Role Of Colonialism In A Passage To India

Literature of the Margin, Dalit and the Subaltern came into existence as a result of the conflicts and clashes between the marginalized, ruled class and the ruling dominant class and as a strong reaction against the imperialistic tendencies, socio-cultural racial and political hegemony of the white British rulers across the entire Europe. The prevailing contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes inherent in the ties between the whites and the non-whites, between the upper caste and the lower one, and between the privileged and the underprivileged are at the core of the margin-centre perspective. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, published in 1924, brings into sharp focus the background of multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-religious landscape

M. Forster was published in 1924 – an era of pre-independence India when “Congress abandoned its policy of co-operation with the British Raj to follow Ghandi’s revolutionary call for non-violent revolution.” (Wolpert, 301). The novel presents a socio-cultural, religious and political scenario in which too many diversities, paradoxes and contradictions existed. The whole sub-continent was sharply divided along different lines. If viewed in this perspective of socio-cultural, polarization of the native Indians on the one extreme and the superiority complex of the British rulers on the other, the novel reflects a deepening gap between the East and the West. This gap – emotional, religious, cultural etc., is between the colonizer and the colonized, the dominant and the marginalized, the high and the low, the so-called superior race and the inferior one. As Aimé Césaire rightly observes that in a colonized country, there will be “no human contact, but relations in domination and submission.” (Césaire,

This section is symbolic of a new hope and a new awakening which brings the chaos of life in the order of human life. A Passage to India is a full expression of the paradox of man’s predicament and gives a new direction to man’s struggle and leads to the birth of a new hope that in spite of multiplicities of cultures, castes, traditions, superstitions in the Indian sub-continent, there can be a possibility of the margin-centre friendship. It also deals with the Hindu concept of the Absolute that man is a part of the Absolute and his chief goal is to unite with it. Metaphorically Lord Krishna stands for the Absolute and the Gopis for the individuals. Mrs. Moore serves as the central element or as a unifying link between the native Indians and the English. She realizes the truth and Adela suddenly revokes the charge against Aziz, Mrs. Moore plays a symbolic and mystic role. Thus the novel presents a paradoxical situation in which class and caste distinctions are dominant and cultural chauvinism of the English is deep-rooted – a typical situation of the colonized India in which no single person is absolute or adequate in his or her ideology in the pre-independence Indian context. It is a context in which one set of values is constantly neglected by another. Forster has offered an insight into the complex and contradictory situation in which