reversed to the extreme negation of reality even with its possible success between individuals, a success which is never extended to the larger reality of communal life. Reading Forster’s novel, Césaire would presumably ask whether ‘only connect’ is the best contact or even the contact that the civilized can make with the colonized. ‘Only connect’ becomes, then, only disconnect to negate any contact at all. Forster’s new formula would be: unfortunately ‘only connect’ cannot function with imperialism. British officials in India (imperialists) believe and act (ironically, of course) in the affirmative to Césaire’s question, as they have no reservation that colonization is the best contact with civilization, and they are in fact brought up as early as public-school days to implement this kind of contact. The definite role prepared for those officials makes Forster avoid a meaningful discourse with them. Their presence in the novel is mainly functional; they form the site of the battleground where they meet the other, independent group trusted with the main preoccupation of the novel. The answer to the question of friendship made by the three individuals is never direct, but concluded after they



2

3

are tested by experience, each in his own way. Fielding, a liberal humanist, believes that tolerance, free will and education are the basis for any passage to cross-cultural contact. With such an ideal of liberal humanism Fielding succeeds by establishing intimate contact with Aziz and by standing against his people in Aziz’s trial. Mrs Moore’s affectionate contact in the memorable scene at the mosque is a particular example of possible intimacy between the two races. Adela Quested also befriends Aziz at one stage of her quest for the real India. Yet all these successful attempts are not in a position to continue, and they fail to expand before they become capable of a permanent successful contact, opposing the only contact adopted by the other group of British officials. This does not mean that one group wins because of its will to domination and the other group fails because its idealism is curbed by the counter-power of the other group. The major discourse of the novel does not lie in the conflict between the group which holds the belief that colonization is the best contact of civilization and the other group which believes in the ideal aspect of civilization as an alternative for that ‘best contact’. Out of the encounter between one group and another emerges the major side of the conflict altogether which is India itself where the conflict becomes between civilization, whether politicized by one group or (idealized) by another, and the muddle as the resistance whose potential is beyond human capacity. For this reason the Caves scene is central, and for the same reason the answer to the question mentioned above is confined in it. This is the answer (a most controversial one) at the conclusion of the novel: ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’ (PI, 312) This answer evidently re-echoes Césaire’s own, and what distinguishes one from the other is that Césaire’s is straightforward while Forster,



Introduction


being a novelist, cannot afford to be so. Yet a similar straightforward answer can be found in Forster’s non-fiction, especially in the political pamphlet Forster wrote on Egypt (see Appendix 1). The pamphlet will be discussed in some detail in Chapter 4, not only to show Forster’s clear attitude as anti-imperialist but also to bring this important nonfiction into focus after it has been somehow overlooked. Perhaps it has been eclipsed by Forster’s masterpiece of fiction which is subtle enough to invite investigations into Forster’s elusive mind; and the enormous amount of studies A Passage to India has already prompted is evidence of the continuing ambiguity it displays. This study is mainly undertaken in the light of two major critical accounts which offer us two different approaches to Forster. The first is by Burra which, for one reason or another, Forster himself found most perceptive for any reading of his fiction. In any major study of Forster, Burra’s criticism deserves special attention more for the impact it seems to exercise on Forster studies than for any special merit this particular appreciation actually can have. Burra’s critical account had the effect of suspending Forster in the conventional aesthetics of form, curbing his movement into the wider context of cross-cultural and post-colonial studies. One really wonders whether Burra’s criticism obliquely prevented Forster from entering earlier the realm of culture and politics as a pioneer novelist of this kind of fiction in the twentieth century. Edward Said’s account of Forster (being the other major critical account) runs in total opposition to that of Burra. He sees in the socio-political elements of Forster’s fiction, almost abandoned by Forster and Burra, the real force behind the comprehensive reality shaped in Forster’s fiction, and that A Passage to India, for example, is enriched by investigating its cultural context rather than reducing it into an object of aesthetic form. Said sees that the novel form is mainly responsible for not realizing the full purpose of Forster’s fiction owing to the limitation inherent in the genre itself. Burra, in contrast, credits the form with tempting Forster to shift the emphasis from the socio-political aspects to the aesthetic elements. Whether politics in A Passage to India are undermined by Burra, and equally suspended by Forster, or acknowledged with some reservation by Said, they form a crucial structure of the novel and a serious commitment on the part of the author. Forster seems to believe



4

5

that once politics enter the realm of fiction they should no longer be as explicit or straightforward as in his non-fiction, and the difference between the non-fiction writer and the novelist is also the difference between the historian and the novelist. In Aspects of the Novel the distinction is made clear, where Forster says that one ‘records’, the other ‘creates’. It is natural that Forster’s non-fiction, where his explicit politics are charted, cannot compete with his fiction especially with a work of the magnitude of A Passage to India. Yet acquaintance with Forster’s politics as seen in his non-fiction is evidence for the explicit manner of Forster’s actual commitment, causing us to remember that the identification of politics, imaginatively tackled, remains a problem, inviting exploration rather than mere identification. Politics in A Passage to India generates a discourse that resists the reduction of the novel to a specific form of aesthetics at the expense of a range of different potential readings. Said is critical of the literary conventional form for reducing the author’s vision into the convention of ‘marriage and property (Fielding, for example, marries Mrs Moore’s daughter)’. But conventional form in the novel makes little or no contribution to the main discourse of the novel (discussed later). In the final analysis, Forster and Said are not really in disagreement on the principal ground of politics in A Passage to India. Forster has his own reasons for what seems to be a denial of the political and social intention of the novel. The cultural critique which Said offers is obviously different from the crude thesis of British politics in India which Forster gives himself the privilege of rejecting. Meanwhile, Forster may be justified in adopting Burra’s criticism which points to his creation as ‘aesthetically compact’. Moreover, I find Said’s critique of Forster so novel not only because it extends the sphere of Forster’s fiction to a wider contextual reality far beyond Burra’s comparatively limited domain of form, and not only because Said ushers Forster with vigour to this scope of reality, but also because Said’s promotion of Forster over the years in his assessment (or reassessment) of Forster comes as a further assurance of Forster’s elusive mind which Said himself acknowledges. Said questions the absence of resistance to imperialism in Forster particularly as seen in the discourse of the conclusion. A Passage to India, a case in point, where Forster’s ‘not yet’, ‘not there’, is not only suspending resistance but also kidnapping its time and place. Of



Introduction

6


A Passage to India, on the other hand, disallows any distinction between friend and beloved: both terms are precariously conterminous in a colonial world where cultural reading is predicated on the passionate misinterpretation of the art of invitation. The intimacies of colonialism are thereby translated into the social and political peculiarities represented by the question, how can a people invite another people not into a home, or into a different culture, but into that alternative civil space known as a friendship? Into what caves of disappointed sublimity must such civility collapse, before it can articulate the fact that colonial friendship is never autonomous from the literal presence of the racial body? (Goodyear 1995: 152) The comment is persuasive enough to make it very appealing to us once we hold one kind of realistic view or another of the relationship between art and life. Said would probably look at such a reading in the same way that he looks at the conclusion being damned by the demand of the conventional form which he believes Forster submits to. It is as if Said then evaluates Forster in the light of that confession where Forster sees himself as belonging to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism. But Forster, we know, is elusive. To follow up the discussion of Forster’s politics of imperialism mainly set by what Said says about Forster, I shall discuss another work of non-fiction (beside the Government of Egypt (GE)), on which Forster was engaged in writing prior to the time he worked on A Passage to India. It is ‘Hassan in England’, being a fragment (1907?) of evidence of Forster’s awareness of the East–West relationship. I find the fragment (discussed in Chapter 2) significant because it was written at such an early stage of Forster’s literary career. Chapter 3 is an evaluation of the unpublished paper that Forster delivered at the Weybridge Literary Society in 1913. Nowhere in Forster’s writing do we have such a vigorous argument about the politics of imperialism where Forster states his anti-imperialist views with clarity, vigour and confidence. The paper, I believe, is a rare document, which urges a detailed discussion. It provides concrete



course, Said’s vigorous mind would not accommodate a comfortable reading of the conclusion such as, for example, the one offered by Sara Suleri Goodyear in her ‘Forster’s Imperial Erotic’, where she says:

7

evidence about Forster’s serious commitment to the politics of imperialism. Chapter 4 presents Forster’s direct commitment to the politics of anti-imperialism mainly drawn from a rather neglected pamphlet (Government of Egypt) which explicitly shows Forster’s attitude towards the rulers and the ruled. In this pamphlet, Forster openly challenges British imperialism in Egypt and particularly records how the natives are capable of challenging it as demonstrated in their resistance to the British atrocities during the 1919 uprising. Forster also corresponded with writers, who like him, supported the Egyptian cause and opposed imperial sovereignty. What needs to be noted here is the discrepancy between Forster’s politics as explicitly expressed in his non-fiction and as imaginatively integrated into A Passage to India. The latter is not simply a reflection or an extension of the former, but rather a subtle fusion of various aspects of reality and fiction. As Forster is well known for being a liberal humanist, any discussion of his politics is bound to include this long-life tradition. Chapter 5 attempts a fresh look at Forster’s liberal humanism without reducing its contextual reality into a form of ethics. One pattern of thought, which Forster envisaged as embracing the theme of the British in India, is that liberal humanism and imperialism cannot co-exist. Similarly, imperialism can never be redeemed by liberal humanism. For this reason, a discourse between liberal humanism and imperialism, or between natives and imperialists, is never seriously contemplated by Forster, and by its impossible co-existence seems to be the only form of its expression. The frame of any discourse in A Passage to India has to take into consideration that the veiled spirit of imperialism stands as an impediment in the way of the ideal of connection, making its realization beyond contemplation. Fielding’s return to England after the crisis, where he finds himself welcomed by order, as he enters the Mediterranean, does not simply suggest a triumph of order over the muddle or even the opposite, but rather the rejection altogether of Fielding and his order by the muddle Fielding personally experiences. The tone of the concluding chapter of Part II of A Passage to India, where Fielding is reunited with order leaving behind the muddle, is perceptively articulated by Said when he points to the innocent Greek cultural tradition, suggesting that British cultural values such as those held by



Introduction

8


The Greek classics served the Italian, French, and English humanists without the troublesome interposition of actual Greeks. Texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated by people who imagine an ideal commonwealth. This is one reason that scholars rarely speak suspiciously or disparagingly of the Renaissance. In modern times, however, thinking about cultural exchange involves thinking about domination and forcible appropriation: someone loses, someone gains. (Said 1993: 235)1 Fielding’s failure to connect in his passage to India is similarly articulated by what Aimé Césaire says above: ‘whether colonization has really placed civilization [presumably liberal humanism] in contact?’ (Césaire’s emphasis). Or it may recall what he says earlier: ‘a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies’. Chapter 6 tries to show how Forster’s response to his own work as demonstrated in Burra’s Introduction is unsatisfactory, whatever reasons he has behind it. Yet Burra’s criticism is an occasion to demonstrate that Forster’s A Passage to India is his crowning experience of integrating politics into fiction, without making it lose its aesthetic perspective. Contrary to what Burra believes, A Passage to India is Forster’s full expression of politics. The final chapter is an assessment or reassessment of Forster’s politics as shown in Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Said’s great insight explores with affection and appreciation the challenge Forster encounters in dealing with the vastness of India, using the traditional form of fiction inherited from the nineteenth century. In reassessing Forster over the years, Said reassures us how elusive Forster can be, and that he is not simply an aesthete who stands outside the worldliness of fiction.



Fielding cannot enjoy a similar privilege of neutrality:

Person and Persona in the Portrait of Imperialism

It is always easier to describe Forster’s politics in terms of what it is not rather than what it is. Forster was not a politician or a political writer, not a party member or even a supporter of one, as he resolutely rejected any intimacy with the party system. He never wrote with a certain ideology in mind. What I find central in his outlook on politics is the amalgamation of the public and personal where the two emerge as one. He is never embarrassed to see the personal generate the public or the public generated by the private. The driving force in this interplay is honesty, sincerity and strong affection which all make for the great integrity of the man and the artist in Forster. It is well known that Forster was passionately in love with the Indian Ross Masood and the Egyptian Mohammed El-Adle: one introduced him to India, the other to Egypt, and the passage from one to another evidently helped to shape A Passage to India. This infatuation with the two men is Forster’s long-life story which survived with him not only in England but also in Egypt, Switzerland, France and India. Masood and El-Adle became Forster’s most engaging human contacts. Fortunately Forster’s love story has been charted by Furbank, Forster’s biographer, whose narrative of the great intimacy between Forster and his two beloveds, Masood and El-Adle, is most captivating. Furbank’s account has been followed by two very interesting ones. The first is by R. W. Noble, ‘ “Dearest Forster”–“Dearest Masood”: “An East–West Friendship” ’ (1981), the other by Donald Watt, ‘Mohammed El-Adle and A Passage to India’ (1983). 9



1

10


He stands at the close of my youth. I wish very much he had felt, if only once, what I felt for him, for I should then have no sense of wasted time. He and the continent he introduced [emphasis mine] have added little to my growth – not even a novel. (KCLC) This is a precise account of the ferocious interplay of the personal and public elements in Forster’s life. It sounds like a climactic confession in a Bildungsroman novel, and as a matter of fact it is quite reminiscent of Pip’s bitter disillusionment after he discovers that Miss Havisham was not his benefactor and Estella was not the prize, in Great Expectations. Pip consequently goes to Egypt. So does Forster in 1915. Forster’s infatuation with El-Adle runs almost parallel to that with Masood. The major difference between Forster’s story with Masood and his story with El-Adle is that one belongs to a continent and the other belongs to a country which forms a passage to that continent. We always wonder whether Forster’s meeting with El-Adle was more than a coincidence at the tram and tram station of Ramle in Alexandria, that is, Forster went to Alexandria with the ghost of Masood as if hoping to meet his Indian friend somewhere in the passage to the continent he had left behind. Several years after that entry mentioned above, Forster wrote an entry on El-Adle which has almost the same tone as if the experience of one is destined to repeat that of the other. On 3 May 1922, Forster writes: Very difficult to know what the beloved is like – or rather how he feels and behaves towards the lover. Determined my life should contain one success I have concealed from myself and others M’s frequent coldness towards me. And his occasional warmth may be due to politeness, gratitude or pity. The prospect of his death gives me no pain. (KCLC) These two entries are important for the significant bearing they have on Forster’s scheme that had been waiting for completion since 1912. First, Forster realizes that a great passion is necessary for the



On 31 December 1914, Forster wrote in his Diary with reference to the painful disruption of contact with Masood:

creative process. Second, a distance from the beloveds is needed for this passion to come to fruition. What Forster learnt from his experiences with Masood and El-Adle is that love is not measured by its fulfilment. Failure in love does not mean its end, or an end to its expression. It rather means an intensification of feeling which urges expression. Forster particularly learnt that the ‘realization’ of love as in previous novels, which successfully led to learning how to connect, is not the only mode of expression. As the two entries show, failure to connect has its own impact on the need to express and seems to urge a similar impulse towards creation. Of course, Forster at the time was not sure of this. The other lesson Forster was to learn, as the two entries suggest, is that passionate involvement with a subject or object urges a kind of detachment before creation is possible. The fact that he was able to finish A Passage to India is in itself evidence of the rational control Forster managed to exercise over a relationship with Masood. Perhaps the dedication is the debris left of that once uncontrollable feeling. Forster is not unaware of the perennial conflict between selfeffacement and self-expression in the process of creation. On 25 March 1923, Forster records the troubling memory of El-Adle as demanding the urgent need to forget him: I remember now my promise to never forget him, and in fact I never can. Some image labeled with him will always recur. But I have lost the feeling that to have him in my mind is either fine or helpful. All that is satisfactory is ‘The Life to Come’ where my indignation found an outlet through my art. I object to exploiting Mohammed less than I did. (Qtd by Watt 1983: 320) On another occasion Forster confides to Masood how he tries to divert the impact of the loss of El-Adle: All that remains positive is the expression of oneself through art, and this at present I cannot attain to. Art seems the only true event for our sorrows and for the dissatisfactions that are sometimes more fanciful even than our sorrows. It alone redresses the bias against romance that runs through the material of the world. (Ibid.)



Person and Persona in the Portrait of Imperialism 11


Less than a year earlier Forster writes to Mrs Barger about his last visit to El-Adle and the moving scene when El-Adle sat by Forster in the railway carriage and said, ‘My love to you there is nothing else to say’, which Forster asserts as ‘exactly the truth’. Forster concludes the letter as follows: Ah me – but everything is bearable, it is the betrayal from within that wears away one’s soul and I have been spared that. Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through. (Lago and Furbank 1985: 23) The phrase to ‘come through’ is as ambiguous as many of Forster’s phrases, such as, ‘only connect’, but it evidently has the grace of a prayer. No matter what it may specifically suggest, it inspires a cluster of implications: continuity in life, survival of struggle, aftermath, realization of a dream once promised, triumph and so on. With the completion of A Passage to India, Forster and Masood (and partly El-Adle) came through. Just before the completion of the novel, particularly between 1921 and 1922 when Forster was working very hard on it, Masood, Noble remarks, was ‘actively defending the imperial power’: ‘the Central authority must be supported when the alternative is general loot … if the Central authority gets weakened … all the badmashes, of whom we have quite a lot in our country, will … loot, in spite of Gandhi’s so-called soul force.’ Masood knew to whom in this emergency he owed his duty: The British Raj and Princely India. (Qtd by Noble 1981: 69) Masood’s support for imperialism indirectly helped Forster to emancipate himself from his intense personal relationship with Masood whose disruption of that relationship was perhaps the main reason for the progress of the novel in 1914 beyond half a dozen chapters. Perhaps Masood’s attitude encouraged Forster to abandon identifying the continent with Masood and see it better identified with Gandhi whose revolutionary hartal, as Noble sees, was reaching a peak between 1921 and 1922. When Forster wrote that letter from Egypt (25 February 1922) saying that ‘it is the betrayal from within that wears away one’s soul’, Masood was probably on his mind, and



12

El-Adle and Ghandi were, at the same time, engaging his mind with the second part of the statement having been, like Forster himself, ‘spared that betrayal’. In its general description, imperialism simply suggests self-betrayal, to begin with. I believe that the letter mentioned here and quoted above is especially significant in marking a new turn in Forster’s perspective on his relationship with the two men he personally adored, and that the letter can help us in decoding the story of the completion of the novel. Forster’s story of coming through with El-Adle is not identical to the one with Masood. He first makes two similar attempts: the pamphlet on the ‘Government of Egypt’, which he wrote for El-Adle, and ‘The Life to Come’, which he also confessed was written as a memorial of his relationship with El-Adle. After he had written them, and even after A Passage to India, Forster seems to have felt that something else was needed to chart this most affectionate relationship, and he embarked on the most fictitious letter perhaps ever written to record the tension between fiction and reality in Forster’s life and I am personally surprised that the letter has not been so far published in full (see Appendix 2). The reader of the letter can easily sense that Forster survived, even after A Passage to India, without actually being able to ‘come through’ with El-Adle in a satisfactory manner. One is actually tempted to believe that nothing less than another novel of the stature of A Passage to India will put Forster’s mind at rest. This is what Forster writes about six weeks after the publication of A Passage to India to Mrs Barger (19 July 1924): No one, except you, knows that he lies buried in my heart, in some place where there is neither remembrance nor forgetfulness, the sort of place from which old age radiates, to bring death to oneself in the long run. (KCLC) Forster had already begun the fictitious letter which took him several years to finish, the thing which suggests that Forster was actually unable to ‘come through’ with El-Adle even after A Passage to India and other pieces he had attempted. Is it possible to contemplate here that Forster would have been able to write a kind of ‘A Passage to Egypt’ had El-Adle similarly exercised ‘the betrayal from within’ like Masood, to achieve the distance needed at the time of creation? But as El-Adle and his Forster ‘have been spared that betrayal’, they





continued to live with a soul which never ‘wears away’, and with consequently no distance accessible to help in identifying the soul of imperialism. Yet it is gratifying that Forster was able to complete A Passage to India and to demonstrate once and for all that imperialism is a betrayal of the self first, which naturally leads to a betrayal of the other. It is here where we can trace Forster’s form of portraying imperialism, at least, in its overt pattern. Interaction of the personal and the public is the basis of this pattern. Imperialism for Forster is an act of betrayal from within and consequently lives with a soul already worn away, and, in Forster’s term, already made popular, he survives with ‘undeveloped heart’. This applies to the official group in India who are already in power. The non-official group are those who come to India on a kind of fact-finding mission. First, they observe how the official people make civilization establish colonization as the contact or perhaps the best contact with the other, to use Césaire’s words. They sincerely try to establish an alternative form of contact but they fail at the end because their movement lies in the shadow of imperialism. After all, they come to an India which is already under British rule. As Forster is non-conformist, his portrait goes beyond the crude picture of imperialism, and he tends to view imperialism from within. The three individuals of the non-official group show that civilization even at its best as contact or alternative to contact in the context of imperialism cannot ‘come through’, and its failure at the end of the novel confirms the idea that with imperialism there is no compromise. Before and after A Passage to India, Forster maintained his affection for the personal element. His portrait of imperialism is mainly designed to show its negative impact on the personal life of the individual rather than to expose its external life, or to show the futility which results from any contact made by or through imperialism. Forster’s conviction in the sanctity of the individual can be related to the common ideal of the romantic tradition cherished by him throughout his literary career. John Beer is most perceptive in arguing that, to understand Forster fully, one has to see him at the end of that earlier phase, the spiritual heir of Blake, Coleridge and Shelley, of Beethoven and Wagner. He shares their aspirations and their struggles, while counterposing them with his grasp of human affairs (Beer 1962: 15).



14

Drawing upon this statement Forster could presumably have added to his confession of being the fag-end of Victorian liberalism something like the stump of the romantic candle or the last drop of oil in the romantic lamp, to use Abrams’s famous metaphor ‘The Mirror and the Lamp’. What Forster seems to have inherited from the romantic tradition is the passion (versus prose) needed against ‘the betrayal from within that wears away one’s soul’. Forster’s fictitous letter and much of his effective writings are written in the flame of the romantic spirit. Yet what particularly attracts Forster to the romantic tradition is the power of imagination in its broad sense whose vision Forster finds helpful in probing what Trilling refers to as ‘the strange paradoxes of being human’ (Trilling 1944: 158). Later in life Forster revises the romantic impulse which dominated his writing at the time of writing Howards End, replacing the ‘private’ for the ‘personal’ which belongs to the realm of liberal humanism at large. This is how he reflects on the change of sensibility as expressed in his lecture ‘Three Generations’: By the time I was writing novels [reference to the Edwardian era] and I remember a section in them: [reference to Howards End] personal relations are the only thing that matters, for ever and ever. I still believe this as regards this private life. My own relations with people have brought me the only happiness I have found with having or recommending, not a flash-in-the pan happiness either, but solid achievement. (KCLC) For Forster an imperialist is a member of society who happens to lose the grace of personal relations or, in specific terms, private life, that is, an individual who is betrayed from within and consequently survives with a soul worn away. Life for him becomes not only a betrayal but also a trap of betrayal for other people who come close to him. Imperialism, then, becomes a kind of infection in the absence of the immunity inherent in the grace of the romantic element of personal relations and private life. It is Forster’s design, I think, to view imperialism from within rather than from without, such as in the exploitation of other people’s economy and land. In A Passage to India, and in his politics of imperialism, Forster tends to go beyond what imperialism actually does, to the root of the





human soul. The question arises as to what makes Ronny so insensitive to an affectionate mother and so stubborn to an innocent future wife like Adela. Its answer is how Ronny, as an imperialist, exploits civilization as a mask for contact not only with India and Indians but also with his mother and Adela. The result is a damage to personal relations and private life which is calamitous for all the parties concerned. In simple terms Forster envisages imperialism as an initial act of ruining individual relations, eventually developing into a misrepresention of the contact between the cultures of different races. With A Passage to India Forster moves with politics from mere recording or reporting as in non-fiction to that of character portrayal in fiction. In this practice Forster accommodates imperialism in the division he coined of flat and round characters in Aspects of the Novel. Imperialists are flat characters simply because they do not change or develop and they are identified by Forster’s well-known remarkable phrase of the ‘undeveloped heart’. They are certain of what they stand for and have no intention of changing their status. Let us look, for example, at Ronny, whose character is that of a typical imperialist. In India he undertakes the imperialist mission with loyalty and extreme confidence. Whenever there is an occasion to bridge the gulf between the English and Indians, Ronny spares no effort to spoil it instead, even when he knows that such conduct offends the two people closest to him: Adela and Mrs Moore, as happens when he snubs Aziz at Fielding’s house. He actually practises what he preaches. On one occasion the narrator tells us why Ronny undermines any experience of India that Adela may have: simply because Adela, Ronny believes, ‘could not interpret it’, and this is a flat denial of the other. In Said’s views, the remark is what typical Orientalists produce of misrepresentation of the Orient through an authoritative interpretation designed to fit imperialist objectives. The remark is followed even by a particularly ironical account of the qualification needed (sarcastically, of course) for an imperialist in India like him: A public school, London University [not Cambridge, like Hamidullah and presumably Fielding], a year at crammer’s, a peculiar sequence of posts in a particular province, a fall from a horse and a touch of fever were presented to her as the only



16


Obviously, the comment here is a message for Adela to remind her of the futility of any attempt to experience India outside the imperialist frame of reference: no matter how illogical, the logic of the message is intended to impress her. Ronny objects to his mother’s religious love based on the ‘essential fellowship and unity of all men’ and instead ‘approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but objected when it attempted to influence his life’ (PI, 45). In a typical Forsterian comedy, Forster characterizes Ronny’s rigidity in different contexts: Ronny’s religion was of the sterilized public-school brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Whenever he entered, mosque, cave, or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the Fifth Form. (PI, 245) Ronny is a type rather than an individual character. For him public affairs come first and personal matters after. He flatly rejects Adela after she had acquitted Aziz, despite the fact that he was eager to marry her before the crisis. His final decision of breaking the engagement, however, does not shock us; on the contrary, it would be quite unacceptable for him to try to ‘come through’ and accommodate Adela’s trouble instead. Ronny’s character is determined by the typicality of imperialism. Another type of character is the Superintendent of Police, Mr McBryde, who is obviously a typical racist. He tells Fielding that the historical account of the Mutiny is always on his mind, at least as far as Indian brutality is conceived, as if the British atrocities at the time never occurred. He also advises Fielding during the crisis of the Caves not to part company with his British fellows: ‘So I have just told you.’ ‘But at a time like this there’s no room for – well – personal views. The man who doesn’t toe the line is lost.’ ‘I see what you mean.’ ‘No, you don’t see entirely. He not only loses himself, he weakens his friends. If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line. These



training by which Indians and all who reside in their country can be understood … (PI, 73)

18


During Adela’s trial he is very critical of the 1883 Ilbert Bill which allowed Indians to be cross-examined before an Indian magistrate, and he wishes that autocracy had not been replaced by democracy. This racial prejudice is already expressed by the Collector: and during those twenty five years I have never known anything but disaster result when English people and Indians attempt to be intimate socially. Intercourse, yes. Courtesy, by all means. Intimacy – never, never. The whole weight of my authority is against it. I have been in charge at Chandrapore for six years, and if everything has gone smoothly, if there has been mutual respect and esteem, it is because both peoples kept to this simple rule. Newcomers set our traditions aside, and in an instant what you see happens, the work of years is undone, and the good name of my District ruined for a generation. I – I – can’t see the end of this day’s work, Mr Fielding. You, who are imbued with modern ideas – no doubt you can. I wish I had never lived to see its beginning, I know that. It is the end of me. That a lady, that a young lady engaged to my most valued subordinate – that she – an English girl fresh from England – that I should have lived – (PI, 155–6) This scene is rendered by means of Forsterian comedy, but it has much to offer beyond Forster’s great passion for comedy. A most penetrative reading of this scene and the like (and they are many in Forster’s narrative) can be undertaken through the masterly analysis of ‘the representation of splitting’ in the discourse, advanced by Homi Bhabha. This notion of splitting and multiple belief, Bhabha remarks, is what makes it ‘easier to see the bind of knowledge and fantasy, power and pleasure that forms the particular regime of visibility deployed in colonial discourse’. Bhabha goes on to say that this ‘visibility of the racial/colonial other is at once a point [Bhabha’s emphasis] of identity “Look at a negro” and at the same time a problem [Bhabha’s emphasis] for the attempted closure within discourse’ (Barker et al., eds 1986: 168). The discourse of the scene between the Collector and Fielding can be illuminated through the frame of reference of what Bhabha



jackals’ – he pointed at the lawyers’ cards – ‘are looking with all their eyes for a gap.’ (PI, 162–3)

intelligently calls ‘the colonial nonsense’. Bhabha’s discussion of ‘Articulating the Archaic: Cultural Difference and Colonial Nonsense’, in The Location of Culture, certainly helps us to conclude, while reading Forster, with the Meredithian comedy (and Forster was in his own way an admirer of Meredith) which has the corrective power of the Comic Spirit. It is true that Forster used this corrective comedy in his early novels with the conventional perspective of optimism inherent in Meredith’s use of comedy, but the case is different in A Passage to India, where comedy is only a façade, the iceberg of something invisible (more details later). It is a comedy of a developed mind (public-school training) which lacks the essential developed heart needed for the integration of part and whole. In any case it lacks the social dimension. While listening to the Collector pouring out his angry remarks before Fielding as a result of the alleged assault on Adela, we can imagine Fielding in silence reiterating Derrida’s question ‘He is saying this to me, but what does he want?’ (Qtd by Bhabha 1994: 124). Does the Collector want to shout his anxiety over difference between the two races which results in producing differentiation as an exceptional strategy of defence? Does he want to impress Fielding by his wisdom and sage-like observations to distract Fielding’s attention from the affair McBryde had already had with Miss Derek in case Fielding happened to hear about it? How can the Collector be correct in seeing Fielding’s modern ideas illuminating and at once abandoning tradition as the cause behind the crisis? Is not this a double standard of morality? Is not the Collector aware of the discrepency between the ideal of culture in English tradition such as that held by Fielding and the authority he claims over culture! Fielding obviously makes no sense of what the Collector says simply because the latter discharges the difficulty of the crisis without making it clear when it matters. At his best the Collector introduces himself to Fielding as a stereotypical British official who claims knowledge as power to justify the White Man’s racial dominance. He is presumably unaware of the fact that the difference he advances to construct the differentiation between the two races extends to Fielding, who in response would dismiss the Collector’s hybrid truth as a fantasy characteristic of the colonial discourse altogether. This is, of course, quite ironical. It is perhaps what makes the Collector refer to Fielding’s ‘modern ideas’ with favour in an attempt to veil the





ambivalence for which the stereotypical official stands. There is more irony in the Collector knowing (but hiding) or not knowing that purity of origin based on differentiation is categorically rejected by Fielding. This is, for example, what Fielding believes in: ‘The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence’ (PI, 58). Bhabha writes: The recognition and disavowal of ‘difference’ is always disturbed by the question of its re-presentation or construction. The stereotype is, in fact, an impossible object. For that very reason, the exertions of the ‘official’ knowledges, of colonialism – pseudoscientific, typological, legal-administrative, eugenicist – are imbricated at the point of their production of meaning and power with the fantasy that dramatizes the impossible desire for a pure, undifferentiated origin. (Baker et al., eds 1986: 169) What the Collector says (which is in correspondence with what his fellow officials do) stands as an attempt to reverse the scheme of friendship as a possible bridge between English and Indians which Forster gives to the other group; the latter are envisaged as more rounded characters. It goes without saying that the real gap is not as it appears between Indians and English, but rather between friendship and imperialism, and this is the challenge that the discourse in the novel advances. How to structure the feeling of friendship in the ambience of imperialism is the central concern of the novel, which the rounded characters try to realize. Friendship between races is a common ideal found to be most appealing at personal and public levels. An identity card given to oversees students sponsored by the State Department to follow a course of study in the United States of America carries the following phrase: to promote friendship and understanding. The million flour sacks donated by America to the Third World countries carry the picture of shaking hands annotated with friendship between peoples. But what makes Forster find in the flat-and-round character classification an appropriate form for approaching the politics of imperialism? Forster seems to find in imperialism typicality rather



20

than individuality, seeing the imperialist as a person indoctrinated by the social and political institution of the empire (such as the special civil servants produced by the public schools). The imperialist cannot believe, in Forster’s term, ‘What I believe’ but rather what others believe for him or make him believe in. Forster was thought to have gone to the extreme in expressing his conviction of the sanctity of the individual when he made that provocative statement: ‘I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’ (TCD, 62). Yet Forster had no intention of being committed in the way people thought him to be. The statement is hypothetical, as he said to me and to many others who asked him for a clarification. He hoped that he ‘won’t be put in that situation’. The statement is, I believe, an indirect emphasis on the integral relationship between the public and the private. Yet what I believe drives Forster to apply this characterization to the question of imperialism and its politics is the design always on his mind which is that of working out a scheme in sharp opposition to that already undertaken by Kipling. English officials in India who are condemned by Forster are glorified by Kipling as pillars of the publicschool code of devotion and self-sacrifice in imperial administration. Jeffrey Meyers perceptively outlines the contrast between Forster and Kipling as follows: The English officials portrayed by both writers share the same [Meyers’s emphasis] values, but appear in entirely different lights, for Kipling’s heroes become Forster’s villians. The military officers, whom Kipling respects and praises, are the most vile and hateful of Forster’s characters, Major Calendar, Aziz’s superior, deliberately subjects Nureddin, his Indian patient, to physical cruelties, and boasts about it afterwards. The Army subaltern is a bully and a boor who calls Fielding a ‘swine’ when he alone courageously defends Aziz. (Meyers 1973: 30) To demonstrate his view of Kipling’s character as the embodiment of imperialism – the same as the officials in A Passaga to India, Meyers turns to Kim. He sees Kim mainly as a spy who betrays the India he once loved. It is true that Kim is quite vulnerable to such criticism,





and that a convincing picture of the novel and its protagonist as an expression of imperialism can be easily solicited. Another different reading of the novel can be also offered. Meyers’s assessment can probably be applied to characters in Kipling’s poems rather than to those in Kim, where Kipling successfully manages to subjugate imperialism to a wide range of individual merits of character (details are further discussed in the following two chapters).



22

‘Hassan in England’: a Western Room with an Oriental View

Elizabeth Heine, co-editor of Arctic Summer and Other Fiction where ‘Hassan in England’ is included, classifies the piece under ‘Shorter Fragments’; hence the reference to it as a ‘fragment’ (whether Forster intended it to be so is another question). Hassan is obviously Masood. After the editor gives the fragment an approximate date (1907?), she comments: ‘It offers surprisingly early evidence of Forster’s interest in Indian and English differences, but his friendship with Masood began late in 1906’ (AS, xxviii). Elizabeth Heine goes on to quote Forster to Edward Dent suggesting the background for Hassan. I have also become friends with a nice (who isn’t, except in novels?) Mohammedan – at least he thinks he’s a Mohammedan and that I am a Christian. ‘I must really bike over to the mosque some Friday’ or ‘Excuse me if I tell you, but I am told that even clergymen find the Trinity hard to understand’ or ‘let me explain my religion. Not to drink wine. Not to eat the pig. There is one God and Mohammed is one of his prophets. To believe in the Last Judgment. Oh yes, and not to eat an animal that has died.’ (AS, xxviii) In the ‘Supplementary Material’ of Arctic Summer Elizabeth Heine further digs up some background material (to be discussed later), which adds little or no significance to what the fragment particularly implies. One wonders why ‘Hassan in England’, in comparison with other pieces in the collection, does not receive the attention it certainly deserves. For example, Elizabeth Heine rightly discusses in 23



2


the Editor’s Note Forster’s experimental achievement in fiction as related to ‘Nottingham Lane’ and its bearing on The Longest Journey. With reference to Forster’s experiment in ‘Nottingham Lane’, Elizabeth Heine remarks: A theory of fiction, if still embryonic, is clearly at work. Nonetheless, Forster’s later opinion of this undergraduate novel, expressed in an unpublished memoir in which he credits his Cambridge tutor, Nathaniel Wedd, with calling his attention to his possession of the ‘special and unusual apparatus’ of the novelist, is severely just: ‘that novel about a boy named Edgar … wasn’t writing, though. The apparatus was working, not inaccurately, but feebly and dreamily, because I wasn’t sure it was there’. (AS, ix) What is said here about Nathaniel Wedd can similarly be extended to, for example, Dickinson, whose impact on Forster and A Passage to India is so obvious as not to need much introduction. ‘Hassan in England’ is a kind of ideogram to A Passage to India. Forster chooses two most intimate people as models: Masood as Hassan (and later Aziz) and Dickinson as Fielding; and Elizabeth Heine’s comment on the narrative voice in ‘Nottingham Lane’ can be equally applied to ‘Hassan in England’. Here is the comment: ‘Forster even at this early stage uses the voices of the narrator for wise and ironical comment’ (AS, ix). ‘Hassan in England’ consequently can be read within the scope of wisdom and irony rendered by the narrative voice, which in great density yields the mutual implications of culture and imperialism, captured by Forster at such an early stage. Counter to Dickinson are the rector and his wife who are described by Forster as ‘typical Westerns’. They are also a model for the officials in India, especially Mrs Callendar and her husband: ‘They are a good sort, but they have no true sense of the unseen’ (AS, 246). Such characters belong to those Anglo-Indians in A Passage to India described by Forster as having ‘undeveloped hearts’. Forster’s great skill can be seen in his ability to describe a serious issue in a very condensed clue phrase used as a frame of reference. Forster’s great dispute is with those who ‘have no true sense of the unseen’. A Passage to India can be read as a battle against those British imperialists or agents of



24

imperialism who have ‘undeveloped hearts’ and this is what presumably makes them ‘equal to those have no true sense of the unseen’. One phrase implies the other. Yet a most significant reference in the fragment is that to Kipling, and this evidently demonstrates the difference in attitude between Forster and Kipling right from the beginning of Forster’s career: ‘Kipling – whom I detest and I’m sure you do too – ?’ (AS, 246). Forster, however, is in agreement with Kipling that there is a gulf ‘an enormous gulf, between East and West’, but he strongly objects to the way Kipling and others like him deal with the problem, and the difference between the two different attitudes held by an imperialist and an anti-imperialist. The opposition between Forster and Kipling begins from this fragment and continues later on.1 Again A Passage to India can be summed up by the following sentence which is central to the discourse of the narrative: ‘And it is inability to realize this gulf that is at the bottom of all our mistakes in India’ (AS, 246). Forster (who says the above with reference to Kipling) means here that there is a discrepancy between taking the gulf for granted as Kipling does and realizing the gulf so as to see through it and consequently deal with it without prejudice. Hence Forster’s opposition to Kipling2 (details discussed later). This is in itself evidence of Forster’s integrity and his solid attitude as an anti-imperialist. What I find particularly attractive about Forster in this fragment ‘Hassan in England’ is that he had been conscious of the task of postcolonialist criticism long before the genre settled on the map of culture and politics. In this fragment we can trace the two major aspects of strategy initiated by those writers: the ‘journey within’ and ‘writing back’. By declining to offer any knowledge of the West when asked by Hassan, Dickinson obliquely stands against the kind of Orientalism marked by the impartial knowledge produced by some Orientalists. This is the dialogue between Hassan and his tutor: ‘May I ask you a question about the West, Mr. Dickinson?’ Dickinson burst out delightedly. ‘I’m the worse [sic] person in the world to ask. I have no tenderness for the West.’ (AS, 246) In his response to Hassan’s question, Dickinson comes very close to the crucial argument of knowledge as power utilized by imperialists,



‘Hassan in England’ 25


and Dickenson, for example, makes no claim to such knowledge whatsoever, confirming his dissociation from a possible consequential misrepresentation. Forster here sums up the whole situation about the crisis in A Passage to India, which is actually about the gulf between Indians and the British, who unfortunately do not realize the need for a bridge between the different cultures. He seems to believe that the British public are unable to see the gulf in the first place so that it could be eventually acknowledged. Forster envisages the British public as hopeless in coping with the problem, simply because they do not and, perhaps, cannot see the problem: ‘I din it into the ears of the British Public every week. But they cannot see it. They are not capable of seeing it. Yet it is plain as a pikestaff was plain before’ (AS, 247). This confirms Forster’s clear attitude towards the ruled and the ruling imperialist power. The fragment further makes an allusion of particular interest when it refers to ‘the salt of the world’ being the dissidents from ‘the practical men’ of the world: How it would have puzzled him to be told that those who make mistakes, those who render unto God the things that are Caesar’s and unto Caesar the things that are God’s, are really the salt of the world. They do not need to classify. To them love is love, infinity infinite. Unlike the practical man, they have seen that facts are alive. (AS, 247) This is exactly the kind of discourse which runs between Aziz and Mrs Moore in A Passage to India when the two encounter each other at the entrance of the Mosque where the gulf is immediately bridged as a result of the intimacy that spontaneously establishes itself between the two. The climax of the fragment, however, occurs with the reflection Dickinson makes about Hassan. ‘Yes, he’s interesting,’ reflected Dickinson. ‘He’s not what I expected, but he’s interesting. He’ll teach us a good deal.’ (AS, 248) Dickinson’s reflection on the situation may be quite relevant to the relationship between East and West once it is read along with the context of Mustafa Sa’eed and his tutor, Maxwell Foster-Keen, in Season of Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih), a novel viewed by Edward Said as an excellent example of the activated post-colonial



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performance of ‘writing back’. The common theme Forster and Tayeb Salih deal with is the topical encounter between East and West, which takes the opposite direction with each writer. Hassan’s English tutor, Dickinson, as mentioned above, is most positive about the other, and intimacy is the basis of Dickinson’s conduct towards the culture of the Orient. In contrast, Mustafa Sa’eed’s English tutor, Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen of Oxford, is quite negative about the other: ‘You, Mr. Sa’eed, are the best example of the fact that our civilizing mission in Africa is of no avail. After all the efforts we’ve made to educate you, it’s as if you’d come out of the jungle for the first time.’ (Salih 1980: 93–4) This is exactly the kind of misrepresentation exposed in Orientalism, demonstrated by the relationship of power between the West and the Orient. In comparison the Oxford tutor says what the Cambridge tutor would never contemplate saying. Forster-Keen adopts the kind of attitude adopted by those Orientalists in Orientalism. In identifying hegemony Said draws upon: What Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. (Said 1978, rept 1995: 7) In contrast to this account of the Orient based on Western assumptions is Dickinson’s memoir written by Forster as a tribute to his mentor whose liberal thought and independent mind had a great impact on Forster and his generation. This, for example, is one portrait of Dickinson and China derived from the memoir: He came to her [China] as a lover, who had worshiped from afar for years. In a life which contained [see Ph, 26–7] much





disillusionment, China never failed him. She stood firm as the one decent civilization, and when he mourned over her it was not because she had disappointed him but because he had lived to see her destroyed by the violence and vulgarity of Europe. In his last years, her fate seemed to epitomize mankind’s. If China could have been saved, he would have been persuaded that humanism is indestructible. His was an impersonal love; no private relationship coloured it, although he became friendly with many individual Chinese. (GLD, 141–2) It is worth noting here that Forster addresses Dickinson in a tone similar to the one in which he describes Alexander in his history book about Alexandria. Forster sees both Alexander and Dickinson as priests of global culture. A Passage to India is presumably outside time and place as it stands alone in the context of cross-cultural writings. Forster fulfills the requirement of the post-colonial ‘journey in’ without being a dissident native like Fanon, and that of ‘writing back to imperialism’ without being one of the post-colonialist writers. In his Culture and Imperialism Said sees Ngugi’s The River Between and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North as successful attempts to rewrite Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ‘from the point of view of the colonized’. A Passage to India (and the fragment in question) can, I believe, equally be added to the two. Said is conscious of the special place Forster enjoys among the British novelists and the subtlety of his novelistic art receives a serious discussion in Said’s criticism. It is this subtlety of Forster, which makes Said revisit Forster in Culture and Imperialism.3 ‘Hassan in England’ serves as an important supplement for any reading of A Passage to India in a cultural context, as it illuminates Forster’s preoccupation with the global issue which has been developing over the years since the fragment was written. ‘Hassan in England’ was presumably designed as a narrative (short or long, we do not know) and not as a flimsy or piece of essay or journalism. No matter how brief statements of the fragment are, they carry with them significant implications which expand, later, in the complex discourse of A Passage to India. For this reason one may find it rather surprising that Elizabeth Heine somehow overlooks the illuminating effects the fragment



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offers. The note she makes to ‘Hassan in England’ is obviously superfluous simply because it oversimplifies Forster’s design and particularly misses the point behind the reference to Kipling. Forster has no intention of reminding us of the beginning and ending of Kipling’s ‘Ballad of East and West’, but rather to use Kipling as a starting point for the great controversial issue where Forster stands in sharp opposition to Kipling. Besides Elizabeth Heine seems to miss the irony behind Forster’s twist of the close of Kipling’s ballad, and overlooks the significant issue Forster makes: ‘They do not need to classify’ (AS, 247). In the manuscript of the fragment ‘they’ is a reference to ‘the artists, the poets, the true dreamers, the salt’ which supersede ‘really the salt’ as Elizabeth Heine herself notes (AS, 338). The reference to Kipling and to religion, which we find in the fragment, certainly inspires the big cultural issues which have been for decades a serious concern in cultural studies. This reference and the like suggest more than the casual explanatory notes derived from the Kipling poem and the New Testament made by Elizabeth Heine as follows: The opening of the refrain of Kipling’s ‘Ballad of East and West’, where ‘never the twain shall meet’, is better known than the close: But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! Christ’s answer to those who would entrap him, that they should render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s, and unto God those things which are God’s, is told in each of the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25. (AS, 338) A careful reading of Forster’s text indicates Forster’s mobile design which brings about the movement from the theological to the secular – and this itself forms the core of Forster’s notion conveyed by the condensed short fragment. Had Elizabeth Heine put ‘Hassan in England’ in a cultural perspective, she would probably have given it a special status, realizing Forster’s serious engagement with the ‘worldliness of the text’. In one sentence Forster makes his design clear: ‘Unlike the practical man, they have seen that facts are alive’ (AS, 247). With this key phrase ‘facts are alive’, Forster crosses the limitation of misrepresentation and the barriers between different





cultures, and what he says here recalls Said’s invitation to abandon ‘essentialization that has the power to turn human beings against each other’ (Said 1993: 276). What brings about the great change in Mrs Moore’s sensibility is the discrepancy she discovers between the ‘essentialization’ of ‘talkative Christianity’ and those facts around her she finds alive. In Said’s words, Mrs Moore presumably finds in this kind of ‘essentialization’ a path leading ‘into an unthinking acceptance of stereotypes, myths, animosities, and traditions encouraged by imperialism’. It is such a path that Mrs Moore struggles to abandon forever, especially when she discovers a world ‘not constructed out of warring essences’ (Said 1993: 277). Similarly Adela changes as she emancipates herself from the ‘essentialization’ dramatized as an echo. Both Adela and Mrs Moore are liberated in Fanon’s definition of the term, which is referred to by Said as ‘a transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness’ (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999: 111). In all its brevity (and Forster, like great poets who are masters of the line, is a great master of the phrase), ‘Hassan in England’ can be read as an embryo of A Passage to India, and can be further illuminated through Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. It is simply a fragment of culture and ‘wordliness of the text’.



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Forster’s Debate on ‘Kipling Is Not Literature’

Forster’s most extended views on imperialism and its politics is found in an unpublished paper he gave to the Weybridge Literary Society in 1913. The paper is rarely quoted, and somehow it has not been given the attention it deserves since Colmer quoted it in his book in 1975. One reason behind this negligence may be due to the fact that Colmer’s reference is not specific enough, for Forster’s papers at the time were not classified to give this paper the bibliographical reference needed. However, now that more work has been done on Forster’s papers over the years following his death this is how the paper is described: ‘A MS of “Kipling’s Poems”, given to the Weybridge Literary Society in 1910 [1910] in Monument Green’ (KCLC, vol. 8/20). Obviously the annotation is quite misleading as it makes no reference whatsoever to the fact that it is a paper by Forster about Kipling’s poems. Besides, the date 1910 is wrong, and the right one is 1913, given in Kirkpatrick’s Bibliography of E. M. Forster.1 What I find most intriguing is the question as to why this very important paper has not found a place in those volumes of Forster’s prose already published, including essays, lectures and papers some of which are probably less important than the paper under consideration. No less intriguing is Forster’s particular concern with the paper which made Alice Clara Forster copy it, evidently as a gesture on Forster’s behalf to preserve it. The paper is given a different call number and the following description ‘MS copy made by ACF of “Kipling’s Poems” includes a MS note by EMF, n.d.’ (KCLC, 6/24/2A). The note referred to here consists of the following words written in Forster’s hand on top of the first page of the version written by 31



3


ACF: ‘Read to the Weybridge Literary Society’. My first acquaintance with this paper was in the early 1970s through Elizabeth Ellem, the first archivist, who apparently edited ACF’s version (KCLC), presumably with the intention of publishing it herself. Elizabeth Ellem was asked to leave her job at the archive shortly after she had already published extensively from Forster’s papers, leaving the paper under consideration as she found it.2 In any case this bibliographical background is not our concern here, no matter how appealing it may seem to be. Of particular relevance to our general discussion is Forster’s abstention from publishing the paper. One justification, I think, is possibly that offered by John Beer in the forward to this book, where he remarks that ‘At the time when he [Forster] was writing [A Passage to India], however, it was extremely difficult to foresee the events which would in time make it inevitable for Britain to give up its rule, so that he might readily have been dismissed as a dangerous and foolish subversive.’ What Beer says here also explains what seems to be the sort of ambivalence (justifiable, of course) noticed in the paper used by Forster, in the course of evaluating Kipling. Forster’s dilemma in this paper is how to express his views on imperialism taking a very popular figure like Kipling as a model. It is like swimming against the current. We know that Forster is nonconformist and that he is independent enough to say ‘What I Believe’, the title of a typical essay by him, but he cannot possibly ignore a public already allured by Kipling. How then to appeal to the public while launching such harsh criticism against a literary figure so popular throughout Forster’s life? Forster begins the paper with a long introduction which sets the tone of his strategy for the whole discussion in advance. He first tells us about his visit to that famous art exhibition of caricatures where the one of Kipling by Max Beerbohm is included. The visit is dramatized in a classical fashion to form an oblique comment on what Forster actually wants to say about imperialist Kipling. It precedes not only the discussion of the poems but offers a critique of them at once. So the introduction includes the visit to the exhibition followed by his own comment: A few years ago I went to an amusing exhibition of caricatures. Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Balfour, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Belloc were all held up to ridicule, but perhaps the most diabolical of all was the



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caricature [crossed out: Those who visited the recent exhibition of caricatures by Max Beerbohm are certain to remember Beerbohm, will remember with a peculiar joy his portrait rendering] of Rudyard Kipling. Our poet is represented in the act of carrying off the Nobel prize [crossed out: for English Literature] lately awarded to him by the Swedish government. He is clad [added: for the ceremony] in Brown reach me downs: on his head is a bowler hat into which the Union Jack is stuck; in his hands are immense money bags; and out of his mouth proceeds the legend ‘Good Lord, they ha’ paid in full? [added: He is attended by] A tin soldier and a [crossed out: little wooden] toy motor car [crossed out: attest the sources of his poetical inspiration] while [crossed out: the figure of] Mr. Hall Caine, standing disconsolately in the background, indicates the type of rival with whom he has had to compete. Above, at the top of the picture, heaven opens, and we perceive George Meredith and Algernon Swinburne, sitting on a cloud and both serenely indifferent to the whole affair. ‘These things’, they say, ‘do not concern the [crossed out: immortals] gods.’ Kipling is not literature. (KCLC) Forster then goes on to say that the caricature ‘will be made a very good starting point for our survey’ for having ‘much food for thought in this picture’. Addressing his audience he tells them how ‘The caricaturist has put the case against Kipling – unfairly if you like, but not untruly’ [my emphasis]. After the balance and counterbalance made through the two adverbs Forster immediately draws the attention of his audience to the skill of the caricaturist to shift the emphasis on the truth rather than the justice of the situation: He has expressed with a few strokes of the brush, certain unpleasing qualities that all the poet’s admirers must allow, and every line in the picture – one might say every tint in it – could be illustrated by some quotation from the victim’s [my emphasis] poems. (KCLC) The image Forster tries to advance objectively does not seem to suffice; hence the verdict which follows: ‘Kipling is vulgar. He does brag.’ In an attempt to counter this gloomy picture Forster turns to the truth about the caricature and its suggestion that ‘Kipling is not literature’. Forster does not deny the truth that Kipling is ‘putty, brass and paint’3 to make him stand outside literature as he seems to be



Forster’s Debate on ‘Kipling Is Not Literature’ 33

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Putty, brass and paint are there, but with them is fused, at times, inextricably, a precious metal. To call the Kipling amalgam all poetry would be absurd. To call it ‘partly poetry’ is surely justifiable, and if anything understates its power. Words that move the reader so deeply, that have an almost physical effect on him, cannot be the words of a charlatan. As we read Kipling he seems actually to be in the room with us; we see his face – occasionally with feelings of disgust: we accept or reject his remarks vividly: his verse has all the power and the defects of personal conversation, and in spite of the defects, it takes us in a snare that can not fail. (KCLC) Forster continues to comment that readers who fall under the spell of Kipling’s magic have to reconsider literary definitions and place him, for example, outside those of Plato, Milton and Tasso. In their quest for a place in literature for Kipling ‘they [readers] will come to the less dignified but tenable belief that there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right’. In his usual practice Forster concludes with a sudden cryptic utterance: ‘Kipling is alive’. Obviously this remark is quite ironical, if not typical elusive Forster altogether. It is important to notice here that Forster’s reference to Kipling’s practice of constructing ‘tribal lays’ recalls to mind the similar practice of constructing tribal laws in India. Forster cannot afford to tell his audience at this stage of introducing Kipling that their poet is first and foremost an imperialist. Forster is elusive. We can imagine him looking at his audience, throwing a bait for them every now and then to engage their mind and then to convince rather than to shock them; his reiteration that ‘ “Kipling is alive”. That is his great merit’ comes after he assures his audience that a poet with four books of poetry cannot be excluded from literature even if his poetry does not fall within the definitions of literature that readers ‘have been unwise enough to make’. Forster asks his audience to permit him to pass on to another point, which is, as a matter of fact, only an elaboration of the same point



rendered by the caricature which makes him also of little concern to the gods. Yet this is not, Forster comments, the whole truth:

in an opposite direction. Forster’s honesty makes him confess the contradiction behind the shift from the positive quality of being alive, already ascribed to Kipling, to the negative one he advances as a counterbalance: ‘The orator is always privileged to contradict himself – a privilege that will be frequently exercised when the subjects of the oration is Kipling.’4 The other point Forster observes in Kipling is vitality which ‘irrespective of the qualities that inform it, is such a poor business’. Forster wants to say that Kipling’s poetry falls between two categories: one can be associated with ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and this is where Forster sees him as ‘alive’; and the other as ‘Life for Life’s sake’ (obviously Forster coins this) which qualifies him for being vital. Both are equally dangerous, Forster remarks. In an attempt to demonstrate what he means by vitality in Kipling, Forster comes close to producing a caricature perhaps more serious than the one already mentioned: An eel is full of vitality, [crossed out: but all the same it is not a particularly interesting animal. An eel can wriggle and bite and jump, it can tie itself in knots, it can survive decapitation for several hours] Yet few men have made a companion of [crossed out: an eel] it. They have usually preferred the vitality of a fox terrier. Vitality, before it attracts us, must be plus something:– plus intellect, plus beauty, plus goodness. Though it lies at the root of all things it is … only the manure that fertilizes, it is the back of everything, it is but the raw material worthless alone. To admire Kipling simply because [Forster’s emphasis] he is alive, would be a grave mistake. (KCLC) In this account lies the portrait of the poet as imperialist who survives with the vitality of an eel. It further suggests that imperialism is a sort of eel, whose vitality lacks intellect, beauty and goodness. The introduction concludes with most original remarks which, when read closely in the context of Forster’s approach to Kipling, can be found quite relevant to the initial movement of imperialism. In these remarks Forster tells us, obliquely though, that the nemesis of imperialism is a cosmopolitan middle-class culture driven ‘east of Suez’ by eel-like vitality. The concluding remarks provide a unique picture of the caricature ‘Kipling is not literature’, by showing how this literature produced by Kipling (and the like) is an extreme case





of the urban middle-class culture which is not by literary definitions literature. By analogy imperialism is not literature. Here is the picture of the journey Forster draws to demonstrate the inevitable relevance between imperialist literature and its milieu, with the producer of this literature as an agent of imperialism: Into this mistake [of admiring Kipling simply because he is alive] we are very likely to fall. We middle classes – our life [crossed out: here in the suburbs] is so sheltered, so safe, we are so protected by asphalt pavements, creosoted palings, and policemen, so guarded on all sides from all that may injure the body or disturb the soul, that in literature we are apt to rush to the other extreme, and to worship vitality unrestrainedly. ‘How magnificent’ (we think) to lead a lawless roving life somewhere east of Suez [crossed out: where there are no trains to catch, where the wildest dreams of Kew are facts, and the crimes of Clapham respectable] where the divorce laws, which we should be discussing this evening need no reform because [crossed out: they do not exist] there are none. Armed with a sword instead of an umbrella and a revolver instead of a train ticket, how magnificent to meet some other strong men face to face and [between the lines, reversed: Having said one thing it] of course to get ‘the best of him.’ It is we of the suburbs who buy the physical culture magazine of Mr. Sandow and Mr. McFadden, we who read the bellicose poems of Henley, we who encourage all [crossed out: romance] books that beckon the imagination outwards. As for the soldiers and sailors and backwoods men – they, I understand, prefer poems to be about their mothers. And so, when Kipling comes along with a great bang-whanging, dropping his h’s, splitting his infinitives, jolly well ending up a sentence with a preposition if he has a mind to, and singing Ow the look! Blooming the look! That is the thing that makes the boys sit up and shoot!5 We are too apt to exclaim ‘Oh this is the Reality [crossed out: Thing]. This is life. This man is in touch with [crossed out: Reality] the [crossed out: naked] fact of existence’ too apt to regard him as a sort of inspired buccaneer and not of as complex poet, who, like most poets touches the facts of existence at one moment, and fails to touch them at the next. (KCLC)



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Thus end the concluding remarks which articulate the journey of imperialism from within, without even mentioning imperialism by name. Forster explores here the origin of imperialism pointing to the way the middle class develop a desire, rooted in fantasy, for a different reality beyond their own stable and secure life. This desire is promoted by people like Kipling, Henley, Sandow and McFadden who notably expound their jingoistic patriotism and dictate their imperialistic views. Forster lays great emphasis on the fact that ‘we’, the middle class, are both producers and consumers of imperialist literature. In one stroke Forster sums up the story of imperialism: ‘How significant’ (we think) to lead a lawless roving life somewhere east of Suez …’. It is worth while remembering that Forster says this at a time when A Passage to India was ferociously shaping itself. In its embryo the novel was presumably designed to be a different passage altogether ‘east of Suez’, being the opposite of Kipling, a hostile passage intended, at once, to reach Masood, who was behind launching the scheme through the invitation extended to Forster to visit India. Yet the conclusion of the introduction restates those remarks (set as lines for the criticism of Kipling) in another form. Forster reiterates that the two dangerous posts which the critic should avoid in criticizing Kipling are: ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and ‘Life for Life’s sake’. Forster remarks that ‘if we go too near [the first] we shall undervalue Kipling, and miss half the wonder of his work’, and one really wonders how serious Forster is here in stating that Kipling will ever be undervalued by this position or any other position, and I take Forster’s ‘wonder’ to mean simply a compliment more to the audience than to Kipling. If, in contrast, we go too near the other post, Forster adds, ‘we shall [crossed out: estimate] overvalue him, and try to make out that those lines I have just quoted about loot are virile stuff, whereas they are clearly balderdash’. What Forster actually restates here is a further emphasis on the location of Kipling in the caricature: being not literature; and being so, one can presumably say that his kind of literature is not criticism, or at least beyond its cannon. Forster’s restatement is strongly expressed in the concluding paragraph where Kipling receives no compliment (usually provided as a concession to the audience): And it may further be premised that in the blind worship of Vitality lies Kipling’s own danger, and that it [crossed out: too]





often leads him to mistake violence for strength, lust for manliness, and [crossed out: vulgarity] impudence for truth – [crossed out: and to believe that merely by/too often leads him to/calling a spade without reflecting whether thus he is more likely to dig up/will be able to dig up/the Hidden Treasure. (KCLC) ‘The Hidden Treasure’ immediately recalls Kipling, the imperialist poet. Behind imperialism and its mythology lies the quest for the hidden treasure often motivated by the fantasy of the stable, peaceful middle-class life mentioned above. In literal terms it is the hidden treasure of ivory in the Congo (Heart of Darkness), the silver in Latin America (Nostromo), the gold in Australia and South Africa, or the natural sources east of the Suez, and nowadays the oil in Arabia. In figurative terms it is the quest for the exotic as well as for the materialistic whether related to people or to places. Forster subtly means that literature for Kipling is a hidden treasure inaccessible to him, even when he finds it within reach as an imperialist in actual life, that is, the quest for the hidden treasure in literature cannot be identified with the similar quest for the hidden treasure in the imperialist career. Obtaining one is not necessarily determined by obtaining the other. Hence the conclusion in its comprehensive term: imperialism is not literature. The introduction shows that Kipling’s poetry is not the real target of Forster’s criticism. It is more or less an occasion to discuss Kipling’s views on imperialism. In poetry or prose Forster sees Kipling as imperialist, and the discussion of Kipling’s poetry further demonstrates this effect. Forster suggests a classification for Kipling’s poems based on ‘the Wordsworthian system’ which he thinks appropriate enough ‘because it will annoy Kipling so much, and it does him good to be annoyed’. Forster’s remark here cannot be innocent, although a simple analogy can be seen between Wordsworth’s late poetry, ‘the child is father of the man’, and Kipling’s poems relating to childhood which Forster puts at the end of classification. I would like to suggest that Forster’s criticism here calls to mind Forster’s review of Kipling’s Letters, ‘The Boy Who Never Grew Up’. In any case Forster sees Kipling’s poems falling into four big or five principle classes. Poems in narrative form containing Kipling’s



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greatest work: ‘The Ballad of East and West’, ‘Tomlinson’ and ‘Mary Gloster’. Poems relating to military matters: ‘The Barrack Room Ballads’ and ‘Service Songs’. Poems suggested by residents in India which are the ‘Departmental Ditties’ – early written. Poems dedicated to imperialism which Forster sees as didactic and moral. Poems connected with childhood, where Forster remarks, ‘they will speak for themselves, and I don’t think we shall quarrel about them!’ Forster notes that the classification is not ideal but it is better than the chronological one. He adds that ‘some splendid verse’ is not included in any of the classifications. What Forster says about childhood poems is ironical, but nevertheless reveals his intention. Childhood and its poetry (form and content) is not Forster’s concern. The discussion makes its emphasis mainly on the poems Kipling dedicates to imperialism; and Forster makes his purpose clear when he announces the plan of his intentional design for those poems which he sees as highly didactic and dogmatic in tone: ‘we shall find them a convenient excuse for examining Kipling’s opinions and for saying anything about him that we have not been able to say before and for quarrelling a little with one another’. The discussion continues consistently to extend praise followed by quarrelling. Poems in narrative form are surprisingly good, Forster comments. Kipling’s narrative skill whether in prose or in poetry can hardly be disputed, and the technique of these poems is admirable: all of them grip our attention in the opening lines, proceed without effort to a climax, and leave no loose threads at the conclusion … The incidents are simple and striking, the characters are firmly contrasted: regarded merely as craftsmanship, they are worthy of high praise. However, no praise is conclusive no matter how high it is. Any praise is superseded by a flawed perspective in which Forster finds Kipling inevitably caught. ‘But this is not all’, Forster says about the poems, ‘worthy of high praise’: They might all have their technical merits and yet be only putty, brass and paint. For all their competence, they might still [crossed out: only] confirm the [crossed out: Max Beerbohm] caricature. What is that lifts them from journalism which only denies to be




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Only long quotations from the poems themselves could answer this question, Forster continues to say. ‘Failing that, the best answer is this, “Because they are inspired by passion”.’ Forster acknowledges the merit of passion to the extent that he takes Kipling’s poems to illustrate that the poetry implies passion in a similar way prose implies reflection. Yet he quarrels with Kipling over the manner passion is used in his poems. This is how Forster classifies Kipling’s passion: ‘The Ballad of East and West’ is inspired by the passion for strength – strength as Kipling understands it; not a very heroic quality, but inspiring a passion all the same. ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ is inspired by the passion for Law, Order, Duty and Restraint, Obedience, Discipline, as embodied in the engines of an Ocean Liner. ‘The Rhyme of the Three Captains’ and the poem on the finding of the Parnell commission are inspired by the passion for justice, ‘Tomlinson’ by the passion of contempt. And the ‘Mary Gloster’, the greatest of them all, is inspired by the greatest of all passions – Love; not the love of little Cupids, but the love that a long rough life has nourished and that bursts into fuller splendour at the hour of death. (KCLC) All that passion inspires here belongs to what Forster refers to above as Kipling’s tribal lays and tribal laws. Obviously he is not serious about law, order and the like, which are, more or less, Forster implies, substitutes needed for the imperialist to rule. Forster suggests that nothing is wrong with the concept itself; it is rather the way the concept is conceived by Kipling which makes it flawed. When passion is so personal, as is the case with Kipling, its objectivity is bound to suffer. Eliot tells us that poetry is not about emotions but an escape from them by means of what he calls depersonalization. Another example Forster provides on Kipling’s practice of misrepresenting concepts is from ‘Tomlinson’, when he first tells us that the sincerity and force of the poem is beyond all question. He then adds that ‘Kipling’s conception of the Unseen World is a little too Anglo-Saxon



paid in full, into literature, where no one should work for money, and no one should work for fame? What tells that they are made by hand not by machinery? (KCLC)

for some of us’, and Forster records in a marginal note ‘This upsets Sir Charles’. Forster is critical of the poem because ‘There is no mysticism in it, no spirituality, nothing intellectual. Action is the only thing that matters, and Kipling does not mind if the action is good or bad.’ In the light of this criticism the poem does not achieve the minimum of literary canon, and the aesthetic effect anticipated is sacrificed for the biographical account in it. Being ‘a little too Anglo-Saxon’, ‘the Unseen World’ is being partial, not objective, and on top of that racist. This asserts Kipling’s identity of the ‘White Man’s Burden’, an identity which is his own invention, in the first place. In a sarcastic manner Forster comments on ‘Tomlinson’, reiterating what is mentioned above in the introduction: ‘The moral of the poem’ Be vital. Vitality at all costs, if it is only the vitality of an eel. Life for life’s sake, irrespective of the qualities that inform it. In other words, the poem has no moral. (KCLC) Forster extends his criticism to Kipling’s method which he likes to call the Kipling ‘amalgam’. In a typical gesture, his voice alternating between praise and blame, Forster turns to ‘the Mary Gloster’ for praise first. He tells us that the poem is ‘the greatest triumph of Kipling’s method’, because it is a ‘mixture of slang and bluff and Scriptural reminiscences’. Sir Anthony Gloster is neither a Hamlet nor a King Lear in disguise. Nor is he disguised Kipling ‘covertly getting at the reader for the purpose of preaching the gospel of vitality’. Sir Anthony is simply himself for he is always ‘unconscious of the reader’s existence’. Forster, however, hastens to say that ‘The Mary Gloster’ is, unfortunately, exceptional and that Kipling cannot be equally successful in his other poems: ‘Would that Kipling had always written on these lines! Would that he was always content to let us love his characters instead of insisting that we should imitate them! Perhaps it is too much to wish.’ Forster concludes his discussion of the narrative poems by general remarks about Kipling, presumably intended to make a balance of positive and negative effects altogether. Kipling, Forster tells his audience, is a preacher, and, with the exception of Shakespeare, he notes, we all want to preach, believing ‘that our own sermon is the one that





really matters’. Forster then goes on to classify sermons in terms of the different effect exercised on people: ‘We cannot realize that sermons only profit those who agree with them beforehand, and that those who disagree will merely be repelled from the preacher.’ Calling on us to observe how this works in Kipling’s case, he adds, reiterating the key term of criticism he has used to describe Kipling’s performance: Those who accept the gospel of vitality will think him the more human for setting it forth. Those whose temperaments reject it will be inclined to reject the preacher also and so commit a deplorable mistake. They must remember that man is always more vulnerable than his message, and that Kipling is worth reading even when he is scolding a round peg because it will not go into a square hole. This ends the discussion of the narrative poems with balance. Poems connected with military matters provide Forster with another example of Kipling’s defective method, and he particularly applies to those poems ‘the Kipling amalgam’ which he sees as ‘a convenient metaphor’. This amalgam ‘cracks very easily’, Forster comments: ‘it will often hold in one verse and crack in the next’. In his judgement, Forster is supported by the fact that ‘the matter and the method are incompatible’. Such a perspective makes Forster remark that the poems are ‘certainly convincing to the casual reader’ and only a soldier can be sure ‘whether they are true to life’. In modern criticism, according to Forster, Kipling does not succeed in integrating form into content, and in terms of modern theory he fails to provide us with ‘creative synthesis’ to prevent topicality emerging as altogether dominant in the creative process. As Forster continues to discuss Kipling’s poetry he introduces Kim to establish a contrast in Kipling’s attitude towards the invisible world. Reading ‘Tomlinson’, ‘with the Anglo-Saxon account’ of the unseen world, or ‘the Recessional Hymn’, with the assumption of a ‘Chosen Race’, Forster urges us to remember the memorable concluding scene in Kim where the old Lama has received the mystic reward, his soul has left the body and united to the World Soul, and beholds all India at once



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Forster concludes his remark with an apologetic note for not giving more details suggesting that Kim deserves particular appraisal. He sums up the contrast between the two poems mentioned and Kim by saying that ‘Tomlinson’ and ‘Recessional’ ‘are thrown off by the superficial layers of Kipling’s mind, while Kim proceeds from the central core of it that was quickened into life by India’. This summary, I believe, marks the contrast Forster finds in Kipling, and Forster’s reference to Kim is a highlight in the whole discussion where the enigmatic in Kipling is somewhat further explored. It is as if the two poems provide an occasion for Forster to show us the positive aspect of Kipling as it can be seen outside his poetry. If ‘Kipling [is] choosing a wrong medium in which to express himself in poetry’ he certainly chooses the right one to express himself in fiction: The greatest of his books is Kim. Kim is [Forster’s emphasis] Kipling. It is the one book that we must bear in mind when we are trying to estimate his genius, for it contains the spiritual standard by which all his developments must be measured. Mysticism may be a mistake, but no one will deny this – that if once a man shows traces of it, those traces must be carefully scanned by all who are trying to understand him. To have felt, if only for a moment, that this visible world is an illusion, to have conceived, however faintly, that the real is the unseen, to have had even a passing desire for the One – is at once to be marked off from all who have not thus felt, thus conceived, thus desired. There is no explanation of the gift of mysticism; many criminals and outcasts had have passed it; many bishops, if the truth were known, are devoid [sic] of it; it pays no honour to rank, character or a vocation; only one thing is certain: it is the peculiar gift of India, and India has given it to Kipling and he gave it to his hero’s Kim. (KCLC) The last statement quoted above is the kernel of Forster’s debate. Kipling here achieves great success, as Forster remarks, when he substitutes the unseen account of the Anglo-Saxon and a Chosen



from the Himalayas to Ceylon, and from that bliss he withdraws himself, and returns to the silly body without agony, in order that Kim also may attain salvation. (KCLC)


Race by the Indian unseen mysticism. He also does so when he becomes, like the Lama and his disciple, modest enough to receive India by means of its mystic nature rather than imposing on it the White Man’s Burden. The concluding statement here suggests that only when Kipling could reach a state of submission to the vastness of the place did the artist in him realize such an expression of genius. It is perhaps Kipling’s detachment from the topicality of his intentional purpose practised in poetry which makes him see the unseen in India without the help of the preaching voice which dominates most of his poems. The peculiar gift of India is a useful diagram in reading Kipling’s works and balancing his different achievements in poetry and fiction. For example, the Great Game in Kim may not be seen as flat, evil vitality, a vitality for its own sake, or action for the sake of action, but rather a playground against which characters contest their own inner self, struggling for freedom from predestination. Kipling is endowed with the peculiar gift of India, that is, mysticism, whose context is the Great Game, and in his turn he hands this gift to Kim for expression. ‘India is Kipling.’ Another diagram suggests that Kipling willingly submits to the great power of mysticism which, to his surprise, perhaps helps him discover a new triumphant ‘burden’ of the Lama. The diagram is better articulated by Said in his Introduction to the Penguin edition of Kim: ‘After all it is India itself which is responsible both for the local vitality enjoyed by Kim, and the threat to British Empire’ (Said 1987: 27). The interpretation of Kim Forster offers in the discussion is intended then to show first the contrast between the poet and the novelist in Kipling, and, at the same time, the contradiction in Kipling’s practice as a poet. ‘To admire Calvinism [which finds Kipling sympathetic]6 and to admire Buddhism [and its India being the most important religious influence that Kipling underwent] as well might seem impossible.’ Forster believes that Kipling has little comprehension of religion as it is presented to the finer minds of the West:7 ‘In all his poems you will find little encouragement for that in heart or the meek or the merciful or for any of those whose lives have been transfigured by the Christian ideal.’ Forster further demonstrates this practice from specific poems: The God of his celebrated Recessional is a Hebrew deity who has given us dominion over palm and pine and who may take that



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dominion away if we do not keep to Law. The spirit is not mentioned. It is the Jeshovah of the Thunder that we are to pray is the Hymn to Action, to Samson to Ahib and to Tubal Cain that we are to turn for example of righteousness and wisdom. The New Testament exists for him scarcely more than it did for the Ironsides of Cromwell: all his affinities are with OT. (KCLC) Another example is given from Mr ‘Andrew’ who is saved from sin only ‘by seeing in the machinery of his steamer, the spiritual machinery that God has created to resume his elect’. All this shows how the ‘unseen’ is seen by Kipling in his poetry. Again it is seen by means of that ‘vitality’ (mentioned above) which Kipling senses in Calvinism (admired by Kipling for its strengthening influence upon character). Calvinism and Buddhism can be viewed as ‘the Kipling amalgam’ which cracks because of the incompatibility of the two elements joined together: for one is spiritual machinery, the other is mystic experience. With reference to Kipling’s experience in India Forster tends to believe that it is not enough to enter India and embrace its religion. What is needed is the will to abandon the claim over the unseen. Kipling succeeds, in Forster’s eyes, when he realizes that the would-be ‘non-elect’ Indians are saved by the unseen ‘Arrow River’, and not by the ‘spiritual machinery’. Hence the conclusion Forster gives to the discussion of the poems relating to Indian matters showing the contrast and at once confirming the contradiction in Kipling’s works: ‘Into all this can Kipling enter but behind it all there remains the mystic passionless face of India and the Lama saying to Kim “Just is the Wheel” Certain is our deliverance! Come!’8 The division of the poems dedicated to Imperialism to which Forster moves for discussion after the Indian division equally provides him with the occasion of quarrelling with Kipling. Forster starts by pointing to what is known in modern literary theory as ‘the reader’s response’, where Kipling makes a political appeal with the anticipation of proportional response from the reader’s side to this appeal. Forster specifies this response provoked by Kipling’s appeal to show how Kipling’s poems here are written in line with the previous ones, with the intentional purpose of the poet. Forster notes ‘that the more we respond to that appeal the more we shall respond




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Those who believe that the Anglo-Saxon Race is divinely appointed to govern the world will rejoice when he expresses their belief worthily, and pardon him when he vulgarizes it. Those who, like myself, have a sneaking admiration for ‘these furriners’ and who hope that France, Italy and Germany, even Germany will help to shape the civilization of the future – we shall read these later poems with a feeling of tension, for Kipling will be dragging us into a position that isn’t ours. We shall readily accuse them of materialism and of cant, and of an almost bestial view of the English character: we shall shudder when we read about the Race with a big R., the Blood with a big B., and the Trail with a big T.: we shall resent the facile appeals to the Almighty, interspersed with demands for consumption and a preferential tariff … (KCLC) He then gives examples of poems which ‘will seem to us to contain more than their due share of frothy, brass and paint, the brass is dominating’. Such poems are: ‘Et Dona Feron’, ‘Kitchener’s School’, ‘The Old Issue’, ‘The Lesson’ and ‘South Africa’. Forster comments that all readers agree ‘that his [Kipling’s] imperial work has a certain hardness of touch’. Forster holds a comparison between early and later poems to show how the former ‘throb with life’ and the latter exercise great ‘stress on vitality’. His explanation (which he makes in a crossed-out remark) is that the latter poems ‘depreciate the things of the spirit’. Forster adds that Kipling’s fault is mainly related to his desire for demanding physical action which results in despising ‘the activities of the spirit’. Quoting some of the later poems, Forster says that ‘when the Anglo-Saxons have triumphed, then poems are rather absurd’ and ‘that is to say virtue and philosophy count as nothing in the development of the British Empire – all that is wanted is commercial honesty’. Though Forster is not really concerned with Kipling’s moral attitude, he criticizes Kipling for pushing ‘inner life’ (or rather denying it altogether) ‘far into the background’, bringing ‘material strength and material organization to the front’, and at the same time failing to realize that inner life is ‘the true measure of the national progress’. In a remark which is crossed out, Forster



to his poetry’:

writes: ‘Apply this arrangement to the British Empire, and no wonder the result depresses one.’ Then follows what I believe is a particular highlight of the whole discussion from the beginning to the end, where Forster carefully articulates his own response to Kipling’s poetry and the inspiration of the caricature: ‘Kipling is not literature’. This is the evaluation Forster makes of Kipling with a direct exposition of his imperialist disposition: Now to approach the British Empire in such a spirit is to ensure jingoism. An Empire is a very difficult subject for poetry. Unless the poet possesses exquisite taste and deep inspiration, he will fall into Kipling’s error, and praise it because it is big and can smash its own enemies. To celebrate a nation is easy enough: it demands a straight-forward patriotism that most of us can supply. But an Empire, with its claims to world wide dominion demands something more profound – that instinctive reverence for all humanity that was possessed by Virgil when he celebrated the Empire of Rome. Kipling’s task is more difficult than Virgil, for the British Empire, unlike the Roman cannot claim a monopoly of civilization [crossed out: whereas the Roman could]. And needless to add, he lacks Virgilian qualities, he would scorn them as unBritish. The results are depressing. For one thing the colonies are exulted beyond all proportion, because being young communities, and therefore still engaged in the physical struggle with nature, they appeal to him strongly, whereas England, aged 1000 years and occupied in the effeminate problem of education and social reform, rouses his soul to loathing. (KCLC) Forster goes on to say how Kipling hijacks the concept of vitality to advance the notion of imperialism, and he perceptively sees through the dominion of the Chosen Race derived from this concept at the hands of Kipling: For another thing the foreigner is beyond all proportion insulted. Kipling’s big vital empire must do [Forster’s emphasis] something, it must have something to hit at, otherwise its vitality in vain. Fortunately these are the foreigners [crossed out: or in his own pleasing phrase the Gentiles] whom he regards as a sort of moral football, designed by providence for the purpose of keeping the





Chosen Race in good condition. Smash them up, smash up the Gentiles. They are sure to be plotting against us, if only we could understand their beastly lingo. Teach them that we are the chosen race and they are not, [crossed out: smash them up of course] that we have the law, and they haven’t, that we are the real Jund Folk and they are the gibbering monkeys who carried away Mawgli for a little, but they were afterwards slain in their thousands by Bagleese and Kao. (KCLC) What Forster says here about Kipling’s imperialistic treatment of the Other immediately brings to mind the portrait of imperialism rendered by Conrad in that famous passage from Heart of Darkness: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to … (Conrad 1902: 50–1) Forster even uses the same wording: ‘The sentimental is not a pretty one and Kipling’s religious philosophy makes it doubly repellant.’ Yet the notion of imperialism delivered by Kipling goes far beyond the abstract idea set by Conrad in this controversial passage. Forster shrewdly sees how Kipling makes imperialism a concrete reality by means of physical action and eel vitality (or perhaps hyena vitality), presumably to ensure its response with the appeal Kipling works out. Forster concludes: ‘And one may note that it [the sentiment] springs from demanding action, and always action, and is the logical goal towards which Kipling has been moving. India, as it were, put the drag on him and granted him visions of another ideal …’ Unfortunately, Kipling sees, Forster implies, imperialism as pretty action. Challenging both Conrad and Kipling who see it as not a pretty thing or sentiment in the first place, Forster also regrets the fact that the ideal granted to him by Indian visions is different from the ideal of these visions. As shown above in Forster’s reference to Kim, Kipling succeeds only once when he is granted mysticism by India, where Forster subtly comments that Kipling, in his return, gives this mysticism to Kim. In



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Back to the caricature of ‘Kipling is not literature’. The question which emerges from Forster’s robust argument as to whether Kipling is literature prompts us further to see where Forster’s paper stands in the literature about Kipling written after the caricature and Forster’s paper. An answer can be found in Eliot’s remarkable essay which prefaces his own selection from Kipling’s verse. So much of what Eliot says in his essay is not essentially in disagreement with what Forster tells us in his paper, though with a different perspective altogether. Eliot introduces his admirable essay by announcing his sympathetic stance towards Kipling, ‘making an effort to detach ourselves from the assumptions of our own generation, enquire whether there is something more in Kipling than is expressed by Beerbohm’s caricature of the Bank Holiday cornet virtuoso on the spree’ (Eliot 1941: 7). Yet following up Eliot’s discussion one wonders whether he, in practical terms, actually finds something more in Kipling than is expressed by Beerhom’s caricature! This is an example from Eliot’s comment on Kipling’s two famous poems ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ and ‘The Mary Gloster’ (where the influence of dramatic monologue as Forster shows above is visible): ‘Why is the influence of Swinburne and Browning so different from what you would expect? It is due, I think, to a difference of motive: what they wrote is intended to be poetry; Kipling was not trying to write poetry at all’ (1941: 8). Eliot here goes as far beyond the mere reference to the impact of Browning’s dramatic monologue on Kipling as Forster does. He contrives a strategy to defend Kipling, drawing upon ‘a difference of motive’. Eliot similarly dwells on Kipling’s ephemeral location outside the borders of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and ‘Life for Life’s sake’ discussed by Forster. No matter how vague Eliot is, he appreciates the urgent response needed for expression in Kipling which is not merely a skill. Whether in prose or in poetry Kipling, notes Eliot, finds himself committed to the necessity of expression itself, and for this reason perhaps Eliot finds ‘no particular pattern’ in Kipling’s poems, as each poem demands a particular form. Eliot gives appraisal to almost everything Foster criticizes in Kipling. This is what Eliot says about



his poetry Kipling adopts, instead, the ideal of romance which makes him see imperialism as essential and permanent.

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I know of no writer of such great gifts for whom poetry seems to have been more purely an instrument. Most of us are interested in the form for its own sake – not apart from the content, but because we aim at making something which shall first of all be [Eliot’s emphasis], something which in consequence will have the capability of exciting, within a limited range, a considerable variety of responses from different readers. For Kipling the poem is something which is intended to act [Eliot’s emphasis] – and for the most part his poems are intended to elicit the same response from all readers, and only the response which they can make in common. (1941: 18) Eliot introduces Kipling as a different poet, whose poetry is written ‘in a different motive’ and ‘a different order of value’. This, Eliot assures, naturally extends to Kipling as the imperialist voice, and it is here where the contrast between him and Forster actually begins. Eliot demands that we must accustom ourselves to recognizing that for Kipling the Empire was not merely an idea, a good idea or a bad idea; it was something the reality of which he felt. And in his expression of his feeling he was certainly not aiming at flattery of national, racial or imperial vanity, or attempting to propagate a political programme: he was aiming to communicate the awareness of something in the existence of which he felt that most were very imperfectly aware. It was an awareness of grandeur, certainly, but it was much more an awareness of responsibility. (1941: 25)9 How Eliot can be convincing in the rationalization of imperialism he offers to Kipling is the question. Unless a close reading is made, what Eliot says here can possibly become a typical imperialist rather than a special (or different) one. According to Eliot, Kipling can also be a missionary who is sincerely engaged in a cause he adheres to. He does not have to be a chauvinist or a propagandist in order to be a typical imperialist. The essential difference between Forster’s approach to Kipling and that of Eliot is a difference of emphasis: Forster’s is on poetry (poems) rather than the poet, on imperialism and the belief in



action and response in Kipling (particularly criticized by Forster):

it rather than on the believer; while Eliot’s is more on the poet and the believer. Like Eliot, Forster does not deny the fact that Kipling is sincere, a genius, a strong adherent to what he believes in, and that he is not, as he says, ‘dull’ at all, but these admirable personal qualities do not redeem his actual practice in art and life. One particularly interesting contrast between Forster’s and Eliot’s approach to Kipling is in relating Kipling to the Roman Empire. We have already seen how Forster presents Kipling’s ideal of the British Empire as falling short of that of the Roman Empire. Eliot, in contrast, admires Kipling’s capability for capturing the greater vision of the Roman Empire and placing the vision of his British Empire within it: He had always been far from uncritical of the defects and wrongs of the British Empire, but held a firm belief in what it should and might be. In his later phase England, and a particular corner of England, becomes the center of his vision. He is more concerned with the problem of the soundness of the core [Eliot’s emphasis] of Empire; this core is something older, more natural and more permanent. But at the same time his vision takes a larger view, and he sees the Roman Empire and the place of England in it. The vision is almost that of an idea of empire laid up in heaven. And with all his geographical and historical imagination, no-one was further than he from interest in men in the mass, or the manipulation of men in the mass: his symbol was always a particular individual [my emphasis]. (1941: 27) Forster would comment that Kipling adopts an ideal different from the ideal of the vision granted by the Roman Empire, a practice similar to what he happened to do with the visions granted by India, as mentioned above. He would add that Kipling missed one ideal and, instead, adopted another, ‘the romance’. Once again Eliot’s account yields a typical image of an imperialist beside the image Eliot wants us to see. For example, Kipling’s symbol, being ‘always a particular individual’, is the symbol of ‘the White Man’s burden’, a particular individual with the will to power, and, to use Forster’s terms, to action, to strength, to vitality, rather than to inner life. One wonders whether Eliot, at the time of writing his essay, was not aware of this symbol as central in Fascism and anti-Semitism. Perhaps Eliot felt that it would be awkward to take an





anti-imperialist stand at a time when the imperialist government of the host country was fighting a great war. Another common ground of dispute over Kipling between Forster and Eliot is the reference to Kim which is subtly expressive, and only a close reading makes us see the distinction between the tone of the high compliment given to Kipling and the undertone of the limitation of the achievement altogether. Forster wants us to remember that only once in his lifetime was Kipling granted the ideal of the visions India gave him. In contrast, Eliot puts Kim in the service of Kipling’s poems by extending the positive effect of the former to the latter. Eliot first admits the racism in Kipling and finds it difficult to justify, yet he defends it. He advances the argument that the celebrity of the imperialist characters in Kipling’s poems does not originate from the fact that they are Britons, but rather from the particular individuality they have, and not without being abrupt he urges us to look at characters of different colours in Kim: No attentive reader of Kipling can maintain, however, that he was unaware of the faults of British rule: it is simply that he believed the British Empire to be a good thing, that he wished to set before his reader an ideal of what it should be, but was acutely aware of the difficulty of even approximating to this ideal, and of the perceptual danger of falling away even from such standards as might be attained. I cannot find any justification for the charge that he held a doctrine of race superiority. He believed that the British have a greater aptitude for ruling than other people, and that they include a greater number of kindly incorruptible and unselfseeking men capable of administration, and he knew that skepticism in this matter is less likely to lead to greater magnanimity than it is to lead to a relaxation of the sense of responsibility. But he cannot be accused of holding that any Briton, simply because of his British race, is necessarily in any way the superior or even the equal of an individual of another race. The types of men which he admires are unlimited by any prejudice; his maturist work on India, and his greatest book, is Kim. (1941: 31) What is particularly relevant about this passage and the rest of the essay, as well, is the fact that Eliot first sets the image of Kipling



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found in Forster’s paper, then he adds to it the defence which is subordinated to the image: no effort can be made to invalidate it or reduce its total effect. The defence here can be read as a kind of identification which Eliot makes with the ‘alien’ (Eliot’s words for Kipling) poet, or an attempt to see him within some range of distance. Eliot always advocates some separation between the man and the poet or the person and the persona. In specific terms it is the separation between the poet and his politics. This certainly applies to Eliot (and his mentor Pound) whose extreme politics did not really interfere with their great poetry, but this does not apply equally to Kipling. In contrast, Forster makes it obvious that the imperialist Kipling produced poems dedicated to imperialism, and the result is that man and poet are inseparable in him. Eliot is not actually in disagreement with Forster except that, for reasons which are not our concern here, he attempts to offer Kipling’s imperialism a justification for the enigmatic joint between poetry and imperialism. In any case the defence survives in the essay as a subordinate to the image, and in Forster’s term the defence is a kind of ‘Kipling’s amalgam’ which, unfortunately, cracks. How can Eliot’s defence or any defence of its kind challenge ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and many similar poems and occasions which testify that the poet and the imperialist form an amalgam intended by its maker to be joined, but the cement available is not enough to prevent the crack? Rereading Eliot’s essay one wonders whether Eliot in his enquiry actually finds something in Kipling more than is expressed in Beerbohm’s caricature and whether Eliot and Forster do not meet at the end over Kipling’s portrait. Yet Eliot’s essay remains quite relevant to any serious discussion of Kipling. It is not only a moderate voice on its own, but also an illuminating one (directly or indirectly) to other voices such as that of Forster. Eliot’s essay helps us see how Forster’s elusive voice stands alone in comparison to other voices. In his approach, Eliot questions the foundation of Kipling’s imperialism and its promotion in his work. This is where Eliot and Forster meet. But Eliot goes beyond this and provides what I have referred to above as justification or defence. Some major criticism of Forster rests with such questioning as that of Eliot, but Eliot’s justification would serve more as a complement than criticism. Edmund Wilson, for




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We have been shown two entirely different world’s existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other, and we have watched the oscillation of Kim, as he passes to and fro between them. But the parallel lines never meet; the alternating attractions felt by Kim never give rise to a genuine struggle … The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatize any fundamental conflict. Kipling would never face one. (Qtd by Said 1987: 23) In his most celebrated study of Kim Jeffrey Meyers tackles the same question when he comments on Kim’s frequent questions which are crucial to the whole novel ‘Who is Kim?’, ‘What am I?’ Meyers perceptively remarks how: The novel provides an answer to these questions, focuses the various aspects of Kim’s hybrid personality, and resolves the conflict between heredity and environment that is expressed in the opening lines of the eighth chapter: Something I owe to the soil that grew More to the life that fed But most to Allah Who gave me two Separate sides to my head. (Meyers 1973: 21–2) After quoting the above lines which I believe can be viewed as the quintescence of Kipling’s mind and thought he comments: Though Kim considers himself an Indian and is unaware of any conflict until the chaplains explain his racial origins to him, the question of his identity and allegiance is really settled before the novel begins. Kim’s most admirable and sympathetic qualities are his Indian ones and we expect these to be dominant. But Kipling believes the collective racial (English) identity is always more important than the personal cultural (Indian) one, and the meaning of the novel is simply that blood will tell: ‘Once a Sahib, always a Sahib.’ (Ibid.) Meyers, like Wilson, questions the foundation of conflict in Kipling and answers some of the questions raised by Eliot’s justification, as seen above, a justification to be preferred for the way in which it



example, regrets the absence of social and political conflict in Kim:

helps readers to see Kipling in the context of the ideal in which he actually believes and which he sincerely promotes – an ideal very much different from that of a political programme propagandist. In contrast Forster questions neither the foundation of conflict in Kipling nor the ideal of his sincere thought and feeling, but rather the foundation of this foundation: the origin of the conflict and the ideal itself. He would not stop with the ‘Separate sides of my head’, or merely question the absence of conflict between them, but rather question the origin of Kipling’s ‘head’. For example, he would add an adjective to the verse in question to make it read: ‘Separate sides to my white head’. Hence the contradiction in Kipling from where the flaw in his vision originates. Forster’s ‘Kipling is Kim’ is in correspondence with Wilson’s ‘The fiction of Kipling’, and does not dramatize any fundamental conflict because ‘Kipling would never face one’. Yet Forster questions the foundation of both, assuming that Kipling’s mind with all its contradictions would make the question of conflict groundless, because imperialism for him is a fixed and permanent identity, regardless of the colour and culture it acquires by time. Kipling finds fatalism in Islam and Eastern resignation to fate in general particularly appealing, presumably because of what he sees of the affinity they have with racial hereditary. ‘Once a Sahib always a Sahib’ is Kipling’s amulet, with which he happily survives. However, the main foundation questioned by Forster is the question of development in Kipling. In the course of his defence of Kipling, Eliot remarks that Kipling develops from ‘Imperial imagination’ as demonstrated in his poetry to ‘historical imagination’ as seen in his fiction in general. Forster would argue that the basis for development in Kipling is missing, in any case, and this is demonstrated in his review of Kipling’s Letters of Travel entitled ‘The Boy Who Never Grew Up’ (1920). The review, like the paper he delivered at the Weybridge Literary Society seven years before, provides Forster with an occasion to discuss (or, to use Forster’s own words ‘to quarrel with Kipling’). About half of the review is devoted to Forster’s views on Kipling. The review begins with a summary which reflects what Forster always thought of Kipling, and it confirms what comes in the paper already discussed: When Kipling first dawned upon our world he was the very spirit of youth – mischievous and irreverent, but full of romantic emotion,





half a private detective and half an acolyte like his own Kim. And even when Fate was unkind and roped him in to be an Imperial prophet something of the early charm survived, so that one could enjoy his work without bothering over his Imperialism. But as the years passed a peculiar phenomenon became evident – arrested development; the young gentleman was as clever as ever, but he failed to grow up. (Forster 1920: 7) Development here has some special connotation. We know how crucial the ‘undeveloped heart’ is in A Passage to India, and that it is one of the magic phrases which has been introduced into the English language. Forster presumably puts Kipling’s characters along with those officials in A Passage to India who live with ‘undeveloped hearts’. It is worth noting that on the same page where the review of Kipling’s letters appears, another kind of review (‘Obituary Notes’) is published and signed ‘Pharos’ (Forster’s pseudonym); and here is what Forster says in relation to Wells’s Outline of History: ‘He seldom makes an individual live (it is his chief defect as a novelist), but he can always make a movement live, and he has presented the whole of human development in the most vivid way’ (Forster 1920: 7). Is Forster here making a contrast between one approach and another? Or is he implying that imperialism stands as an obstacle in the way of human development? After all, Forster’s motto ‘only connect’ aims at development. In a most impressive reading of Forster’s motto Edmund Leach starts his discussion with the title ‘ “Only Connect …” 1967’. As an introductory text for these lectures I might very well have taken E. M. Forster’s magic phrase ‘Only connect … ’ All the way through I have been urging you to keep on remembering the total interconnectedness of things as distinct from their separate isolated existence. But there is more to it than that. In most cases the connectedness is dynamic, not static. (Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw 2000: 268) This is what Forster would like to say in connection with the missing basis for development in Kipling: the connectedness is dynamic, not static, and Allah’s gift of two ‘separate sides to my head’ given to Kim and to his creator is hopeless.



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The review shows that Forster is not really in need for an occasion like that of the caricature to inspire him. It also confirms Forster’s consistent stand in opposition to Kipling and imperialism. Kipling’s main problem, in Forster’s eyes, is with literacy rather than with literature. His poetry, fiction and letters suffer from the flaw of the wrong ingredients in the amalgam. It is impossible, for example, to put Allah, Christ and Bhudda together in one religion, in one amalgam. In the meantime it does not help to keep them separate except as an analogy to Kipling separate from literature, and the amalgam of literature and imperialism is made for and by Kipling as an image. This is the foundation of all foundations put to test in Forster’s approach to Kipling.




Forster Writes to the Empire and Salutes the Orient: a Passage through Egypt

It was dark and I heard an Egyptian [El-Adle] shouting who had lost his friend:– Morgan, Morgan, you calling me and I felt we belonged to each other, you had made me an Egyptian. (KCLC) Which side are you on, Gog or Magog? O solemn question. Behold the two worthies, each a little moth-eaten but still hale and trailing a venerable beard. Fine work can be done under either banner, but which is it to be? Choose. Gog stands for – well, you can see what he stands for, and Magog stands for opposition to Gog. So choose, and having chosen, stick, for such is the earthly destiny of man [1919]. (From Forster’s review of Wilfrid Blunt The Earlier Diaries (1888–1900) in (AH, 263)) Forster’s particular appreciation of Burra’s Introduction and his strong support for it (see Chapter 6) must have been partly prompted by his general view of fiction; and I believe it is Forster’s concern to see some demarcation line between fact and fiction, no matter how illusory this may be. Commenting in Aspects of the Novel on the interrelationship between life and fiction, he makes it a point that the reality of one is not that of the other. Fiction for him is not life but lifelike, and although argument about this matter has become almost commonplace in the present torrent of criticism of the novel, it evidently was not so at the time. Forster further believes that fiction 58



4

and life eventually interact and the distinction between them obviously remains in the fact that one is implicit, the other explicit. This probably accounts for what is often described as Forster’s evasive mind, which succeeds in suspending the line of demarcation between the fictitious and the real. Forster’s elusive mind seems, then, to invite readers to see him as non-committal in politics and society, and this is apparently amplified by Forster’s own liberal outlook. I would like to suggest here that Forster’s political voice can be sufficiently committed to make one see his attitude towards an issue with no evasion, despite the fact that he would not have liked to be called a political writer. Three sources demonstrate this aspect of Forster. One is Forster’s pamphlet, The Government of Egypt. Another is Forster’s correspondence. A third is an extended speculation entitled ‘Salute to the Orient’ (1923), in which Forster explicitly expresses his attitudes towards the Orient. The pamphlet evidently includes first-hand experience of Egypt, as it was published shortly after Forster’s return from that country, where he stayed from November 1915 to January 1919. In order to guard himself against political commitment to any ideology, he states in an introductory note that he has ‘seldom drawn any conclusions, leaving such a task to those who are better qualified’ (GE, 3). Yet Forster’s usual non-committal voice does not curb the flow of his implicit voice, which is felt throughout the discussion. Forster’s particular emphasis on current issues in such a brief account is in itself a commitment. For example, he says about the dynasty of Mohammed Ali: ‘But they were Oriental despots at heart, and oppressed the peasants and agricultural labourers, who form the great majority of the population’ (GE, 3). Of course Forster here seems to have used his own personal observation of Egyptian peasants along with what he read about them in historical records. He similarly comments on the Europeans in Egypt and the growth of their influence: ‘They had, and still have, scarcely any duties to the land where they claim so many rights’ (GE, 3). An issue dear to Forster’s heart is the emergence of the Egyptian struggle under the leadership of Arabi Pasha (Forster presumably follows Blunt’s spelling, which in transliteration should be either ‘Orabi’ or ‘Urabi’) in 1882. In a sympathetic manner Forster regrets the defeat of Urabi and his movement which would have prepared Egypt for constitutional liberty (GE, 4).1



Forster Writes to the Empire and Salutes the Orient 59


Forster writes about history with an imaginative eye and the balanced viewpoint of the artist rather than that of the historian, who usually records facts (we remember Forster’s distinction in Aspects of the Novel between the novelist who creates and the historian who records). This can be seen in his account of Lord Cromer, where he assesses the different aspects of his political and administrative activities fused with the individual qualities of his personality: He pleased foreign creditors by rendering Egypt solvent, and he introduced useful and humane reforms – e.g., encouraged irrigation and abolished the lash and the forced labour (corvee) that the peasantry were annually compelled to give upon the canals. But he had a profound distrust of Orientals; his sympathy with Nationalism was purely academic; he started the flood of British officials who now deluge the administration, and his aim was a contented but torpid Egypt who would never criticize the Occupying Power. (GE, 4) Forster’s picture of Egypt during the war is derived mainly from his own experience, and this seems to promote his critical picture of the British occupation in Egypt: Our troops, and in particular the British Tommies, were well received, and though the Colonials (who ought never to be quartered amongst friendly Oriental peoples) rioted in Cairo and elsewhere, and regarded the natives as ‘blacks’, their misbehaviour did not discredit the Expeditionary Force as a whole. I have walked alone, both in the native quarters of towns and in the country, and always met courtesy and kindness, and I have entered without difficulty mosques that were supposed to be fanatic. The mild and cheerful Egyptians seemed (especially to one who had known Indians) an easy people to live with. But evil influences were at work. (GE, 5) Forster particularly attacks the censorship imposed on the local newspapers and describes it as ‘more than average stupidity’. He shows how British Army authorities extended their sphere of



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The total result of these suppressions was disastrous; not only were the natives irritated, but they believed that we had been defeated, not merely in Gallipoli but all over the world, and dared no longer tell the truth. (GE, 5) Towards the end of the war Forster writes that Egypt was betrayed by Britain, in that Britain did not honour Egypt as it had the Indian Native States. He points to the wretched condition of the Egyptian countryside under British auspices, and regrets the fact that Maxwell, who was quite sympathetic to the public, was superseded by British officials who were merely ‘sentimental about the natives’ but made no efforts to protest against the existing situation which was gradually deteriorating. When Sa’ad Pasha Zaghloul (spelt by Forster Zagloul, a leftist leader who stood against the British interests in Egypt) headed a delegation to negotiate with Britain about Egypt’s independence, Forster expressed remarkable sympathy for Zaghloul, regarding him as ‘a politician of the highest repute’, as well as for the general circumstances of the Egyptians: The important point is that every Egyptian sympathized openly or secretly with the rising, and that it was national, not religious – Copts (native Egyptian Christian) took part in it and were also represented in the Zagloul Delegation. (GE, 7)2 As regards the Milner mission, Forster has no reservations in exposing its imperialistic nature. He refers to Milner as a militant imperialist who believes that the British upper middle class is the saviour of the world. Forster quotes from Milner’s own book England in Egypt: If any man desires to help Egypt forward on the road of independence, the worse and most short-sighted thing he can possibly do is to resist the introduction of English control into any department of the Government. (GE, 7) Forster further records how the Egyptians (with the exception of the European communities) opposed the mission with an effective



censorship to all non-military matters, from Lord Lansdowne’s letter about peace to the Legislative Assembly, which was denied the right to meet. He concludes his observation with a typically witty remark:


boycott. He also exposes the dubious behaviour of the British rulers toward the Egyptian Cabinet when they introduced a British Financial Adviser, who was ensured a veto upon important measures. During his stay in Egypt Forster was able to make close contact with the European communities (whose influence was dominant enough to complicate the Egyptian question), and in this he was helped by the fact that his stay was mainly confined to Alexandria, where most foreigners lived. The picture he presents of those communities is, I believe, authentic as well as articulate: At the worst they include some unmitigated scoundrels, at the best they contain men of character and culture whom it is a privilege to have known; but in all cases they are aliens in Egypt and have come to exploit it. They despise Oriental ways, they are agnostics or Christians who have no sympathy for Islam, and they feel for the natives a fear that too often proceeds from a bad conscience. (GE, 9) In contrast, he defends the Egyptian character against the racial prejudice of British rulers like Milner who believed that Egyptians are ‘a population so easy-going and so submissive’, and who, like other foreigners, looked upon the Egyptians ‘as an inferior race, incapable of taking the initiative or of suffering an ordeal’. He believes that ‘The people that risked so much for their liberty can never be called inferior again.’ And he adds: ‘Whether their patriotism has a constructive side we cannot tell until we give it a chance: at present it necessarily takes the form of rioting’ (GE, 9). However, Forster’s concern for the political situation in Egypt can be further demonstrated from the following correspondence. On 4 January 1920, he wrote to Wilfrid Blunt: I thought that you might be interested to see the enclosed – the more so since your own correspondence from Egypt is probably confiscated. I was nervous about him [M. A. Zahra], since he promised to write at once. However, he appears to be alive, and as kicking as circumstances permit. All the letters I receive point at bad developments. I wonder what effect the El-Azhar proclamation will have. I saw it in the Times, but have seen no allusion to



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it this end. Your letter I read with great interest – side by side with the vaticination of Ian Hamilton. Ross Masood told me how much he had enjoyed his visit to you. He is one of my best friends and I feel awfully lost now he has gone back. We have heard from Port Said – where more of them were to be allowed to land. There is no answer to this: and I don’t want Zahra’s letter back. But when the summer comes I shall remind you of the promise you so kindly made me that I may but come and see you again. I have done a small pamphlet on Egypt. If it gets printed I will send you a copy; but it is small in every sense. Yours very sincerely, E. M. Forster I am anxiously expecting the next volume of your diaries.3 ‘The enclosed’ referred to above is a letter by M. A. Zahra, an Egyptian who was educated at Bristol University in England, and who kept contact with some of the British, such as Forster and Blunt, after his return home. Zahra wrote to Forster from Egypt on 10 January 1919, at a critical time in Egypt’s history: I am very sorry I had no opportunity to write to you directly after I had reached home. I was waiting until everything is fixed up here, and then write and tell you all about it, but finding that a settlement is an exceedingly difficult task, I have decided to write now. I am now at Tanta, and I expect you are quite familiar with it. Although a bit too small it is quite lively and energetic as all places in Egypt are just now. Schools have been open for two months, although I had only an opportunity of one week to teach, because the pupils don’t go to school, or in other words have been on strike. Sorry to tell you that things have gone so badly and are in such a lamentable condition, as to make it impossible to go any further in the way of a settlement. As far as schools are concerned, neither headmasters nor teachers had anything to do with the discipline or control of schools, since these, together with the fixing of exams, the issuing of certificates, good conduct of the pupils, matter taught at schools,





the punishment of pupils and so forth are only ruled by and subject to martial law. It makes me furious to look round here, and see the facts as they are in Egypt, the risings and the quellings and then to read them described in your newspapers, some of which arrive here, the way they disfigure the facts is simply scandalous. I got a letter this week from Mr. Woolf which he had sent to Bristol, and it had been kept there for nearly a month, since they did not know my address at home very recently. Will you please tell him that I shall write in a day or two and that his letter had been so delayed? I expect this week is going to be eventful in Egypt although things look a bit smooth now. Lord Milner arrives in two days or so.4 The correspondence above further shows that Forster’s Egypt was not only Alexandria or the antiquities of Luxor and Cairo. Nor was it merely the interesting people he met there, like C. P. Cavafy and Mohammed El-Adle. To his friend E. H. Ludolf, Forster wrote shortly after his return from Egypt (13 January 1920): I feel about Egypt. The War saved it, the War took it away … I do wonder what you will think of it, of England, and of its inhabitants. For my own part I keep regretting the East – not the Red Cross indeed … (KCLC) Forster, then, maintained his deep concern for Egyptian politics particularly as regards British imperialism, even after he had left Egypt, and he continued to exchange views and ideas on the situation with Ludolf, Blunt and others. One can assume that Forster would have had little in common with people like Blunt and Pickthall other than the politics of Egypt.5 Forster obviously held quite an independent view of what has been termed ‘Orientalism’, and this can be seen in the critique that he wrote about the Orient. ‘Salute to the Orient’ provides further evidence of Forster’s independent and critical mind which singles him out from European writers such as Loti, Doughty and others. Early in the ‘Salute’ Forster makes an observation on what he calls ‘elderly’ European travellers



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They have letters of introduction and facilities, but not ears in any useful sense, and the jewels that they bring back are, ‘I am much struck with the alterations in Bethlehem – not to say improvements, since my previous visit in 1885’, or ‘representative institutions should be introduced into the Oasis of Siwa’, or ‘after an interesting conversation with the Mufti, in which Henry acted as interpreter, Lucy and I proceeded to inspect the so-called tomb of Potiphar’s wife’. Elderly travellers don’t write Eothen. It is hard to be generous and direct after thirty, even when the desire to be so remains, and even in England. And it is harder in the East. Prejudices or ideals (they amount to the same under a vertical sun) will arise in the mind and distort the horizon and slop pieces of sky into the sand. Only in youth or through memories of youth, only in the joyous light of the morning, can the lines of the Oriental landscape be seen, and the salutation accomplished. (AH, 246–7) Forster further explores the image of the East as portrayed in the writings of individual Orientalists. One example of this is the English tourist in Marmaduke Pickthall’s The Valley of the Kings (1909) whose strange psychology is revealed through the eyes of his Syrian follower, Iskender. As the Englishman finds no gold in the valley, he comes to believe that he has been misled by his follower and he consequently scolds Iskender severely. Forster views the crisis as a failure on the part of the Englishman to understand or appreciate Iskender’s innocent fantasy, which made him romanticize about the gold. Forster’s comment is: The West is to blame, we feel; why cannot the Englishman see what has happened? He does half see it, but he is ill and angry, he is bored, and he abandons his Salute to the Orient before it has been completed. (AH, 264) He then quotes Pickthall’s conclusion: Oh, yes, I suppose I forgive you, and all that. Only I don’t want to speak to you or see your face. You’ve got to be a kind of nightmare



in the East. He quotes the Arabic proverb, ‘God has given earrings to those who have no ears’, and remarks that ‘few elderly travellers have escaped this irony of Allah’s’:


to me. I dare say I misjudged you; I don’t pretend to understand you; in some ways you behaved quite well and honestly. Only I can’t endure the sight of your face, the sound of your confounded voice. Get out, I tell you! (AH, 251) Forster writes: ‘These words might serve as the epitaph of much European sentiment towards the East. Were they nearly Mr Pickthall’s own epitaph? Did he not almost abandon Iskender and all that he signifies, and return to efficiency and cocktails?’ (264). They can similarly serve as an epigraph for Said’s Orientalism. These words also recall Aziz’s predicament brought about by the alleged assault on Adela, which Forster brilliantly exploits to show how prejudice on the part of British imperialists can complicate contact between East and West. Forster finds another facet of this misrepresentation in Pierre Loti’s Les Désenchantées (1906), which he sees as a distorted picture of Oriental women, particularly in that it represents them as disposed to an immoral life. He also relates Loti to Pickthall, who, Forster remarks, presents yet another distorted picture of Oriental women in his Veiled Women (1913). The two writers, Forster believes, leave the reader bewildered, for one of them imagines women leaving the house in search of a better life, and the other thinks that they want to go into a harem. ‘A book that recommends a Harem is bound to give an unconvincing picture’, says Forster in connection with Veiled Women (AH, 254). He similarly comments on Loti’s sentimentality: Pierre Loti is a sentimentalist who has voyaged hat in hand over the picturesque world. He has saluted Brittany and the Basque, India, Anam, Japan, the South Sea Islands, the whole of the North African coast from Morocco to Egypt, also the Syrian seaboard and the fringes of Asia Minor, paying particular attention to Constantinople, and from all these places he has brought back trophies. (AH, 254) Forster is annoyed by Les Désenchantées ‘because Loti has touched a real problem, and one wishes to see it handled decently’, if not objectively, Forster would rather say (AH, 255). All this shows how Forster’s ‘Salute’ differs from that of his fellow European writers, and the main difference lies in the way the Orient



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is handled when its problems are experienced by the European. Forster seems to believe that the interaction between East and West can enrich understanding of different cultures, but only if it is handled properly (which is incidentally Said’s main thesis in Orientalism). If not, it will be like the gift of the earrings bestowed upon those who have no ears. Forster even extends the metaphor to the hypothesis that the earrings or the jewels would not be available in any case, when the ears are not there; and this is how Forster explains the reward of those writers, as trophies in return for jewels. Forster suggests that the Orient remains rather inaccessible to those elderly writers because their approach is not motivated by the intention to see whether ‘the twain shall meet’. This is why they do not learn how to ‘connect’ for they view the Orient from a viewpoint predominantly structured by their vernacular culture as well as their personal disposition. This point can be particularly demonstrated from Forster’s comments on Blunt and T. E. Lawrence. Blunt, he remarks, was fully in tune with the ‘easy-going Eastern life’ and its ‘power of resistance’, which was his creed, but he ‘had been too much of the grand seigneur to live down to it’ (AH, 249). Also, Blunt’s inconsistencies or even ambivalences are shown in the discrepancy Forster sees between Blunt’s early enthusiasm for Islam (which he was about to profess at one time) and his rebellion, later on, against the religions of the world as a result of his experience with the Senussi. Forster believes that Blunt was not great, despite all the popularity he enjoyed in his lifetime: ‘He was sensitive, enthusiastic, and sincere, but he had not within him the fiery whirlwind that transcends a man’s attitude, and sweeps him, whatever his opinions, into the region where acts and words become eternal’ (AH, 264). In another comment on Blunt’s later diaries, Forster remarks that Blunt’s views on the world lack what ‘can be termed development’. He ascribes Blunt’s dread of the war to his fear that conservative Oriental nations will be further enslaved and their traditional life, which he cherished, will consequently disappear. Forster shows that Blunt never managed to free himself from the governing aristocracy, the milieu that he belonged to: In England it gave him the entrée to any society he chose to frequent; in the East, conjoined with his personal charm and




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Though written earlier in the century, Forster’s views stand in agreement with what is being written about Blunt in recent biographies such as those by Elizabeth Longford and Kathryn Tidrick. This similarly applies to Forster’s views on T. E. Lawrence, whose contemporary popularity did not distract Forster from seeing an invisible dimension in Lawrence’s personality. In a lecture he delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1944 Forster comments ironically that ‘it was not by the spear of an Arab but by a high-power motor-bike that he came to his death’ (AH, 268. More details later). A fair portrait of the Orient, Forster observes, may not be reached by Loti’s sentimentality, or Pickthall’s exaggeration, or Blunt’s championship, or Lawrence’s Don Quixotism. Nor can it be grasped, he says, by a professional amorist. In his evaluation of Pickthall’s and Loti’s pictures of the Oriental woman, Forster says, ‘Perhaps a woman novelist may one day tell us what does happen in the Harem … But she must be a novelist, not a journalist or a missionary’ (AH, 254). What is particularly interesting about Forster’s portrait of the Orient is the explicit challenge it poses against the kind of misrepresentation Said points to as ‘Disraeli’s Asiatic mystery’ (Said 1978, rept 1995: 244). Forster certainly realized that this mystery cannot be unveiled by the prosaic mind of his compatriots, whether journalists, missionaries, free travellers, or writers. Forster’s remark above urges the need for a woman novelist but not that she should write about the mystery of the Orient. It presumably indicates the need for a woman novelist to see through the reality of the Orient with an honest outlook and without prejudice. Perhaps Forster was seeing himself moving from the explicit picture of the Orient to its implicit vision, as A Passage to India was taking shape at the time, realizing the discipline of when to be explicit and when to be implicit. However, Forster’s salute to Egypt can be seen as a tribute he pays on his way to or out of India, where his full homage is eventually paid. More than other people, even in the same region, Egyptians are known for expressing themselves by endless gestures of salute which are often interpreted as an aspect of their informal social nature. The term registers in Forster’s mind probably because of the many salutes



warmth, it ensured him still more profitable experiences. Perhaps only for an Englishman, and only in the nineteenth century, was such a career possible. (AH, 273–4)

he was met with every day during his stay in Alexandria. It may be worthwhile remembering that the most intimate contact Forster made in Egypt started with a salute. This is what he writes to Florence Barger (16 January 1918) about his early meeting with Mohammed El-Adle: For a little time afterwards he would half salute me at the Terminus if I happened to come along, but he isn’t impressed and this died down. Each knew the other wasn’t someone else, but no more was established. (KCLC) A salute, then, can lead on rare occasions to intimacy, even to a very special one, like that between Forster and El-Adle. In any case it stands for a possible connection or a bridge in perspective between different cultures. It is the advent of friendship in cross-cultural contact tested in A Passage to India. For Forster Egypt was a kind of transitional journey, as I tried to show in a previous discussion (Shaheen 1979: 79–89). In Forster’s mind Egypt seems to have occupied a place between reality and fiction, as Forster probably expanded the geographical location into a metaphorical one. It is important to remember that Forster’s experience in Egypt comes between the first and the final drafts of A Passage to India (1912–22). Forster might have viewed Egypt as being different from Europe but close enough to the Mediterranean to remind him of the European home of his different Italian novels. At the same time he might have felt that Egypt was on the way to India – to that East which was shaping the vision of his novel at the time. This is well expressed in a letter he wrote to G. H. Ludolf (8 May 1920): For my own part I keep regretting the East – not the Red Cross indeed. Mr. MA [Mohammed El-Adle] has vanished from my memory with great thoughtless [sic] and any [of ] the kindness I received there, and the climate remains. (Lago and Furbank 1983: 293) In the fictitious letter he wrote to Mohammed El-Adle, Forster struggled to free himself from his emotional involvement with him. The letter concludes: So much has happened to me since that I may not recognize you and I am pretty certain not to think of you when I die. I knew how




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We can assume that Forster was reducing the Egyptian experience to a climate so as not to confuse Egypt with India and Mohammed ElAdle with S. R. Masood. The comparison between El-Adle and Masood is articulated in what he wrote to the latter (8 September 1917), referring to El-Adle as one of his good friends in Alexandria: ‘I have lately got to know an Egyptian whom I greatly like and who sometimes reminds me of you’ (Lago and Furbank 1983: 269). What Forster needed for A Passage to India was more than a climate, rather a space, which is separated from Europe not by a seashore but by an ocean, so that it could accommodate his global vision. Forster was often haunted by the sense of space even in Egypt. On his visit to the southern part of Egypt he wrote to his mother (19 December 1917) that the place ‘is quite unlike Upper Egypt – for one thing there is the sense of space which must be lacking in the narrow valley of the Nile’ (ibid.). However, the climate does not seem to be absent from Forster’s space of mind. It is not a coincidence that Forster makes frequent references to Egypt in relation to India. He writes to his mother (? 1916): And Egypt (as seen in eight hours of train) is a feebler India, as flat but without the sense of immensity … Damanhour, which I visited … is an Egyptian town – curious unlike India, but thoroughly Oriental … (KCLC) No doubt the climate of Egypt affected the shaping of many scenes in A Passage to India. I was personally assured by P. N. Furbank, Forster’s biographer, that the description of Chandrapore was the outcome of Forster’s own experience of Alexandria, and that Forster wrote it with Alexandria on his mind. The scene of the bee which solicits Mrs Moore’s sympathy with India at a very early stage of her arrival, and the scene of the bee which is equally blessed by Godbole toward the end of the book, probably designed to create a rhythmic pattern of unity, presumably have their origin in a real situation Forster describes to his mother (19 December 1917): This time I rested on the edge of an old Roman quarry, playing with a most agreeable bee who had drilled a hole in the solid rock



it would be from the first, yet shouldn’t have been so happy in Egypt this Autumn but for you. [See Appendix 2]


A most remarkable scene in A Passage to India, we know, is Mrs Moore’s visit to the mosque, whose beauty spontaneously establishes her friendship with Aziz. This scene recalls an incident that happened personally to Forster as he records it to his mother (8 March 1916): ‘There are some fine buildings, I tried to go into one of their churches, but they would not let me go in, and on the spire they have the half moon’ (Ibid.). (Forster is writing ‘churches’ instead of ‘mosques’ and ‘half moon’ instead of ‘crescent’ presumably to make things intelligible to his mother.) One wonders whether Aziz’s ambitious dream of building a mosque, which he contemplates when he rushes into the mosque, originates in a conversation between Forster and Mohammed ElAdle. Forster writes to Florence Barger in a letter quoted above: ‘When I remembered that I enjoyed the travelling he (El-Adle), replied “You would have been better at home making some useful invention, I think. If I was rich I should build first an eye hospital then a Mosque” ’ (Lago and Furbank 1983: 281). It is remarkable to see how Forster captures the spirit of romance about the mosque and skillfully uses it in characterization when Aziz faces the first major crisis in the novel and finds that the mosque is the only refuge against the insult inflicted on him by those arrogant insensitive British ladies. This scene seems to have been already on Forster’s mind, as can be inferred from a piece presumably written in Egypt: [The mosque] embodies no crisis, leads up through no gradation of nave and choir, and employs no hierarchy of priests. Equality before God – so doubtfully proclaimed by Christianity – lies at the very root of Islam; and the mosque is essentially a courtyard for the Faithful to worship in, either in solitude or under due supervision. (AH, 261) The mosque scene ranks, I believe, among the great scenes of fiction. Aziz enters the mosque to dig up some historical identity as selfprotection against the insulting arrogance of Mesdames Callendar and Lesley. No sooner does he do so than he encounters Mrs Moore trying to come into the mosque: before a crisis develops, a resolution emerges, and Aziz is further reconciled by means of ‘The secret



and was popping pollen into it I suppose to feed a grub at the bottom. (Ibid.)


understanding of the heart’, a phrase frequently quoted as an entry to the secret understanding of Forster’s own mind. Yet Forster’s evasive mind gives the scene a permanent effect far beyond its locality. Also the scene, I believe, is a demonstration of Forster’s motto: ‘Only connect’. The mosque seems to reconcile Aziz to himself as an Indian in India and obliquely serves a further possible reconciliation with the British. Here is Forster’s exquisite account of the mosque, presumably drawn from his observations in mosques in Egypt: He had always liked this mosque. It was gracious, and the arrangement pleased him. The courtyard – entered through a ruined gate – contained an ablution-tank of fresh clear water, which was always in motion, being indeed part of a conduit that supplied the city. The courtyard was paved with broken slabs. The covered part of the mosque was deeper than is usual; its effect was that of an English parish church whose side has been taken out. Where he sat, he looked into tree arcades whose darkness was illuminated by a small hanging lamp and by the moon. The front – in full moonlight – had the appearance of marble, and the ninety-nine names of God on the frieze stood out black, as the frieze stood out white against the sky. The contest between this dualism and the contention of shadows within pleased Aziz, and he tried to symbolize the whole into some truth of religion or love. A mosque by winning his approval let loose his imagination. The temple of another creed, Hindu, Christian, or Greek, would have bored him and failed to awaken his sense of beauty. Here was Islam, his own country, more than a Faith, more than a battle-cry, more, much more … Islam, an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home. (PI, 13) The narrative continues to describe Aziz rejoicing in his refuge as he realizes the complex surrounding of contrasts: the club of the English community on the one hand and the uncongenial drumming of Hindus on the other. Out of this complexity emerges the mosque as a distinct reality acquiring a concrete shape overlooking the surrounding chaos: But the mosque – that alone signified, and he returned to it from the complex appeal of the night, and decked it with meanings the



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builder had never intended. Some day he too would build a mosque, smaller than this but in perfect taste, so that all who passed by should experience the happiness he felt now. And near it, under a low dome, should be his tomb with a Persian inscription: Alas, without me for thousands of years The Rose will blossom and the Spring will bloom But those who have secretly understood my heart – They will approach and visit the grave where I lie. He had seen the quatrain on the tomb of a Deccan king and regarded it as profound philosophy – he always held pathos to be profound. The secret understanding of the heart! He repeated the phrase with tears in his eyes, and as he did so one of the pillars of the mosque seemed to quiver. It swayed in the gloom and detached itself. Belief in ghosts ran in his blood, but he sat firm. Another pillar moved, a third, and then an Englishwoman stepped out into the moonlight. Suddenly he was furiously angry and shouted: ‘Madam! Madam! Madam!’ (PI, 14) The description of the Caves can also recall the tombs and temples of Luxor (which Forster saw and admired), with their smooth, round inner surface. From Luxor Forster writes to his mother (20 October 1917): [The valley] twines up between magnificent cliffs from which stand out buttresses of rock: not a leaf nor a drop of water: only brown-yellow precipices and blue sky. At the head it sprays out into several ravines, the chief of which ends under a queer mountain shaped like a cake, a cake in which there has been rather too much baking powder, and in the flanks of this cave the principal tombs are cut. As art it is doubtless better than Indian, though for general sensationalism nothing here, either in temples or tombs, touches the Kailasa Cave at Ellora. (KCLC) Evidently India was on Forster’s mind as he was wrestling with its vastness so as to make it accommodate the passage under review which he started in 1912. No doubt Egypt provided Forster with a kind of frame of reference to various details he used in A Passage to





India, but India and Egypt could not acquire a similar perspective for Forster either in the physicality of place or in the politics of imperialism. India was the home of British imperialism. Egypt was not so. British occupation and atrocities urged Forster to write the pamphlet and other pieces under consideration and explicitly express his politics, whereas Forster found in the duplicity of life British imperialists were leading in India the appropriate form for his multiple visions. Even art in Egypt Forster finds lacking in what he refers to as the ‘general sensationalism’ presumably needed to initiate fiction. But Egypt was crucial for Forster especially when we remember that it comes as A Passage to India was suspended, waiting for completion, and India seen in comparison to Egypt certainly helped Forster, in one way or another, to sustain India. Forster’s visit to Luxor, for example, made Forster immediately envisage Kailasa Cave at Ellora and presumably ‘to sleep on’ the dramatic expedition to the Caves. On his way back from Egypt to England Forster writes to his Egyptian friend, Mohammed El-Adle, and ‘posted a line to you, at last. I think I did. It was curious seeing that soil again’ (KCLC). This is transformed into fiction in Chapter XXXIII. Isn’t Egypt always a passage to and from India, which Forster anxiously passed through and bestowed his salute upon?



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Beyond the Mediterranean Human Norm: the Politics of Liberal Humanism in Retreat

Humanism is a distinctly European phenomenon, inseparable from imperialism. Implicit in humanism’s will to see sameness wherever it looks is a desire to make [Fanon’s emphasis] sameness, to impose a partial world-view as a universal truth. (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, in Posthumanism, Neil Badmington (ed.)) Forster concludes Part II: ‘Caves’, the central part of A Passage to India with Chapter 32, which, I believe, deserves particular attention for its articulation of the great task underlying Forster’s whole journey between East and West across the Mediterranean. I quote only this key extract: The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest experience of all. (PI, 270–1) The chapter presents Forster’s life-long preoccupation in fiction with the question of order, harmony and law which form the basis of liberal humanism. Forster’s account here reminds him of the old days 75



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when his treatment of liberal humanism used to end with a kind of settlement. The winds have changed: his old ideal has been put on trial to encounter his experience of India and Indians. The chapter under consideration stands as a passionate passage for Forster’s design whose centre here seems to be: ‘Mediterranean is the human norm’. Anything beyond, to the East, is a deviation from the norm which inevitably portends trouble. Any reading of this chapter immediately recalls to mind the conclusion of the first chapter of the novel standing in opposition to the human norm: ‘These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves’ (PI, 4). Throughout the novel, the extraordinary is dramatized so as to signify some kind of ‘sound and fury’ muddle instead of order and form, that is muddle. The Mediterranean forms the border between order and muddle, and the ‘Grand Canal’, as Forster calls the Suez Canal, stands as a passage (literal and figurative) from one to another. In fact the whole of Egypt is envisaged by Forster as fulfilling a transition as mentioned above. Clearly obvious is how fiction and fact meet here where person and persona (Forster and Fielding) experience a similar transformation in the course of their journey. Forster always had this curious view of Egypt which comes in his life as a transition between his Indian East and Western Europe. While in Egypt he could not avoid the irreconcilable division with which he lived during his service with the Red Cross. This seems to have been the orientation from which his perspective was developing, as A Passage to India was at the time in progress. Forster’s Egypt had neither the threatening muddle of India nor the dominant order and form of the Mediterranean norm. Forster arrived in Egypt with four novels already published. In those novels he had already tested his well-known motto of ‘only connect’. All these novels begin with the tension of disunion and separation, with people inevitably caught in conflict as a result of individual differences, either within the same culture (English versus English) or against European culture (English versus Italian, Greek or German). People in these four novels learn their lesson at the end, and they learn how to connect. The result is reconciliation if not unity. But it is far from a straightforward moral practice.1 How to explain Forster’s tendency to conclude his early fiction with reconciliation remains a matter open for speculation. We may



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go as far as remarking that Forster was practising his sense at the time of belonging to the Victorian fag-end and that he was still carrying the common spirit of Victorian optimism and sense of settlement. Another reason is probably related to the idealization ‘of the classical spirit’ of Hellenism which Forster (presumably owing to his training in Classics) may have viewed as a means of redemption for this chaotic modern world. Yet, whatever the reason behind the compromise is, we may conclude that Forster worked in his early career before World War I within the border of the Mediterranean human norm. We can also add that Forster’s vision acquired new dimensions as he journeyed across the Mediterranean eastward, to Egypt, where his perspective underwent a drastic change, and towards India, where this perspective expanded beyond the frontiers of the human norm. The question worth asking here is what happens to Forster’s perspective when it embraces the ‘terrestre’ occupied by his countrymen? Obviously the new perspective becomes too complex and its context naturally defies reconciliation. One may envisage Forster’s motto almost reversed such as: Learn how to survive without the urgent need to connect or at least to attempt a permanent connection. We can perhaps say that Forster’s achievement in A Passage to India is an experience of alienation expressed in the impossibility of reconciliation. In India, Forster’s perspective seems to shift from addressing the human norm of learning how ‘to connect’ to the contemplation of the inhuman (referred to in literary terms as inanimate) that rejects any such discourse. Forster’s new journey demonstrates a critical liberation, and redeeming appropriation and incorporation of the past into the present with a sustained prophetic eye on the future. Also, it is a new perspective of the comparatively simple dualism he always cherished in Classics, and accommodating the paradox uniting either, and, or existentially. Before further discussion of such a shift, an account of what I would like to call Forster’s orientation in Egypt (some of which has been discussed above) will introduce the sequence of change and development in Forster’s complexity of perspective. Egypt offers Forster a larger room with a different view. Here he comes in direct contact with his British countrymen who have nothing to do with learning how ‘to connect’ with Greeks, Italians or Germans as his fiction prior to A Passage to India demonstrates.



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For Forster, Egypt was an occasion to put his liberal humanism on trial after it had already been tried in his first but brief visit to India with Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1912. The trial, however, consists of three main parts. First, Egypt’s geographical location which forms a border on Forster’s milieu of the Mediterranean, Italy and Greece, probably parallel with his own border of the Victorian fag-end. And this brings Forster back to the question of muddle which had been a previous preoccupation. In A Room with a View, Emerson tells Lucy, ‘Take an old man’s word: there is nothing worse than a muddle in all the world’ (RV, 201). In this novel Forster refers to the muddle as the ‘sadness of the incomplete’ where he adds ‘the sadness that is often life, but should never be Art’ (RV, 140). The second aspect of the trial (already discussed) is Forster’s experience of British atrocities in Egypt. Although Forster had no intention of being seriously engaged in politics and society in its crude form, he found himself committed to expose the ruthlessness of British politics in Egypt. Forster’s journalistic writings of the period relevant to the Egyptian question show his attitude as anti-imperialist.2 The third aspect of the trial is related to Cavafy, the Alexandrian whose impact on Forster obliquely contributed a great deal in reshaping Forster’s vision. It was through George Antonius, an Alexandrian of Palestinian extraction, that Forster first met Cavafy. Friendship between the two was fostered by a kind of cultural affinity they discovered in each other. In Cavafy, Forster explored the Greek myth in progress. What can be done with a cultural heritage in exile? This is perhaps the question which posed itself to Forster during his own exile in Alexandria, and his attraction to Cavafy was, presumably, motivated by a genuine desire for a reassessment of his English culture, especially in terms of its impact on his fiction. In his poetry Cavafy created a new mythology of Alexandria, whose history was evidently his inspiration. It is a simple mythology based on the deep conviction that national territories and racial boundaries lead only to a vicious circle. Cavafy has little or no interest in the classical perfection of fifth-century Greece or in the early Hellenistic world as a whole. He carefully avoided Athens, its literary and rationalist circles, as he saw himself the poet of Greater Greece and of Pan Hellenism, as Hellenic rather than Hellenized or a Hellene who belonged to the land of Greece. Cavafy’s ancestors were spiritually



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linked to contemporary Alexandrians presented in his poems without being actually so to the nineteenth-century Greeks, and in a similar way ancient Alexandrians were linked with the Hellenes who settled in various places from Alexandria to Antioch and further. Without Cavafy, Forster’s guide and collection of essays on Alexandria would have been different. Forster acknowledges this debt when he says to him, ‘These two books are for you and me.’ He dedicates Pharos and Pharillon to Cavafy and concludes the first part (Pharos) with Cavafy’s well-known poem ‘The God abandons Antony’, particularly favoured by Forster. The poem is a good example of the way Cavafy reshaped history and mythology. In this poem Antony is portrayed in a way which is not in accordance with the historical account. No rhetoric or sentiment of the usual kind is given by the poet to any side involved in the most famous encounter between Rome and Alexandria. The poem recalls Johnson’s ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’ in theme and perspective, but it remains sharply different as being deeply rooted in the concrete history without relying on historical details and incidents. It is typical of Cavafy to capture a historical moment and see through it without glorifying what actually happened. In his Alexandria: A History and Guide, Forster similarly remarks that Alexandria fell to the Moslem leader Amr (greatly admired by Forster) because the city had lost its soul. This is a conclusion which defies historical accounts and it often puzzles readers and historians alike. Like Cavafy, Forster believed that evolution is not really the only way of reviewing history. And like Cavafy also, Forster places no emphasis on the high points of Hellenic history, especially the early one, and his account of Alexandria makes no celebration of heroism or culture. Crude history, like crude politics, falls outside Forster’s design and practice When Forster goes back to India to complete his novel he meets a much bigger muddle. Instead of a kind of marginal muddle standing between formless Africa and the formed Mediterranean, Forster finds himself face to face with muddle itself, which has no beginning or end, and his account of the Indian sky, sun and earth immediately expresses his sense of loss as he becomes aware of a formless reality. This he noticed on his first journey to India. In his Indian Diary, for example, he describes his visit to an ancient city where he had to




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There was no place for anything, and nothing was in its place . . . There was no time either. . . nothing remained certain but the dome of the sky and the disc of the sun. (KCLC) In retrospect are we not justified in assuming that Forster abandoned the novel partly because he was upset by India’s abnormality which he realized was challenging the Mediterranean human norm, the finite England and the balanced form of its external reality – all of which is reflected in the setting of his early fiction? We can imagine chaotic, disintegrating and confusing India sweeping into Forster’s imagination as characters arrive at the door of their creator ‘with mutiny’ (Forster’s words in Aspects of the Novel). Forster’s return to India was a return to a novel awaiting completion. Not all long intervals turn out to be beneficial for works left behind incomplete, but the approximately 12-year break between the first draft and the final version of A Passage to India seems to have helped Forster in capturing a different and broader perspective. In his Diary, Forster writes from Bombay, late in 1912: ‘The Egyptian East has been Royal Academised, but not the Indian. Sometimes everything was strange.’ It was apparently to the advantage of the novel that the break in orientation which Forster had in Egypt was eventful enough to help him get on with such a big project of handling a reality beyond the ‘human norm’. After Egypt, Forster continued to be seriously concerned with the current politics of the time, especially British foreign policy east of the Mediterranean. Beside the pamphlet on Egypt, and his correspondence with people concerned with the politics of Egypt, he wrote some reviews which were all relevant to A Passage to India. For example, the review of ‘The Poetry of Iqbal’ obviously illuminates the nature of tension between Moslems and Hindus in the novel.3 The correspondence between the review and the novel is too obvious to require emphasis. Even the title of the book under review, The Secrets of the Self, seems to have inspired Forster with the gracious phrase, ‘the secret understanding of the heart’, all that the British officials (Forster envisaged) need to have so as to avoid hurting Aziz and his fellow Indians. Iqbal’s aspirations voiced in his poetry are the same as those Forster adopts for the Moslems in the narrative. Forster



travel by horse as follows:

captures from Iqbal’s poetry the division in Moslems and Hindus between religious and national feelings, between past and present. Another similar review, of the book My Pilgrimage to Ajanta and Bagh by S. M. C. Dey, is entitled ‘Indian Caves’. The title is obviously suggestive enough of its relevance to the second part of the novel: ‘Caves’.4 Forster continued to have a consistent attitude towards British foreign policy. In an essay ‘India and the Turk’, written in his last days in India, just before the publication of his novel, Forster asks, ‘Why have the Indian Mohammedans acquired these strong feelings for Turkey?’, a question he then answers himself: Islam is more than a religion, and both its opponents and supporters have wronged it by their hard legalistic insistence on the Faith. It is an attitude towards life which has produced durable and exquisite civilizations, an attitude threatened by Europe’s remorseless crusade today.5 Forster is quite critical of the British double standard of morality when he further reports that he is told (ironically, of course) that It is a war; Turkey has lost, and Great Britain must compensate herself and her allies, there is no idea of hostility to Islam, it is Great Britain, the protector of Islam, who appears as a solitary crusader, whose fleet holds the Straits, and whose Ministers assert that the British Empire stands behind them.6 Out of the political mess Forster was aware of, and out of the muddle of the land where the British Empire actually stands, emerges Forster’s novel. It is a complex experience which Forster has to envisage as defying the Mediterranean human norm and the politics of imperialism. The political situation of the novel is rendered perceptively in an intelligent essay ‘The Politics of Representation in A Passage to India’, where Benita Parry comments: Imperialism inflicted a catastrophic dislocation on the world it conquered and colonized, generated new forms of tension within




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Much as Parry’s insight can be appreciated here and elsewhere in her essay, the last part of the statement is controversial: Forster is paradoxically not only as usual evasive but also convincing and coherent. It is obvious that Forster was trying hard to see whether a reconciliation was possible in an India divided into cultural groups, not at all sympathetic to each other, and at the same time dominated by rulers hostile to them all. In addition, these groups, along with the ruling aliens, face a hostile earth, sky and sun, embracing a continent. Forster’s shifting point of view and the continuous oscillation between desire, reconciliation and the harsh reality of non-reconciliation towards the end (which is particularly emphasized by Benita Parry and partly by Said) is a typical expression of the artist’s dilemma. Here Forster was aware of the fact that resolution would require a reliance on some sort of ideal leading to a conclusion. It is not that Forster completely lost the ideal of liberal humanism in India but rather he realized that it simply did not work in or with the muddle. The evasive element in the book is better viewed as an acute dilemma for the artist between the ideal and the real, as he finds himself caught between a lost ideal (the liberal humanist’s ideal stripped of its potential) and a solid reality (the imperialist’s occupation which, at the end, drags into its camp even the liberal humanist Fielding). In the light of this situation, Forster finds himself left with one alternative: the shift of any resolution possible to time and space, and I do not think that Forster was really concerned whether the shift should imply a certain resolution. Forster probably relied in his ending on what he believed and recorded in an essay he wrote early in his life, probably a talk given to an undergraduate society (1898–1901) under the title ‘Happy v. Sad Endings’: What are we to say about those stories that do not end at all or, to be more accurate, that end not with a full stop but with a mark of interrogation – those stories in which the fate of the characters is left to the reader’s imagination? (KCLC) Hence Forster’s memorable shift of the whole responsibility to time and place comes as a conclusion to the novel: with the ‘not yet’ and



the metropolitan countries and brought the West into a condition of permanent antagonism with other civilizations; yet about this very epitome of contemporary conflict the novel is evasive.7

‘not there’. What else can Forster, perhaps, ask, and what else can emerge with the human norm, facing the muddle? However, the ending which has been controversial is not really sudden or abrupt. Any close reading of the novel shows that it is a natural outcome of the underlying conflict of the divergent forces. It is like an imagist poem where the different sensuous details are set together, and no longer seen separately in a state of harmony; rather they appear diverging against oppositions of different sensuous details. For example, ‘Part III: Temple’ of A Passage to India begins by presenting the wish to overcome all the obstacles in the way of unity and holds a magnificent ceremony unifying matter and spirit: Infinite Love took upon itself the form of SHRI KRISHNA, and saved the world. All sorrow was annihilated not only for Indians, but for foreigners, birds, caves, railways, and the stars; all became joy, all laughter; there had never been disease nor doubt, misunderstanding, cruelty, fear. (PI, 278) However, when the ceremony ends, divisive states return as before, emerging in opposition to the unifying forces of reconciliation, curbing the will to union. In the last chapter of the book, as the ending is weaving itself by thesis and antithesis the narrator tells us that ‘the scenery, though it smiled, fell like a gravestone on any human hope’. This is a most exquisite expression which articulates the situation of any occupation anywhere, at any time. It is also a beautiful parody of any false reconciliation of false, peaceful accord between the occupier and the occupied. The narrator seems to delegate the crisis to the scenery as the only party left eligible. At least it has the right to sustain the settlement, any settlement, indefinitely. We remember that in the early novels Forster would leave the good to survive the muddle on earth. When the earth is dispossessed, and the dispossessed themselves cannot keep their own ground, no matter how good and eligible they are, the earth itself should naturally claim the mandate over the muddle of its own account. How can we read A Passage to India in terms of the politics of imperialism? Benita Parry comments on the final discourse of the novel that it is Forster’s saying ‘epitaph on liberal humanism’. Certainly this conclusion has enough validity, but a sufficient distinction must be drawn between Forster’s theory (or ideal) and practice. Forster presumably never abandoned liberal humanism as a





major goal in life. He simply realized that its practice in India under imperialism was out of context. Liberal humanism, one can imagine Forster whispering, falls short of compatibility with imperialism which is itself a deviation from any human norm. Had Fielding been a politician and not an educationalist liberal humanist, he would probably say that liberal humanism should accept limits and stick to borders rather than go beyond the Mediterranean to face the ultimate test of its legitimacy. Western anti-imperialist writers show how imperialism armed itself with what is called the banner of civilization as an umbrella in its mission. On many occasions in his non-fiction, Forster points to the practice of the British imperialist of marching into the lands of others with what he considers superior values of law and order whose exterior motive is to impress and intimidate the ruled. We know that intimacy between Fielding and Aziz is initiated when Aziz is made to feel the absence of the intimidating form: ‘His spirits flared up, he glanced round the living-room. Some luxury in it, but no order – nothing to intimidate poor Indians’ (PI, 57). The scene is similar in effect to that of the mosque where intimacy between Mrs Moore and Aziz is established, when Mrs Moore is assured of the absence of muddle in return for the absence of order (Mrs Moore opts to wander around instead of going to a performance of Cousin Kate at the Club). In both cases barriers are broken down as a result of crossing the limits of order and muddle at the same time. Yet what makes the Mediterranean scene subtle and ambiguous is the fact that Fielding cannot be a liberal humanist and a judge of liberal humanism at the same time. What we see of him in Chapter 32 is only the tip of the iceberg. The rest is left for us to sense. What I find missing in Parry’s comment is an emphasis on the contextual politics of liberal humanism or what may be called its ideology. It is not so much that liberal humanism meets its end in India but rather that the journey of liberal humanism to India is a contradiction in terms. Fielding’s awareness of the Mediterranean as a human norm in comparison to muddle is particularly important, and although it comes in the narrative discourse as a kind of anti-climax it is as important as the climactic scene of the Caves and the pre-climactic car incident. The Mediterranean human norm is made subtle because it is experienced by Fielding, the liberal humanist, and it is natural that Fielding’s response is articulated by appreciation of law and order



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versus muddle. Certainly Fielding expresses relief as he finds himself in the Mediterranean norm of Egypt, Crete and Venice. It may be Fielding’s awareness that there is contrast between the muddle of India left behind and the norm he was approaching, but it is not a moral design showing the superiority of form over the formless muddle. Fielding’s relief is more the acknowledgement of the distinction between two worlds. It is not, however, the acknowledgement of a writer like Kipling who announces the crude fact by saying, ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, but rather the dilemma of being caught between two worlds. The distinction here stems out of the interplay of moral and aesthetic authority. I think it is particularly interesting to compare Fielding’s return to Europe from India with Marlow’s return to Brussels, to what Conrad calls the sepulchral city in Heart of Darkness, to see the difference in the way both writers work out their perspective in the ending of each journey. Here is Marlow quoted at some length: You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear to lie, not because I’m straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appeals to me. There is taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by letting the young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to my influence in Europe. I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow would be help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see – you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams . . . (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 1902: 152) Marlow here returns with the horror of darkness (literal and figurative) on his mind and he seems to be unable to sever the physical





darkness of Africa from the mental darkness of the European man; the normality (human or not) of Brussels could not soothe his imagination. The European form of life was not ‘a cup of beauty’ or even a cup of tea for Marlow, who comes back to Brussels with the heavy burden of darkness, that is, the experience of imperialism in the Congo articulated: ‘the horror, the horror’, Kurtz’s famous expression quoted with great admiration by Marlow, who would consider it an epitaph for Kurtz and imperialism as well. Any European encounter of any form will be lost in the heart of darkness, and Marlow steered in it to sense that any return to normality would sound unreal, if not ridiculous. Fielding, in contrast, finds it unrealistic to connect muddle with the form or even to pass from one to another without sensing contradictions, and he somehow manages to keep things in compartments, as one way out. The difference between Forster and Conrad lies in the genesis of perspective. Forster believes that ‘no missionary shall ever create’: and, by implication, he would further say that a missionary cannot be a subject for creation. Forster says that imperialism is a crusade, and it is not a subject for any aesthetic contemplation to warrant fictive rendering. In contrast, Conrad views imperialism as a destructive force that needs to be identified, because he believes that evil should be grasped. If imperialism is darkness it ought to be penetrated not with the intention of achieving a result or realizing a goal, but rather with the hope of capturing the intensity of ‘the human norm’ at stake and in the process of being dehumanized. ‘To the destructive element surrender yourself and learn how to swim’: Conrad’s apophthegm in Lord Jim. What Marlow actually admires in Kurtz is the courage demonstrated in taking the mission of imperialism to its last end and utmost intensity so as to see it as the articulation of horror (see Appendix 3). Conrad’s characters are directly and seriously involved in the experience of imperialism. Forster’s view of expansion (conquest or occupation) is set, as early as his short essay ‘The Return from Siwa’ in his second book on Alexandria: Pharos and Pharillon, where Forster remarks that Alexander found his inspiration ‘in the recesses of the Siwan Oasis’ for his major adventures. This is how Forster restructures Alexander’s story beyond the Mediterranean: And Alexander, the heroic chaos of whose heart surged with desire for all that cannot be, turned away from his Hellenic town-planning



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and his narrow little antiquarian crusade, and flung himself again, but in a new spirit, against the might of Persia. He fought her as a lover now. He wanted not to convert but to harmonize, and conceived himself as the divine and impartial ruler beneath whom harmony shall proceed . . . Persia fell. Then it was the turn of India. (Ph, 26–7) Forster’s account here is reminiscent of Conrad’s reference at the beginning of Heart of Darkness to the Roman conquest which brought civilization to Britain, in contrast to the British expansion which resulted in imperialism. Wasn’t Alexander in his journey to the East on Forster’s mind while on his way to India, at least on his second journey? Wasn’t it Forster’s original plan to harmonize East and West across the Mediterranean until he found out how much discrepancy there is between the harmonizing expedition of Alexander and the disintegrating crusading mission of Britain in India? This perspective seems to acquire articulation in a lecture Forster gave in Italy 30 years or so after the publication of the novel, entitled ‘Three Countries’. In this lecture Forster echoes or re-echoes the visionary pattern of the global mission of harmonizing the different parts of the world he sets for himself. This is how Forster begins his lecture: The three countries of my title, are your country, my country and India. I had originally meant to call it Four Countries and include Greece, but that would have given too much material. Italy, England and India are material enough, and what I hope to do is to show how those three countries have influenced and helped me as a writer. Geography interests me. I like to see the face of the world and to think about it. I enjoy travelling and am indeed a confirmed globetrotter, though a trotter upon a rather quiet globe, none of my travels having been adventurous. Such as they are they have got into my work, as have my home surroundings, and I want today to pay homage to the earthy localities where my books were born. (KCLC) What would be also an appropriate epitaph that Forster perhaps intended for A Passage to India is his conclusion about Alexander towards the end of the essay referred to above: ‘He had tried to lead





Greece, then he had tried to lead mankind. He had succeeded in both. But was the universe also friendly, was it also in trouble, was it calling on, on him, for his help and his love?’ (Ph, 27). Forster here finds himself caught between the friendly but unfortunate India which Fielding encounters and the sympathy he eagerly extends to an India under imperialism. The result is a suspended interplay between the real and ideal which unfortunately falls short of realization. Yet an alternative epitaph would be something like Hardy’s words ‘no more writing novels for me’, a cry resulting from the public’s extremely negative response to Jude the Obscure. Forster was not initially happy with his achievement in A Passage to India as his correspondence shortly after he had finished writing it shows. Only when the novel was well received by reviewers did Forster begin to be sure of its success and started writing to his friends in a different tone, whose change was evidently not enough to bring about a change of heart towards the further writing of fiction. ‘I have nothing more to say,’ Forster said to me on my first evening at King’s College as I sat having my supper at the same table he was sitting at. That was in response to my question to him in connection with his abandoning of fiction, after A Passage to India. Apparently I was not the only one privileged to hear such a remark. But the long span of time in Forster’s life which follows the publication of the novel seems to urge the question which was never answered by Forster. One conclusion can be derived from Aspects of the Novel which indirectly yields a counter-effect to the novel. The Clark Lectures, which were originally titled ‘Aspects of Fiction’, must have provided Forster with relief after he had finished A Passage to India. We may say that Forster’s critical account demonstrates the discrepancy between theory and practice, the ideal and the real, at least in his own literary career. It is true that Forster was modest enough to make no reference to his fiction in his criticism, but it is also true, I think, that Forster’s A Passage to India was, in a sense, a deviation from the familiar artistic norm. Forster’s journey can be described in sequential order as the practising in his early career of the human norm with all its potential, followed by movement towards muddle where the human norm is tested rather than practised, then back to the artistic form which is the literary reality of the human norm. One can imagine Forster, like his Fielding entering the Mediterranean atmosphere, announcing the abandonment of muddle which he left behind.



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In Aspects of the Novel, Forster says that the novelist has access to ‘the secret life’ where he can ‘reveal the hidden life at its source’, and with his special insight he can represent the character’s ‘selfcommunings’, and from that level he can descend even deeper and deeper into the subconscious (AN, 58). For Forster, imperialism is flat enough to invite no exploration into its existential order, and imperialists, Forster seems to believe, have no secret life in them (surely no secret understanding of the heart). Unlike Conrad’s characters whose life is made complicated by the interaction between the social and the individual impulse, official characters in Forster are victims of their own ‘undeveloped heart’ obliquely shaped by imperialism. ‘The secret understanding of the heart’ mentioned early in A Passage to India, presumably meaning the needed secret life in the novel, is denied realization because there is no chance for bridging the gap and connecting the different parties. Learning how ‘to connect’ is not in view. Of course, Forster as a novelist was competent enough to dramatize the scene in the Caves so as to generate the secret life of India as a counterpart to imperialism which, in Forster’s view, is required for fiction. The other question I asked Forster on that evening was the typical question relevant to the famous scene: ‘What happened in the Caves?’ Forster’s answer was the recurrent one, that he did not know. It seems that Forster turns to the secret life of characters. In the early novels the secret life of characters originated in deviation from the human norm, and it was corrected by what Forster inherited of the ‘comic spirit’ from Meredith as seen above. The situation in A Passage to India, in contrast, is quite different, more than deviation from the human norm: it is irredeemable and ‘extraordinary’. Yet it is not ordinary oneness and certainly not ordinary nothingness. The concluding ‘not yet’ ‘not there’ captures the oneness in a state of suspension which rejects the ordinary nothingness as annihilation. Any reading of the last words of the novel as settlement will, I believe, diminish the effect of Forster’s complex perspective. Such a reductive reading is that of Mary Lago who remarks, ‘Friends, to remain friends in the rewarding, must go away from each other (spiritually) every now and then, and improve themselves’ (Lago 1995: 91). This was the moral at the end of A Passage to India. Similarly Parminder Bakshi laboriously argues that A Passage to India engages itself with the personal and the




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The novel is not really about politics . . . It’s about something wider than politics, about the search of the human race for a more lasting home, about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and Indian sky, about the horror lurking in the Marabar Caves . . . It is – or [rather] desires to be – philosophic and poetic.8 Such appraisals seem to overlook Forster’s complex mind which usually suspends commitment rather than advance easy resolution. Forster’s design is better articulated by George Eliot’s frequently quoted statement in Felix Holt that ‘there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life’. What is sometimes missing from comments on Forster’s scheme in A Passage to India lies in the fact that it begins as it ends in a ferocious interaction between the public and private without obvious result. The critical judgements of the conclusion of the novel taken by Mary Lago and Parminder Bakshi fail to see that the concluding words ‘not yet . . .’ come as a response to the question advanced early in the novel by Hamidulla and his compatriots, about the feasibility of friendship between Indians and British, a question which is of a public nature in its direct reference. It is directed at Indians and British as nations and individuals, and extended to the human race. Introducing his talk to the audience in ‘Three Countries’ Forster says: And I am not going to tell you what their (my books) purpose is – it is for the books themselves to say that and if they don’t say they have failed; nor am I going to talk about characters or plots or dialogues except incidentally. Our subject is the surface of this earth and what it has done for a writer who has lived on it for eighty years. (KCLC) What I think has contributed enough to the misreading of Forster’s perspective in terms of personal relationship is the fact that Forster chose a Moslem as a main character. Many Indian scholars are critical of Forster for choosing a Moslem rather than a Hindu to be the representative of India.



political. Much as I appreciate Bakshi’s robust argument I believe that his demonstration supports rather the opposite of the thesis he advances. For example, he quotes Forster as saying that

We know that Masood was a most intimate friend of Forster and that Forster coached Masood in Latin in 1910. Also we know that the novel itself was written as a kind of homage to Masood to celebrate the special affection between the two friends. This is what Forster says in ‘Three Countries’ in full recognition of the genesis of Masood’s portrait: My connection with India [pre-partitional] is peculiar and personal. It started because I made friends with an Indian, and but for him I might have never gone to his country, or written about it. His name was Masood, he was a Moslem, who had come over to go to Oxford; we saw a great deal of each other and traveled in Italy and France and when he returned to India it was agreed that I should go to stay with him. This I did in 1912, and twelve years later when ‘A Passage to India’ came out I dedicated it to him. It is on this basis of personal relationship that my connection with that strange country rests. I didn’t go there to govern it or to make money or to improve people. I went there to see a friend [and make more friends crossed out]. Masood was important in his community. His grandfather had founded the college of Aligarh, his remote ancestors had been nobles at the Mogul Court and he was ultimately descended from the Prophet. He showed me his country – or rather the side of it he knew – in an offhand and arresting way. The tension between the Indians and the British was increasing and I listened to political and semi-political talk night and day, especially night. [‘Most of the Indians were pretty bitter’ inserted]. Masood was entertained by the English rather than hostile to them. I remember him once saying ‘As for your damned countrymen, for my own part I pity the poor fellows from the bottom of my heart and give them all the help I can.’ (KCLC) The fact that Aziz is an Indian Moslem and not a Hindu (Bradbury, for example, wrongly refers to Aziz as the young Hindu doctor)9 is not a coincidence. It is natural that a novelist should draw upon personalities he knows fairly well and the story of intimacy between Forster and Masood is too well known to need any elaboration here. However, it was Forster’s own decision to represent India with an Indian Moslem, as his letter to his Aunt Laura (6 November




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The more I know the less I understand. With the Mohammedans it is different. When after the nightmare of Gokul Ashtami, I stood on the minaret of the Taj in Agra, and heard the evening call to prayer from the adjacent mosque, I knew at all events where I stood and what I heard; it was not a land that was merely atmosphere but had definite outlines and horizons. So with the Mohammedan friends of Masood whom I am meeting now. They may not be as subtle or suggestive as the Hindus, but I can follow what they are saying. (Qtd in Furbank 1977: 99) However, it is not that Forster was partial or anything like that. The Hindu element in India, Forster seems to suggest, stands more for muddle than for mysticism. Mysticism is more of a help towards articulation than muddle but mysticism does not seem to be big enough to accommodate the Hindu element. And Forster himself had the chance of being exposed to the Hindu experience when he worked as secretary to a Maharaja on his second visit to India, perhaps with the anticipation that he would be able to finish his novel already put aside for over 12 years. Commenting on this experience, Furbank remarks that Forster ‘was disturbed . . . by the memory of his own panic and disorder’. Furbank goes on to quote Forster’s letter to his mother (12 November 1921) which he wrote a few days after he had written to his aunt. Referring to his departure Forster wrote that he and the Maharaja ‘were very melancholy’ and adds: I hated leaving, but it is his tragedy not to know how to employ people, and I could not feel it any use to go on muddling with work that gave me no satisfaction, and was of no essential importance to him. The things of this life mean so little to him – mean something so different anyway – I never feel certain what he likes, or even whether he likes me: consideration for others so often simulates affection in him. I only know that he is one of the sweetest and saintliest men I have ever known . . . (Qtd in Furbank 1977: 98) One can envisage Forster’s scheme suspended over the years even after his return to England from his second visit to India partly



1921) demonstrates:

because of finding the muddle of India impenetrable and beyond verbal articulation. This is Forster’s actual experience recorded in ‘Three Countries’ where in an afterthought he adds (the genesis of the book is worth noting): I began the book about my 1912 visit, wrote half a dozen chapters of it and stuck. I was clear about the chief characters and the racial tension, [had visualized the scenery, added] and had foreseen that something crucial would happen in the Marabar Caves. [But I hadn’t seen far enough, added]. When I returned to India in 1921, to stay with the Maharaja I took the chapters with me and expected that the congenial surroundings would inspire me to go on. Exactly the reverse happened. Between the India I had tried to create and the India I was experiencing there was an impassable gulf. I had to get back to England and see my material in perspective before I could proceed. Perhaps the long wait was to the good and the religious atmosphere of Dewas certainly helped to establish the spiritual sequence I was seeking, particularly in the last section of the book. (KCLC) Forster’s account above is followed by the frequently quoted: ‘For the book is not really about politics though it is the political aspect of it that caught general public and made it sell . . .’ Forster goes on to say: It’s about something wider than politics, about the search of the human race for a more lasting home, about the universe as embodied in the Indian Earth and the Indian sky, about the horror lurking in the Marabar Caves and the release symbolised by the birth of Krishna. It is or rather desires, to be – philosophic and poetic, and that is why [when I had finished inserted] I took its title ‘A Passage to India’ from a famous poem of Walt Whitman’s. (Ibid.) I would like to suggest that mysticism serves as a kind of catalyst in the process of grasping the muddle and as a kind of bridge between liberal humanism and the muddle. In its magnitude it is less than liberal humanism but it remains more capable of grasping the muddle. The narrative discourse of the novel comes out of the interplay of the rational liberal humanism of the West and the





muddle of India with mysticism embracing it. In this interplay lies the problematic scheme of the novel expressed as early as the tea party, where the major foreshadowing question is exposed: whether India is a mystery, a muddle or both. Fielding says that India is a mysterious muddle which obviously leads nowhere! Similarly Mrs Moore tries to simplify the complex context and says that she likes mysteries and rather dislikes muddles. All major characters (British officials not included) encounter the complexity of the situation and the signal lack of communication. Such statements make no immediate effect on such situations, as we find, for example, in the bridge party, the tea party and in the climactic scene of the Caves. As early as his first encounter with India, Forster seems to have conceived of A Passage to India as a passage beyond language, a view beyond a room or even a room without a view, rendered explicitly by the crude politics of the British in India. A most relevant account of the genesis of the novel is a personal memory recorded by Forster on the occasion of his and Dickinson’s visit to India. This is what Forster writes about Dickinson’s impression: For the hardworking and conscientious Anglo-Indians I met I felt a sympathy tinged with a kind of despair. For it seemed almost that the more conscientious they did by their work the further they were from the native sympathy and mind. But that too may be an illusion. I am however pretty sure that the irony that brought the English into contact with the Indians is only equaled by that which brought them into contact with the Irish. The barrier on both sides of incomprehension is almost impassable. I feel this incomprehension very strongly myself. Indian art, Indian religion, Indian society, is alien and unsympathetic to me. I have no sense of superiority about it, but one of estrangement. What indeed is there or can there be in common between the tradition of Greece and that of India? (Forster 1934, rept 1962: 137) Forster, I believe, never lost this picture while writing this novel. With the attempt to emphasize this impression, Forster announced (long after the publication of the novel) that A Passage to India is ‘about something wider than politics . . .’ This reiterates Forster’s own words with which he concludes the biography of his tutor and



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He did not merely increase our experience: he left us more alert for what has not yet been experienced and more hopeful about other men because he had lived. And a biography of him, if it succeeded, would resemble him; it would achieve the unattainable, express the inexpressible, turn the passing into the everlasting. (Ibid.: 241) Forster is always after the unattainable, the inexpressible and, in his own word in the opening sentence of his novel, the ‘extraordinary’. For him even the actual acquires effect and significance when it is viewed from a distance so as to be transformed into fiction as we see in his biography of Dickinson. The main aspect of his developed approach to fiction is ‘musicalisation’ based on pattern and rhythm which tend to make up the deficiency in the verbal medium of expression. When Forster asks himself whether he has succeeded in achieving ‘the unattainable’, or ‘the inexpressible’, turning ‘the passing into the everlasting’, his answer, which concludes the biography, is as follows: ‘No. And perhaps it only could be done through music. But that is what has lured me now’ (ibid.: 241). Forster makes us sense the situation in all its complexity but without really bothering to explain, resolve, complete or close the file of the muddle. For example, we sense the gulf between East and West and the deep differences between characters but with no final prospect of bridging the gap or settling the difference. We get muddled up like Adela, panicked like Mrs Moore, sadly and passionately withdrawn like Aziz, and intensely puzzled and disoriented like Fielding. No justification is offered to persuade us that what happened should or could not happen in the way it did. The narrative voice acknowledges the gulf not as fact to be taken for granted, as Kipling does, nor does he take it as a highly imaginative truth to be accepted as superior to mundane truth as Conrad does. Conrad is at great pains to make us see what he does and this explains the narrator’s resort to the rhetoric of fiction and confidence of his Marlow as he probes deeply into the psyche of character and invites us through the artifice of language to share his experience. This explains Marlow’s recurrent cries before his audience soliciting their response



mentor Dickinson:


to the story he tells, wondering whether they see what he says or sees. Forster, in contrast, is satisfied with making us sense the muddle without the support of rhetoric; and the climactic Marabar Caves scene is a demonstration of this effect. For this reason A Passage to India requires rereading so that we may capture or recapture the links missed in the first reading. In the second reading it is hoped that no single aspect of the narrative will be taken as the dominant discourse of the novel, but rather as potential liberated once it is made a participant in the whole interplay of the narrative discourse. Any discourse of the narrative should not escape the inevitable interaction between the private and the public. A crucial statement (quoted above) about A Passage to India points to the novel that is ‘about the search of the human race for a more lasting home . . .’ In this statement, Forster sums up the adventurous history of colonization and imperialism from the colonized island of Robinson Crusoe to the India of Kipling under the umbrella of the common ideal of liberal thought. Were not European settlers throughout history, leaving their own home, and searching ‘for a more lasting home’, from South Africa to South East Asia? Were not David Livingstone and many others in a quest ‘for a more lasting home’? Like his dear Dickinson, Forster was most dissatisfied with British imperialism in India, and at the same time it was not easy for him to formulate the experience he and Dickinson encountered on their first visit to India. We know that Forster does not agree with the strategy adopted by Conrad to describe imperialism. As mentioned above, in his letter to Masood (27 September 1922) Forster disclaims any attempt to promote racial harmony when he says, ‘When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable’ (KCLC). This explains Forster’s shift of emphasis to the non-human element in India, that is, the Indian sky and earth, of the conclusion. This also explains Forster’s repeated statement that the novel is ‘about the horror lurking in the Marabar Caves’, the horror of which Forster, unlike Conrad, minimized its description, but not its effect. I find Forster’s own commentary on the novel in ‘Three Countries’ most illuminating in that it sets imperialism as a kind of quest for



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a more lasting home where public and private elements meet. Forster’s image embraces imperialism as a context of what he calls ‘the human predicament’. The non-official characters have the responsibility of enacting the quest and of exploring its already knowable result. Unlike the officials in India whose choice ends in settlement in India as a more lasting home, the other group arrive in India with the idea of experiencing themselves what it means to take India as ‘a more lasting home’. Hence the context with the nonhuman protagonist (sky, earth, Caves and so on), which, at the same time, forms the context of the whole drama. It is as if Forster listens to the potential voices of these characters wondering whether a passage to India can lead to a more lasting home. Let them see! And out of their interplay emerges Forster’s contemplative outlook overriding the explicit situation of the novel. First, Adela who somehow stands for British morality arriving in India to decide whether a more lasting home beyond the Lake District (where she first met Ronny) would materialize. Would India, where Ronny is a City Magistrate, be her new home? Whether she can integrate herself in the India of Ronny becomes the question. Hence her well-remembered statement which comes as a vortex in the narrative: ‘I want to see the real India.’ To use Bakhtin’s notion of the inevitable correlation between language and culture, we can say that Adela’s proposal is not ‘culture free’. Adela herself is innocent but not her proposal, which, without her awareness, carries the will to power. For example, the case would be different had she said that she would like to be shown India or that she would like herself to be introduced to India. The difference here would be marked by using the passive rather than the active voice. Without her being conscious of its implication Adela’s proposal is reductive in nature, as it fails to address India as a human experience which might eventually lead to some kind of identification. Adela’s voice in her proposal falls within the discourse of Orientalism which tends to depersonalize the Orient because it is essentially self-constituting and tends to establish the Orient as an artificial entity, while ignoring its individuality. Edward Said observes: I consider Orientalism’s failure to have been a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible




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However, particularly significant is Adela’s response to Aziz’s question at Fielding’s house and this comes after she had decided not to marry Ronny. Aziz asks her, ‘Why not settle altogether in India?’ She replies: ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that’ (PI, 66). This is Adela at her best. It is Forster’s attitude adopted by the ordinary British subject who has almost nothing to do with the official politics in India. For Adela to settle in India ought to be preceded by union with love. Hence Adela’s scepticism. The quest for ‘a more lasting home’ which she had hoped to find in India, at least as an expansion or extension to that of the Lake District, turns out to be a mirage. For Adela then settling in India is determined by settling in union with love. Ronny makes Adela abandon any hope for such union when after the trial he decides that she will never make an AngloIndian wife, for she will never learn to be an insider, and that would be ‘the end of his career’. Obviously Adela is victimized by the system devised by the imperialist rulers who have full claim over Indians and India, and impose on them a union of force and fear. It is here that the private and the public elements are intricately interwoven, and it is crucial, I think, to observe the correlation between Adela’s failure to marry Ronny and her frustration in trying to reach Aziz, as it shows how Adela’s quest for ‘a more lasting love’ fails from beginning to end: What a handsome Oriental he was, and no doubt his wife and children were beautiful too, for people usually get what they already possess. She did not admire him with any personal warmth, for there was nothing of the vagrant in her blood, but she guessed he might attract women of his own race and rank, and she regretted that neither she nor Ronny had physical charm. It does make a difference in a relationship – beauty, thick hair, a fine skin. (PI, 144) In staging the situation of Adela just before the climactic incident of the Caves, Forster provides a most intricate design of the interplay of the private and the public. Adela is actually disturbed by the



opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience. (Said 1978, rept 1995: 328)

presence of difference. Hence her asking Aziz whether he has more than one wife. Although Adela is already disturbed by the fact that she has already committed herself to a union with Ronny without love she is further disturbed by her attraction to Aziz. Here Adela stands between two oppositions without even having the choice. The tension is generated by an act of differentiation doubly made by Adela herself, against Aziz (unconsciously perhaps) and by Ronny as an agent of imperialism. The question of polygamy directed by Adela at Aziz reveals the issue of differentiation. Adela seems to pick up an infection from the culture of imperialism, and Aziz here is treated as a stereotype. Adela’s ambivalence, being attracted by Aziz and at once not being able to accept him, is an extended fixated image of the colonial ruler who views colonial and cultural opposition as colonial power exercised over the ruled. Adela is simply disturbed by the presence of difference which she finds impossible to resolve or at least to reconcile. How can she fit herself into a commitment without love to a British imperialist ruler like Ronny and to an instinctive desire for an Indian ruled by that ruler. The crisis is made obvious by the inevitable stand between two oppositions which naturally produce unpredictability, fantasy and a split in attitude altogether. Adela’s situation is well articulated by an analogy Fanon makes in terms of the difference against the black. Here is the extract in mind: The little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama the nigger’s going to eat me up. (Fanon 1970: 80, qtd in Bhabha 1986: 169–70) If we substitute Aziz for the Negro, Adela for the little handsome boy, and Mama for the British officials in India or for the echo which Adela develops as a result of her fantasy of the alleged assault, we find the analogy in full circle and illuminating. However, Adela’s situation is further illuminated by Bhabha’s comment which follows the quotation from Fanon: It is the scenario of colonial fantasy which, in staging the ambivalence of desire, articulates the demand for the negro which the




negro disrupts. For the stereotyped other reveals something of the fantasy (as desire, defence) of that position of mastery. For if ‘skin’ in racist discourse is the visibility of darkness, and a prime signifier of the body and its social and cultural correlates, then we are bound to remember what Karl Abraham (Abraham 1978) says in his seminal work on the scopic drive. The pleasure-value of darkness is a withdrawal in order to know nothing of the external world. Its symbolic meaning, however, is thoroughly ambivalent. (Bhabha 1982: 170) Adela undoubtedly believes in the sanctity of union or partnership leading to a marriage settlement, and she is tormented by the fact that marriage with Ronny means settling with him at a usurped home. For this reason Forster lays little or no emphasis on personal disputes between Adela and Ronny and, instead, shifts the emphasis onto the colonial context Ronny submits to as a stereotype so that it becomes for Adela the target of a ferocious struggle standing beyond compromise. This explains Adela’s early decision to leave India without returning, and she tells Aziz about it and conceals it from Ronny. But Forster twists the plot to intensify the gap between the public and private further, between the individual and the stereotype. The disaster Adela eventually meets shows that the ideal cannot compete with imperialism and that is not, I think, an expression of defeat on the part of Adela. Adela wants to be imaginative and sincere to her feelings, but how can she be so while she is involved with an imperialist? Her attraction to Aziz is arrested by her relationship with Ronny. Adela’s image of home is doubly threatened by the lack of love and the fixed form of difference Ronny creates in dealing with Indians (Aziz, of course, included). Beyond the Lake District, where Adela first met Ronny, her ideal cannot survive with those who expand the territory of their home beyond Britain in quest of an everlasting home. Adela returns home in triumph. Adela is, I believe, a unique picture in the total image of imperialism undertaken by anti-imperialist writers in the twentieth century. She is an individual, not a type, and exactly the opposite of Miss Derek, whose casual presence in the novel is often if not always overlooked. The very minor role Miss Derek is given is significant in terms of its relevance to Adela Quested (or if one is allowed to provide a



100 E. M. Forster and the Politics of Imperialism

description: Tested). A comparison between the two British women who are ‘fresh from England’ shows that one is the opposite of the other. Here is a reference to Miss Derek in relation to Cousin Kate, a show in the English Club, and the review of the performance afterwards: An ‘unkind notice’ had appeared in the local paper, ‘the sort of thing no white man could have written’, as Mrs Lesley said. The play was praised, to be sure, and so were the stage management and the performance as a whole, but the notice contained the following sentence: ‘Miss Derek, though she charmingly looked her part, lacked the necessary experience, and occasionally forgot her words.’ This tiny breath of genuine criticism had given deep offence, not indeed to Miss Derek, who was as hard as nails, but to her friends. Miss Derek did not belong to Chandrapore. She was stopping for a fortnight with the McBrydes, the police people, and she had been so good as to fill up a gap in the cast at the last moment. A nice impression of local hospitality she would carry away with her. (PI, 34–5) One wonders whether Forster implies (within the range of irony bestowed on the situation) what part of the nice impression of local hospitality she would carry away with her on her way back to England! But surely being ‘as hard as nails’ made her very insensitive towards stealing the car of her Maharaja which she suddenly appears with at the scene of the Nawab Bahador’s car incident. She knew that her Maharaja ‘would be awfully sick’ if he knew that she had stolen his car, ‘but she didn’t mind; he could sack her if he liked’. In her own self-rightuous manner she adds: If I didn’t snatch like the devil, I should be nowhere. He doesn’t want the car, silly fool! Surely it’s to the credit of his state I should be seen about in it at Chandrapore during my leave. He ought to look at it that way. Anyway he’s got to look at it that way. (PI, 83) What Miss Derek does with the Maharaja’s car recalls what the English ladies do with Aziz’s tonga-wallah grabbed without even an apology, and Mrs Callendar’s words to Mrs Lesley would articulate the situation Miss Derek describes. Mrs Callendar says to




Mrs Lesley: ‘ “Take the gifts the gods provide, anyhow”, she screeched, and both jumped in. “O tonga-wallah, Club, Club. Why doesn’t the fool go?” ’ (PI, 11–12). Yet Miss Derek is a different type from those British women in that her typicality articulates Adela’s character in reverse. She is presumably designed to remind us indirectly of Adela’s merit. She is what Adela is not. While riding with Miss Derek in the stolen car, Adela finds the young lady’s tone of conversation – claiming that Ronny knows nothing about the Maharanis – most disagreeable. Miss Derek seems to continue parading her claim of knowing India and Indian women of high position all the way through to Chandrapore, with Ronny and Adela sitting in the back seat having no choice but to listen. In this situation Adela’s ‘hand touched Ronny’s again in the darkness, and to the animal thrill there was now added a coincidence of opinion’ (PI, 84). When Nawab Bahador, who was sitting in the front seat, had to get out of the car, Ronny’s hand, which he had removed to say goodbye, touched Adela’s again; she caressed it definitely, he responded, and their firm and mutual pressure surely meant something. They looked at each other when they reached the bungalow, for Mrs Moore was inside it. It was for Miss Quested to speak, and she said nervously, ‘Ronny, I should like to take back what I said on the Maidan.’ He assented, and they became engaged to be married in consequence. (PI, 85) It is this scene that Frank Kermode perceptively sees as ‘a wonderfully delicate passage in the building of a unique structure’, which, in comparison to the very complex design of Forster’s other novels prior to A Passage to India, he adds, ‘cannot aspire to such subtle order’. It is so ironic that the accidental arrival of Miss Derek at the scene giving the group a lift serves to intensify the sense of panic, confusion and muddle Adela has already experienced. How can one in Adela’s situation maintain the necessary amount of emotional and intellectual stability in such a crisis? Perhaps Adela felt that Ronny, in comparison to Miss Derek, was honest, naïve, considerate and not so self-rightuous. Hence the sudden announcement probably made as a concession on her part. In return Ronny offers his own concession to





Look here, both of you, see India if you like and as you like – I know I made myself rather ridiculous at Fielding’s, but . . . it’s different now. I wasn’t quite sure of myself. (PI, 86) Concession for reconciliation is like friendship between Indians and British, possible but not permanent. The adverb ‘nervously’ in the announcement is particularly prophetic, and the crisis later in the Caves has its origin in the ‘nervous’ announcement. It should be noticed that the concession Adela offers is never completed to mean a final settlement without any reservation; even at the time of the announcement Adela ‘felt too that there should have been another scene between her lover and herself at this point, something dramatic and lengthy’ (PI, 86). Ironically enough what happens in the Caves was actually the suspended ‘dramatic and lengthy’. What upsets Adela most about the sudden announcement is the form of stereotype into which she has to be integrated. Immediately after the announcement the narrator tells us of the new status she has to acquire: ‘Unlike the green bird or the hairy animal, she was labelled now’ (PI, 85). To be Mrs Ronny Heaslop means that she becomes one of those British women who ‘did nothing that they could not share with the men’ (PI, 34). Adela has the right intuition to keep the announcement rather suspended, intending ‘to revert to her former condition of important and cultivated uncertainty’ (PI, 85). This is demonstrated by Ronny’s withdrawal of that concession he offers to Adela and his mother to visit the Caves and see India as they like in response to Adela’s renewal of the engagement. After a day of hard work in his office which engaged him in a religious riot between Hindus and Moslems Ronny retreats with a tranquility of his own: ‘His voice grew complacent again: he was here not to be pleasant, but to keep the peace, and now that Adela had promised to be his wife she was sure to understand’ (PI, 87). This is quite revealing as it shows that Ronny is set and has no intention to change his attitude even when Adela becomes his wife in the near future. In retrospect it similarly suggests that he only felt threatened by the common ideal held by his mother and Adela. Now that his mother withdraws (she does not even accept or believe her



Adela and his mother:

son’s concession) and union with Adela is imminent, Ronny feels in full control of his imperialist office. It is worth noting here that Ronny stands indifferent to the riot and he does not even comment on the way the Collector favours the Hindus, and he renders the scene as if he were a reporter observing it from the outside. What is essential for him is dominance with peace at any expense, and his scheme is to make Adela understand or rather to force her to understand the situation of the British in India instead of seeing the real India. For Ronny, marriage means simply an easy exchange of one stand for another, and what makes the order so subtle (Kermode’s words) is Adela’s awareness of the order of events in view. Adela is conscious of the horrible fact that with the prospective marriage she will be ‘labelled’ not only with the type of imperialist husband and the typical British wife in India but also with Miss Derek. It is anticipated that Adela finds it quite puzzling when she hears Ronny say ‘how a decent girl like Miss Derek can take service under natives puzzles me’ (PI, 88). In the end Adela goes with Aziz to the Caves with the scene she had in Miss Derek’s car and the conversation in the Bungalow held immediately afterwards between the couple and Mrs Moore – all in all she makes the fatal move into the Caves, which immediately brings to mind Checkhov’s ‘impossible love’. What further makes Adela an exceptional portrait of women characters in twentieth-century fiction and particularly in Forster’s own is the simple reason that Adela is given quite a serious role to play in a most serious issue handled by Forster and other modern writers such as Conrad, that is, imperialism. This may be a good occasion to make a comparison between Forster and Conrad with reference to female characterization in fiction. It is Conrad here rather than Forster who ought to be taken as the Victorian fag-end when the Intended of Heart of Darkness is compared to Adela. When Marlow returns from the Congo after his tormenting experience of the place, he is questioned by the Intended about her beloved Kurtz, whose whereabouts while in the Congo never reached her in Brussels. The Intended was so curious to know what were the last words Kurtz uttered before his death. Knowing how sheltered and innocent the Intended is, Marlow, with his sensibility, finds it most difficult to tell her the truth and he sensed that she could not accommodate the complex experience Kurtz actually had




undergone. Marlow seems to have no alternative but to fabricate that famous lie to suit the romantic girl, who lived all her life in illusion and anticipated nothing from Marlow but sentimentality. Marlow said to the Intended that her name was the last thing her beloved uttered, hiding from her ‘the horror, the horror’, the actual utterance of Kurtz before his death. Hence the most famous lie in fiction which has been controversial enough to invite various readings. A most perceptive remark is made by Bhabha: ‘The horror, the horror!’ Marlow, you will remember, had to lie as he moved from the heart of darkness to the Belgian boudoir. As he replaces the words of horror for the name of the Intended we read in that palimpsest neither one nor the other, something of the awkward, ambivalent unwelcome truth of empire’s lie. (Bhabha 1994: 138) In brief Conrad describes to us the experience of imperialism and its quintessence, while Forster makes Adela live the experience of imperialism and conveys it to us through her own experience no matter how tormenting the experience itself is. That is why we feel sometimes that Forster is ruthless in exposing Adela to all that experience of horror. Instead of leaving Adela behind in the Lake District with the romantic image of her relationship with Ronny, as the Intended is left behind in Brussels waiting for the knight errant to come back, Forster takes Adela to India to experience herself what it means to encounter a partner who is an agent of imperialism. Forster says that what separates Adela from Ronny is not character but experience. For both Conrad and Forster, imperialism is a horrifying experience: the former talks about it, the latter tells us about it, and Adela is one major character of four individual characters who undertakes the task of showing us what she experiences of ‘the horror, the horror’. In Bhabha’s words she conveys to us by means of experience ‘the next lie, the next and the next’ (ibid.). This is how imperialism eventually went bankrupt, losing time and place. One wonders, in portraying Adela’s situation, whether Forster had on his mind a certain Koranic verse I find relevant to the matter. On his first visit to India, Forster records in his Diary that in Simla he went to a Moslem wedding where ‘the bridegroom’s brother rose and said in English that the ceremony would begin with verses from




the Koran, which he read’ (KCLC). The verse reads as follows: ‘And of His signs is this. He created for you partnermates from yourselves that ye might find more lasting home in them’ (Verse 21, Surah XXX, The Romans). Any Moslem marriage is initiated by this verse which is recited at the beginning of the ceremony; wedding invitation cards are decorated with this verse. And then: Mrs Moore. The search for ‘a more lasting home’ is relatively more urgent for her. This is determined by her age, character and situation. She is evidently outside British officialdom, and even very critical of it. This, for example, is how the dialogue between son and mother goes, shortly after her arrival in India: ‘I’m going to argue, and indeed dictate,’ she said, clinking her rings. ‘The English are out here to be pleasant.’ ‘How do you make that out, mother?’ he asked, speaking gently again, for he was ashamed of his irritability. ‘Because India is part of the earth. And God has put us on the earth in order to be pleasant to each other. God . . . is . . . love.’ She hesitated, seeing how much he disliked the argument, but something made her go on. ‘God has put us on earth to love our neighbours and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.’ He looked gloomy, and a little anxious. He knew this religious strain in her, and that it was a symptom of bad health; there had been much of it when his stepfather died. He thought, ‘She is certainly ageing, and I ought not to be vexed with anything she says.’ ‘The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God. . . . The sincere if impotent desire wins His blessing. I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure. Goodwill and more goodwill and more good will. Though I speak with the tongues of . . .’ (PI, 45). In contrast, her encounter with Aziz in the mosque expresses her real but undeclared mission of ‘the secret understanding of the heart’ which is obviously the shortest passage to Forster’s positive ‘search of the human race for a more lasting home’, and the safest way to ‘the everlasting Friend’, as Godbole’s song and Ghalib’s poem suggest. Contrary to what Adela says about her desire to ‘see the real India’ Mrs Moore seems to be saying that she wants to see the whole of




India embraced by universal love or by Christian mysticism. Also, unlike Adela who enters the Caves with the negative effect of her personal experience echoing in her mind, Mrs Moore goes into the Caves with a positive successful experience, which comes back alive to her mind while walking into the Caves, as she imagined Aziz holding her hand: ‘And today felt this with such force that it seemed itself a relationship, itself a person, who was trying to take hold of her hand’ (PI, 127). Yet the result is the same, for Mrs Moore, like Adela, is caught in the horror lurking in the Caves; and this is the most ironic situation in the novel as it demonstrates the triumph of the non-human element in the whole narrative over the humanist ideal. Had Forster been romantic in his treatment of the Caves episode, or had he imposed a moral vision on the situation, he would have let Adela fail and Mrs Moore succeed, applying Coleridge’s view ‘we receive but what we give’. Mrs Moore’s success with Aziz early in the novel is not intended to be a permanent success. Forster makes the point that the muddle makes no distinction between people who move in the same imperialist context even if it happens that they are innocent; horror further levels the differences between them. Both Adela and Mrs Moore surrender as they find themselves disarmed of their previous weapons: Adela of the desirable knowledge, Mrs Moore of Christian mysticism, instinctive sympathy and love. However, each goes in a different direction after failure. Adela continues to enact the drama of horror until she recovers when the situation is redeemed by the saintly spirit of Mrs Moore’s name chanted as Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu Goddess, while Mrs Moore continues to enact the horror more by meditation – a Proustian style perhaps Forster happily uses for this purpose. Mrs Moore ironically withdraws to ‘a more lasting home’, to Aden, where she dies; for she could neither go back to the ‘real lasting home’ in England nor stay in India which she had contemplated at one time would be ‘a kind of lasting home’, at least for Ronny and Adela. It is quite significant, I think, that Mrs Moore dies in Aden, in the Indian Ocean, on the border between East and West, just beyond the human norm of the Mediterranean – almost in the passage to India: Dead she was – committed to the deep while still on the southward track, for the boats from Bombay cannot point towards Europe




until Arabia has been rounded; she was further in the tropics than she ever achieved while on shore, when the sun touched her for the last time and her body was lowered into yet another India – the Indian Ocean. She left behind her sore discomfort, for a death gives a ship a bad name. Who was this Mrs Moore? When Aden was reached, Lady Mellanby cabled, wrote, did all that was kind, but the wife of a Lieutenant-Governor does not bargain for such an experience; and she repeated: ‘I had only seen the poor creature for a few hours when she was taken ill; really this has been needlessly distressing, it spoils one’s homecoming.’ A ghost followed the ship up the Red Sea, but failed to enter the Mediterranean. (PI, 244) Mrs Moore, Forster seems to say here, breaks down with the unexplained muddle of the Caves which she fails to survive and could accommodate only as far as the Mediterranean. But it is the honourable debris of humanist failure, characteristic of so many disastrous ends in Conrad’s fiction. Fielding is the last in the trilogy. Though seemingly independent, Fielding is not completely outside the establishment for he is the Principal of a small college at Chandrapore. Unlike Mrs Moore, who thinks India is a mystery rather than a muddle, and who tends to like mysteries and dislike muddles, Fielding is outside the realm of both. Fielding journeys to the muddle of India with the liberal spirit which is his vision of ‘a more lasting home’, which clearly stands in total opposition to the home the officials make by force: Neither a missionary nor a student, he was happiest in the give-and-take of a private conversation. The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence – a creed ill suited to Chandrapore, but he had come out too late to lose it. (PI, 56) This is Forster’s own ideal carried to India. Fielding’s outlook is quite reminiscent of Dickinson’s political account mentioned above. Fielding’s response to Aziz’s question concerning the justification





‘It’s a question I can’t get my mind onto,’ he replied. ‘I’m out here personally because I needed a job. I cannot tell you why England is here or whether she ought to be here. It’s beyond me.’ (PI, 102) Like Mrs Moore’s success with Aziz, Fielding succeeds in establishing intimacy with him, thus concluding the first part of the novel with another graceful scene where the secret holiness of the heart’s affection is felt: But they were friends, brothers. That part was settled, their compact had been subscribed by the photograph, they trusted one another, affection had triumphed for once in a way. He dropped off to sleep amid the happier memories of the last two hours – poetry of Ghalib, female grace, good old Hamidullah, good Fielding, his honoured wife and dear boys. He passed into a region where these joys had no enemies but bloomed harmoniously in an eternal garden, or ran down watershoots of ribbed marble, or rose into domes whereunder were inscribed, black against white, the ninety-nine attributes of God. (PI, 113) Also Fielding’s success, like that of Mrs Moore, is not intended to last. It is essential to remember that Fielding’s failure is not because of any personal weakness in his personality or in his ideals; as mentioned above, it is a failure within a complex context of politics surrounding him. However, a most important turning point in the narrative comes when Fielding comes back from England and works for Ronny, becoming actually part of the establishment. With this change of heart Fielding surrenders his liberal humanism, at least while he is in India, and obliquely helps the muddle somehow to engulf him. Fielding’s failure is apparently worse than Adela’s or, certainly, that of Mrs Moore’s, and may be less honourable than that of Adela, for Adela wakes up from her predicament disillusioned. This is how Adela reassesses the situation to Ronny: My dear, how can I repay you? How can one repay when one has nothing to give? What is the use of personal relationships when everyone brings less and less to them? I feel we ought all to go



England may have in holding India is clear:

back into the desert for centuries and try and get good. I want to begin at the beginning. All the things I thought I’d learned are just a hindrance; they’re not knowledge at all. I’m not fit for personal relationships. Well, let’s go, let’s go. Of course Mr Fielding’s letter doesn’t count; he can think and write what he likes; only he shouldn’t have been rude to you when you had so much to bear. That’s what matters . . . . I don’t want your arm, I’m a magnificent walker, no, don’t touch me, please. (PI, 188) The difference between the Adela who once saw union with Ronny as acceptable at the incident of the Nawab Bahador’s car and the Adela who turns down Ronny’s offer to help her shows the drastic change Adela has already undergone. The distance Adela consciously establishes between herself and Ronny, as the last sentence of the quotation suggests, demonstrates this change. Unlike Fielding she is totally liberated from the establishment and rejects even the pressure of Ronny’s hand which had at one time tempted her to see union without love as possibly agreeable, the thing which eventually confused her and led to disaster. In Adela’s reassessment lies, I think, what is presumably the prophecy of the novel. Didn’t Mahatma Gandi ‘begin at the beginning’? Doesn’t Forster seem to be saying that ‘in the beginning was the muddle’? Or ‘before the word was the muddle’? Has Forster not suggested that the beginning is the ‘more lasting home’ we struggle to reach in our long journey? The prophetic vision, viewed in retrospect after the independence of India in 1948, was subtle enough to foretell the fall of British imperialism in India and invalidate the imperialist’s notion of the passage to India as ‘a more lasting home’. It equally discredits the validity of ideals adopted by those who look for a lasting home in the already occupied homes of others. Forster did not see ‘the search for a more lasting home’ as an easy or even justifiable mission. For this reason we are left with the narrative voice lurking in the background whispering to the British, settling in or visiting India, to leave the muddle alone, reminding them that they could neither accommodate it nor be accommodated by it, and that they had better stick to their civilizing mission in their homeland. The muddle, as Forster himself says, is unexplained so it cannot be subdued by knowledge, mysticism or any human norm. Imperialism, the prophetic voice seems to suggest, will not survive it.




Forster, of course, does not tell us explicitly where the ‘search of the human race’ ends; but we can say that it ends in retreat from the actuality of India to the reality of form and order across the Mediterranean as the last chapter of the Caves scene demonstrates, leaving behind the muddle to fight the official rulers. All the announcements which Forster made after the publication of the novel seem to come as a reaction to inadequate reading by readers who had been taken by the glamour of the big theme the narrative apparently represents. A most illuminating pronouncement occurs in the ‘Three Countries’, where Forster says: And I’ll conclude with another quotation which happens conveniently to summarise the lecture and gives us all three countries under a single heading. One of the characters travelling, Mr Fielding, is travelling from India via Italy to England. He is a brave intelligent fellow who has sided against his own countrymen over the trouble – that arose from the Marabar Caves, because he knew they were wrong, and has taken the part of the Indians. Now he is going home on leave, by sea and much as he has liked the Indians he is thankful to go home. (KCLC) Fielding’s passionate response to the Mediterranean human norm on his way back from India is more than an identification with the home of liberal humanism. It is also more than excitement and relief. Chapter 32, then, is not a mere celebration of the happy return of the native but rather a revelation of the illusion with which liberal humanism survives once it travels beyond the Mediterranean human norm to encounter the muddle. Fielding indirectly assures himself that ‘the common conviction of the white man’s burden’ to civilize the uncivilized by means of order is invalidated, and that the quest for an everlasting home beyond the Mediterranean is an act of appropriation doomed to failure. One can envisage the Mediterranean human norm waiting for Fielding’s return from India to tell him in frank terms that liberal humanism or other Western values lose force when they travel beyond their border to serve the designs of imperialism. This may be viewed as the other side of the coin of Said’s Orientalism which points to the power of knowledge provided by Orientalists to the imperialists in support of dominance over the ruled. Both Forster and Said show how corrupting knowledge and




abused values lead to misrepresentation. Corrupting knowledge, like abusing values, end in the degradation of reality and the negation of its status. Immediately after the illuminating pronouncement quoted above from the ‘Three Countries’ Foster quotes Chapter 32 as an illustration of his lecture, the chapter referred to above as a passionate break. Earlier in his lecture Forster quotes Chapter 12 as a demonstration of the muddle. Thus Forster makes the highlight of the narrative the juxtaposition of muddle and order where the secret understanding of the heart falls between them and becomes a passage, then a retreat from one to another. So different is Fielding here from Lucy Honeychurch whose love for music emancipates her from her cousin Charlotte’s oppressive limited ideas and codes of behaviour. One settles with music, the other stays caught between the muddle of India and the order of Europe where liberal humanism somehow thinks that the passage to India is a privileged pilgrimage to the East via Egypt, guided by a divine right. The reference made by Forster above to Fielding leads us to believe that the representative of liberal humanism did not bury the ideal in India, and that A Passage to India is not really an epitaph for it, as it is sometimes taken to be. It is quite significant, I think, that Forster quotes in his lecture ‘Three Countries’ Chapter 12 which opens Part II: ‘Caves’, and concludes by quoting Chapter 32 which closes the same part. Here, Forster offers us, perhaps for the first time, a most valuable account of ‘the heart of the matter’ which, I believe, confirms the complex perspective of the novel. It is as if Forster says that the narrative lies between the two polarities of muddle and order and that the discourse is a passage forward and backward. It is the longest journey to the mirage of ‘a more lasting home’ and back to the original home. It is ‘the surface of the earth’ Forster cherishes in his lecture against the battle of a liberal humanism adopted to conquer or rape under the banner of civilization.




Burra’s Introduction and Beyond: a Detour Round the Floods

Forster’s own denial that it was a political novel was not taken quite seriously, and it is surprising that he greeted Peter Burra’s essay of 1934 (reprinted in the Everyman edition) with relief and gratitude, though Burra left nearly everything to be said. (Frank Kermode, The Listener, 18 June 1970: 833) Assuredly the novel dates. In writing it, however, my main purpose was not political, was not even sociological. If anyone cares to inquire what my main purpose was, an answer can be found in the subjoined Introduction by Peter Burra. Forster writes in his Prefatory Note (1942) to the Everyman Edition of A Passage to India (PI, 313), and he later adds: I have reread it with pleasure and pride, for Burra saw exactly what I was trying to do; it is a great privilege for an author to be analyzed so penetratingly, and a rare one. One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood. (Ibid.) Burra’s Introduction first appeared as a review article in The Nineteenth Century and After in November 1934 under the title ‘The Novels of E. M. Forster’, and the review was then adopted as an introduction to the Everyman Edition of 1942. Since then, it has 113



6


The three structures, Mosque, Caves, Temple are outward shapes of a man’s spiritual adventures, but only by actual association in the story; pure symbolism would involve an unwanted reality. Mr. Forster, we said, was a musician who chose the novel because he had ideas to utter which needed a more distinct articulation than music could make. He is interested passionately in human beings; not only in the idea of them – which is presumably what most novelists mean when they lay claim to that passion – but in their actual living selves. (PI, 321) Nowhere in Forster do we find such strong expression of a critical view as we find in this Prefatory Note, making of Burra’s appraisal a most exceptional account of his [Forster’s] novels in general and of A Passage to India in particular. In Frederick P. W. McDowell’s words, the Introduction (referred to hereafter as such) ‘had won by then Forster’s approbation for its grasp of his work and purposes’.1 It may be worthwhile noting here that what Burra wrote about Forster’s fiction appeared shortly after a critical essay called the ‘Diabolism of E. M. Forster’, by Montgomery Belgion, published in T. S. Eliot’s review, The Criterion (October 1934), where he speaks of the ‘mystery’ of Forster’s world of fiction and of the ‘peculiarly symbolical’ use of characters and events. Belgion comments that characters are morally judged by their creator on the basis of their response to those symbolic moments. The result is that characters who respond are redeemed, and those who do not are condemned. Belgion relates characterization in Forster to a theory of predestination based on an apriority of the saved and the damned. He makes the conclusion that Forster’s practice is ‘uncharitable and diabolical’. No doubt Belgion’s essay was written in the line of what I. A. Richards wrote earlier of Forster in ‘A Passage to Forster: Reflections on a Novelist’ (The Forum, December 1927). Richards remarks that one of Forster’s aims is to develop half-mystical themes whose survival is inevitably vague. Another aim remarked by Richards is Forster’s presentation of a sociological thesis. Pointing to scenes that are often found to be very appealing to readers such as the wynch-elm scene towards the close of Howards End and the scene of the idiot



appeared in further editions. In 1978 it was published as an appendix in the Abinger Edition along with the Note. In this Introduction Burra says:

messenger in Where Angels Fear to Tread, in addition to some scenes of Mrs Moore, Richards concludes: ‘Mr Forster has always had a peculiar gift for charging his sentences with a mysterious nervous shiver’ (Bradbury 1966: 19). Richard’s criticism of Forster, we may remember, was written in the same year in which Forster gave the Clark Lectures (Spring of 1927), and shortly after those lectures were published in book form under the title Aspects of the Novel (October 1927), when Forster’s reputation as a novelist was increasingly on the rise. Although Forster is never in the habit of making an issue of any attack launched against him, he seems not to have suppressed it altogether from his memory, as we see in a letter dated 20 August 1930 (to an unidentified recipient): Thank you for your kind letter. I am glad that you enjoyed my book, but hope that you will not pay much attention either to it or to any other work of literary criticism. When one is actually writing novels – as you tell me you are – I think it most important that one should trust one’s own inclination, instincts, and tastes, and should not go to other writers to find out what a novel is or ought to be. Books like mine or Mr Richards’ or Mr Lubbock’s are all very well for students or examinees, but, seriously, I think they may do more harm than good to those who are actually engaged in creative work. (Lago and Furbank 1985: 94)2 The letter here shows how subtle Forster is in his response. He tends to belittle the perspective of his own criticism of the novel for the sake of condemning Richards’s criticism in the context of criticism in general. After all, Forster implies that he (Forster) is a novelist and this is what matters in the end for him; to reduce the status of criticism altogether would harm only those who, like Richards, make criticism a career. The letter quoted above is an example of Forster’s form of self-defence in which, perhaps out of dignity and pride, he tends to avoid making criticism a public issue.3 A stronger response to Richards’s and Belgion’s criticism is demonstrated, I believe, by means of Forster’s enthusiasm for Burra’s Introduction and by the above letter. Forster tends to undervalue the social and political elements of fiction probably because he thought the aesthetic aspects would remain less vulnerable to criticism. However, what is particularly crucial in the discourse of Burra’s Introduction and Forster’s Note is the impact they have indirectly



Burra’s Introduction and Beyond 115

exerted on Forster scholarship afterwards. So many scholars approach Forster with Forster’s enthusiasm for Burra’s criticism in mind, as if the admired Introduction had become a definitive critical statement allowing little or no departure from its frame of reference. The result is that the politics of Forster’s fiction have been either overlooked or discussed with reservation. Trilling’s celebrated study E. M. Forster (1944) is typical of the major studies which have fallen under the spell of Burra’s criticism, and the title of the first chapter ‘Forster and the Liberal Imagination’ immediately suggests an affiliation with Burra’s Introduction and Forster’s Prefatory Note. To make his point as concrete as possible, Trilling makes a comparison between James and Forster. Acknowledging James’s talent and productivity, he sees Forster superior in his equipment as a novelist: ‘Forster not only knows but feels that the earth is round, that the light from the stars is reaching us even on the clearest day’ (Bradbury ed. 1966: 82). Forster’s world, Trilling remarks, is ‘the natural and the eternal’ while James’s is ‘the world of closed rooms’ of the drawing room, the salon and the library. This is how Trilling sees Forster’s image of life in comparison to that of his fellow novelist: Forster writes brilliant comedies of manners, and he is a penetrating analyst of what lies deeper than manners, the universally human; but one of his finest gifts is his ability to carry us through the social comedy, through and beyond human nature, to the natural and the eternal. The lines in his pictures converge in a reality more ultimate than that which brings the eye to rest in the works of James. (Ibid.) To view Forster from the perspective of Burra’s Introduction some studies turn to the intellectual background of Forster, especially the humanism of the Classics in which he had been trained early in his career. An example of this is an essay published in Essays in Criticism where Forster’s fiction including A Passage to India is evaluated as an achievement created with the help of the aesthetic impulse of Hellenism rather than Greek history.4 While some scholars are not in disagreement with what Burra’s Introduction asserts, at the same time they find it unrealistic not to discuss at least what Burra excludes; hence the approach they adopt to accommodate what is excluded by Burra without rejecting his




criticism altogether. Such an approach, being the most popular one, aims at exploring the insight and strategy used by Forster in reconciling the contradictions faced in the process of creation, such as the opposition between rationalistic humanism and intuition, presence and absence, negation and affirmation, private and public, sky and earth, and above all the polarity of East and West. John Colmer’s comprehensive and analytical study E. M. Forster: the Personal Voice (1975) carefully puts Burra’s Introduction and Forster’s Note into a new perspective. It proposes to discuss the politics of Forster’s fiction which have been abandoned by Burra and Forster, and assess their presence in Forster even without giving them a perspective. A Passage to India is not a political novel but a novel about personal relations. According to Forster, the solution to human misunderstanding lies in human nature, not in political institutions: it lies in man’s capacity to transcend human difference by developing the heart and the imagination. Consequently he employs dialogue to show that the misunderstandings involve all areas of life: how we greet each other, our attitudes to art, poetry, religion, love, sex, and marriage. But politics hardly at all. Some critics have said that the almost complete neglect of politics is a characteristic weakness of the English liberal humanist. This may be so. But would it have been a better novel if Forster had filled the Indians’ dialogue with the 1920s equivalent of such phrases as ‘the trouble is we are all alienated from the decision-making process’, or ‘it is all a question of destroying an elitist tyranny’? In A Passage to India, the reader is made to feel the blindness and stupidity of imperial rule, but it is clear that the removal of that rule would not bring Utopia, only a different set of problems. History has borne this out. (Colmer 1975: 169) Despite the serious effort Colmer makes to see how contradictions are reconciled and to sort out the complex interplay of the oppositions, he ends advancing simple solutions. Forster, for example, does not put political solutions as a counterpart to human nature in the process of searching for the solution to human misunderstanding, as Colmer observes. The conclusion that imperialism is almost irreplaceable because it would not be loving Utopia cannot possibly




be convincing. His argument about politics is illogical, if not altogether erroneous. The hypothetical statements Colmer produces in defence of Forster are misplaced. With all the appealing rhetoric Colmer offers, I believe, he fails to realize the good intentions he initially has in defending Forster. As the quotation above shows Colmer is confused about the way politics functions in the novel simply because of his preconceived notion of what politics should not be in the first place. He is equally confused about the ending of the novel where he forces a moral reading over its suspended state of expression: where he says that towards the end of the novel Forster offers the generalization that the characteristic weakness of the East is suspicion, that of the West hypocrisy (Colmer 1975: 170). The ending of A Passage to India is too controversial to be settled by this reductive moral observation. The partners of the equation are the rulers and the ruled, the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, and so on. Forster’s generalization suggests a much larger reference than a hypocritical West and a suspicious East, and certainly a profounder novel than a comedy of manners. Nowhere in the novel does Forster show that the East is to blame for misunderstanding because of being suspicious. On the contrary, on one occasion, Forster gives Marmaduke Pickthall credit for the picture of the East and the West presented in his novels: ‘So completely does the writer capture the reader that it is the West, not the East, that has to be explained’ (AH, 249). However, what I find especially intriguing is the way Colmer develops his attitude towards Forster several years after the publication of his study. In 1979, Colmer contributes an invaluable study to E. M. Forster: A Human Exploration Centenary Essay (edited by Das and Beer). The title of the study ‘Promise and Withdrawal in A Passage to India’ is very apt, because it embraces so many polar oppositions and contradictions. In this study Colmer offers better articulation of Forster’s attempts at reconciling what seems to be irreconcilable. He also clarifies his attitude towards the major issue of imperialism and the relationship between East and West, and, despite all the revisions made here of his previous views, he maintains his sincere and affectionate outlook towards Forster. This is how he evaluates Forster: Only a novelist who was deeply aware of the internal contradictions of his own class and who possessed an intuitive insight into




the contradictions inherent in the historic situation that produced the bankruptcy of liberalism and imperialism could have produced such a complex and finely organized work of art. As an autonomous work of art it is true to the laws of its own being. As an expression of social and political values it is true to the dense ambiguity of motive and consequence. Clear-sighted and sceptical in its estimate of the extravagant claims made on behalf of liberal rationalism and imperialism, it neither evades political issues nor offers the creed of personal relations as a simple solution to political problems, but explores life at a deeper level than admitted by such a distinction. (Das and Beer 1979: 127–8) Colmer’s views as quoted above stand almost in reverse to his previous ones. For example, instead of the history that bears out that imperialism cannot be easily replaced (as he tends to make us believe in the previous study) he tells us here that historic situation produced the bankruptcy of imperialism. Political issues are strongly acknowledged. Colmer further acknowledges social and political values and issues and this obviously marks a break from Burra, and from his own previous study, as well. Colmer concludes his study by a revaluation of Forster’s pattern of promise and withdrawal, and his practice of reconciliation. He gives the ending of A Passage to India an appraisal obviously different from the previous one: To claim that it is imperfect or untruthful because it ignores topical issues or because Hindus and Moslems no longer behave as they do in A Passage to India is singularly wide of the mark. It is a mistake that arises from confusing the difference between the facts of history and the truths of art, which depend on the justness and appropriateness of structure and form. In A Passage to India the three-part symphonic form finally reconciles the opposites of promise and withdrawal. At the end of the novel we realize that true wisdom comes from acceptance of absence as well as presence. The novel communicates no simple political message, rather it expands our vision of life by bringing East and West into a new and significant relationship. It is the only great novel of the twentieth century to embrace the declining civilizations of East and West in unified vision. (Das and Beer 1979: 128)




Colmer is right in pointing to the common mistake ‘that arises from confusing the difference between the facts of history and the truths of art’. He is equally so in observing that ‘The novel communicates no simple political message.’ Yet it is very unfortunate that the last sentence reiterates Colmer’s own confusion in the previous study and that the new study would, I think, end better with a full stop after ‘relationship’. Nowhere in his writing does Forster require the civilization of the East declining so as to unite with the declining civilization of the West. Forster is elusive but not passive or ambivalent, and when it comes to principles and attitudes towards crucial issues like imperialism and the civilization of the East he shows consistency. His dispute with Wilfrid Blunt and the like (see Chapter 4) is related to the fact that they cannot choose, as shown above, but stay oscillating between East and West. Colmer’s view expressed in the last sentence can be easily invalidated by Forster’s own writings on the East which are consistent all the way through. Colmer’s studies can have the merit of moving Forster forward to the vast areas of politics and culture, liberating him from the limitation of pattern and form emphasized by Burra’s Introduction and similar supporting studies. And this is in agreement with what Forster himself believes when he points to the limitation of the Victorian age represented in Meredith who does not allow literature to be sufficiently emancipated to include culture. This is what Forster remarks about a whole era; he is critical of the pre-war period as different from the 1920s which Proust, Forster thinks, represents: ‘You can’t imagine him [Proust] making that bad pre-war mistake, and restricting culture to literature, as George Meredith did’ (KCLC). Recent studies tend to view Burra’s Introduction with no reservation and refer directly to Forster’s ulterior motive behind its adoption. They indirectly point to the justification Forster himself has for welcoming the Introduction rather than for the merit the Introduction itself originally had. In his study J. Crane notes: ‘In A Passage to India, any reference to the national movement was carefully veiled, partly because Forster did not want to be read as a political novel or simply as a novel about the British in India’ (Crane 1992: 95). The tormented state of mind which Forster underwent over the years which he spent in completing A Passage to India was partly due to the complex design of politics which he seems to have intended to be ‘carefully veiled’.




The crucial question which arises here is why Forster avoids calling A Passage to India a political novel. Or, to put it in simple terms, what makes Forster resort to this demand and even authorize it (or even legitimize it) by means of an Introduction the publication of which he first approved in the Everyman edition in 1942, and which since then has appeared in further editions! Of course, Forster may have a reason behind denying any emphasis on politics in his fiction, but does this mean we should deny what is practically realized with great emphasis in his own work? The least that might be said about Forster’s attitude towards Burra’s Introduction is D. H. Lawrence’s well-known saying ‘trust the tale not the teller’. Crane’s remark and Colmer’s studies, which are only two out of many studies influenced by Burra’s Introduction, urge us to explore the whole situation of Forster and politics to see whether the Introduction as strongly supported by Forster fairly deserves the status bestowed on it. Here is, for example, Forster’s firm stand against imperialism expressed on three different occasions. First, Forster’s voice in Howards End: Healthy, ever in motion, it hopes to inherit the earth. It breeds as quickly as the yeoman, and as soundly; strong is the temptation to acclaim it as a super-yeoman, who carries his country’s virtue overseas. But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled the earth that he inherits will be gray. (HE, 314–15) One really wonders whether the first statement of this account is the reason behind Trilling’s comment on Howards End, a comment which seems to evoke the following interesting remark by Forster: ‘One of my critics – the one to whom I owe most, Professor Trilling of Colombia – thinks that the theme of the book who shall inherit England? The business people who run her or the people who understand her?’ (KCLC). It is surprising that Forster’s reference to Imperialism has been rarely noticed. One can but appreciate Said’s remark on Trilling’s critique of Forster: In recently rereading Lionel Trilling’s fine little book on E. M. Forster, for instance, I was struck that in his otherwise




perceptive consideration of Howards End he does not once mention imperialism, which, in my reading of the book, is hard to miss, much less ignore. After all, Henry Wilcox and his family are colonial rubber growers: ‘They had the colonial spirit, and were always making for some spots where the white man might carry his burden unobserved’. (Said 1993: 77)5 Said here obliquely confirms the impact that Burra’s criticism had already made even on great critics of Forster like Trilling. Said’s reference to Forster and the quotation from Howards End show a most strong criticism of imperialism. Such criticism indicates Forster’s conviction that imperialism was indefensible. It also shows that imperialism and its misdeeds were on Forster’s mind earlier than Furbank notes, or at least as early as Howards End if not before, and obviously before World War I. These references further tell us that the story of imperialism was shaping itself in Forster’s mind before 1912, the date Forster started A Passage to India. The other occasion where Forster mentions imperialism is more specific and historical. This is what he says about the Boer War in a lecture ‘In the Early Years of This Century’ (1899–1902): We began the century with a false start – Jingoism and the Boer War – and soon became ashamed of it. We began by thinking we should paint the world red, red being in those days a most respectable colour, and indicating the British Empire. Kipling, the tribes without the law, the white man’s burden, these things were genuinely believed in for a few years by thoughtful people, but only for a few years … It was no good talking about the tribes without the law when tribes said they had laws. It was no good taking up the white man’s burden when it didn’t want to be taken up. Many of us soon saw that this crude imperialism had an economic side and we were put off. (KCLC) This explains why Forster early in his career received the Independent Review with great appreciation for its anti-Boer War attitude and its stand against imperialism. When his The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories appeared in 1911, he (having been already appreciative of its progressive politics) made the following dedication at the centre of page v: TO THE MEMORY OF THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW. One might say that Forster was quite ahead of his time.




As a matter of fact Forster’s lecture quoted above is in full agreement with J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism in which ‘Hobson develops the first comprehensive ethical critique of imperialism, founded on an objection to the claim for the universal superiority in a scale of civilization; he argued instead that civilization has to be conceived as “multiform” ’ (Porter 1968: 181, qtd in Young 2001: 98). Hobson concentrated on economics (which is perhaps what attracted J. M. Keynes to be his disciple) and published his research (which he started in the 1890s) in 1902 as Imperialism: a Study, which went into a third edition in 1938, at the time when Forster gave his lecture. In his comprehensive account of postcolonialism, Young further adds: Hobson’s study represented the first theoretical study of imperialism as an economic, political and institutional practice which, he contended, was fundamentally irrational. In the context of jingoism of the Boer War, Hobson provided an unsurpassed economic and ethical critique of the ideology of imperialism which was freely utilized by the Labour Party in its campaign against the war. (Porter 1968: 123–37, qtd Young 2001: 98) This solid stand against imperialism could not have escaped Forster’s notice since Hobson’s work appeared in Forster’s early days in Cambridge. The condensed account of ‘the imperialist’ in Howards End (mentioned above) reiterates Hobson’s notion of imperialism. The third occasion is also historical. Forster writes an article in the Egyptian Gazette on the occasion of the 1919 Egyptian uprising which incidentally coincided with the notorious Amritsar massacre in India. Forster was very familiar with the Egyptian scene which he had just left behind on his return to England. In the article entitled ‘Some Consequences and a Moral’, Forster surveys the politics of imperialism in Egypt (and incidentally in India) and the strong reaction of the natives against it by asking the following question, ‘Why then and especially so after the outrage in the spring, have such demonstrations of the natives been allowed to become a regular feature of the life of the city every Friday?’ Forster replies: The answer is that in Egypt and in many other parts of our Empire we have become infected with wasting malady, that has been diagnosed as ‘political Jellybism’. To all who know Bleak House this




phrase will at once bring to mind that immortal character, Mrs. Jellyby, who entirely neglected her own and her family’s interests in her love for the native of this continent and spent her time, money, and energy on philanthropic devotion to the inhabitants of Borrioloola Char to the detriment of her own household. As was observed a quarter of a century ago by that acute student of the East, the late Meredith Townsend in his study of the question whether England will retain India, a question he answered most reluctantly in the negative, that, whether for good or for evil, a great change is passing over Englishmen. His theory was that they have become uncertain of themselves, afraid of their own opinions, doubtful of the true teaching of their own consciences. They doubt if they have any moral rights to rule any one, themselves almost included. An old mental disease, the love of approbation, has suddenly risen to the height of a passion. Instead of being content to rule well, to do justice and to love mercy, they are trying themselves by a new standard, and desire to rule that the governed may applaud, or, as they phrase it with a certain unconscious unctuousness, may ‘love’ them. This is the real root of the great change, which has passed over the whole difficulty in Ireland and India, of the reluctance to conquer, and of the whole of the new social philanthropic legislation. Such was the diagnosis of our malady, and from some aspects of our rule in Egypt pessimists may be inclined to concur with these views. But if Egypt is to be restored to political health we have to make it clear to the world that so far as this country is concerned, we are firmly convinced that we have an absolute right to govern quite irrespective of the opinion of her people, and that we in no way will permit any derogation from the cardinal principle of our Imperii protecta majestas. (Forster 27 October 1919: 2) This stands in full agreement with the notion of the quest for everlasting home. The three occasions (chosen here at random) where Forster speaks about imperialism and its politics provide a critique of the common ideals and values of imperialism. They evidently show that Forster was not at all insensitive to the political questions of his time and that this interest in politics could not have been excluded from his fiction.




‘The White Man’s Burden’, Kipling’s poem of 1899, presumably provoked Forster’s lecture ‘In the Early Years of This Century’ quoted above. Lynda Prescott comments on Kipling’s burden of the White Man in the course of her discussion of Kim by saying that: It appeared at a fragile moment in the history of empire, when England’s own sense of national cohesiveness depended on a belief in her imperial destiny that was almost a secular religion in itself; this faith, however, was underscored by anxiety. The anxiety arose partly from actual and feared reversals in what was seen as the onward march of civilization across the globe and the prolonged strain of bearing ‘The White Man’s Burden’. (Allen and Trivedi eds 2000: 67) No matter what ‘The White Man’s Burden’ may suggest, one kind of anxiety or another, a shift from the old civilizing mission to a confrontation of a new emerging reality such as the national cohesiveness, or a shift from the old romances and ideas of progress to the new socioeconomic theories, Forster views ‘The White Man’s Burden’ in the context of the agency of imperialism which, for him, continues to be a variety on the same theme. One articulation of what Forster means by ‘The White Man’s Burden’ can be identified by George Orwell in Burmese Days (1934): ‘I’m here to make money like everyone else. All I object to is the slimy white man’s burden humbug. The pukka sahib pose. It’s so boring. Even those bloody fools at the club might be better company if we weren’t all of us living a lie the whole time.’ ‘But, my dear friend, what lie are you living?’ ‘Why, of course, the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them. I suppose it’s a natural enough lie. But it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can’t imagine …’ (Qtd in C. C. Eldridge 1996: 178)6 The narrator here exposes the impracticability of the imperial situation which, ironically, he is part of. This recalls the similar situation of Fielding in A Passage to India when he says that he is in India to have a job, but Forster’s picture is comparatively subtle, and Forster will in no way be nearly as straightforward as Orwell.




It seems that Forster finds in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ a major frame of reference to the system of imperialism to make him subtly sum up the situation with reference to Kipling and the British Empire as shown above: ‘It was no good talking about the tribes without the law when tribes said they had laws. It was no good taking up the white man’s burden when it didn’t want to be taken up.’ The reference to the lawless tribe here has its source in Kipling’s poem ‘The Law of the Jungle’ (1895) where Kipling says: Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. To understand Kipling’s imperialism, Eldridge remarks, it is crucial to know that the law is central to his political philosophy. Eldridge’s comment is, I believe, worth quoting: Kipling was not an advocate of expansion, nor was he a jingo. His empire was a positive force in the world, representing law, order and discipline. It was engaged in eternal combat with the negative forces of darkness, disorder and chaos. The Law sustained the imperial administrators in a hostile environment and from it flowed progress and civilization. Kipling’s world was one of work, discipline, duty and service, a world of grandeur, sacrifice and achievement. It was an expression of the imperial idea at its loftiest, freely subscribed to by the great advocates of the day: Rosebery, Chamberlain, Curzon, Milner, Cromer and Balfour. This was the imperial idea at its zenith. To their critics, however, the apparent claim that imperialism was virtually another form of international altruism was sheer cant. (Eldridge 1996: 114) Forster makes it clear that one cannot take up an issue with the White Man because the system of his burden is governed by the lawless law which the ‘tribe’ of imperialism sets by force as the Law. It is this deeply rooted conviction in imperialism that Forster rejects in Kipling, who is, to Forster, worse than a simple jingo. So much literature produced by advocates of imperialism and its organs (such as Nineteenth Century and Contemporary Review) proclaimed the nemesis of the tribal system. ‘The White Man’s Burden’,





And in that hour I saw my work, and, I think, too the ideal of our race. If we cannot create a new heaven, we can create a new earth. ‘The wilderness and solitary place shall be glad for us: the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.’ (Buchan 1906: 32) This sounds like a nomad wandering around with a tent until a place is found to pitch his tent. The difference between a Bedouin in the desert and the White Man is that the former roams in the desert within the territory he actually belongs to and with no intention to stay long, while the White Man takes the whole world of Asia and Africa as a desert, and his burden is not to find water and grass for his cattle and camels, but rather to ‘create a new earth’ by grabbing it and settling there. This is exactly the opposite of what Forster believes. ‘The surface of the earth’, he says, has its own sanctity. Indian earth, sky and wilderness throughout A Passage to India have the potential of resistance greater than that of the Indian inhabitants of India themselves. The surface of the earth in Forster’s novel, we are made to sense, resists rape. In A Passage to India we never feel that its conquest can be legitimized. Another example on the rhetoric of imperialism is from a speech by Joseph Chamberlain which expresses great confidence in the British race: I believe in this race, the greatest governing race the world has ever seen; in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, tenacious, selfconfident and determined, this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilization. (The Times, 12 November 1895, qtd Eldridge 1996: 108) A parody Forster makes of ‘this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate’ is in Ronny’s religion which does not go rotten in the tropics. Being most ironical, the reply goes beyond the immediate comedy it arouses. In any case the speech quoted above is the reference to ‘The White Man’s Burden’ of the Anglo-Saxon race



Forster further suggests, is, more or less, the burden of the tribe assigned to itself by itself. In Said’s precise term it is ‘tribal solidarity’. Here are only some of the abundant examples.

and the English like a tribe with the burden of ‘future history and universal civilization’. A third example is from ‘Imperialism’, by J. Lawson Walton where he talks about imperialism as a denting for Great Britain. We are imperialists in response to the compelling influence of our destiny. We are not grouped with nations ‘vacant of our glorious gains’. We are the heir of the ages, with all the great prerogatives and solemn obligations which attach to this high privilege. We are and shall be, Imperialists because we cannot help it. (Contemporary Review, March 1899: 305) The sense of fatalism inherent in the last sentence of the quotation above is probably what makes Forster despair in ‘taking up the White Man’s Burden when it didn’t want to be taken up’. One would like to conclude from the brevity of non-fiction of political journalism rendered with such great precision that Forster has no hope of entering into discussion or taking up the issue with the agency of imperialism. How can one argue with the imperialist whose main task is believed to be bringing peace, order, justice and discipline to the underprivileged peoples of the world? Can the imperialist really have such a task? Whoever the imperialist is and whatever his mission or burden will be, imperialism for Forster is a fixed misrepresentation of reality. It is a flat character, as flat as Mrs Jellyby, to whom Forster made reference in the article quoted above (1919). This portrait of fixation was given further emphasis in Forster’s Aspects of the Novel.7 The image of imperialism as an act of misrepresenting reality to which Forster refers with great brevity can be further enlightened by Said’s critique of, for example, ‘The White Man’ in Orientalism. The White Man is the main agent of the relationship between East and West in Orientalism. He is the Orientalist expert and adviser on the Orient. Said begins his discussion by quoting other Kipling verses referring to the White Men: Now, this is the road that the White Men tread When they go to clean a land …





Said remarks how influential Kipling was on the imperialist scene in promoting the perceptions and rhetoric of the White Man. He perceptively concludes: One became a White Man because one was a White Man; more important, ‘drinking that cup,’ living that unalterable destiny in ‘the White Man’s day,’ left one little time for idle speculation on origins, causes, historical logic. (Said 1993: 227) Said points to a crucial point here which is the belief held by imperialists that imperialism is a kind of destiny. ‘We are, and shall be, Imperialists because we cannot help it.’ Kipling and people like him took this reality for granted where they saw in the White Man’s Burden no subject for negotiation. In the absence of ‘idle speculation on origins, causes, historical logic’ (and, Forster would add, in the absence of law) how can people approach the issue of the White Man? Forster is right then in realizing the futility of talking about the law of tribes and taking up issue with the White Man’s Burden altogether. Said gives an account of the idea and reality of the White Man: Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant – in the colonies – speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which non-whites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible. (Ibid.)



Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread Their highway side by side. (Qtd by Said 1995: 226)

All Forster’s official characters in A Passage to India can be read in the light of this account. Ronny’s behaviour towards Adela cannot be better formed than by Said’s words ‘although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled’. Ronny’s complex realm of emotions, seen particularly in the ferocious encounter with his mother about the anticipated visit to the Caves, can be similarly decoded by what Said calls ‘a reasoned position towards both the white and non-white worlds’. What I find particularly novel about Said’s critique is the way he documents the new premises that the White Man occupies in continuation of the same active role undertaken in the past. Said tells us that in the twentieth century White Orientalists have realized that scholarly work produced about the Orient, no matter how functional it successfully proved to be for the mission, turned out to be not effective enough. He further remarks that ‘preserving the Orient and Islam under the control of the White Man’ was the main issue which engaged people like Lawrence of Arabia, Hogarth, Doughty and Bell. He adds: A new dialectic emerges out of this project. What is required of the Oriental expert is no longer simply understanding: now the Orient must be made to perform, its power must be enlisted on the side of ‘our’ values, civilization, interests, goals. Knowledge of the Orient is directly translated into activity, and the results give rise to new currents of thought and action in the Orient. But these in turn will require from the White Man a new assertion of control, this time not as the author of a scholarly work on the Orient but as the maker of contemporary history, of the Orient as urgent actuality (which, because he began it, only the expert can understand adequately) … (Said 1995: 238) Said notes that ‘only the expert can understand adequately … a scholarly work on the Orient’, with reference, in particular, to Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom which is quoted by Said in the course of ‘the dialectic’. It is most surprising how Said can be in full agreement with Forster on the subject. Reviewing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Forster says: What is this book about? It describes the revolt in Arabia against the Turks, as it appeared to an Englishman who took part in it; he would not allow us to write ‘the leading part’. (AH, 137) 10.1057/9780230597631 - E.M. Forster and The Politics of Imperialism, Mohammad Shaheen



Forster’s remark is very brief, but most illuminating, as it sums up Lawrence’s failure to grasp the interrelationship between fact and fiction; Said’s contextual critique is similarly revealing. Somehow one feels grateful to Said for helping the reader to decode Forster’s elusive mind. How can we grasp what Forster says about Lawrence being conscious of himself as a White Man without Said’s perceptive details? Here is what Forster quotes from Seven Pillars of Wisdom when Lawrence dumped himself in the little basin of a spring to rub the travel-dirt away from his tired skin: While I was so happy, a grey-bearded, ragged man, with a hewn face of great power and weariness, came slowly along the path till opposite the spring; and there he let himself down with a sigh upon my clothes spread out over a rock beside the path, for the sun-heat to chase out their thronging vermin. He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes at this white thing splashing in the hollow beyond the veil of sunmist. After a long stare he seemed content, and closed his eyes, groaning, ‘The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.’ (AH, 138)8 Still the specific details of the new phase of the White Orientalist that Said offers have the potential of illuminating Forster in a wider context. But first to Said’s detailed comment. With great competence Said sums up the history of Orientalism in two words: ‘vision’ and ‘narrative’. The presence of one necessarily implies the absence of the other. To make a distinction between the two, Said says that ‘narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the permanence of vision’ (Said 1940: 240). Said sees in Edward Lane an example of the permanence of static vision: Lane sensed the dangers of narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic or lexicographical vision. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake ‘classical’ civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history.





With World War I a new phase of Orientalism emerged, and Said remarks that when ‘the Orient was made to enter history, it was the Orientalist-as-agent who did the work’ (ibid.). Said sees in Lawrence a servant of the permanent vision in the Orient emerging with what Lawrence himself calls ‘new Imperialism,’ and this is obviously different from ‘the collective academic endeavour’ of the ‘beaurocratic institution’ undertaken by traditional Orientalists before the war. I find Said’s brilliant observation of Lawrence different from any account on Lawrence I have come across: The great drama of Lawrence’s work is that it symbolizes the struggle, first, to stimulate the Orient (lifeless, timeless, forceless) into movement; second, to impose upon that movement an essentially Western shape; third to contain the new and aroused Orient in a personal vision, whose retrospective mode includes a powerful sense of failure and betrayal. (Said 1995: 241) Forster is justified then in concluding his review of Lawrence by a conciliatory note anticipating better work in the future: ‘He had still several years to live, during which he was developing through methods which he himself understood, and writing things which often pleased him better’ (AH, 141). Forster implies here as well as in the rest of the review that The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a failure, simply because Lawrence fails to tell the story of his experience, and the remark in the early part of the review that ‘he would not allow us to write the leading part’ confirms this failure. When Said similarly evaluates The Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a failure he shows how it is written as a ‘vision’, not a ‘narrative’.9 Forster believes almost the same when he remarks: Whatever his inner life, he yearned to create a single work of art out of that life and out of his military experiences. He was rather superstitious about works of art and spoke of them as if they belonged to a special category. (AH, 140)



Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by vision. (Said 1995: 240)


T. E. Lawrence hated the progress of industrialism, he hated what your city of Glasgow and my city of London stand for. He fled from it into the deserts of Arabia and the last of the romantic wars, in the search of old-time adventure, and later on into the deserts of his own heart. (Forster 1945: 267) This recalls Lawrence’s letter (1923) quoted by Said in a most perceptive account of Lawrence, ‘A Standing Civil War’, where Lawrence says: I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it top-speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour. My nerves are jaded and gone near dead, so that nothing less than hours of voluntary danger will prick them into life . . . (Said 2001: 36) Said’s comment on Lawrence’s letter follows: ‘The unceasing inner ferment of his later life had developed from his young man’s habit of doing remarkable, unexplained things . . . ’ (ibid.). It is obvious how Said’s assessment of Lawrence agrees with what Forster says in his lecture at the University of Glasgow. This is the portrait of Lawrence as a knight errant. Romance is not the type of reality both Forster and Said believe suitable for modern ‘narrative’. Novelist and critic believe in the narrative Susan Sontag spoke of: we need to tell a story in order to comprehend things. It is the kind of narrative which goes beyond representing the crude politics of imperialism as found in George Orwell. It is also not the sort of crude politics misrepresented by John Buchan and Kipling. It is not even the kind of politics Lawrence only yearned for, nor is it the aesthetic. In the meantime, it is not the aesthetic of permanent vision hailed by Burra and welcomed for one reason or another by Forster. It is rather the quest for what is left unsaid by Burra and Forster as well. What makes, for example, people like Lawrence, Kipling and others get entangled in the web of imperialism and accept its politics as a way of life developing ‘man’s habit of doing remarkable, unexplained things’?



However, a most interesting account of Lawrence comes about ten years later in the course of a lecture that Forster gives at the University of Glasgow (1944). This is what Forster says:

Forster’s Politics in Said’s Culture and Imperialism: a Modern Debate

For a work so complicated, so passionate, so obsessed with the world tragedy of negatives and exclusions and yet so committed to its own wholeness must not be confined to such narrow contexts [reference to Burra’s Introduction], or even to the geology and topography of a continent. (Frank Kermode, The Listener, 18 June 1970, p. 833) This is what Frank Kermode adds to his comment on Burra’s Introduction after he observes that ‘Burra left everything to be said’. Said’s critique of Forster, I believe, says much of what is left ‘to be said’ and gives Forster a wide range of context which invites us to explore its intricacies further. It is a most profound account where Forster’s elusive mind is carefully and sensitively explored. Said appreciates Forster’s project of encountering the vastness of India, and his passion for the Indians. He has no reservations about Forster’s solid stand against imperialism. Yet Said finds Forster’s achievement somehow incomplete, mainly because it overlooks nationalist resistance. The rationale behind this incompleteness, Said remarks, is the traditional form of the novel which, he thinks, is too limited for vast India, and is not originally designed in the first place to accommodate resistance and opposition. In his concluding remarks Said turns to the ending of A Passage to India as a major source for his argument, and it is this ending which makes Said see how indecisive Forster is in suspending the 134



7

time and place of the conflict between the ruling British and the ruled Indians. Said comments on Forster’s ‘No, not yet … No, not there’ by saying: ‘There is resolution and union, but neither is complete’ (Said 1993: 242). Forster receives a serious discussion in Chapter 3 of Said’s Culture and Imperialism (‘Resistance and Opposition’), where Said devotes Part I (‘There are two sides’) mainly to the politics of Forster’s fiction, and, whenever he discusses other writers of similar preoccupation, Forster is central in the controversial common ground in view. In seeing Forster’s achievement as falling short of expectation, Said tries to shift the blame onto the canons of the novel form rather than onto the creative mind of the novelist. This is Said’s dialectic which introduces Forster’s discussion with: What are the cultural grounds on which both natives and liberal Europeans lived and understood each other? How much could they grant each other? How, within the circle of imperial domination, could they deal with each other before radical change occurred? Consider first E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, a novel that surely expresses the author’s affection (sometimes petulant and mystified) for the place. I have always felt that the most interesting thing about A Passage to India is Forster’s using 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. Mrs Moore especially and Fielding too are clearly meant to be understood as Europeans who go beyond the anthropomorphic norm in remaining in that (to them) terrifying new element – in Fielding’s case, experiencing India’s complexity but then returning to familiar humanism (following the trial he comes home through Suez and Italy to England, after having had a shattering presentiment of what India could [Said’s emphasis] do to one’s sense of time and place). (Said 1993: 241–2) The questions Said asks here embrace the scope of critical views written about the complex encounter between East and West. They also recall the central question in A Passage to India put up by Hamidullah and his fellow Indians early in the narrative: whether British and Indians can be friends. The rest of the quotation (and what follows in his argument) which follows the questions sums up



Forster’s Politics in Said’s Culture and Imperialism 135

Said’s discourse on Forster with great insight and affection. My discussion, however, will not advance any kind of ‘resistance’ on the part of Forster, or dispute with Said’s evaluation of Forster. It will rather be a complementary reading of both Forster and Said. Drawing upon Said’s picture of Forster, emphasis will take the following course: Forster and the conventional form; national resistance; the ending for A Passage to India viewed in the light of Said’s own words: ‘the notion that there is “a truth” to events involving both sides that transcends them’ (Said 1993: 249). Before exploring Forster’s own practice of the conventional form in A Passage to India it may be worthwhile turning to what Forster says about this form in Aspects of the Novel. Forster introduces his Clark Lectures (1927) by talking about the conventional form under the head of story. He sees life in the novel oscillating between life in time (story) and life by value, and he sees the shift from the former to the latter as a sign of development in modern fiction. These are Forster’s words: Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different – melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form. (AN, 17) Forster, then, is quite aware of ‘the atavistic form’ Said thinks Forster inherited from the previous century. Forster further adds: For, the more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growths that it supports, the less shall we find to admire. It runs like a backbone – or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary. (Ibid.) Said is evidently right in noting: The novel returns to a traditional sense of a social propriety in its last section, where the author deliberately and affirmatively imports into India the habitual novelistic domestic resolution (marriage and property): Fielding marries Mrs Moore’s daughter. (Said 1993: 242)




This marriage is only marginal in the whole story of the novel. Yet it is not without function. It is rather allegorical in the sense that a union between Estella and Fielding anticipates the survival of Mrs Moore’s spirit in India and it somehow recovers Aziz’s friendship and trust in Fielding. We know that Aziz felt bitterly disappointed when, on hearing the news of Fielding’s marriage, he suspected that Fielding had married Adela. After realizing the bankruptcy of liberal humanism in India, Fielding needs some substitute to survive with such as the common ideal of love and friendship as exemplified in the memory of Mrs Moore. After all, the marriage in question is not a union between a Briton and an Indian, so as to suggest any significant settlement in the novel, and it is not a marriage of a British imperialist to a British anti-imperialist. However conventional the marriage of Fielding and Estella is, it stands as a counter-story to the troubled relationship between Adela and Ronny, the backbone story of the novel. For non-conventional form we need to turn to the story of Ronny and Adela together where ‘melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form’ are embodied. This can be well demonstrated from Chapter 8 of A Passage to India. As we read this chapter we immediately see Forster’s transition moving in his discussion from ‘story’ to ‘people’. We need not to ask what happened next, but to whom did it happen; the novelist will be appealing to our intelligence and imagination, not merely to our curiosity. A new emphasis enters his voice: emphasis upon value. (AN, 30) In assuming that Forster’s problem lies in the conventional form of the novel, Said helps us identify Forster’s dilemma which, as he notes, Forster inherits from the nineteenth-century tradition. Forster, we know, stands at a juncture of the old and modern, and he neither belongs among those Victorian novelists who were quite under the tyranny of form nor to the extreme modernists; Meredith, greatly admired by Forster,1 once said that the problem for the novelist is when to tell and when to show or when to tell and when to say, that is, when to be explicit and when to be implicit. Forster started his literary career with the complex heritage of those Victorian writers like Meredith, who wrestled with the conventional form; other writers,




such as Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells were called materialists by Virginia Woolf and continued to write in the conventional form with ease and confidence. Modernists like Virginia Woolf, Joyce and Proust broke away from the conventions of the nineteenth century. Forster praises the modernists without condemning the traditionalists and, at the same time without really belonging to either, he uses the conventional form of plot and story, but he similarly practises modern aspects of technique such as ‘pattern and rhythm’ and ‘prophecy’ as it is called in Aspects of the Novel. Forster, like the conventional writers, says much by means of the omniscient narrator, and Said, for example, quotes Forster’s comment on the bird incident in Chapter 8 to confirm what Forster himself says about the vastness of India, which Said takes as assurance that India is beyond the capacity of the conventional form Forster seems to depend on. But Forster’s strategy is to counterbalance the explicit with the implicit which soon becomes not only most engaging but also quite taxing to the reader, and this is where Forster’s voice becomes elusive. For example, Ronny and Adela are engaged to be married as a result of the car incident. But how ambiguous the whole scene is! A most perceptive comment on the car incident and the sudden agreement of the couple to get engaged again is by Frank Kermode who points to the subtle order of the scene when the nameless beast runs out onto the Marabar road and Ronny and Adela experience their first sexual impulse, an evil one because of the absence of the god – a wonderfully delicate passage in the building of a unique structure. (Kermode, The Listener, 18 June 1970, p. 833) It is such a unique structure (to be discussed in this chapter later) which demonstrates Forster’s tendency to depart from the respectability of the conventional form. India is deceptive, whether that experienced by imperialists or experienced by non-imperialist officials like Fielding, who detaches himself from those imperialists. In either case this reality forms the target of Adela’s quest and Mrs Moore’s desire to grasp. The discovery of this reality as deceptive by the two visitors through their own experience immediately suggests that this reality is even more deceptive and irredeemable. Thus the novel functions on two




levels: the deceptive reality actually inhabited by those who do not acknowledge its deceptiveness, as they somehow delude themselves about it, and the reality whose deceptiveness is remorselessly discovered by quest and experience. It is true that the novel is partly undertaken in the conventional form of fiction which Forster had inherited from the nineteenth century. This is only part of Forster’s practice, for the conventional form and content of the knowable are counterbalanced by the extraordinary unknowable, and the result is that the novel makes its impact on us in terms of the unknowable echo rather than through the knowable voice. To borrow the title of an essay by Edward Said, it is a journey ‘from silence to sound and back again’ (Said 1997).2 Said acknowledges Forster’s elusiveness of mind, a quality which naturally forms the major source of difficulty in the approach to his fiction. In the two major incidents of A Passage to India, Forster finds himself unable to avoid ambiguity which obviously leads to differing assessments of the novel. The first is the incident of the Nawab Bahadur’s car which is not less, if not more, ambiguous than the focal incident of the Caves. The mystery of the Caves has its embryo in the car incident which serves as a catalyst to the climax of the novel. Chapter 8 provides a kind of prelude to the core of the novel. This does not mean that the value of the car incident lies in its explanatory function, if it actually has any. It is rather the manner in which it provides a juxtaposition to the Caves incident where we sense a structural rather than a thematic continuity. What happened in the Caves is a question that ought to be preceded by the question of what caused the car incident, not in the hope of finding an answer but rather because we realize that the two incidents are intimately related, and in sensing that the climactic incident of the Caves does not come out of a void. As a matter of fact, questions that can be raised about the car incident are particularly puzzling. What caused the incident in the first place? Is it a creature, an animal – any animal, an animal bigger than a goat, a buffalo or a hyena? Adela’s conjecture that it was a hyena turns out to be a most significant motif in the chapter. Or is it a ghost as Mrs Moore first remarks when she hears about the incident from Ronny and Adela on their return to the Bungalow (we know that Mrs Moore withdraws her guess later by altogether denying that she had made it)? Is it the evil spirit residing in the place where




a drunken man was once killed in a car accident by the Nawab Bahadur? What makes Ronny order the Nawab Bahadur’s driver to take the Marabar road instead of the Cangarvati road first intended by their Indian host? Significant enough is the Nawab Bahadur’s falling asleep just before the car starts to go on the road despite the promise he has made to watch his driver while driving along the road for his odd driving lessons. The old man’s rude response to the incident is certainly suggestive. Particularly significant is Adela’s decision to marry Ronny immediately after the incident, though she had already broken her engagement to him when they were watching polo on the Maidan; and this seems to confuse Mrs Moore most. Aziz has his share in the mystery for we do not know why he tells Nawab Bahadur’s grandson that he should not believe in ghosts, declaring that it was his denial of ghosts which initiated his friendship with Mrs Moore. And so on. Such a highly fragmented incident recalls Said’s remark that the whole matter of India is ‘so affectionately personal’ and ‘so remorselessly metaphysical’. It is to Chapter 8 and the like that we can turn for evidence that the conventional novel form did not actually succeed in dulling Forster’s perception ‘with its structure of reference and attitudes held over from the previous century’, as Said remarks. Let us, for example, look at the hyena reference which is quite central to the novel as it features in the whole chapter, and obliquely gathers the ‘limbs of Osiris’ in a way to generate a significant frame of reference exploring the missing linkage between the fragmented incident. The fact that the hyena keeps lurking in the back of the characters’ minds suggests that the incident has a great bearing on the main movement of the novel. In an afterthought, Adela somehow realizes that the animal which hit the car was a hyena, rather than a buffalo, and Ronny comes to believe that they actually ran into a hyena, and this receives full approval from the Nawab Bahadur. It is known that the hyena (which feeds on carrion) has the strongest jaws of any mammal, capable of crushing the bones of lambs and other animals, yet, what makes the hyena in this context so suggestive is its position in Oriental folklore. The hyena is known as being the most deceptive animal to man, who immediately becomes spell-bound on any encounter or contact with the animal at night (for the hyena is a nocturnal animal). When an encounter with the hyena happens, man is simultaneously made to follow the hyena




to its den or to any place where the animal may feel that it can safely crush the bones of its victim. With sheer luck, man may wake up just before meeting this fate and so free himself from the ferocious animal: to do so requires that the man make a cut on his body, preferably on the ear, to cause some bleeding. This is supposed to help him recover his senses as a result of the release of the blood. It is said that in moonlight the animal traps its victim through its shadow, which serves as a bait. When someone is lost in the desert or in the wilderness at night, it is believed that he is kidnapped by a hyena, and if he survives the ill-fated trip it is thought that he needs some time to recover fully. In Oriental culture, the hyena, and its legendary name, has become a stock metaphor for being overruled by some external force outside one’s own. This is what Frazer says about the hyena: The ancients supposed that in Arabia, if a hyena tread on a man’s shadow, it deprived him of the power of speech and motion; and that if a dog, standing on a roof in the moonlight, cast a shadow on the ground and a hyena tread on it, the dog will fall down as if dragged with a rope. Clearly in these cases, the shadow, if not equivalent to the soul, is regarded as a living part of the man or the animal, so that injury done to the shadow is felt by the person or animal as if it were done to his body. (Frazer 1922, rept 1994: 190) The main part of the mysterious incident lies in the Nawab Bahadur’s response to Adela’s speculation which, for significant reasons, gains Ronny’s acceptance. This is the key extract where Adela speculates first on a buffalo: ‘I believe it was a buffalo,’ she called to their host, who had not accompanied them. ‘Exactly.’ ‘Unless it was a hyena.’ Ronny approved this last conjecture. Hyenas prowl in nullahs and headlights dazzle them. ‘Excellent, a hyena,’ said the Indian with an angry irony and a gesture at the night. ‘Mr Harris!’ (PI, 81) What remains a mystery is the Nawab Bahadur’s irony and anger. Why ‘he had not come out very well!’ Is it because he knows about the murderous truth of the animal and he chooses to maintain silence over it lest the accidental unity between his Sahib and the




proposed wife should be affected after it had been cemented accidentally by the incident itself? For the Nawab Bahadur, and for Ronny as well, the incident appears to possess two contradictory truths at once, and the situation demands that one should be kept exposed to protect the other. Ronny’s observation that ‘Hyenas prowl in nullahs and headlights dazzle them’ suggests that he knows about the animal and perhaps he knows enough about its basic instincts and inclinations to make him avoid any elaboration. Does this mean that deceptiveness is something common between the hyena and imperialism and that one is identified with the other? Isn’t there a kind of secret-sharing between the hyena and Ronny, which Ronny finds it necessary to keep hidden from Adela? Yet the most intricate part of the mystery is enacted in the role Ronny plays with the innocent Adela – a role that can be identified with the instinct and inclination of the hyena. Like a hyena, Ronny kidnaps Adela’s mind and she recovers it only later on with enough bleeding and cuts made by the rocks of the Marabar Caves. What then is the significance of the fact that the car incident takes place on the Marabar road chosen by Ronny instead of the Gangavati one which the Nawab Bahadur had intended the driver to take in the first place? Does it not signify with its action and reaction a kind of link to the climactic incident and an embodiment of the whole enormous crisis? One reason why the car incident remains mysterious lies in the fact that the omniscient narrator whose comment usually helps elucidate the text offers little or no help to the reader: The English people walked a few steps back into the darkness, united and happy. Thanks to their youth and upbringing, they were not upset by the accident. They traced back the writhing of the tyres to the source of their disturbance. It was just after the exit from a bridge; the animal had probably come up out of the nullah. Steady and smooth ran the marks of the car, ribbons neatly nicked with lozenges; then all went mad. Certainly some external force had impinged, but the road had been used by too many objects for any one track to be legible, and the torch created such high lights and black shadows that they could not interpret what it revealed. Moreover, Adela in her excitement knelt and swept her skirts about, until it was she if anyone who appeared to





Instead of making the incident overwhelming, Forster directs our attention to the question: to whom does all this happen? Forster here develops the shift in gradation to accommodate more than the ‘what’ and ‘whom’ separately or together, so as to include the mere presence of the British in India and the means of survival they have already brought with them from home. It is as if Forster wants to say that the ordinary question of what brought the British to India is more relevant than what happened to them no matter how mysterious that may be. But Forster, who does not want to betray the secret of the craftsmanship of the novel, makes it appear rather ‘remorselessly metaphysical’. Of course, any meaningful dialogue relevant to anti-imperialism with imperialist characters like Ronny is futile. Hence the subtle omniscient voice is what remains to represent the anti-imperialist voice; Forster has no intention of producing a flat picture of imperialism. Such a bridge can lead to a rearrangement of the sequential order of events and references in the total structure of the narrative. As mentioned above what happened in the Caves should be seen in the light of what caused the car incident, and this incident should be viewed in the perspective of Ronny’s odd reaction to Aziz’s invitation to the Marabar Caves and his obnoxious response demonstrated through his inquiry about the invitation from Adela and his mother. Being haunted by the proposed visit, Ronny forces a very unpleasant response to the subject. This is the scene quoted at length: They had scarcely left the College grounds before she heard him say to his mother, who was with him on the front seat, ‘What was that about caves?’ and she promptly opened fire. ‘Mrs Moore, your delightful doctor has decided on a picnic, instead of a party in his house; we are to meet him out there – you, myself, Mr Fielding, Professor Godbole – exactly the same party.’ ‘Out where?’ asked Ronny. ‘The Marabar Caves.’ ‘Well, I’m blessed,’ he murmured after a pause. ‘Did he descend to any details?’



have attacked the car. The incident was a great relief to them both. They forgot their abortive personal relationship, and felt adventurous as they muddled about in the dust. (PI, 81)

‘He did not. If you had spoken to him, we could have arranged them.’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘Have I said anything funny?’ ‘I was only thinking how the worthy doctor’s collar climbed up his neck.’ ‘I thought you were discussing the caves.’ ‘So I am. Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar-stud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race. Similarly, to “meet” in the caves as if they were the clock at Charing Cross, when they’re miles from a station and each other.’ ‘Have you been to them?’ ‘No, but I know all about them, naturally.’ ‘Oh, naturally!’ ‘Are you too pledged to this expedition, mother?’ ‘Mother is pledged to nothing,’ said Mrs Moore, rather unexpectedly. ‘Certainly not to this polo. Will you drive up to the bungalow first, and drop me there, please? I prefer to rest.’ ‘Drop me too,’ said Adela. ‘I don’t want to watch polo either, I’m sure.’ ‘Simpler to drop the polo,’ said Ronny. Tired and disappointed, he quite lost self-control, and added in a loud lecturing voice: ‘I won’t have you messing about with Indians any more! If you want to go to the Marabar Caves you’ll go under British auspices.’ ‘I’ve never heard of these caves, I don’t know what or where they are,’ said Mrs Moore, ‘but I really can’t have’ – she tapped the cushion beside her – ‘so much quarrelling and tiresomeness!’ (PI, 74–5) Forster here tells us so much about the imperialist character of Ronny without saying anything about imperialism. Then comes the car incident which, taking place on the Marabar road, serves Ronny’s concealed scheme of sabotaging the proposed visit to the Marabar Caves. At least, Ronny presumably thought that Adela and his mother would be scared to undertake the expedition where they might possibly encounter ferocious animals again in the same area. Yet the fruit of the car incident is Adela’s circumstantial




change of heart by compulsively accepting the renewal of her engagement to Ronny. This evidently helps to cure the wound she had already inflicted on Ronny by confiding to Aziz about her decision to go home and not to come back to India in the future, and, at the same time, hiding her plan from Ronny. Ronny is now assured, thanks to the car incident, that he is safe and in full control of the situation. He is back to normal: a conqueror, an imperialist, a master of India – a hyena. And back to the car incident. The first thing the extract above tells us is how imperialists walked a few steps back into the darkness, as if it is a typical strategy of imperialism in danger, which they face united and not unhappy. The ironic situation continues to suggest that these imperialists have been endowed by their youth and upbringing to which they ought to be grateful (ironical, of course) with the immunity needed to face the danger of the incident. Then comes the most fascinating connection which the characters work out between the incident and their disturbance. This is the will to rationalization. The omniscient narrator further observes in those English people what is called the will to power when he says, ‘Certainly some external force had impinged …’; yet the rest of the statement suggests a denial of the assumed will when he says, ‘but the road had been used by too many objects for any one track to be legible …’ Back to mystery then, and to the intractability of the writhing of the tyres which foreshadows a more complex intractability of the rocks later in the Caves. However, the omniscient narrator implies more than he says and the car incident serves as a redemption only temporarily, and it is merely an overt pattern of the narrative. The conclusion of the extract particularly heightens the sense of this redemption by telling us that the car incident was a great relief to Adela and Ronny, for ‘they forgot their abortive relationship, and felt adventurous as they muddled about in the dust’. The fact that the ideal of connection succeeds in a most difficult situation does not mean a redemption of the mortal disconnection. On the contrary, its temporary success will turn to be the seed of disaster for Adela, who is deceived by the mystery of the incident. She falls into the trap made partly by the imperialist Ronny, who obliquely rationalizes British imperialism in India, and partly by the total silence maintained over the car incident by the Nawab Bahadur and the Indian driver.




Adela survives the incident but with a ferocious conflict in her which, not to the expectation of Ronny, tempts her to pursue the expedition to the Caves, reviving her desirable quest, perhaps in the hope that it might help her to sort out the conflict. But Adela arrives at the Caves with the double intention of settling the question, whose resolution at the car incident was developing complex perspectives, and at the same time with the intention of seeing the real India, the quest which is renewed as a result of recovering her relationship with Ronny. Perhaps it is the intensity of emotions and counter-emotions, as demonstrated in the scene of the sudden union between Adela and Ronny after the car incident, which makes Said see Forster’s portrait as so affectionately personal. Yet Said’s main argument centres around the national resistance Forster makes almost absent. In the course of his discussion he makes reference to some British and French authors whose writings, Said remarks, are relevant to this argument and which end up like Forster, despite the fact that they are ahead of him in their opposition to imperialism. Said tells us for example that Malraux’s La Voie Royale (1930) is a remarkable case of enacting ‘a voyage into “the interior” ’ (like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) and he assures us that the writer puts aside the role of the Indochinese people in resisting French imperialism. Hence the identification with Forster. This is Said’s comment: I attach so much importance to La Voie Royale because, as the work of an extraordinary European talent, it testifies so conclusively to the inability of the Western humanistic conscience to confront the political challenge of the imperial domains. For both Forster in the 1920s and Malraux in 1930, men genuinely familiar with the nonEuropean world, a grander destiny confronts the West than one of mere national self-determination – self-consciousness, will, or even the deep issues of taste and discrimination. Perhaps the novel form itself dulls their perceptions, with its structure of reference and attitudes held over from the previous century. (Said 1993: 251–2) In addition to the dulling form and Forster’s preoccupation with the grand destiny confronting the West which he views as harming the picture of national resistance, two other examples are advanced by Said for this purpose. One is that Forster ‘cannot connect him




[Aziz] to the larger, coherent movement for Indian independence’ (Said 1993: 244). The other is Hamidullah calling ‘to a worrying committee’ which Said views as falling far short of resistance. ‘When it comes to ruling India – which is what Hamidullah and the others are agitating about – the English had better go on doing it, despite their mistakes: “they” are not yet ready for self-rule’ (Said 1993: 247). I would like here to quote the passage concerning Hamidullah and his committee already quoted by Said because it particularly requires relevant annotation to clarify the situation it implies: Hamidullah had called in on his way to a worrying committee of notables, nationalist in tendency, where Hindus, Moslems, two Sikhs, two Parsis, a Jain, and Native Christian tried to like one another more than came natural to them. As long as someone abused the English, all went well, but nothing constructive had been achieved, and if the English were to leave India, the committee would vanish also. He was glad that Aziz, whom he loved and whose family was connected with his own, took no interest in politics, which ruin the character and career, yet nothing can be achieved without them. He thought of Cambridge – sadly, as of another poem that had ended. How happy he had been there, twenty years ago! Politics had not mattered in Mr And Mrs Bannister’s rectory. There, games, work, and pleasant society had interwoven, and appeared to be sufficient substructure for a national life. Here all was wire-pulling and fear. (PI, 97–8, qtd by Said 1993: 246) This passage can be illuminated by ‘Hassan in England’ (discussed above). Mr and Mrs Bannister’s rectory is the same as Mr and Mrs Asher’s rectory of King’s College, Cambridge, and Hamidullah is the same as Masood’s friend Forster met with Masood (Aziz’s model in A Passage to India). The tone is nostalgic, and Said is brilliant at capturing this nostalgia when he comments on the passage already quoted by saying: ‘This registers a change in political climate: what was once possible in the Bannister rectory or in Cambridge is no longer appropriate in the age of strident nationalism’ (Said 1993: 246). In his nostalgia the narrator sets a demarcation line between the past when politics was simple, and generally meant in this context the human relationship between East and West as ‘Hassan in




England’ shows, and as Said observes in his reference to Malraux and Forster. Of course between the past of that Cambridge and the present of this India is World War I which hardened Forster’s outlook on politics and made him adopt a more complicated view of national politics in the aftermath. The Manuscripts of A Passage to India further illuminate this point. In line 5 (Abinger Edition) ‘interwoven’ is substituted by ‘interwoven there harmoniously’, and in line 6 ‘a national life’ by ‘the whole life of England’ (MPI, 140) – perhaps to make ‘national life’ apply to both England and India and to suppress the nostalgia of the past by omitting ‘harmoniously’. Another illuminating source of the passage concerning Aziz and his lack of interest in politics is in Forster’s account of Masood at the end of 1914 when Forster abandoned A Passage to India as a result of the breach of friendship between himself and Masood – and in Masood’s active defence of the imperial power of the Central authority which he openly supported between 1921 and 1922 (discussed above). I would like to add a few points to Said’s comment on the passage (and I am particularly grateful to him for drawing my attention to it). Being elusive (and Said acknowledges this in Forster) the passage does not express an obvious point of view despite the fact that it is the omniscient narrator who handles the matter. Forster (as mentioned above) maintains a firm stand against imperialism even when Masood himself, to Forster’s surprise, of course, turned out to be a supporter of imperialism! The other point is that the passage renders Forster’s perennial interest in comedy beside nostalgia, and that he is not as serious as he may be taken to be. The passage is like comic relief in a play and an example of Forster’s elusive mind which entices different readings among different readers. The third point, which, I believe, is crucial, is related to the responsibility for national resistance (see Appendix 4). India as a whole, rather than natives, has the role of national resistance. Said is aware of this role of India when he says that ‘The crux of the novel is therefore the sustained encounter between the English colonials – “well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts” – and India’ (Said 1993: 243). And again when Said points to the message Adela could not fathom as she hears the train’s ‘pomper, pomper’. ‘India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world’s trouble to its uttermost depth’ (ibid.).




However, Said is critical of Forster when he advocates that the ending of the novel comes as an obvious expression of Forster’s incomplete design. On the three occasions on which Said has discussed Forster over the years, the ending is the cornerstone of his argument, the frame of reference of which is the sustained encounter between the English colonials and India. On those occasions, Said consistently remarks, the conventionality of form and the vastness of India are responsible for imposing this sustenance which Said finds unsatisfactory as being ‘resolution and union, but neither is complete’ (Said 1993: 242). Earlier in Orientalism Said quotes the ending and criticizes the conclusion for its failure in the reconciliation attempted by Aziz and Fielding in their last meeting. He finds the conclusion ‘disappointing’ (Said 1978, rept 1995: 244). In Reflections on Exile Said returns to the ending but with a rationale from Georg Lukacs as if to specify what is wrong with the conventional form. He carefully puts the ending this time in the complex context of the crisis of modernism which foundered on or was frozen in contemplative irony for various reasons, of which one was the disturbing appearance in Europe of various Others, whose provenance was the imperial domain. In the works of Eliot, Conrad, Mann, Proust, Woolf, Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Forster, alterity and difference are systematically associated with strangers, who, whether women, natives, or sexual eccentrics, erupt into vision, there to challenge and resist settled metropolitan histories, forms, modes of thought. To this challenge modernism responded with the formal irony of a culture unable either to say yes, we should give up control, or no, we shall hold on regardless: a self-conscious contemplative passivity forms itself, as Georg Lukács noted perspicaciously, into paralyzed gestures of aestheticized powerlessness, for example, the ending of A Passage to India in which Forster notes, and confirms the history behind, a political conflict between Dr. Aziz and Fielding – Britain’s subjugation of India – and yet can recommend neither decolonization nor continued colonization. ‘No, not yet, not here,’ is all Forster can muster by way of resolution. (Said 2001: 313) A suspended action at the end of A Passage to India is, I think, more than a conventional form of the previous century (nineteenth




century – particularly Victorian novel). It is rather the conventionality of language at any time which faces the artist whether novelist or poet. It is the suspended truth of the vastness of India embracing the novel from beginning to end rather than the suspended state of reconciliation which the conclusion of the novel offers. I find Said’s comment on Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal (1925) applicable to Forster; this is what Said says: He is one of the earliest and most persuasive metropolitan attempts to understand imperialism as a cultural affliction for colonizers as well as colonized. But he is bound to the notion that there is ‘a truth’ to events involving both sides that transcends them. (Said 1995: 249) There is a ‘truth’ – perhaps a certain truth – that transcends not only Fielding and Aziz (as representatives of the colonizer and the colonized) facing each other at the end of novel and failing to achieve the reconciliation they have already attempted but also the politics of imperialism altogether. Such truth, suspended subtly and implicitly in time and place, brings at the ending of the novel the truth about Mrs Moore and Adela beside that of Fielding and Adela. It is the truth of India facing imperialism. Truth in Forster or his quest for it may sound close to that in Conrad. As a matter of fact, both use similar vocabulary to describe the inaccessibility of truth and its inexplicability. Yet Forster, unlike Conrad, makes little or no concession to the effective irony of rhetoric. Forster’s explicit statement or accounts rendered in conventional form are not really helpful in the grasping of Forster’s truth. They are attractive enough to make us believe that they represent what Forster intends to say in the final analysis, but they remain elusive. However, one source I believe Forster might have drawn upon in his quest for truth or in identifying his visionary truth is the concept known in India as Satyagraha, introduced by Gandhi in 1919 as a method of gaining political and social reform. In his speech on 2 September 1917 Gandhi speaks on the misrepresentation of it, emphasizing the fact that the term is not very accurately described either by the English phrase ‘passive resistance’ or by its Hindi rendering. This is what Gandhi says about Satyagraha not being passive





The force denoted by the term ‘passive resistance’ and translated into Hindi as nishkriya pratirodha is not very accurately described either by the original English phrase or by its Hindi rendering. Its correct description is ‘satyagraha’. Satyagraha was born in South Africa in 1908. There was no word in any Indian language denoting the power which our countrymen in South Africa invoked for the redress of their grievances. There was an English equivalent, namely, ‘passive resistance’, and we carried on with it. However, the need for a word to describe this unique power came to be increasingly felt, and it was decided to award a prize to anyone who could think of an appropriate term. A Gujarati-speaking gentleman submitted the word ‘satyagraha’, and it was adjudged the best. ‘Passive resistance’ conveyed the idea of the Suffragette Movement in England. Burning of houses by these women was called ‘passive resistance’ and so also their fasting in prison. All such acts might very well be ‘passive resistance’ but they were no ‘satyagraha’. It is said of ‘passive resistance’ that it is the weapon of the weak, but the power which is the subject of the article can be used only by the strong. This power is not ‘passive’ resistance; indeed it calls for intense activity. The movement in South Africa was passive but active. The Indians of South Africa believed that Truth was their object, that Truth ever triumphs, and with this definiteness of purpose they persistently held on to Truth. They put up with all the suffering that this persistence implied. With the conviction that Truth is not to be renounced even unto death, they shed the fear of death. In the cause of Truth, the prison was a palace to them and its doors the gateway to freedom. Satyagraha is not physical force. A satyagrahi does not inflict pain on the adversary; he does not seek his destruction. A satyagrahi never resorts to firearms. In the use of satyagraha, there is no ill-will whatever. Satyagraha is pure soul-force. Truth is the very substance of the soul. That is why this force is called satyagraha. The soul is informed with knowledge. In it burns the flame of love. If someone gives us pain through ignorance, we shall win him through love. ‘Non-violence is the supreme dharma [duty]’ is the proof of this



resistance, which I quote here at length for what I believe to be relevant to the spirit of Forster’s attitude:

power of love. Non-violence is a dormant state. In the waking state, it is love. Ruled by love, the world goes on. In English, there is a saying, ‘Might is Right.’ Then there is the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Both these ideas are contradictory to the above principle. Neither is wholly true. If ill-will were the chief motive-force, the world would have been destroyed long ago; and neither would I have had the opportunity to write this article nor would the hopes of the readers be fulfilled. We are alive solely because of love. We are all ourselves the proof of this. Deluded by modern Western civilization, we have forgotten our ancient civilization and worship the might of arms. (Qtd in Allen and Trivedi, eds, 2000: 300–3) Gandhi further adds to clarify his point: The banner of satyagraha can again fly in the Indian sky and it is our duty to raise it. If we take recourse to satyagraha, we can conquer our conquerors the English, make them bow before our tremendous soul-force, and the issue will be of benefit to the whole world. … [A] satyagrahi does not fear for his body, he does not give up what he thinks is Truth; the word ‘defeat’ is not to be found in his dictionary, he does not wish for the destruction of his antagonist, he does not vent anger on him; but has only compassion for him. A satyagrahi does not wait for others, but throws himself into the fray, relying entirely on his own resources. He trusts that when the time comes, others will do likewise. His practice is his precept. Like air, satyagraha is all-prevading. It is infectious, which means that all people – big and small, men and women – can become satyagrahis. No one is kept out from the army of satyagrahis. A satyagrahi cannot perpetrate tyranny on anyone; he is not subdued through the application of physical force; he does not strike at anyone. Just as anyone can resort to satyagraha, it can be resorted to in almost any situation. People demand historical evidence in support of satyagraha. History is for the most part a record of armed activities. Natural activities find very little mention in it. Only uncommon activities strike us with wonder. Satyagraha has been used always and in all situations. The father and the son, the man and the wife are




perpetually resorting to satyagraha, one towards the other. When a father gets angry and punishes the son, the son does not hit back with a weapon, he conquers his father’s anger by submitting to him. The son refuses to be subdued by the unjust rule of his father but he puts up with the punishment that he may incur through disobeying the unjust father. We can similarly free ourselves of the unjust rule of the Government by defying the unjust rule and accepting the punishments that go with it. We do not bear malice towards the Government. When we set its fears at rest, when we do not desire to make armed assaults on the administrators, nor to unseat them from power, but only to get rid of their injustice, they will at once be subdued to our will. The question is asked why we should call any rule unjust. In saying so, we ourselves assume the function of a judge. It is true. But in this world, we always have to act as judges for ourselves. That is why the satyagrahi does not strike his adversary with arms. IF he has Truth on his side, he will win, and if his thought is faulty, he will suffer the consequences of his fault. (Ibid.: 301–2) The quotation above serves as a common ground, I think, for both the fiction of Forster as represented in his A Passage to India and the criticism of Said as represented in his account of Forster’s novel. No other account can be better support for Forster’s ‘secret understanding of the heart’ scene in the early part of the novel when we read of the truth of the contact between Aziz and Mrs Moore, and ‘God is love’ as demonstrated by Krishna in the ritual of the last part of the novel. Between the two scenes lies Forster’s truthful vision which transforms by means of narrative Gandhi’s Satyagraha into fiction. It is crucial here to remember that Mrs Moore stands out in relation to the car incident by opting to go to the bungalow and leave Ronny and Adela alone – simply because she has already realized her vision of ‘new freedom’. Mrs Moore here survives with the spirit of Satyagraha, and with no return to the past (in England) from which she has liberated herself. Adela is left alone trying to free herself from Ronny’s invasive world of imperialism, moving towards a more actual and active one of human relationship such as the one successfully established between Aziz and Mrs Moore. She almost succeeds apart from the car incident which exposes her to the wrong experience by driving her to think of a commitment to future




marriage. Only later, with her experience in the Caves, Adela realizes how disastrous the transformation of her thinking has been. Everything turns out to be beyond her grasp, and hence paralyses her will. In any case, Adela’s transformation falls within the realm of her idealism where her quest is always directed towards finding out the truth about India and Ronny in it. Thus we see Adela’s notion that what she experiences is dependent on her experience of it, which stands in clear opposition to the realism maintaining the independence of the object of an experience from the experience of it. The car incident leaves Adela in the dark to wrestle with the meaning of the experience until she suddenly or ruthlessly formulates it in a commitment to a future marriage to Ronny. A general comment by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society may be applicable to Adela’s case: To take a meaning from experience, and to try to make it active, is in fact our process of growth … The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do. (Qtd by Parrinder 1987: 68) The whole crisis of A Passage to India can be equally identified with this quotation. How can an honest, straightforward person like Adela ‘see the real India’ where her quest for truth about India should begin, at least, with the dominant reality of imperialism? We know that Kurtz, the agent of imperialism in Heart of Darkness, ends up discovering that imperialism is ‘the horror, the horror’. We also know that Adela can have no such precise formula, which so impressed Marlow. When Adela finds herself face to face with Ronny in the Nawab Bahadur’s car, she impulsively accepts a future union not only as a way out but also as a formula next to truth (or non-truth) simply because the whole affair is beyond her grasp, since the private is subtly interwoven with the public, which is also beyond Adela’s grasp. Hence the state of muddle curbs the right decision in Adela as a natural result of her not being able to understand genuinely what can be done or what is going on. In his celebrated essay ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’ Williams divides the realist English novel into the ‘social novel’ and the ‘personal novel’, with a further division of both into the ‘documentary’ and the ‘formula’, making the whole division as




follows: the ‘social documentary novel’, the ‘social formula novel’, the ‘personal documentary novel’, the ‘personal formula novel’. A Passage to India is first located by Williams in the ‘personal formula novel’. This is Williams’s comment: Some of the best novels of our time are those which describe, carefully and subtly, selected personal relationships. These are often very like parts of the realist novel as described, and there is a certain continuity of method and substance. Forster’s A Passage to India is a good example, with traces of the older balance still clearly visible, yet belonging in a high place, in this divided kind, because of elements in the Indian society of the novel which romanticizes the actual society to the needs of certain characters. This is quite common in this form; a society, a general way of living, is apparently there, but is in fact often a highly personalized landscape, to clarify or form an individual portrait, rather than a country within which the individuals are actually contained. (Williams 1961: 281–2) Forster is thought to create a fictitious picture of India based on the misrepresentation of reality. Said is in full agreement with Williams, who points to A Passage to India as one of the best novels of the time describing ‘carefully and subtly, selected personal relationship’, and this is similarly Said’s comment: ‘These are the prerogatives of a novel that deals with personal not official or national, histories’ (Said 1995: 246). Also Williams’s emphasis on ‘some traces of the older balance’ in the novel is the same as that of Said’s on the conventional form of the nineteenth century. But Said is critical of A Passage to India as being ‘the triumphant expression of the British imagination exploring India’ (Benita Parry’s comment) through the portrait of the personal individual characters. Acknowledging Forster’s elusive mind Said subtly says ‘that Forster’s India is so affectionately personal and so remorselessly metaphysical’ (Said 1995: 246) which Said sees being at the expense of the political element. No doubt Said supports Williams’s critique of Forster but he elaborates on it and verifies its ambiguity. In his fifth lecture on the ‘English Novel’ at Lady Mitchell Hall, which I had the privilege of attending (‘A Parting of the Ways’), Williams reiterates what he said earlier in ‘Realism and the




Contemporary Novel’ about novelists who resort to certain concerns as an alternative to the crisis ‘in a society suspended, temporarily dominant, unable to change’. Williams is critical of those writers who select the only knowable reality – social or personal. He mentioned Wells and James as two examples of the wrong emphasis selected as an alternative: There’s no choice in the end between those two roads; no separable merit – I mean merit in emphasis – in either. It’s like the choice, the related choice – the same choice in other terms – between art as a vehicle, the position Wells came to argue, and art as autonomous in its own clear circle, the position of James. That, it seems to me, is no choice at all: the terms, the questions, are just a record of failure. (Williams 1970, rept 1974: 112) Williams continues to say that Forster lies outside the strict circle of choice and emphasis, implying that Forster is different from his fellow realist novelists: But as we put it that way, let’s take care, respecting care, to emphasize the seriousness, the effort, the important and the lasting energy of the attempt to keep hold, to keep going. In Forster, for example, we can see these radical impulses straining, almost dislocating, his early novels; the sense of strain, of inevitable but reluctant divergence as late as A Passage to India, and then the significant silence in this most self-appraising of our living writers. (Ibid.: 112–13) First, we notice here how Williams after several years revisits his attitude towards Forster and views him as a distinguished author independent of authors of other categories, like Wells and James. His novel is no longer a set pattern of conventional form and personal matter as he thought it to be in 1961. Secondly, Williams’s ‘the sense of strain, of inevitable but reluctant divergence … and then the significant silence’ – all refer to the suspended reconciliation of the ending of A Passage to India. I write this, thanks to Said, of course, who decodes Williams’s phrases. After criticizing ‘the separation into classes, into categories, into mutually hostile preoccupations and methods: the individual or





What matters to us is the crisis itself: where what was and is most creative in the novel – the open response to an extending and active society, the similarly open response to intense and unique and connecting feeling – encountered major difficulties: difficulties of relationship and so difficulties of form: difficulties that connect and disturb through all the rest of our century. (Williams 1970, rept 1974: 213) Doesn’t this help us see through Adela’s crisis which, being an ‘experience’ rather than a ‘matter’, demands open response to intense and unique and connecting feeling, the thing which makes her encounter major difficulties of relationship and form that connect or rather force her to connect and disturb throughout the novel. Earlier in the discussion, Williams uses the phrase of ‘a stubborn active life’ as opposed to ‘matter’, and I find this phrase a key to the description of the whole of Adela’s character. It is this ‘stubborn active connecting life’ which made her accept on the spot an engagement for future marriage, where a difficult relationship creates or rather imposes a difficult form, which at the same time continues to disturb her until the crisis of the car incident, apparently settled, further generates the major crisis of the novel in the Caves. Though Forster does not receive detailed discussion in Williams’s criticism, the few remarks he gets from Williams over the years are remarkably significant. The last one comes in an interview (1979) about ‘The English Novel from Hardy to Lawrence’ where Williams is asked about many issues which seem to be overlooked, especially that of imperialism. In his reply Williams puts Forster at the end of one of the two eras his criticism of the novel covers. Acknowledging the narrower range of social experience of the writers from 1880 to 1930 in comparison to the writers from 1830 to 1880 Williams says: The characteristic change is from a George Eliot to a Forster. Now Forster proclaims the same aims as George Eliot, but there are areas of social experience to which he is no longer open. The vision of Englishness itself changes: whereas earlier it is really



society; the public or private; social or literary studies’, Williams sums up his discussion with a conclusion which, I think, can be particularly illuminating for any reading of A Passage to India:

internal to England, in the 1800–1830 period it is far more defined in terms of an external imperial role. Tom Narin argues that England was deprived of a modern nationalism by imperialism. This linked to what I meant by Englishness becoming problematical in this period. (Williams 1979, rept 1981: 263) The Englishness of England, being problematical, is not clear unless it means imperialism, and this is too general to have a practical value. In Forster’s case it is the Englishness of England in India facing the vastness of India, and it is identified by Said as follows: Almost by virtue of its liberal, humane espousal of Fielding’s views and attitudes, A Passage to India is at a loss, partly because Forster’s commitment to the novel form exposes him to difficulties in India he cannot deal with. (Said 1995: 243) In conclusion Forster is carefully read by Said at least as he sees him suspended between the problematical Englishness and the vastness of India. Forster says that his novel is not ‘simple politics’ which suggests how politics is rendered by a novelist. Said (and Williams, as well) extend a particular sense of appreciation for Forster who handles the story of imperialism as narrative rather than vision. And with reference to Burra’s Introduction, Forster could have probably added that the novel is not simple formal aesthetics. No one can defend Forster better than Said who says in a concluding remark as if to justify Forster: ‘Of course Forster was a novelist, not a political officer or theorist or prophet … ’ (Said 1993: 248).




If I have concentrated so much on Said’s evaluation of Forster, it was to accentuate the major shift of studies in Forster. Let us take, for example, what Richard Allen says in a contribution to a publication which he edited for the Open University Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990 (already quoted above). Allen repeats almost everything Said said in Culture and Imperialism seven years before his contribution. He points to a nineteenth-century realist novel style in which Forster wrote his novel. The frame reference here is in Said’s argument. More important, however, is Allen’s central point related to the representation of the Indian nationalist movement ignored by Forster in A Passage to India – which, as we know, is focal in Said’s critique of Forster. What is particularly interesting is that Allen holds the same comparison Said makes between Edward Thompson and Forster to reach the same conclusion. This is what Allen says: Thompson also wrote non-fiction dealing with the history and politics of India and set out his ideas for the future. The Construction of India … for example, again shows him fully cognizant of the Indian nationalist movement but still coming to a conclusion that seems to show him adopting a stance not dissimilar to that of Forster at the end of A Passage to India. (Allen and Trivedi 2000: 99) Allen then quotes Thompson in support of his comment: I believe that by remaining in the Empire India can most effectively use her own qualities. East and West are by no means as 159



Conclusion


And this is followed by Allen’s own remark ‘wondering whether the absence of any representation of the Indian nationalism movement [is] simply a sign of Forster’s having begun writing A Passage to India in 1913, before – for example – the events at Amritsar’ (ibid.). However, Allen makes no acknowledgement to Said, and he even somehow undermines Said’s invaluable debate on Forster when he says: ‘What is at issue here is “Orientalism” in Edward W. Said’s use of the word. Said makes barely a mention of A Passage to India in Orientalism … though he does deal with it in a little detail in Culture and Imperialism’ (ibid.: 100). Can Said’s account of Forster be described as ‘little detail’ when, at the same time, it includes all Allen’s ideas reproduced about Forster here? It is true that what Said says about Forster is relatively brief, but the articulate presentation of the scope of Forster’s ideas given by Said to this debate is remarkable and its value will be useful for further studies on Forster. What Allen could have done even without giving Said the credit he is entitled to would have been to discuss some of the main ideas he has already offered. One is the comparison between Thompson and Forster. The fact that he quotes Thompson to assure us that he [Thompson] is a pacifist should have made him realize that Forster in comparison is never a pacifist. This is Allen’s quotation from Thompson’s The Reconstruction of India under the title ‘Ethics of the Situation’ (given by Thompson) to the matter: There is no justification for the kind of charge often made, that England ‘stole’ India, and so on. These ethical considerations apply to events of recent years – to the way we entered Egypt, if you like, or to anything that has happened in Central America. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a different world, and what the British did, and what Indians did, were the normal conduct of the time. The facts now are, the British are in India, they are the only guarantee of its ordered progress, and events in Palestine (to take only things of yesterday) have proved to everyone that the Indian question is more complex than choice between ‘keeping India in bondage’ and ‘setting her free’. (Ibid.: 297)



apart as many represent. The historical and cultural contact of Great Britain and India has laid down a causeway, which should be used. (Ibid.)

The last sentence may recall Forster’s ending, but Thompson’s ‘complexity’ is different from Forster’s ‘suspension’ as Thompson remarks further that the British in India have a third choice. In the same discussion Thompson offers a cross-cultural contact as the solution in view, when he concludes that ‘Our own language was once fed by French and Italian’ (ibid.: 299). This is obviously not the resolution Forster would contemplate. How can Forster resort to such reconciliation when he shows us that the mystery of the Caves and the Nawab Bahadur car incident is beyond the potential of any language to articulate. The ending of A Passage to India is consistent with what comes before in the novel. It can be read in the light of what Said says about beginnings where he remarks that ‘they are formally useful: middles and ends, continuity, development – all these imply beginnings before them’ (Said 1975: xii). The suspended ending is in agreement with the suspended answer to what happened in the Caves and what caused the Nawab Bahadur car accident. I would like also to conclude by what Said says in Beginnings: that beginning is basically an activity which ultimately implies return and repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment, that beginning and beginning – again are historical whereas origins are divine, that a beginning not only creates but is its own method because it has intention. (1975: xiii) Has not Forster intended to narrate the complex story of imperialism versus the belief of imperialists to the effect that it was of divine origin? Has not Forster intended narration to imply rather than to say this story? Imperialism is not an incident more than the car incident of the Nawab Bahadur is or what happened in the Caves will be an incident. This is well demonstrated from the Caves scene in the original, discarded in the revision by Forster to prevent a vivid portrayal of Adela’s delusion, and to prevent the reader from believing that the assault was real and that it actually happened. The revisions made on the original (to be quoted later) suggest in retrospect Forster’s design to shift the emphasis from what might have happened in the Caves to what actually happened in the aftermath as demonstrated by the response of the British officials. The main point here is how those officials confuse the cultural with the personal.



Conclusion 161

Whatever happened in the Caves, and whatever caused it, the personal in Adela is its major source. When in the Caves with Aziz, Adela is unable at the time to realize the reality of her own sexuality. In a kind of stream of consciousness pattern the narrator provides us with Adela’s theatrical enactment, showing us what actually happened in her mind and the confusion resulting from engagement to Ronny and attraction to Aziz: one is a possible promise, the other is a certain appeal. It is as if Adela’s personal dilemma is enacted within the bigger framework Forster puts as a perspective for the novel: ‘India is an appeal not a promise.’ This is how the critical scene is being enacted on Adela’s mind: first in relation to Ronny: But as she toiled over a rock that resembled an inverted saucer she thought, ‘What about love?’ The rock was nicked by a double row of footholds, and somehow the question was suggested by them. Where had she seen footholds before? Oh yes, they were the pattern traced in the dust by the wheels of the Nawab Bahadur’s car. She and Ronny – no, they did not love each other. ‘Do I take you too fast?’ inquired Aziz, for she had paused, a doubtful expression on her face. The discovery had come so suddenly that she felt like a mountaineer whose rope has broken. Not to love the man one’s going to marry! Not to find it out till this moment! Not even to have asked oneself the question until now! Something else to think out. Vexed rather than appalled, she stood still, her eyes on the sparkling rock. There was esteem and animal contact at dusk, but the emotion that links them was absent. Ought she to break her engagement off? She was inclined to think not – it would cause so much trouble to others; besides, she wasn’t convinced that love is necessary to a successful union. If love is everything, few marriages would survive the honeymoon. ‘No, I’m all right, thanks,’ she said and, her emotions well under control, resumed the climb, though she felt a bit dashed. Aziz held her hand, the guide adhered to the surface like a lizard and scampered about as if governed by a personal centre of gravity. (PI, 143) In the same pattern of stream of emotions overflowing, Adela finds herself engaged in the issue of marriage, which ends in the




Conclusion 163

Probably this man had several wives – Mohammedans always insist on their full four, according to Mrs Turton. And, having no one else to speak to on that eternal rock, she gave rein to the subject of marriage and said in her honest, decent, inquisitive way: ‘Have you one wife or more than one?’ (PI, 144) What is emphasized in the two quotations above is the personal element behind the crisis Adela faces, and what is suppressed from the original in Chapter 15 is the details which, had they survived, would stand as a support for us to believe, mistakenly, that the assault actually happened. This is the scene as it occurs in manuscript B48: At first she thought that she was being robbed, he was holding \taking/ her hand \as before/ to help her out, then she realised, and shrieked at the top of her voice. ‘Boum’ went \shrieked [?]/ the echo. She struck out and he got hold of her other hand and forced her against the wall, he got both her hands in one of his, and then felt at her dress \breasts/. ‘Mrs Moore’ she yelled. ‘Ronny – don’t let him, save me.’ The strap of her Field Glasses, tugged suddenly, was drawn across her neck, it was to she was to be throttled as far as necessary and then … [Forster’s suspension points] Silent, though the echo still raged up and down, she waited and when the breath was on her wrenched a hand free, got hold of the glasses and pushed them at \into/ her assailant’s mouth. She could not push hard, but it was enough to free her hurt him. He let go, and then with both hands \her weapon/ she smashed him to pieces \at him again/. She was strong and had horrible joy in revenge. ‘Not this time’ she cried, and he answered – or perhaps it was the cave \did/. She gained the entrance and of the tunnel, screamed like a maniac lest he pulled her in when she stooped, and regained \then [sic]/ the open air, her topi smashed, her fingers bleeding. (MPI, 242–3) The crucial point here is not what happened to Adela in the caves which Forster consistently ignores. It is the way the crisis is received by the British officials. In their reactions those officials deny Adela’s



fatal question:

individuality: her confusion, sincerity, honesty and even her naivety which led her to believe what Mrs Turton says about Moslems. They ask for no evidence to prove that the assault is real and possible investigation would be, for them, beside the point. What is particularly ironical here is that the revisions, designed obviously to suppress the sensational part of the incident, do not curb the desire in those officials to generate an even more sensational effect, and the incident is a God-given opportunity for them to release the stereotypical prejudice with which they actually survive in India, viewing the incident merely as one of a series of similar incidents throughout British rule in India, and believed by them to be caused by Indians themselves. This is demonstrated particularly after Aziz is acquitted, when Adela’s individuality is denied by those officials whose chauvinism blinds them to her sensibility which transcends the British stereotype of prejudice. By analogy it is impossible for those British officials to see individuality in Indians because they fail to see it in people of their own race. The gap, then, is beyond any bridge. The crisis of the Caves is consequently an opportunity for the British officials to show themselves as an impediment in the way of any possible understanding between the two races. No conclusion of the novel can afford to ignore this climactic effect. Reading the ending of the novel in retrospect and in the climactic effect of the Caves incident we realize that a suspension of resolution is as inevitable as the suppression of the sensational details in the revision mentioned above. The problem is neither between Aziz and Fielding nor between Aziz and Adela. It is rather with the denial of the individuality of those characters by the stereotypes of the British officials, that is the stereotype of imperialism. The suspension of the resolution here defies the traditional notion of resolution which usually concludes with the triumph of one side or the other as found in the resolution of conflict. After all the two sides represented by individuality and stereotype are really incompatible to be interrelated by means of conflict. It is the gap rather than the conflict which determines the discourse of the novel, and, if there is a conflict at all, it is a conflict where imperialist officialdom is dominant rather than a conflict between the individuals of the non-official group. Imperialism stands as an obstacle between the two ends of the spectrum, inevitably preventing a bridge being built between the two




parties, resulting in complete failure: the last attempt at bridgebuilding is the invitation to the Marabar Caves, which ironically widens the gap. The ‘not yet’ and ‘not there’ of the conclusion is a return to the sphere of the Marabar Caves to assure us of the irreconcilability of the situation. The suspended time and place stand for the time and place of the stereotype provided by imperialism which are not the same as those of the individual non-imperialist people. It somehow recalls T. S. Eliot’s reiteration of ‘Time for you and time for me’ in Prufrock, a theme found on other occasions in his poetry. Only stereotypical time, which is like clock time, can be the same time for all, and one major practice of imperialism is to forge time by confiscating it and making it serve its own purpose and record its own history. In one general sense imperialism is an act of hijacking time and place. The suspension of time and place as a conclusion to A Passage to India subtly suggests that any resolution or reconciliation should be preceded by freezing imperialist’s time and place as a pre-requisite for promoting a permanent friendship and bridging the gap. Looking at India from above, the sky said it all ‘not there’ where India, the phrase suggests, looked to the sky like a settlement imposed upon it by imperialism as a usurped home. The ‘not yet’ conclusion is not a dead-end as it may seem to be. It is the ‘then and now’ everlasting structure of narrative. It is also the ‘not yet’ eternal suspension that Shahrazade used all the way through The Arabian Nights. Imperialism is a story which should be narrated until its time (the imperialist’s) is over, after which it becomes a history of the past or a discourse of the present. The suspended conclusion of A Passage to India carries with it a perspective of hope. But this perspective should not be confused with the Victorian notion of evolution, and this brings us to an evaluation of the conclusion in the light of an important literary document by Forster which may tell us what Forster wanted to avoid in concluding his novel. In the lecture quoted above with reference to the Boer War ‘In the early years of the century …’ Forster talks about three different phases in English civilization: the pre-war Victorian age; the 1920s, which is obviously the after-war era; and the 1930s. The first era (where Forster tells us that he feels at home) is, Forster observes, represented by George Meredith (a writer he admires in his own way). Forster is particularly critical of those Victorian ideals and ideas which in fact



Conclusion 165


If you want to recapture the vanished age, read George Meredith and particularly The Egoist. Meredith is a fine novelist and a neglected one. The variety of his characters, the fertility of his plots, the frequent excellence of his English makes him good going, but I refer to him here because he is typical pre-war period. He is a little too Victorian, perhaps a little too behind-hand, just as Samuel Butler is too ahead, still he does pretty well to illustrate what I have been saying. Hope, my goodness, he’s got a proper belly full of hope, and it is hope without faith, the creed of the optimistic evolutionist [italics added]. Clouds gather, dogmas fail, but the Meredithian hero or heroine marches on – suffering, but solid and undismayed. That the personality itself may split, society itself crack – that could not occur to him, living as he did through a period of peace diversified by a few picturesque little wars. He loved to champion oppressed nationalities [italics added]. One of his novels is about the unification of Italy, and there is a big scene – there in the opera house at Milan, when the heroine sings of the resurrection of her country: I enter the black boat Upon the wide grey sea Where all her dead sons float There hear my voice remote: Italia, Italia shall be free. Italia is free and with what results? We know Meredith couldn’t. The future, to him was bound to get brighter some time and the noble men and women whom he delighted to create found their highest activity in spreading the future up, so that it brightened ahead of schedule. Vittoria hurries up the unification of Italy, Clara Middleton the emancipation of women. (KCLC) Forster goes on to discuss Meredith and his popular novel The Egoist in some detail with particular emphasis on the moral force of the ‘comic muse’ and its healing force which ‘will help to get the world right’. He concludes his discussion, saying: ‘So much for the first civilization which I’ve passed and to which I have given the motto of “Hope without Faith” ’ (KCLC).



form a solid ground of imperialism. This is how Forster describes the first era:

Forster then moves to the second phase of civilization of the postwar period and takes Marcel Proust and Remembrance of Things Past as an example in the same way he took Meredith as representative of the Victorian age: Our motto for this post-war age is ‘curiosity’, disinterested curiosity. The disillusioned enquirer has one great advantage over the idealist, he does not want to prove anything, and is likelier to get at the truth. His disadvantage is that he may grow weary and stop, whereas the idealist pounds ahead. But until he grows weary he is the better enquirer, indeed the man who is disillusioned and yet retains vitality represents, in my judgement, to my mind, a very high type of man. The age we are examining tended towards this type. It wasn’t interested in social or political work, it was interested in the truth. It has got the scientific spirit, and this contrasts it with the pre-war age. You can’t imagine him making that bad pre-war mistake, and restricting culture to literature [emphasis added], as George Meredith did. (KCLC) The third phase of civilization Forster observes is the 1930s which, he rightly remarks, promises to be a grim one. He chooses Auden as its authentic voice. Forster quotes Auden’s ‘Ode’ (November 1931), making a special reference to a verse with which the last stanza begins: ‘All leave is cancelled tonight; we must say good-bye.’ He adds further: Contrast these lines of Auden with the ‘Italia, Italia shall be free …’ which inspired Meredith. Contrast both of them with the exquisite in-tuned vision of Proust, which, like a sea anemone, gathers all that passes for its nutriment, and never turns outward like a rose. The civilization Proust represents is self-centered, it retreats from public affairs. It doesn’t, however, retreat from reality [emphasis added]: its curiosity saves it from that. (KCLC) Forster could have similarly made ‘these lines of Auden’ agree with what he referred to as ‘political Jellybism’ (discussed above). In any case Auden’s ‘All leave is cancelled …’ reiterates Forster’s conviction in the retreat to England as home instead of expansion overseas. Out of this context emerges A Passage to India. In his survey of the three phases of civilization in England Forster focuses on the status of the individualist in society. Hence the



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You can sum it up, if you like, as the tragedy of the individualist – a tragedy in three acts. In the first act the individualist hopes to improve society, in the second act he lives to improve himself, in the third act he finds he is not wanted, and has either to merge himself in a movement or to retire. (KCLC) In the light of this evaluation by Forster where can Forster be located? Certainly not in the first phase whose main –isms, liberalism, nationalism and evolutionism, are particularly criticized by Forster himself. His appreciation of Meredith’s concept of comedy is restricted to its application to the individualist as practised in his early fiction, and to amusement as in A Passage to India, where Meredith practised the ‘comic muse’ in a similar way to that of the 1920s. With reference to such practice in the second phase of writers represented by Proust Forster says: They retain the belief in humour, typical of pre-war times, but they’re humourous because it amuses them to be so not for high moral reasons, like George Meredith’s comic muse. (KCLC) Forster is closer to the second phase for its general emphasis on the individualist which means for him less emphasis on external life and much more on internal reality. He is obviously in agreement with the quest for truth as an ideal. But he disapproves of the dispassionate and detached kind of quest. ‘Proust was introspective and morbid and unhappy’, despite his vitality, Forster says (KCLC). The third phase is too grim to provide Forster with a milieu, as Forster always maintained some hope in life to be explored by art which makes life ‘expand’ as he says in Aspects of the Novel. Forster then stands outside the three-act tragedy of the individualist. His location may be envisaged as a fourth act suspended in time and place. The ending of A Passage to India may be only a hint that the novel and its creator belong to posterity, to a fourth suspended act. In the lecture quoted above Forster says that ‘Samuel Butler is too ahead’ of his time. This can be similarly applied to Forster. The fact that Forster and his world has been so appealing to great modern



following summary:

critics like Edward Said and other critics of civilization and cultural studies in the last few decades shows Forster’s particular impact on modern thought and politics. Yet for one reason or another he has been an appeal rather than a promise. It is worthwhile remembering that he was, as mentioned above, aware of the ‘pre-war mistake, and restricting culture to literature’. I should like to conclude by suggesting that the modern issue of the misrepresentation of the Orient by an Orientalist whose text Said vigorously brought to the world was, for example, a major preoccupation in Forster. As early as his stay in Egypt, Forster demonstrates his firm stand against the practice of Orientalists’ misrepresentation. Reviewing two albums of photographs about Egypt for The Egyptian Mail, 13 January 1918, Forster observes of the first album which includes the ‘Snake Charmer’ by Jean-Léon Gérome, late 1860s (the same painting appears on the cover of Said’s Orientalism (1978)): A sheik is kneeling on a leopard skin beneath some palm trees. His companion stands by him, his arms in the air. In the distance the pyramids. Now for the ‘Snake Charmer,’ Not far from the distant Pyramids. On the second album Forster further comments: The fact is that Photographic Egypt is the survival of an old nineteenth century tradition – a tradition that ours is a sumptuous and exotic country – the tradition that has produced the grill-room at Shepherd’s Hotel – and the novels of Robert Hitchens. Queen Victoria, had she permitted her imagination to luxuriate, would have conceived the East as thus. To her, as to the photographer, there could have been cushions in front and the pyramids behind, and maidens going with pitchers to the well in the middle distance, perhaps. It is doubtful whether such an Egypt ever existed. (Forster 1918: 2) Several years earlier Forster records in his Diary (19 December 1910) his criticism of Loti (a typical Orientalist ‘the author [Pierre Loti] is either deceiving the public or himself’ (KCLC)). Does not this and Forster’s other critical views of Orientalists fit well with Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism? However,



Conclusion 169


Conrad always seems to come back to me in one way or another. I think that his exile, the overtones of his writings, the accents, its slippages, the sense of being in and out of language, being in and out of worlds, the skepticism, his radical uncertainty, the sense that you always feel that something terrribly important is going on, what Forster made fun of – a tremendous crisis happening but you can’t tell what it is – has just gripped me more than any other writer has. (Said 2001: 421) It is true that Forster seems to make fun of Conrad by remarking that Marlow’s voice, for example, is too full of experience to sing (see Appendix 3), yet Forster’s stand is not really disputed by Said whose voice brings Conrad and Forster together. Said’s defying voice sings to the world and in it, by means of a hybrid text, where Marlow’s intense experience and Conrad’s own reflections on things and life are intertwined as a beginning. So would the suspended ending of A Passage to India be envisaged as a beginning, identified as such about twenty-five years after the publication of the novel, at the independence of India in 1948. Without its ‘worldliness of the text’ (Said’s world and text) A Passage to India could not have, perhaps, survived with such vitality in the discourse of the politics of imperialism.



the question to be asked is where Forster and Said stand from each other. The answer is implied in what Said says in an interview conducted by Mustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Robin:

Appendix 1 By a Committee of the International Section of THE LABOUR RESEARCH DEPARTMENT …

The following pamphlet has been written for the Labour Research Department by Mr E. M. Forster. It states the historical, social, and political conditions of the problem which confront the Empire and Labour in Egypt.

Egypt By E. M. Forster Note The following notes attempt to state facts rather than a case. A few of them are the result of personal experience: I was in Egypt from November, 1915, to January, 1919, though not under conditions that were favourable for observation. The bulk of them are compiled from such textbooks of Imperialism as Cromer’s ‘Modern Egypt’ and Milner’s ‘England in Egypt’; from the Nationalist manifesto issued by Zagloul and his supporters in January 1919; and from the columns of English and Egyptian papers. I have seldom drawn any conclusions, leaving such a task to those who are better qualified, nor am I responsible for the recommendations set forth in the Introduction.1

Before the War The present troubles have so many of their roots in the past that a brief historical retrospect is necessary.

Dynasty of Mohammed Ali In the 16th century Egypt was conquered by the Turks. Early in the 19th century, Mohammed Ali, an Albanian adventurer, established himself, nominally as a Turkish vassal, and founded the present dynasty. From about 1840–80 Egypt was practically independent. The relations between her and her suzerain were finally thus adjusted (1873 and 1879): The Ruler – entitled ‘Khedive’ – promised to pay Turkey an annual tribute, to limit his military expenditure in peace time, and to observe any treaties that Turkey might sign; but he was in other ways absolute, not only in Egypt, but in the district 171



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Growth of foreign influence Napoleon’s expedition had drawn the attention of Europeans to Egypt, and as soon as Mohammed Ali was established they flocked to the country to make money, and extorted through their Consuls various concessions from its rulers. Since Egypt was nominally part of Turkey they profited by the ‘Capitulations’: that is by agreements which their several Governments had concluded at one time and another with that country. They had, and still have, scarcely any duties to the land where they claim so many rights. The chief instance of their enterprise is the Suez Canal, which was constructed 1859–69 by a French company, and which, however valuable internationally, was destined to do Egypt more harm than good and to accelerate her bankruptcy. The bad finance of the Khedive Ismail put Egypt under the thumb of her foreign creditors, and led to dual control by France and England, the two Powers most interested, and finally (1879) to the deposition of Ismail through the concerted action of all the European Powers. The glory of the dynasty was now over.

Birth of the Nationalist Party Just as the foreign menace was taking shape the Nationalist Party arose. It began in the army, where it was directed against the employment of Turkish officers, but soon spread to politics and adopted wider ideals. The leader, Arabi, effected a coup d’etat (1881) by which he induced the new Khedive to grant a constitution and to support a movement for emancipating Egypt from foreign control in politics and finance. In 1882 Arabi became Minister of War, and the Khedive, alarmed at his popularity, changed sides and sought protection from the French and English. Alexandria always a European stronghold, gave the signal for the upheaval. There was an anti-foreign riot there, and the British fleet, after waiting a month, bombarded the city and produced a second riot. The French, while approving British action, did not participate in it, and the destruction of the Nationalists was entirely effected by our troops. Arabi’s army was defeated at Tel el-Kebir and he was exiled. Thus perished a movement which if treated sympathetically, might have set Egypt upon the path of constitutional liberty.

The British occupation While declaring that they had been compelled to intervene,2 Mr Gladstone’s Government disclaimed all intention of establishing a Protectorate. Much turns upon this disclaimer. It was worded as follows in the dispatch of Lord Granville, British Foreign Secretary (addressed to the Powers on January 3rd, 1883):– Although for the present a British force remains in Egypt for the preservation of public tranquility, Her Majesty’s Government are desirous of



(then ill-defined) of the Soudan. The Khedives established the cultivation of cotton and introduced some of the superficialities of Western civilization. But they were Oriental despots at heart, and oppressed the peasants and agricultural labourers, who form the great majority of the population.

withdrawing it as soon as the state of the country and the organization of proper means for the maintenance of the Khedive’s authority will admit of it. In the meantime, the position in which Her Majesty’s Government are placed towards His Highness imposes upon them the duty of giving advice with the object of securing that the order of things to be established shall be of a satisfactory character, and possess the elements of stability and progress. It is to the second of these two sentences that we appeal in extenuation of our continued occupation. We assert that it has been necessary for us to ‘advise’ Egypt from 1883 to the present moment, and to enforce at times her adoption of our advice by dismissing her Ministers and the Governors of her provinces. In 1887 we did, indeed, offer to withdraw. But negotiations on the subject with her suzerain Turkey broke down, nor would withdrawal have meant renunciation, since we were to retain the right of re-entry. Our position was at first insecure, owing partly to the loss of the Soudan (1883) and partly to the jealousy of France. It was consolidated by the talents of our Agent, Lord Cromer. (For the position of the British Agent, or, to give him his present title, the High Commissioner.) Cromer (1883–1907) was primarily a financier. He pleased foreign creditors by rendering irrigation and abolished the lash and the forced labour (corvee) that the peasantry were annually compelled to give upon the canals. But he had a profound distrust of Orientals; his sympathy with Nationalism was purely academic; he started the flood of British officials who now deluge the administration,* and his aim was a contented but torpid Egypt who would never criticize the Occupying Power. His rule ended in two great triumphs for British policy – the reconquest of the Soudan (1898), which was henceforward administered as a British possession, and the Anglo-French Agreement (1904), by which France abandoned her Egyptian aspirations and left us a free hand. But the Nationalist Party was reforming, and after Cromer’s retirement we so far yielded to protests as to permit the formation of a Legislative Assembly (1913), which, though almost debarred from legislation, was at all events a channel for public opinion. The Assembly met only once, for next year war broke out between Great Britain and Turkey. The Army of Occupation – hitherto fixed at about 6,000 – was at once increased to unknown dimensions, and a new chapter begins.

During the War Proclamation of the Protectorate Since Egypt was still technically a vassal of Turkey, the outbreak of the war placed her in an anomalous position. We dealt with it by putting the country * The figures are 286 in 1896; 662 in 1906; 1,671 in 1919. Some of the officials have served previously in India; such may be useful for their administrative qualities, but they, and still more their women-folk, introduce a racial arrogance from which the regular Anglo-Egyptian officials are free.



‘The Government of Egypt’ 173

under martial law, by proclaiming a British Protectorate, and by setting up a member of the house of Mohammed Ali with the title of ‘Sultan’ in place of the ex-Khedive Abbas, who had deserted to our enemies. The proclamation was moderately worded. It recognized that Egyptians could not be expected to fight against their fellow Mohammedans and late over-lords, nor to bear the expenses of a war that they never sought; it promised them protection, and in return only asked them not to hinder our military activities. The mass of the people took no notice of this ominous document; the educated minority regarded it as a temporary measure, and Rushdi Pasha, the Prime Minister, was (he states) promised that if the country kept quiet during the war substantial concessions awaited it. Egypt fulfilled her side of the bargain. Our troops, and in particular the British Tommies, were well received, and though the Colonials (who ought never to be quartered amongst friendly Oriental peoples) rioted in Cairo and elsewhere, and regarded the natives as ‘blacks’, their misbehaviour did not discredit the Expeditionary Force as a whole. I have walked alone, both in the native quarters of towns and in the country, and always met courtesy and kindness, and I have entered without difficulty mosques that were supposed to be fanatic. The mild and cheerful Egyptians seemed (especially to one who had known Indians) an easy people to live with. But evil influences were at work.

The censorship The fortunes of war connected Egypt with the Gallipoli campaign, the operations against the Senussi, and the Sinai and Palestine campaigns; while thousands of troops and sick passed through in connection with the Mesopotamia and Salonica campaigns. A military censorship was therefore imperative, but the Army authorities, according to their universal habit, diverted it to non-military purposes, and used it to suppress public opinion. All the local papers (Arabic, English, French, Italian, Greek) were censored under instructions that were of more than average stupidity. The most unexpected subjects were prohibited: for example Lord Lansdowne’s letter about peace, the Maud Allan case, the friction between Italy and the Jugo-Slavs, and – crowning absurdity! – the censorship itself. Though the papers frequently appeared with blank columns, they were forbidden to allude to the censor’s existence. Foreign newspapers, except English and French, were also censored, as of course were letters and telegrams. The remaining outlet for public opinion, the Legislative Assembly, was not allowed to meet. The total result of these suppressions was disastrous: not only were the natives irritated, but they believed that we had been defeated, not merely in Gallipoli but all over the world, and dared no longer tell the truth.

Conscription and commandeering As the war progressed, Egypt, despite our promises, was dragged into it. We did not honour her like the Indian Native States, and gratefully accept her help; we took it furtively. Though scarcely using the Egyptian army (a force




about 17,000 strong), we enrolled for various purposes natives to the estimated number of 1,000,000, that is one-thirteenth of the total population. Many of these formed an Egyptian Labour Corps; others were employed as packers in the Army Service Corps, clerks, etc. Enlistment was popular at first, for it was voluntary and the pay good. But as the supply of recruits for the Labour Corps flagged, compulsion was secretly introduced. Grave abuses resulted. The country districts, where public opinion could least express itself, suffered most; so many men were required from each province, the province apportioned the requisition among the districts, these among the villages, and the village-headman sent those men who were his enemies or who had not bribed him sufficiently. The system was extended to the towns as our needs grew, until by the time of the armistice only Cairo and Alexandria were exempt. The Labour Corps was at first employed in Egypt only, but afterwards in Palestine and Syria, and even in France, sometimes working under fire. Hospital accommodation was disgraceful, and the mortality, especially from typhus, very high: no statistics have been published by the military authorities. We also commandeered food, fodder, animals, often paying tardily and inadequately. Before the war was over the countryside had experienced, under British auspices, many of the exactions of an Oriental despotism; and as prices rose and pneumonic influenza took its toll, the misery and discontent increased. The general originally in command (Maxwell) knew Egypt and kept in touch with public opinion, and had he remained much trouble would have been averted. Unfortunately, he was superseded for military reasons, and under his successors all criticism was silenced. Many Anglo-Egyptian officials, though anything but sentimental about the natives, foresaw that disaster was ahead, but were unable to make their advice heard.

After the War We broke promises and made mistakes both before and during the war, but the seeds of revolution were not sown until after the Armistice had been signed with Turkey. The Egyptians who had acquiesced in our Protectorate as an exceptional measure, now hoped to regularize the situation, but found that martial law was sterner than ever and that they were treated as members of a subject race. They were the more amazed because President Wilson had proclaimed, and Great Britain had adhered to, the principle of selfdetermination; and even before the Turkish Armistice (it was when Bulgaria collapsed) I saw a small crowd of uneducated natives standing outside the American Consulate at Alexandria expecting the Consul to announce the independence of their country!3 Egypt was refused representation on the Paris Peace Conference, although the newly created and more primitive Kingdom of the Hedjaz sent its envoy. The Prime Minister, Rushdi Pasha, tried at least to go to London to confer with the Foreign Office, but the Foreign Office replied that it was too busy to think about Egypt yet. In consequence the Ministry resigned, and as no one would take office in its place, the country was left for nearly six months without legal government. The papers were





The Zagloul Delegation Saad Zagloul Pasha was Minister of Education (1906) under Cromer, and is a politician of the highest repute. He is Chancellor of the Egyptian University at Cairo. On the failure of Rushdi, he formed a Delegation of Nationalists to the Peace Conference. Passports were refused on the ground that the Delegation had no mandate, and that the Legislative Assembly, of which Zagloul was the elected Vice-President, was a non-existent body. Zagloul and three of his colleagues were then deported to Malta (March 1919), and this precipitated the rebellion. After a few days the delegates were released and allowed to go to Paris, and other colleagues from Egypt were allowed to join them. They remained there over a year, trying in vain for a hearing. Their programme is summarized below. Whatever their mandate may be technically, they represent Egypt in fact, and apparently this has at last been realized by the British Government, for at the time of writing (June 1920) Zagloul has come officially to London.

The rebellion As soon as Zagloul’s internment was known, the country rose, communications were cut, British were besieged in Assiout, British officers were murdered in a train south of Cairo. Our reprisals were, according to the Egyptians, needlessly severe, whole villages being wiped out. Atrocities and reprisals are inherent parts of the supreme atrocity of war, and nothing is gained by speculating which side committed most, nor is it helpful to dwell on the hastily conducted courts-martial that ensued, nor upon the wild search for arms in which the non-Moslem Indian troops that we employed committed many irregularities. The important point is that every Egyptian sympathized openly or secretly with the rising, and that it was national, not religious – Copts (native Egyptian Christians) took part in it and were also represented in the Zagloul Delegation. The General commanding our forces (Allenby) kept his head, whatever his subordinates may have done. He released the Zagloulists; dismissed the most unpopular British official in the Government (the Adviser to the Ministry of Education); induced Sa’d Pasha, a discredited politician, to form a Ministry; and (July) transferred trials arising out of the rebellion from the courts-martial to the civil tribunals, and abolished the censorship of the Press – two concessions that have been indeed more apparent than real, since the courts-martial had already imprisoned innocent Egyptians who were not released, while, as for the Press, a tight hold was kept over it by suspensions and fines, and the Censorship was reimposed wherever it was deemed expedient. The country became quieter and disturbances did not recommence till September, since when they have been continuous. Allenby tries to keep the British Army in the background, and to leave the suppression of rioting to



prevented by the censorship from alluding to the crisis, but news of it spread orally. During the winter of 1918–19 the natives, including the peasantry, became definitely anti-British: I noticed the change.

the native police. But the police sympathise with the rioters, so our troops have to be employed in the end. The students are generally on strike, and not only discipline in the schools but every detail in the curriculum is arranged and enforced by martial law. Industrial strikes – hitherto unknown – are also frequent, and since most of the employers of labour (e.g., the water and the tram companies at Alexandria) are foreign, the workers combine a political protest with an economic. The military authorities have taken a serious view of the labour troubles. Schemes for a general strike have so far failed. These later disturbances are connected with the Milner Mission.

The Milner Mission In May, 1919, Lord Curzon announced that a Mission would be sent under Lord Milner to Egypt for two purposes: to enquire into the causes of the March rebellion and to grant a constitution under the Protectorate. Egyptians assumed that it was sent mainly for the first purpose, and that any reforms it granted would be inadequate. Moderate Nationalists as well as extreme Zagloulists were against it. Had it gone at once it might have won a hearing, but with incredible negligence it did not sail till December. The British Government was again too busy to attend to Egypt. The composition of the Mission naturally inspired distrust. Milner himself was known as a militant Imperialist, who sincerely believed that the world would be happier if it were ruled by the British upper-middle classes. He had been in Egypt before, first as a journalist, then (1889–92) as Under-Secretary for Finance. His original attitude towards the people he proposed to pacify is best indicated by a quotation from his book:– If any man desires to help Egypt forward on the road of independence, the worst and most short-sighted thing he can possibly do is to resist the introduction of English control into any department of the Government. – ‘England in Egypt’, p. 287 The other members of the Mission were: General Maxwell, who knows Egypt well, and whose attitude is supposed to be sympathetic; Sir Rennell Rodd, formerly British Ambassador at Rome; General Thomas, an authority on tropical agriculture; Mr J. A. Spender, Editor of the ‘Westminister Gazette’; Mr C. J. B. Hurst, Assistant Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office; with Mr A. T. Loyd as secretary and Mr E. M. B. Ingram as assistant secretary and private secretary to Lord Milner. The Mission spent several months in Egypt, encircled by machine-guns and aircraft. The threatened boycott succeeded, and, with the exception of the European communities, no section of society consented to give evidence officially. The Report of the Mission has not yet (June 1920) been issued, but there is reason to believe that it will be conciliatory in tone and possibly on lines that the Nationalists can accept. Zagloul would scarcely have come to England unless he had hopes of a satisfactory settlement.





Egypt is at present under martial law, but the following notes upon her civil government may be useful:–

The Sultan Called, under the Turkish connection, the ‘Khedive’. The present Sultan, Fouad, is a man of no influence, commonplace in appearance, Italian by education, without following in the country. Though our puppet, he is scarcely pro-English, because his pride has been hurt by our recognition of the King of the Hedjaz. The princes of his house, including the wealthy and able Prince Toussoum, have issued an important declaration in favour of Nationalism. The Nationalists, on their side, have not defined their attitude towards the Dynasty, but, although its record has been indifferent and there is no Egyptian blood in its veins, it is likely to survive. At all events, there is no possibility of loyalty to King George, as there is in India.

The ministry The Sultan is supposed to rule through his Cabinet of native Ministers, who are responsible to him. There are normally seven Portfolios: Education; Public Works and War; Interior; Finance; Justice; Agriculture; Wakfs, that is charitable foundations and bequests; and to these has been added (1919) a Ministry of Communications, that is, Railways, Post Office, and Telephones. Inside most of the Ministries is an ‘Adviser’, a permanent British official, and one of these, the Financial Adviser, has a seat without a vote in the Cabinet itself. The Financial Adviser is indeed the corner stone of our power inside the Egyptian administration. No financial decision can be taken without his consent, and, since little can be done without spending money, this ensures him a veto upon all important measures.

The High Commissioner Called, previous to the Protectorate, ‘Agent’ or Consul-General. Appointed by our Foreign Office, and in theory our only diplomatic representative to the Egyptian Government. He became, with Cromer, the means by which we control that Government from the outside. He gives ‘advice’ to the native Ministers and Governors on all important points, which they must carry out or forfeit their posts; he is in touch with the Advisers and other British officials who are inside the Egyptian administration and nominally servants of the Sultan. During the war the High Commissioner, despite his access of title, lost importance. At present he has been superseded by General Allenby, with title of ‘Special High Commissioner’. The triumph of militarism over all forms of civilian government has been complete.



The Egyptian administration


Created 1913, suppressed 1914. Will probably be important in the future. It is by law composed of (i) the Ministers; (ii) 66 members returned by indirect suffrage: they are chosen by elector-delegates, each of whom are chosen by 50 electors; (iii) 17 members nominated by the Government to represent minorities. Its powers were slight. It could initiate Legislation, but the Government was not bound by its resolution, and could enact laws over its head. It had no power over the Executive except in restraint of any increase of direct taxation. Despite its name, it was mainly a deliberate and consultative body, and certain subjects, for example the foreign relations of Egypt, it was not even allowed to discuss. Nevertheless, it represented an important constitutional departure, because it could voice the opinion of the Egyptian people and question and criticize the Government. The Nationalists demand its convocation; and one of Zagloul’s claims to be heard is that he is its elected Vice-President. It has become the symbol of Liberty, just as the Protectorate is the symbol of Tyranny.

Special problems The Egyptian question is complicated by three special problems:

The European communities and the Capitulations The foreign residents are not important numerically – only 56,000 Greeks, 40,000 Italians, 24,000 British, and 21,000 French, out of a total population of 13 millions. But most of the business, banking, and industrial enterprise is in their hands, and their presence raises many difficulties. At the worst they include some unmitigated scoundrels, at the best they contain men of character and culture whom it is a privilege to have known; but in all cases they are aliens in Egypt and have come to exploit it; they despise Oriental ways, they are agnostics or Christians who have no sympathy for Islam, and they feel for the natives a fear that too often proceeds from a bad conscience. Their relations with the Occupying Power of Great Britain vary rapidly and depend partly on local, partly on European conditions. Previous to the Anglo-French Agreement (1904), the French were hostile, and they are still jealous; during the war we had to control the Royalist section of the Greeks; since the armistice the Italians have tried to embarrass us. But at bottom their interests and those of British Imperialism are the same. They dread a strong native government. Under the Capitulations, Europeans have special privileges which they can appeal to their respective Powers to enforce; (a) They are exempt from the jurisdiction of the Native Courts. In criminal cases they are tried by their own country for trial. In civil cases they go before the Mixed Tribunals (established 1876), which consist of Courts of First Instance and of a Court of Appeal, and which are composed of foreign and of native judges, the foreign element



The Legislative Assembly

predominating; (b) They are immune from taxation – excepting customs duty and land tax; (c) They have immunity of domicile. Now that the Turkish connection has ended, the Capitulations are an anachronism, and a committee has been sitting in secret to codify the law with a view of replacing them. The Nationalists, however, wish to retain them. This was not always their policy; but regarding Great Britain as their main enemy they are now conciliatory elsewhere, and some of them, despairing of complete independence, have even wanted to restore the system of Dual Control, in the hope of playing off England against France. The Zagloulists promise to retain the Mixed Courts and to impose no legislation or taxation upon foreigners that is not sanctioned by the general assemblies of the Mixed Court of Appeal.

The Suez Canal The canal was made (1859–69) by a French company. In 1888 it was neutralized: it was to be open both in peace and war to all ships, whether belligerents or neutrals, and no hostilities were to be committed in or near it. Its neutralization was ignored by both Turks and English in the late war. From the Egyptian point of view the canal is a misfortune for it provides foreigners with a permanent excuse for interfering. The Egyptian Government originally sunk over 16 million pounds in it, but in 1875 sold its shares to Great Britain. We paid four million for them, but they are now immensely valuble: as long ago as 1892 their value had quintupled. It is of little advantage to Egyptian trade, for it chiefly serves as through passage between Europe and India, etc. The Zagloulists make no serious claim on the Canal, and would accept ‘whatever measures the Peace Conference may take to secure its neutrality’. It may be assumed that whatever happens Great Britain will remain in control, so that even if Egypt does gain independence, she will always be a weak state, incapable of damaging us as long as we remain a naval power.

The Soudan The Soudan (population about three millions) is at present governed in accordance with the Convention made between the British and Egyptian Governments in 1899, after its reconquest from the Mahdists. Both the British and Egyptian flags are flown, but the administration is practically British and untrammeled by international complications. The Governor-General and the governors of the 16 provinces are British. Administration is carried on by British inspectors, under whom are district officials – usually Egyptians. There is no Legislative Assembly, laws being made by the Governor-General in Council. The people are a backward race, recently delivered from barbarism. They have no national movement, no Europeanized class; the Gordon College at Khartoum is scarcely above the level of a primary school. There is a wide gulf intellectually between them and their British rulers, and, as often happens in such cases, comparative harmony. Englishmen who have governed both invariably prefer the Soudanese to the Egyptian, just as in India they prefer the half-savage Pathan to the civilized Bengali.




The Nationalists claim the Soudan. Main arguments: (a) The Soudan has often been conquered and held by Egypt in the past; (b) Financial. The country not being self-supporting, Egypt has to supply the deficit, which exceeded three million pounds during the first five years after the reconquest. Some of the objects to which the money has been applied are against Egyptian interests: for example one million went to the construction of Port Soudan on the Red Sea and provided an alternative outlet for Soudanese trade. It is true that, as a set-off, Egypt sends her goods into the Soudan duty free and also collects customs on goods intended for the Soudan. But her net loss since the reconquest is estimated by the Nationalists at 11 million, and they argue that she ought to be allowed to govern what she pays for; (c) The Soudan controls the Nile water supply and consequently the fertility and the very existence of Egypt. Great irrigation works are contemplated on the Blue and the White Nile – the two branches that unite to form the main stream at Khartoum. When the dams are finished it would be possible for a hostile Soudan to withhold from Egypt her share of water, or even to loose devastating floods. On the other hand: Despite a common religion and language and a certain affinity of blood, the two races are antipathetic. No doubt the antipathy has been exaggerated by the British, just as they exaggerate the differences between the various races of India, but it certainly exists. The Egyptian regards the Soudanese as a ‘black’, while the Soudanese despises the Egyptian’s body and fears his mind. The Soudanese notables who visited England in 1919 were at pains to dissociate themselves from Egyptian Nationalism. If the country were handed over at its present state of development to a Nationalist Egypt, trouble would certainly ensue. British control must be maintained until the Soudanese are capable of expressing their own wishes – whether for union with Egypt or for independence – and a rudimentary political organization should be introduced to train them for this purpose. Egypt should relinquish her present nominal share in the administration, but should have representatives to protect her interests in any irrigation schemes.

The religious factor Although religion is still a greater force in the East than in Europe, the present disturbances are anti-British, not anti-Christian. Copts have sided with Mohammedans, e.g., in March 1919, Nationalist flags displayed the Crescent and the Cross together. The Mohammedans of Egypt – unlike those of India – evince little interest in the future of the Caliphate and of Constantinople. Rationalism is common among the educated. Even women have taken part in politics, contrary to Islamic precedent; there are processions of ladies in Cairo, and Madame Zagloul has addressed a deputation from behind a screen. It would seem that in Egypt, as in Europe, religion and tradition are dying forces in public affairs. The chief religious center is the Mosque of El Azhar at Cairo, a famous Islamic university (7,000 to 9,000 students). It is connected with subordinate institutions, for example with the Mosque at Tanta, the main stronghold of




fanaticism. Anti-British propaganda went on in the mosques, but there was no official pronouncement until December 1919, when British soldiers violated the sanctity of El Azhar. The University authorities then called upon Great Britain ‘to redeem her pledges and to recognize the complete independence of a country which is distinguished by a glorious heritage and by a peculiar position of predominance in all the East’. This important manifesto stiffened opposition to the Milner mission, but did not transform the opposition into a Holy War.

The Egyptian character Up to 1919 the Egyptians were allowed such plebeian virtues as industry and good temper, but they were regarded as an inferior race, incapable of taking the initiative or of suffering for an ideal. This low estimate of them was not confined to Europeans; it was shared by their co-religionists in Turkey and in India. But hatred of the British has hardened the national character. The official view of this change is that it is due to propaganda. But propaganda is not a magic drug: it must appeal to something that already exists in men’s minds, or its power evaporates. We have seen what genuine grievances all classes of the Egyptians have against us, and Zagloul and other politicians have only voiced the wrongs of the illiterate* and humble, and by voicing them have elicited a response. Writing of the revolt of 1882, Milner says, ‘It is the strongest proof of the intensity of the old misgovernment that a revolution … should have been possible among a population so easy-going and so submissive’; and it is the strongest proof of our misgovernment today. Though a large British army was in the country, the rising was planned so silently that just before its outbreak the Adviser to the Ministry of the Interior (he has since departed) announced that all was peaceful; and it was executed with a skill that has won praise from its military opponents. The people that risked so much for their liberty can never be called inferior again. Whether their patriotism has a constructive side we cannot tell until we give it a chance: at present it necessarily takes the form of rioting.

Conclusion The following lines of solution may be considered:– (i) The Zagloulists, in their Memorandum of 25th January, 1919, ask for complete independence, to be guaranteed by the League of Nations, and also for the restoration to Egypt of the Soudan; they promise to safeguard foreign interests by retaining the Capitulations and they make no claim on the Canal. No British Government is likely to accept this solution. (ii) Mandate to Great Britain from the League of Nations. Would the mandate be honestly applied in the spirit of the Covenant of the League – that is * Over 90 per cent of the population is illiterate.




would the ‘advice’ tendered to the Egyptians by Great Britain really be advice, and not a command as it has been in the past? In other words, would the Egyptians be allowed to manage their own affairs? If they were, this solution would not be inconsistent with the British professions or Egyptian demands, though, of course, it could not be as thoroughgoing as (i). (iii) Retention of the Protectorate, together with reforms that would have seemed revolutionary a few years ago – for example a restoration of the Legislative Assembly with greatly increased powers, and a diminution in the number of British officials. No Egyptian would accept such a solution. (iv) Could we not return to the conditions of 1881, develop the constitution that Arabi then extracted from the Khedive, and restore the nominal connection with Turkey? This solution does not seem practicable. The Egyptians today – except for a few of the upper classes who boast Turkish blood – dislike the Turks, nor have they much attachment to the Caliphate. To withdraw the British connection and restore the Turkish would be to substitute one problem for another.




To Mohammed el Adle, Who died at Mansourah shortly after the 8th of May, 1922, aged about twenty three: of consumption; his mother, father, brother, and son died before him; his daughter has died since, his widow is said to have married again: and to my love for him. Dear Mohammed, This book is for you and me1 – I wish I could distinguish more clearly between us, but it was always difficult, and now you are not here to correct me when I think of you are but as I should like to think you. I write it with my mind on you and with the illusion that your mind still exists and attends. I pretend that you are still alive, because it is only thus that I can think of you as real, although I know that a putrid scrap in the Mansourah burial ground is all that was you. I write for my own comfort and to recall the past, but also because I am professionally a writer, and want to pay you this last honour, although there is much that you will not understand, and some things you will not agree with. Other people may see this book by accident or because I show it to them but that will not alter its nature, it is for you and me. We came to Alexandria at the same time, but it was two years before our friendship was settled. I noticed you first in the spring of 1916 when I stopped with Furness at Abou el Nawatir. You were on the Bagos tram which has the blue label. I looking up from the ground as you went past, thought ‘nice’, and the morning was fresh and sunny. Sometimes on other mornings I looked for you at the same hour, sometimes successfully, but all this is very faint. You were the only conductor who moved between passengers without treading on their feet. Once when Furness was with me you were laughing with a soldier, and when he got off at the Terminus you touched one button of his twice after another in a goodbye caress, which we thought charming and we smiled. ‘That boy has some African-Negro blood,’ Furness agreed. One cold winter night – I was living with Irene at Saba Pacha by then – I returned alone in the tram: you and two other conductors were on the footboard. You asked me to rise, because your great coat was underneath my seat – your first words to me and in English but I can’t remember them. You were charming and polite, I said yes, cold, and we smiled. You half saluted me at

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Appendix 2 Forster’s Fictitious Letter to Mohammed El-Adle

the Terminus, after this if your tram came along, I half responded. Each knew the other wasn’t someone else. No more. In March 1917, ‘you shall never pay,’ you said, because the way I had once said ‘Thank you’ pleased you. – ‘You talk English’ – ‘A little practice makes perfect.’ – ‘I wish I could talk Arabic.’ ‘Why?’ – ‘To read the elf Lela wa Lela.’ – Oh – they were written by a celebrated philosopher.’ – This was on our first talk. Irene had moved into Camp de César by now, and often as I let myself in at night, so safe and dull, wondered. ‘Will this go on forever?’ Seeing you, I felt it would not, and determined not to be afraid until I was obliged. Often waited at the Terminus 3/4 hour till your tram came up into the swirl, and I saw your head stooping over the account book as you brought it into the office, and your number, 86, on a little oval plaque of white and blue, and your khaki uniform and dark red tarboosh, and presently you said ‘second car’ or whatever it was, for you realized that I sought you, and you would explain the hours of your work as far as you knew them – Mohammed I try to keep this real, but my own words get in the way, and you are decayed to terrible things by this time – dead six months. I do not mind that, but I fear you becoming unreal, so that all our talks and the occasional nights we slept in one bed will seem to belong to other people. So I can’t write this letter to you long. It is an effort for you are not even a ghost now and I am only evoking my own memories. Dear boy, I want those memories to be of you, not stained by me. I do not want to prate of perfect love, only to write to you as if you are real. So I try to think of your putrescence in your grave sometimes. It is real, and contemporary with me, it leads me back to the real you. The last instants we sat together, in the train at Cairo, you nudged me twice with your right elbow, out of love. But when we got out of the train to say farewell on the platform, and I asked you to remove your specs, because I found you more beautiful without them, you refused irritably. I want to record that refusal as well the nudge. Also, when the train moved out, you did not watch for the last of me, but turned away with an Egyptian acquaintance. If I miss things like these out you will not be real. – Good night now, dear lad. It is past 12:00 and I must go to bed. I must write of our first evening together – what led up to it can wait. We stand side by side at Mazarita not recognizing one another because neither is in uniform. Then I see that the quiet smart lad in a dark coat, white flannel trousers, and gym shoes is you. ‘Let us go and sit in Chatby Gardens – I call them Chatby Gardens because they are near Chatby. I give them that name: it may not be their name. I give all kinds of things a name.’ Up the hill you were sullen because I had brought cakes: I was so slow to understand your pride and its nature. ‘I do not care for cakes. What did you pay for them?’ – ‘I can’t remember.’ – ‘No? How many centuries ago did you buy them?’2 Also you feared to be poisoned, for your mother had warned you against strangers. ‘Next time you will put me to a similar expense.’ – ‘The possessions of friends are in common, a Greek proverb.’ You did not think it a true one, and were cynical. But while we sat down you said something about ‘a gentleman’ and



Forster’s Fictitious Letter to Mohammed El-Adle 185

‘even a butcher’s son’ – I forget all but its truth, – and ‘I’m still only a boy,’ gravely and proudly. When I called you a ‘gentleboy’ you smiled. And now nearly a year has passed since the date at the head of this letter, which will never get finished in the form in which it is begun. I have written a story because of you and dedicated a book to you and you are more real than in these direct invocations. Oh Mohammed – on the downs in the Isle of Wight where I first realized your death. It means nothing and raises no emotion in me because you are dead, Mohammed, and Morgan is alive and thinks more about himself and less of you every word he writes. You called out my name at Bebbitel Hagar station after we had seen that ruined temple about two miles from it that no one but us seems to have seen. It was dark and I heard an Egyptian shouting who had lost his friend: – Morgan Morgan, you calling me and I felt we belonged to each other, you had made me an Egyptian. When I call you on the downs now I cannot make you alive, nor can I belong to you because you own nothing. I shall not belong to you when I die – only be like you. Yet all the time I remember that you believe we shall meet again3 – one of your last letters said it: – and this makes it easier for me to pretend that you can read this. Only I must just tell you what comes into my mind. How beautiful you looked coming back from the Wadi Hof near Helouan – our last ride. We hadn’t thought you would be strong enough to go all the way, but you managed it, and riding back with the Darker Pyramids showing across the Nile in front and the sun in our faces. I looked sideways at your face and saw it was smiling and happy as you jogged ahead, and I knew you had escaped for a little from your illness. The right side of your face: the more beautiful: I saw it smiling years before when you came back from Kantara on leave, and so ahead of you your friend Abdul Hamid in the main street at Bagos. That was the day the photograph now in my room was taken – in the prime of your physical glory. A few minutes later we sat in Abdul Hamid’s little room opposite the Home of Misery4 and you smiled leaning forward, talking to him. These are the three occasions I remember the beauty and goodness of your smile coming on me as a shock, so that I did not want to intervene or speak to you, only to look. You weren’t speaking to anyone on the return from the Wadi Hof, only happy on your donkey which was jogging straight ahead to get back to Helouan. February 1922. You were dead in three months. Good bye, Mohammed, there is no one like you in spite of this muddle of death. Good bye for ever my friend who says we shall meet again. One slip of my mind would make a spook of you, but this shall not be, for if you are right, you are not right in that way, and nothing that comes to me while I am alive can give me news of your state. Good bye Mohammed, I respect you. I am glad that your own people buried you, I wonder who was there, and whether any one said the prayers afterwards that you paid to be said for your father. A man came and said them when I stopped with you in Mansourah in the downstairs room, it was formal, peaceful.5 And all these words get in my way. I have used them for so many other things. They keep me away from the man I am trying to honour, also my head’s tired. – ‘I should never have known an Englishman could be like that if I had not met you,’ you said at Helouan – I’ll record a thing like that before I go to bed.6




Months have gone by since I wrote the above. You are dimmer. I knew it would happen, and I shall never describe every moment of our intercourse as I hoped. I have fallen in love through you, but falling in love has obscured you. You have faded into being part of my development, and will shrink to nothing unless I can recapture you in a dream. The Home of Misery is morereal than you, because I suppose it is still standing, and I think of visiting it some day in the hope of remembering you once more. Nothing in my life will ever be as great. I shall never forget you in that sense. I never delude myself. This letter shall be finished tonight. It is over seven years since it was begun, and time it was signed. I promised you I would never return to Egypt after your death, the remark did not interest you, and I have broken my promise and taken Florence to see the H. [home] of M.[misery]. It is still standing, with rebuilding all around it, and, what I hadn’t remembered, there is a large flowering tree in the garden behind it – pale purple. Am glad I went back to Alexandria, I was happy there, and often thought of you, which I don’t do now for months at a time, not even when I wear your ring. You have sunk into a grande passion – I knew you would, but you still float about the Egyptians for me – the complexion here, the stoop of the head there. It appears to me, looking back, that you were not deeply attached to me, excited and flattered at first, grateful afterwards – that’s all. But if I am wrong, and if lovers can meet after death, and go on with their love, call to me and I’ll come. I am close on 51 and can never love anyone so much, and if there is the unlikely arrangement of a personal and pleasurable eternity, I would like to share it with you. I never have the sense that there is one, or that you are waiting for me, and I don’t care for love as I did: my needs for the moment are lust and friendship, preferably but not necessarily directed towards the same person. It is just the chance, the faint chance: I am still just able to write ‘you’ instead of ‘him.’ Tomorrow you must join my dead. I think, tonight I’ll wear your ring. I did love you and if love is eternal I may start again. Only it’s for you to start me and to beckon. So much has happened to me since that I may not recognize you and am pretty certain not to think of you when I die. I knew how it would be from the first, yet shouldn’t have been so happy in Egypt this autumn but for you. Mohammed el Adle – my love Morgan December 27th, 1929 Good night, my lad, for nought’s eternal: No league of ours, for sure, To-morrow I shall miss you less, And ache of heart and heariness, Are things that time should cure.



Forster’s Fictitious Letter to Mohammed El-Adle 187

Conrad’s ‘the horror, the horror’ of Heart of Darkness seems to have captured the attention of great writers like Eliot and Forster. We know how Eliot uses this cry in The Waste Land. As for Forster he elaborates on the phrase in his own way, and offers, I think, what can be viewed as a central part of his own vision. In an essay on Eliot’s early poems, which seems to have been overlooked, Forster comments on The Waste Land as ‘a poem of horror’, then he goes on to say: In respect to the horror that they find in life, men can be divided into three classes. In the first class are those who have not suffered often, or acutely; in the second those who have escaped through horror into a further vision; in the third those who continue to suffer. Most of us belong to the first class, and to the elect outside it our comments must sound shallow; they may feel that we have no right to comment at all. The mystics, such as Dostoyevsky and Blake, belong to the second class. Mr. Eliot, their equal in sensitiveness, distinct from them in fate, belongs to the third. He is not a mystic … what he seeks is not revelation but stability … Most writers sound, somewhere or other in their scale, a note of invitation. They ask the reader in, to co-operate or to look … Mr. Eliot does not want us in … He is difficult because he has seen something terrible, and (understanding, I think the general decency of his audience) has declined to say so plainly. (AH, 90–1) Forster describes the terrible thing as ‘Armadello-Armageddon’ identifying Eliot’s terrifying experience brought about by the outbreak of World War I, concluding his essay by saying that most of us forgot the horror of that War or, unlike Eliot ‘do not feel it acutely’ and presumably do not continue to feel it so like him. Earlier in the essay Forster refers to Eliot’s ‘attempted impersonality’ and to what he calls ‘the inhospitality’ in Eliot. And in the footnote attached to the essay Forster writes, ‘In view of Mr Eliot’s later work (not here considered) I would modify these remarks’ (AH, 90), emphasizing, of course, that Forster’s account in this essay applies to Eliot’s early poetry. The critique Forster makes of Eliot here provides us with a significant clue to Forster’s approach to horror without any explicit reference to Forster himself. Forster evidently belongs to the second class, to ‘those who have escaped through horror into a further vision’. Forster acknowledges Eliot’s genius, remarking that Eliot is ‘equal in sensitiveness to those mystics such as Dostoyevsky and Blake’, who belong to the second class, but he regrets the fact that Eliot seeks stability rather than revelation as if horror maintains its

188



Appendix 3 ‘The horror, the horror’

‘The horror, the horror’

189

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – ‘The horror! The horror!’ (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 1902: 149) Marlow and Conrad himself are like Kurtz, allured by the image (of imperialism, of course). They respond to it with mixed feelings of horror and fascination. Being unable to get hold of its vision, they reflect on it in a variety of ways. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster makes a distinction between writers like Hardy and Conrad, on the one hand, and Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, by showing how Jude and Marlow survive as captives of their own fascination with horror and fail to escape their emotion into a further vision like Mitya. Forster, for example, wonders whether ‘Jude [could] step forward like Mitya and release floods of our emotions by saying, “Gentlemen, I’ve had a bad dream” ’ (AN, 94). Forster goes on to say that Conrad is in a rather similar position: The voice, the Voice of Marlow, is too full of experiences to sing, it is dulled by many reminiscences of error and beauty, its owner has seen too much to see beyond cause and effect. To have a philosophy – even a poetic and emotional philosophy like Hardy’s and Conrad’s – leads to reflections on life and things. A prophet does not reflect, and he does not hammer away. (AH, 94–5) According to Forster’s footnote mentioned above, Eliot is admitted to the second class in his later poetry, where Eliot’s revelation and vision provide the hospitality and personality needed for the reader to become a participant. In addition to Eliot’s own poetry, Forster can be assured of Eliot’s transition from the third to the second class. One really wonders whether Forster’s essay was on Eliot’s mind when he gave his lecture in 1955 assigning a special status for creativity, remarking ‘that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to push it forth …’ (Eliot 1955: 21). By implication vision is what emerges out of setting the truth forth, and this is Forster’s second class of the requirement needed for Eliot’s admission. Horror, then, is a kind of event or incident which Forster strongly believes the author should have escaped through into a further vision. What I find most illuminating for Forster’s essay on Eliot, and particularly to his reference to the second class which he favours for authors, is a scene from The Brothers Karamazov which Forster quotes as contrast to George Eliot’s performance as a novelist in Middlemarch. The scene, as Forster quotes, ends with the following: ‘ “I’ve had a good dream, gentlemen,” he said in a strange voice, with a new light, as of joy, in his face’ (AN, 91). This scene with its conclusion stands at the core of Forster’s art and thought, and I believe that it should be remembered at any significant reading



grip on his sensitiveness and curbs its expansion towards a vision. We are assured by Conrad himself that Kurtz’s cry falls short of vision.

of Forster’s fiction. Mitya, the protagonist of The Brothers Karamazov, stands as Forster’s model in fiction whose suffering, as the scene itself demonstrates, helps him to escape ‘through horror into a further vision’. All the main characters in A Passage to India escape after suffering into one kind of vision or another, and Forster’s case was similar to Eliot’s ‘stratum down to which any sound political thinking must push its roots, and from which it must derive its nourishment’ (Eliot 1955: 22). In both cases it is the further vision, the experience of the ‘sufferer’ further submitting a narrative rather than the experience itself. Forster’s distinctive approach to the horror can be viewed with reference to his great admiration of Dostoyevsky where horror, no matter how intense it becomes, is overcome, or, to use Forster’s own words, ‘escaped to a further vision’ by means of narrative. Eliot, in contrast, draws upon Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where horror continues to be horrifying without end, at least in his early poetry. One reason behind this practice is that Eliot borrows the strategy Conrad sets for the horror as being beyond our grasp or control. On many occasions Conrad refers to the horror as ‘Impenetrable’, using different terms for its inexplicabilities. In the meantime he finds in the eloquence of language a means to solicit some description of the horror – the thing that somehow appears to be a violation of his own strategy which the reader is introduced to throughout the narrative. Conrad’s practice here may seem a contradiction in terms, but it can be justified by the fact that the horror, after all the penetration into the heart of darkness, remains the horror, the horror with no vision leading it out of the tunnel. It is particularly interesting to see how Conrad resorts to eloquence to make language say what Forster and Eliot chose not to say. Conrad presumably finds in the eloquence of language a means of avoiding a difficult portrait of horror, as in Eliot, and an evasive one, as in Forster. Obviously eloquence has the practical value of distraction but it cannot act as a substitute for the vision beyond or beneath language. Yet we can return to Conrad for the comfortable distraction which may be offered by the help of his eloquence as a kind of index to Forster’s characters or Eliot’s persona to realize the distinction in effect articulated by the urge to move from ‘silence to sound and back again’ (Said’s words).




I used to think of Forster’s politics in terms similar to those offered by Said concerning national resistance thought to be absented by Forster. One morning I put the following question to Forster when the spirit of student militancy dominated the politics of Europe and America in the late 1960s. ‘Shouldn’t Aziz be portrayed as a militant so that he might lead some national resistance against British sovereignty?’ Malcolm, a brilliant graduate student in biochemistry, who was sitting at the same breakfast table at King’s College dining hall, commented without waiting for a response from Forster, that Mr Forster was concerned with British in India not Indians in India and that Mr Forster had followed them to see why they should be there in the first place. Forster smiled. Malcolm had to leave. Forster asked about the ‘fellow’s name’. I said to him that Malcolm Riley was an outstanding student known for his wit and sarcasm, an activist who took a major part in organizing what came to be known as the Greek Affair, which strongly condemned the junta regime in Greece at the time. ‘There is a grain of wisdom in what Riley said’, was Forster’s response. I met Forster three times afterwards and never succeeded in bringing him back to that query about Aziz. The last time I met Forster was at Webb’s Court, lying on that favourite brown wooden bench down at the bottom of the College’s staircase, basking in the sun and reading a book on the French Revolution. He said to me that he had been developing an interest in history. When I asked him what attracted him most to the French Revolution, his answer was first ‘history’ and after a short pause was ‘its moral force which survives history’. Finding this a useful opening, I jumped in with the question which haunted me, ‘Was it the similar force of India which attracted you to India?’ and his answer was ‘perhaps so, at least it was my little passage to the place’. Forster asked about Malcolm, I took a photograph of him and I left him to enjoy the sun reading the history book he had just borrowed from the College library. I met Malcolm in the evening and spoke to him about the little conversation I had had with Forster. Malcolm said that when we saw Forster again we would ask him why Aziz did not join hands with Gandhi against the British. A few weeks later Forster died, and about a year later Malcolm committed suicide (‘Unpublished Conversation with E. M. Forster’, King’s College Library, Cambridge, 24 November 1968). Forster’s affection for Indians and his genuine commitment to India is, then, what tempts Said and readers alike to wish that national resistance had been given a focal point in A Passage to India. A reassessment of Forster’s achievement 191



Appendix 4 Unpublished Conversation with E. M. Forster

makes one realize that the novel is not about the British in India in the obvious sense, nor is it about national sentiments which Forster records in his novel (particular reference is to Hamidullah calling to ‘a worrying committee of notables’) but about the truth beyond the ordinary facts of crude imperialism and national resistance.




Introduction 1. Said is quite original here in establishing a distinction between the humanist culture of the classics and that of European modern history.

2. ‘Hassan in England’: a Western Room with an Oriental View 1. What Forster says about Kipling here shows that his preoccupation with Kipling dates from much earlier than is assumed by Jeffrey Meyers, who thinks that Forster’s criticism review of Kipling’s Letters of Travel is ‘his only extensive statement about Kipling’ (Meyers 1973: 32). For more details see Chapter 3. 2. This is what Forster replied to Lady Faith Culme-Seymour in an interview in December 1955 when she asked him whether he believed ‘in an absolute standard of beauty and excellence in writing, painting and sculpture’. ‘ “Certainly not”, he explained. “It all depends on the taste of the Age. Take Kipling, for example.” He turned to look at me. “He was popular with the Victorians who admired the successful and the inhibited man. Now none will read his works.” ’ (‘Memories of E. M. Forster’, in J. H. Stape, ed. 1993: 83) 3. For example, cuts from A Passage to India occupy a large space of the flyleaf of Said’s book (1st edn).

3. Forster’s Debate on ‘Kipling Is Not Literature’ 1. This is the entry: ‘[The Poems of Kipling] Lecture possibly read to the Weybridge Literary Society, Spring 1913. (a) Autograph manuscript. 33 leaves; (b) Manuscript in the hand of Alice Clara Forster. 50 leaves’ (Kirkpatrick 1985: 279). Had Kirkpatrick happened to see Forster’s note on the first page of ACF ms he would not have any reservation that the lecture was actually read to the Weybridge Literary Society. 2. Reference here is to Elizabeth Ellem, ‘E. M. Forster: the Lucy and New Lucy Novels: Fragments of Early Versions of “A Room with a View”’, TLS, 3613, 28 May 1971, pp. 623–5, which includes extracts, facsimiles of the manuscript and quotations from letters mainly to E. J. Dent and G. L. Dickinson and The Lucy Novels [1977] (Kirkpatrick 1985: 274).

193



Notes

3. These are derived from Kipling’s verse in his poem ‘The Return’ which has references to the Boer War and to soldiers returning home with mixed feelings. For details, see Ann Parry 1992: 98–9. 4. The privilege Forster bestows on the orator is ironical. Usually the orator (who is also known as the speaker and narrator in the narrative) has power over the direction of the point of view simply determined by his role. Yet when Kipling is mentioned in this connection, the sequential order of authority is reversed from the subjective to the objective, supporting not the orator in the familiar sense of his acquired privileged authority as a subject but rather the privilege brought about by the object to promote its subjectivity. Forster wants to say that the way he acknowledges Kipling’s merit besides pointing to his major defects may sound a contradiction in terms, but this is a privilege of the orator (Forster himself). But then he shifts the emphasis to what he thinks the source of contradiction: Kipling himself. In this manner Forster hopes to win the audience to his side in his evaluation of Kipling and to see Kipling’s major defects overwhelming the little merit casually mentioned in the course of the whole discussion. 5. Reference here is to Kipling’s poem ‘Loot’ which has the same chorus as ‘Shillin’ a Day’. The lines in question are: ‘Ow, the loot!/Bloomin’ loot!/ That’s the thing to make the boys get up and shoot!’ 6. Ann Parry observes the same thing and elaborates on it where she says that ‘Imperialism is here a form of Calvinism’. ‘The Explorer’ appears as a figure chosen by God and guided by: ‘one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated – so: “Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges – Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you, Go!” ’ (1992: 84). 7. In his essay on Kipling, Eliot offers a similar remark when he says that ‘Kipling’s Christianity is less affectionate, that is due to his Anglo-Saxon background …’ (1941: 24). 8. Forster tells us here that Kipling the poet is incapable of grasping India in the way the Lama does. ‘[T]he mystic passionless face of India’ envisaged by the Lama is most expressive, and its ‘structure of feeling’ is unique. In writing A Passage to India we can imagine Forster having this vision of India on his mind as a guide. Yet a passionless face of the Lama which is the same as a passionless face of India is perceptively identified by Peter Hopkirk whose rendering of that memorable scene between Kim and the Lama is not less memorable. Here is Hopkirk’s account of the incident quoted at some length: ‘It was there, as they approached the school’s great wrought-iron gates, that Kim’s keen eyes spotted a familiar, yellow-robed figure in the shadow of a wall. To his intense joy, he recognized the lama. On receiving Kim’s letter, the old man had at once caught the “te-rain” up from Benares, where he was staying at the Jain temple while continuing his search for his sacred river. He had, it transpired, been waiting outside St Xavier’s for a day and a half, hoping to see Kim before he entered this school for young sahibs, which would turn him into a scholar like the Keeper of Images at Lahore.



194 Notes, pp. 33–45

‘Kim leaped down from the tonga and threw himself at the Tibetan’s feet, making no attempt to conceal his happiness at this reunion. But the lama, struggling to contain his own emotions at seeing his chela, hastily assured Kim that it was not any fondness for him that had brought him hurrying from Benares. It was, he insisted, simply so that he could oversee his entry into St Xavier’s. “I had a fear”, he admitted, “that, perhaps, I came because I wished to see thee – misguided by the Red Mist of affection.” To this he added quickly, if unconvincingly: “It is not so …” Crestfallen, Kim asked him tearfully: “Surely it was a little to see me that thou didst come?” But the lama was insistent. Brushing aside the boy’s pleas for him to stay, he told him: “No – no. I must go back to Benares. From time to time, now that I know the customs of letter-writers in this land, I will send thee a letter, and from time to time I will come and see thee. Do not weep … all Desire is Illusion and a new binding upon the Wheel” ’ (Hopkirk 1996: 131). 9. I would like to suggest that Eliot’s defence of Kipling’s imperialism can be viewed in the light of discussion Marlow advances as a corrective rationale redeeming imperialism in theory and practice: ‘What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness’ (1902: 50). For Kipling, as Forster shows, imperialism is violence not strength, and he doesn’t mind that it is ‘just an accident arising from the weakness of others’. In fact in his most celebrated poem ‘East is East …’ Kipling sees that East and West shall meet only when East will be equal in its violence to the West. In his attempt to redeem Kipling of his racism Eliot introduces the idea of ‘competence’ which he proposes that Kipling’s characters enjoy regardless of colour or race. The difference, however, between Conrad and Eliot is that what Conrad says is not his viewpoint while Eliot adopts the idea and what is said about it (competence and the devotion to it) as his point of view.

4. Forster Writes to the Empire and Salutes the Orient: a Passage through Egypt 1. One wonders whether Forster in GE stands on equal footing with Anil Seal whose Emergence of Egyptian Nationalism is quoted favourably by Said (1993: 248). Unfortunately, GE and the like must have been quite inaccessible to Said. For example, Forster’s defence of Urabi is not less passionate than that made by Anil Seal. 2. Forster is evidently influenced by his friend Mohammed El-Adle, who wrote to him from Port Said, on 21 November 1921, a letter in which he



Notes, pp. 45–61 195

says: ‘About policy: [instead of politics, where distinction in Arabic between the two is blurred] no doubt I prefer Zaghloul and now you can find out easily that Adly [rival leader] and his political mission are returning gracefully, leaving to the nation the protectorate not as before, but in a lawful condition. It is so difficult for a foreigner living outside or even for a native living outside to imagine how the government passes on the feeling that they want a man either to be Adlyian or not to be anything. They liberated Zaghloul Pasha as a guiltman [sic]* and I did not read [for have read] papers for about a week … ’ (KCLC) * [Forster, who transcribed his friend’s letters after his death is sometimes confused by the English Mohammed El-Adle writes, and this due to the literal rendering made from Arabic into English, hence the confusion. ‘Guiltman’ is a literal Arabic translation of ‘criminal’ in English. The other expression similarly translated literally from Arabic is ‘if not till now’ which means if he hasn’t already failed. The present perfect is always a problem in Arabic.] 3. Blunt Papers, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 4. Ibid. 5. Wilfrid Blunt (1840–1922) is a romantic man of letters: a poet (a contemporary of Yeats and Pound), diarist, politician, rebel and great seducer of women (Elizabeth Longford 1979). In reviewing Blunt’s The Earlier Diaries 1883–1900, Forster remarks that ‘Wilfrid Blunt would never choose. He was drawn towards Liberalism through his hopes for Ireland and Egypt, but he did not really like it, and when it bowed to Jingo in the South African War he threw it over’ (TCD, 263). Marmaduke William Pickthall (1875–1936) is mostly remembered as a translator of the Koran in 1930 with the title The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, which, in Pickthall’s words is ‘the first English translation of the Koran by an Englishman who is a Moslem’. For more details see my entry of Pickthall in the New Dictionary of National Biography which is being published by Oxford University Press.

5. Beyond the Mediterranean Human Norm: the Politics of Liberal Humanism in Retreat 1. Meredith’s comedy, admired by Forster especially in his early career, does not maintain the original simple perspective of the redemptive and moral power of Victorian hope. 2. For example, Forster was quite indignant when he knew of Mohammed El-Adle’s arrest during the 1919 riots by British officials. As a demonstration of his attitude he made contact with activists like Wilfrid Blunt and corresponded with the British press, writing letters of protest against the British presence in Egypt altogether. See Forster’s letter to Florence Barger



196 Notes, pp. 63–78

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

(6 November 1919) where Forster refers to Zaghloul and the Milner Commission (Letters, 1.312–13). E. M. Forster, ‘The Poetry of Iqbal: The Secrets of the Self ’ by Sheikh Muhammad Iqbal, review The Athenaeum, 29 (1920), p. 803. E. M. Forster, ‘Indian Caves: My Pilgrimages to Ajanta and Bagh’ by C. M. C. Day, review The Nation and the Athenaeum, 37 (1923), p. 462. E. M. Forster, ‘India and the Turks’, The Nation and the Athenaeum, 30 (September 1922), pp. 844–5. Ibid., p. 845. ‘The Politics of Representation in A Passage to India’ in Tambling ed. 1995: 138. ‘The Politics of Desire: E. M. Forster’s Encounters with India’, in Davies and Wood, eds 1994: 61. This quotation which has been frequently quoted is from Forster’s lecture ‘Three Countries’, mentioned above. I have added ‘rather’ to it because it occurs in the original unpublished part of the manuscript. Bradbury 1994: 178.

6. Burra’s Introduction and Beyond: a Detour Round the Floods 1. Frederick W. P. McDowell, ‘Forster Scholarship and Criticism for the Desert Islander’, in Das and Beer, eds 1979: 272. 2. In his Commonplace Book Forster records a most sarcastic remark on Richards when he tries to make a distinction between four kinds of reader – response and the following is the last one: ‘Reader arrives with apparatus which he has a thought out b borrowed from Aristotle or Richards c constructed out of his earlier reading; this he applies, and is apt to be more interested in its working than in what it tells him of the author. Goethe’s “destructive criticism” ’ (Gardner, ed. 1987: 78). The reference here and the other one in the letter are the only two references Forster makes in his works to I. A. Richards. 3. One wonders whether Richards changed his views of Forster over the years after he had presented Forster with a copy of his Tomorrow Morning Faustus (New York: 1962) with the following inscription: ‘To Morgan Forster this token of an inestimable debt I. A. Richards, King’s College, Cambridge June 4th, 1967’ (This book belongs to E. M. Forster: Heffer Catalogue Seven, Cambridge, 1971, p. 50). 4. G. D. Klingopulos, ‘E. M. Forster’s Sense of History’, Essays in Criticism (1958): 156–65. 5. What I find particularly surprising in addition to what Said says here is the fact that Trilling possessed two copies of the pamphlet The Government of Egypt, as he records in his book E. M. Forster (see Kirkpatrick 1985: 26).



Notes, pp. 80–122 197

6. Linda Prescott offers a reading of Kim different from that of the usual ‘imperialist adventure’. It is, she believes, ‘the pressure that was being felt on India’s northern border from the powerful Russian Empire’ (Allen and Trivedi 2000: 68). Linda Prescott further remarks that: ‘The dynamic of Britain’s imperial progress was also threatened in another way: the very sense of nationalism that sustained the vast enterprise of building and maintaining an empire that spread into every continent of the world was a force that could ultimately fracture that empire from within as subject people developed their own sense of national identity’ (ibid.). An interesting picture of the White Man’s Burden is exemplified in Gora, by Rabindranath Tagore, published in the same year as A Passage to India, 1924. An extract from Gora is in Allen and Trivedi 2000: 240–4. 7. ‘Dicken’s characters are types, but his vitality causes them to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to live their own. Mr Micawber, Pickwick, Mrs Jellyby, live, but not in the sense that we can turn them round and see new aspects’ (AN, 132). This is how Mrs Jellyby is described in the Dickens Index: ‘a lady devoted to philanthropic activity, especially to the welfare of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger. With “her fine eyes fixed on Africa” she totally neglects her own family. When her African project ignominiously collapses she takes up the cause of Women’s rights. Mr Jellyby, her husband, is a meek, suffering individual who eventually goes bankrupt’ (Bentley, Slater and Burgis, eds 1988: 132–3). 8. The last words of the quotation from Lawrence ‘The love is from God … ’ (AH, 138) are by no means an accurate rendering of the words originally uttered in Arabic by the ‘grey-bearded ragged man’. This is a typical example of Lawrence’s misrepresentation of Arabic culture while claiming that he understood what the man said in Arabic. Lawrence evidently confuses ‘hubb’ and ‘mahabbah’ in Arabic, without realizing the difference between the two. What the ‘grey-bearded man’ says here is ‘mahabbah min Allah’, which means in English ‘divine love’, compassion, fellowship or piety. It does not mean romantic love (‘hubb’), as Lawrence thought. I believe that Forster showed great shrewdness in remarking on Lawrence’s romanticism. I should like to add here that Lawrence was quite sentimental in his approach to Arab culture in general, and that he desired to be seen by Arabs in the way he sees himself. 9. It is here where Dennis Porter fails to see what Said means by ‘vision’ and ‘narrative’. In his dispute with Said over Lawrence and Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Porter finds strength in what Said (and Forster, as well) points to as an obvious weakness. It is the heterogeneity of the text, Porter observes, which gives the text of Lawrence’s work its strength. Porter somehow fails to see how Lawrence is unable to detach himself from his own experience to be able to see through it and consequently helps us to do so simply because he confuses the war story with the travel journal, and then submits them to the moral and political coming of age (Williams and Chrisman 1994: 150–61).



198 Notes, pp. 125–33

Notes, pp. 137–72 199

1. For details see Mohammad Shaheen, ‘Forster on Meredith’, The Review of English Studies, xxxiv (1973): 185–91. 2. Edward Said, ‘From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature and History’, Raritan, XVII (1997): 1–21.

Appendix 1 1. The ‘Note’ which introduces GE here may be misleading, drawing our attention immediately to a straightforward account of politics and history simply taken from the historical record of Egypt, written by specialists. The so-called pamphlet is a very fine essay written by a writer with an individualist spirit. It has no pretension to the expert knowledge enjoyed by politicians. Instead it has wit, intelligence, irony and shrewd observation. In one sentence, Forster sums up a good deal of history with a long sequence of events, and this is particularly demonstrated by the beginning and concluding sentences of the different headings Forster uses in his essay. He concludes his remarks on the Dynasty of Mohammed Ali by saying ‘The glory of the dynasty was over’ (my emphasis). Of the conclusion of the ‘Birth of the Nationalist Party’ he comments: ‘Thus perished a movement which if treated sympathetically, might have set Egypt upon the path of constitutional liberty’ (my emphasis). ‘The Legislative Assembly’ begins with the following sentence: ‘Created 1913, suppressed 1914’. And so on. ‘Trust the tale not the teller’, D. H. Lawrence gives popular advice to readers of the narrative, which can be useful in reading Forster’s GE. 2. I find this section particularly interesting because it somehow suggests a continuity in the history of British imperialism, and the British occupation of Iraq in 2003 recalls the British occupation of Egypt in 1883. ‘While declaring that they had been compelled to intervene, Mr Gladstone’s Government disclaimed all intention of establishing a Protectorate.’ Has not Mr Blaire’s Government adopted a similar disclaimer after declaring that it had been compelled to intervene? Forster quoted the dispatch of the British Foreign Secretary which states that ‘the position in which Her Majesty’s Government is placed towards His Highness imposes upon them the duty of giving advice [my emphasis] with the object of securing that the order of things to be established shall be of a satisfactory character and possesses the elements of stability and progress’. Is not this the same umbrella provided for the British presence in Iraq? With irony and sarcasm Forster comments on this use of dispatch after he quotes it, saying: ‘It is to the second of these two sentences that we appeal in extenuation of our continued occupation. We assert that it has been necessary for us to “advise” Egypt from 1883 to the present moment, and to enforce at times her adoption of our advice by dismissing her Ministers and the Governors of her provinces.’



7. Forster’s Politics in Said’s Culture and Imperialism: a Modern Debate

It is worth noting here that the same wording of ‘advice’ used in 1883 continues to be used in 2003. Hence the emphasis of ‘advice’ by Forster here and elsewhere in the essay seems to be ironically updated. 3. This is another example of the continuity of British imperialism extending from past to present as a stereotype resistant to any change brought about by time. The history of imperialism seems to repeat itself and the alliance between America and Britain in 1918 in occupying Egypt is quite reminiscent of the same alliance in 2003 in occupying Iraq. For complete identification between the two situations separated by over eight decades we need to substitute Blaire for Gladstone and Bush for Wilson and Iraqis for Egyptians: ‘I saw a small crowd of uneducated natives standing outside the American Consulate at Alexandria expecting the Consul to announce the independence of their country’, Forster records. Large numbers of natives in Iraq, uneducated and otherwise, march the streets in Baghdad daily asking for exactly the same thing. When Forster in the same section says, ‘We broke promises and made mistakes both before and during the war’ (World War I), he actually hits the point relevant to the most critical issue in the relationship between Arabs and Britain. Forster has no reservation in articulating the sins of the British Empire with courage and integrity. It is here where a demarcation line between Forster’s consistent stand against imperialism and T. E. Lawrence’s ambivilant attitude about the imperialist institution can be made. In all his ‘pillars of wisdom’ Lawrence was unable to sort out his sentimentality for his fellow Arabs (claimed as Lawrence of Arabia) and his obligation for his job. Hence his confusion with the ultimate issue he subjected to ‘hybrid truth’ (Bhabha’s words). Forster’s views are vividly expressed in this essay, and in many other writings he wrote to convey his attitude on the same issue. In this he stands alone from his other English fellow writers. Back to Forster’s ‘Note’ at the beginning of the pamphlet essay where, after expressing his reservation over drawing any conclusions, ‘leaving such a task to those who are better qualified’, he goes on to say ‘nor am I responsible for the recommendations set forth in the Introduction’. This is typical Forster who reminds us here of his ‘Note’ to Burra’s Introduction prompted almost by the same design of his desire to separate the novelist from the publicist as a precaution against confusing one with the other in the mind of the public. In both cases Forster anticipates that the subtlety of suggestion and the irony of detachment worked out in his image of politics will be overlooked by the reader who is used to a crude and abstract picture of politics. And Forster evidently does not want to exchange the visionary novelist for the flat publicist either in his fiction or in his non-fiction no matter how explicit he is in the latter mode of writing. But Forster’s strategy, if it is at all so, may not achieve its intentional design to protect the individualistic novelist from the stereotypical publicist. The practical result of Forster’s two notes does not seem to fall in proportion to original designs. In his note to Burra’s Introduction the



200 Notes, p. 175

interest, as has been seen above, shifted from the politics to the aesthetics of the novel. The note here seems to hinder the circulation of the pamphlet, otherwise why has not this very fine essay of Forster’s visionary politics been included in one of Forster’s three big volumes of non-fiction already published?

Appendix 2 1. One wonders whether Forster intended this letter to be a memoir, and this is suggested by the fact that the letter was written over a long span of time. Perhaps Forster meant by ‘book’ simply a record. Yet the reference is probably to ‘The Life to Come’ whose invocation is Mohammed El-Adle. 2. Some cross-cultural misunderstanding arises here on the part of Forster, whereas El-Adle means by ‘How many centuries ago did you buy them?’ that Forster should not be given the excuse to forget what he paid for the cakes. Forster misses El-Adle’s witty (sarcastic) remark and takes it to suggest that the cake was not fresh. 3. This can be read through El-Adle’s religious belief (he being a Moslem) in the hereafter where it is believed that people meet after death on the Judgement Day. One wonders whether Forster grasped it this way, or even if he bothered to do so. In any case it meant a lot to Forster, the agnostic, simply because it implies the perspective, or the illusion, of a vague union in the hereafter. 4. The ‘Home of Misery’ keeps recurring in the correspondence between Forster and El-Adle. It simply means a poor house, but the Egyptian Arabic coins this kind of idiom to twist the meaning of poverty and modesty into misery. Without grasping the original in Arabic, Forster seems to have been attracted by the translation El-Adle produces especially as he confuses home with house. In Egyptian Arabic it is a popular saying to refer to a modest abode as ‘beit al-faqre’ whose literal translation into English is ‘Home of Misery’; and a better translation may be ‘Home of the Wretched’. 5. Reference here is to the ritual of reciting verses from the Koran after burial. This is usually undertaken by amateurs who memorize the Koran and who are invited to the house of the departed to recite some of those verses chosen at random while people are gathering in the house of the departed to pay condolences, sitting in silence. It is not then strict prayers. The reciter (normally called sheikh) is given remuneration, being usually not well-to-do. 6. I have given myself the liberty of not including here parts of the letter dealing with sexual intercourse for two reasons. First, a descendent of Mohammed El-Adle whose name is Ahmad El-Adle said to me that neither Mohammed El-Adle nor his relatives would like this to be published at all. Second, Forster’s tone suggests this reservation, though not without subtlety. I regret the fact that I have to honour the wish of one or the other, or both.



Notes, pp. 184–86 201

Kirkpatrick, B. J., A Bibliography of E. M. Forster, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. McDowell, Frederick P. W., E. M. Forster: an Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him, DeKallo: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976.

Works by E. M. Forster Abinger Harvest and England’s Pleasant Land (Abinger), ed. Elizabeth Heine, London: André Deutch 1996. Alexandria: a History and a Guide, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961. Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, ed. Elizabeth Heine, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981. Aspects of the Novel (Abinger), ed. Oliver Stallybrass, London: Edward Arnold, 1974. Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner, Aldershot, Hampshire: Wildwood House, 1980. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, New York: Harvest HB, 1962. Government of Egypt, a pamphlet, London: Labour Research Department, 1919. Howards End, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. The Life to Come and Other Stories, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. The Longest Journey, ed. Elizabeth Heine, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. The Manuscript of a Passage to India (Abinger), ed. Oliver Stallybrass, London: Edward Arnold, 1978. A Passage to India (Abinger), ed. Oliver Stallybrass, London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Pharos and Pharillon, London: Hogarth Press, 1961. A Room with a View, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, vols 1 and 2, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank, London: Collins, 1983, 1985. Two Cheers for Democracy (Abinger), London: Edward Arnold, 1972.

Critical and related works Advani, Rukun, E. M. Forster as a Critic, London: Croom Helm, 1984. Allen, Richard, and Harish Trivedi (eds), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1900, London: Routledge, 2000. Ashcroft, Bill, and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said, London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 202



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Eliot, T. S., ‘The Literature of Politics’, with a Forward by Anthony Eden, a lecture given at the Conservative Political Centre, Crawly, Sussex, 1955, pp. 9–22. Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, London: Macmillan, 1922. Furbank, P. N., E. M. Forster: a Life (2 vols), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 1993. Goodyear, Sara Suleri, ‘Forster’s Imperial Erotic’, in Jeremy Tambling (ed.), E. M. Forster, London: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 151–70. Halls, Michael, ‘The Forster Collection at King’s’, Twentieth-Century Literature (E. M. Forster issue) (Summer/Fall 1985). Herz, Judith Scherer, A Passage to India: Nation and Narration, New York: Twayne, 1993. Herz, Judith Scherer, and Robert K. Martin (eds), E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations, London: Macmillan, 1982. Hopkirk, Peter, Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling’s Great Game, London: John Murray, 1996. Iqbal, Sheikh Muhammed, ‘The Poetry of Iqbal: The Secrets of the Self ’, review by E. M. Forster, The Atheneum, 29 (1920), pp. 803–4. Kermode, Frank, ‘Forster’, The Listener (18 January 1970), p. 833. Kipling, Rudyard, Kim, London: Macmillan, 1901. —— The Works of Rudyard Kipling, Introductory Essay by George Orwell, Ware, Hertford: Wordsworth Editions, 1994. Klingopulos, G. D., ‘E. M. Forster’s Sense of History and Cavafy’, Essays in Criticism, 8 (1958), pp. 156–65. Lago, Mary (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literature (E. M. Forster issue) (Summer/Fall 1985). Lago, Mary, E. M. Forster: a Literary Life, London: Macmillan, 1995. Leach, Edmund, The Essential Edmund Leach: Culture and Human Nature, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Longford, Elizabeth, A Pilgrimage of Passion: the Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, London: Weiden Feld and Nicolson, 1979. Meyers, Jeffrey, Fiction and the Colonial Experience, Ipswich: The Boydell Press, 1973. Milner, Alfred, England in Egypt, London: Edward Arnold, 1983. Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley (eds), Postcolonial Criticism, London: Longman, 1997. Noble, R. W., ‘ “Dearest Forster”–“Dearest Masood”: an East–West Friendship’, Encounter ( June 1981), pp. 61–72. Parrinder, Patrick, The Failure of Theory: Essay on Criticism and Contemporary Fiction, Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1987. Parry, Ann, The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992. Parry, Benita, ‘The Politics of Representation’, in John Beer (ed.), A Passage to India: Essays in Interpretation, Totowal, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1986, pp. 27–43. Richards, I. A., ‘A Passage to Forster: Reflections on a Novelist’, in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), E. M. Forster: a Collection of Critical Essays, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966, pp. 15–20.



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Royle, Nicholas, E. M. Forster, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999. Said, Edward W., Beginnings: Intention and Method, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, rept 1978. —— Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978. —— Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. —— ‘From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature and History’, Raritan 17, 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 1–21. —— Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London: Granta Books, 2001. —— The Edward Said Reader, ed. Mustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Robin, London: Granta, 2001, pp. 419–44. Salih, Tayeb, Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnson-Davies, London: Quartet, 1980. Shaheen, Mohammad, ‘Forster on Proust’, Times Literary Supplement (February 1974). —— ‘Forster’s Alexandria: the Transitional Journey’, in G. Das and John Beer (eds), A Human Exploration, London: Macmillan, 1979, pp. 79–88. —— ‘Forster’s Meredith: Meditation and Change’, Modern Fiction Studies (Summer 1983), pp. 240–4. —— ‘Forster’s Salute to Egypt’, Twentieth-Century Literature (April 1993), pp. 156–71. Stape, J. H. (ed.), E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections, London: Macmillan, 1993. Tambling, Jeremy (ed.), E. M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays, Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995. Trilling, Lionel, E. M. Forster, London: The Hogarth Press, 1944. —— ‘Forster and the Liberal Imagination’, in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), E. M. Forster: a Collection of Critical Essays, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966, pp. 71–9. Watt, Donald, ‘Mohammad El-Adle and A Passage to India’, Journal of Modern Literature (July 1983), pp. 311–26. White, Gertrude M., ‘A Passage to India: Analysis and Revaluation (1953)’, in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), E. M. Forster: A Passage to India, London: Macmillan, 1970. Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: a Reader, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheat, 1994. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, London: Chatto & Windus, 1958. —— The Long Revolution, London: Chatto & Windus, 1961. —— The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, St Albans: Paladin, 1974. —— Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London: Verso, 1979. —— Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, London: Verso, 1980. Young, Robert J. C., Postcolonialism: an Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.



Bibliography 205

Abraham, Karl, 100 Abrams, M. H., 15 Ahluwalia, Pal, 30 Alexandria, 62, 70, 79, see under Forster, E. M. (works), GE Ali, Mohammed, 59, 199n ‘dynasty of’, 59, 171, 172, see under Forster, E. M., works, GE Allen, Richard, 159, 160, 198n ‘Amritsar massacre’, 123, 160 Arabi, Ahmad (Pasha), 59, see under Forster, E. M. (works), GE The Arabian Nights (elf Lela wa Lela), 165, 185 Ashcroft, Bill, 30

Burra, Peter, ix, 4, 8, 113–33, 134, 158, 200n Butler, Samuel, 168

Badmington, Neil, 75 Bakshi, Parminder, 89 Balfour, Arthur James, 32, 126 Barger (Mrs), 12, 13, 69, 71 Barker, Frances, 18, 19 Bayoumi, Mustafa, 170 Beer, John, ix–x, 14, 32, 118, 119, 197n Beerbohm, Max, 32, 49 Belgion, Montegomry, 114, 115 Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire, 32 Bhabha, Homi, 18, 19, 20, 99–100, 105, 200n The Location of Culture, 19 Blake, William, 14 Blunt, Wilfrid, 58, 59, 62, 67, 68, 120, 196n The Earlier Diaries (1888–1900), 58, 196n ‘Boer War’, 122, 123, 165, 194n Bradbury, Malcolm, 91 Browning, Robert, 49 Buchan, John, 127, 133

Caine, Hall, 33 ‘Calvinism’, 45, 194n Cavafy, C. P., 64, 78–9 ‘The God abandons Antony’, 79 Césaire, Aimé, 1–3 Discourse on Colonialism, 1–3, 8, 14 Chamberlain, Joseph, 127 Chesterton, G. K., 32 Coleridge, Samuel, 14, 107 Colmer, John, 31, 116, 119, 120, 121, 126 Conrad, Joseph, x, 48, 86, 95, 96, 104, 108, 149, 150, 170, 195n Heart of Darkness, 38, 48, 85, 87, 146, 154, 189, 190 Lord Jim, 85 Nostromo, 38 Contemporary Review, 128 Crane, J., 120, 121 The Criterion, 114 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 60, see under Forster, E. M. (works), GE Davies, Tony, 197n Das, G. K., 118, 119, 197n Dey, C. D., 81, 197n Pilgrimage to Ajanta and Bagh, reviewed by Forster, 81, 197n Dickens, Charles, 123 Bleak House, 123 Great Expectations, 10 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 24, 25, 27, 78, 94, 95, 108 Disraeli, Benjamin, 68 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 189 The Brothers Karamazov, 189, 190

206



Index

Egyptian Gazette, 123 El-Adle, Mohammed, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 58, 64, 69, 70, 196n, 201n ‘El-Azhar’, 62, see under Forster, E. M. (works), GE Eldridge, C. C., 125, 126 ‘elf Lela wa Lela’ (The Arabian Nights), 165, 185 Eliot, George, 90, 157 Felix Holt, 90 Middlemarch, 189 Eliot, T. S., 40, 49, 50, 51, 53, 149, 165, 189, 190, 194n, 195n, 196n ‘Love Song of Alfred Prufrock’, 165 Ellem, Elizabeth, 32, 193n Empire British Empire, 47, 52, 58, 159 Roman Empire, 51 Essays in Criticism, 116, 197n Fanon, Frantz, 30, 75 The Wretched of the Earth, 75, 99 Forster, Clara Alice, 31, 193n Forster, E. M. (works) Alexandria: A History and Guide, 79 Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, 23 Aspects of the Novel (Clark Lectures), 4, 15, 58, 60, 80, 88, 89, 115, 128, 136, 138, 168, 189n Diary, 10, 105, 169 Government of Egypt (pamphlet) Allenby (General), 176, 178 Anglo-French Agreement (1904), 173 Caliphate, 183 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 171, 173 El-Azhar, 183 Gladstone, William Ewart, 172 Indian Native States, 174 Legislative Assembly, 173, 174, 180 The Mahdists, 180 Maxwell (General), 175 Milner, Alfred, Milner’s Mission, 177, 188 Mohammed Ali, 171, 172, 174

207

Nationalist Party, 172, 173 Paris Peace Conference, 175 Suez Canal, 172 Zagloul, 176, 177, 179, 180 ‘Hassan in England’, 23–30 Howards End, 15, 114, 121, 122, 123 account of imperialism in, 121 Indian Diary, 79 ‘Life to Come’, 11, 13, 201n The Longest Journey, 24 ‘Nottingham Lane’, 24 A Passage to India conventional form of, 136 illuminated by ‘Hassan in England’, 28 liberal humanism in, 75–112, 119 The mosque scene in, 71–3 not simple politics, 158 revision of, 163 suspended reconciliation in, 3, 156, 163, 164, 165 Pharos and Pharillon, 79, 86, 88 ‘Three Countries’, 90, 91, 93, 96, 111, 112, 113, 197n ‘Three Generations’, 15 Two Cheers for Democracy, 21 Where Angels Fear to Tread, 115 Frazer, J. G., 141 Furbank, P. N., 12, 70, 71, 92, 122 Gandhi, Mahatma, 12, 110, 150–3, 191 ‘Satyagraha’, 150–3 Gardner, Philip, 197n Gérome, Jean-Léon, 169 Goodyear, Sara Suleri, 6 Government of Egypt, see E. M. Forster (works) Greek (cultural tradition), 7, 72, 75, 78 Said’s assessment of, 7 Hardy, Thomas, 88 Jude the Obscure, 88 Heine, Elizabeth, 23, 24, 29 Hitchens, Robert, 169



Index

208 Index

imperialism, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 47, 50, 53, 57, 81, 89, 96, 105, 108, 119, 121, 122, 127, 133, 150, 158, see under Forster, E. M., works, HE ‘conquest of the earth’ as, 48: narration of, 161, 164 Ronny and 17 splitting notion of, 15 The Independent Review, 122 Iqbal, Sheikh Mohammed, 80, 197n The Secrets of the Self, 80, 197n: reviewed by Forster, 80 James, Henry, 116, 156 Joyce, James, 138, 149 Kermode, Frank, 102, 104, 113, 134, 138 Khedive, Ismail, 172 Kipling, Rudyard, 21, 24, 29, 31–57, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133, 194n, 195n Kim, 21, 42–5, 48, 52, 54, 125, 198n Letters of Travel, 38: Forster’s review of, 55, 193n Kirkpatrick, B. J., 31 Klingopulos, G. D., 197n Lago, Mary, 12, 70, 71, 89, 90 Laidlaw, James, 56 Lane, Edward, 131 Lawrence, D. H., 121, 149, 199n Lawrence, T. E., 67, 68, 130, 131, 132, 133, 200n Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 130, 131, 132, 198n Leach, Edmund, 56 The Listener, 113, 134, 138 Longford, Elizabeth, 68, 196n Loti, Pierre, 66, 169 Les Desenchantées, 66

Lubbock, Percy, 115 Ludolf, E. H., 64, 69 Malraux, André, 146, 148 La Voie Royale, 146 Mann, Thomas, 149 Masood, Syed Ross, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 23, 63, 70, 91, 92, 148, 149 McDowell, Frederick P., 114, 197n Meredith, George, 120, 137, 165, 167, 168 The Egoist, 166 Meyers, Jeffrey, 21, 54 Milner, Alfred, 62, 126, 197n, see under Forster, E. M., works, GE muddle, 81, 88, 94, 108, 110, 112 mysticism, 48, 94, 110 Napoleon’s expedition, 172 Ngugi wa Thiongo (James), 28 The River Between, 28 Nineteenth Century and After, 113, 126 Noble, R. W., 9, 12 Orabi (or Urabi) see Arabi Orwell, George, 125, 133 Burmese Days, 125 Parrinder, Patrick, 154 Parry, Ann, 194nn Parry, Benita, ix, 81, 82–4, 155 Pickthall, Marmaduke, 65, 66, 116, 196n The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, 196n The Valley of the Kings, 65 Veiled Women, 66 Porter, Bernard, 123 Pound, Ezra, 53, 149, 196n Prescott, Lynda, 125, 198n Proust, Marcel, 120, 138, 149, 167, 168 Remembrance of Things Past, 167 Raritan, 199n The Review of English Studies, 199n



Hobson, J. A., 123 Imperialism: a Study, 123 Hopkirk, Peter, 195n

209

Richards, I. A., 114, 115, 197n Robin, Andrew, 170

Trilling, Lionel, 15, 116, 121, 197n Trivedi, Harish, 199n

Said, Edward W., ix, x, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 15, 26, 27, 30, 44, 54, 82, 97, 98, 121, 126, 128, 129, 132, 169, 170, 191, 193n, 197n, 199n Beginnings, 161 Culture and Imperialism, ix, 8, 28, 30, 134–58, 169 Orientalism, 27, 30, 66, 67, 111, 128, 149, 160 Reflections on Exile, 149 Salih, Tayeb, 26, 28 Season of Migration to North, 26, 28 Seal, Anil, Emergence of Egyptian Nationalism, 195n Shaw, George Bernard, 32 Shelly, Percy, 14 Sontag, Susan, 133 Stape, J. H., 193n Stephen, Hugh-Jones, 56 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 49

‘Victorian fag-end’, Forster’s metaphor of himself as, 77 ‘Victorian optimism’, 77 Virgil, 47 Celebration of Roman Empire, 47

Tambling, Jeremy, 197n Thompson, Edward, 150, 160, 161 The Other Side of the Medal, 150, 159 The Reconstruction of India, 160 Tidrick, Kathryn, 68 Times, 62

Walton, J. Lawson, 128 Watt, Donald, 9, 11 Wedd, Nathaniel, 24 Wells, H. G., 56, 156 Outline of History, 56 Weybridge Literary Society, 6, 193n Forster’s Paper (1913) at, 6, 31, 32 Whitman, Walt, 93 ‘A Passage to India’, 93 Williams, Raymond, 154, 155, 156, 157 Culture and Society, 154 Wilson, Edmund, 53, 54 Wood, Nigel, 197n Woolf, Virginia, 149 Wordsworth, William, 38 Young, Robert J. C., 123 Zagloul, Sa’ad, 61, 196n Delegation of, 61, see under Forster, E. M., works, GE Zahra, M. A., 62, 63



Index

E.M. Forster and The Politics of Imperialism

forster-howardsend

forster-whereangelsfeartotread

forster-aroomwithaview

Japan and the Specter of Imperialism

Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of Imperialism

Forster, E.M. - Howard's End

The EM Algorithm and Extensions

The EM algorithm and extensions

The EM Algorithm and Extensions

The EM Algorithm and Extensions

Love 'Em or Leave 'Em

Imperialism and Social Classes

Culture and imperialism

Imperialism and Unequal Development

E.M. Forster (Critical Heritage)

Love 'Em or Leave 'Em

Culture and Imperialism

Imperialism and unequal development

Growth And Imperialism

Imperialism and Theatre

Imperialism and Resistance

Marxism and Imperialism

The New Imperialism

Imperialism and World Economy

E. M. Forster: the Novels (Analysing Texts)

Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Rim (The Politics of Language Series)

Islam :The Arab Imperialism

Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe

Hold 'Em

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination

E.M. Forster and The Politics of Imperialism

forster-howardsend

forster-whereangelsfeartotread

forster-aroomwithaview

Japan and the Specter of Imperialism

Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of Imperialism

Forster, E.M. - Howard's End

The EM Algorithm and Extensions

The EM algorithm and extensions

The EM Algorithm and Extensions

The EM Algorithm and Extensions

Love 'Em or Leave 'Em

Imperialism and Social Classes

Culture and imperialism

Imperialism and Unequal Development

E.M. Forster (Critical Heritage)

Love 'Em or Leave 'Em

Culture and Imperialism

Imperialism and unequal development

Growth And Imperialism

Imperialism and Theatre

Imperialism and Resistance

Marxism and Imperialism

The New Imperialism

Imperialism and World Economy

E. M. Forster: the Novels (Analysing Texts)

Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Rim (The Politics of Language Series)

Islam :The Arab Imperialism

Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe

Hold 'Em

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination

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