Colonialism In John Forster's A Passage To India

A Passage to India begins and ends by posing the question of whether it is possible for an Englishman and an Indian to ever be friends, at least within the context of British colonialism. Forster uses this question as a framework to explore the general issues of Britain’s political control of India on a more personal level, through the friendship between Aziz and Fielding.

At the beginning of the novel, Aziz is scornful of the English, wishing only to consider them comically or ignore them completely. Yet the intuitive connection Aziz feels with Mrs. Moore in the mosque opens him to the possibility of friendship with Fielding.

Through the first half of the novel, Fielding and Aziz represent a positive model of liberal humanism:

Three architectural structures – though one is naturally occurring – provide the outline for the book’s three sections: Mosque, Caves and Temple.

Forster presents the aesthetics of Eastern and Western structures as indicative of the differences of those particular cultures as a whole. In India, architecture is confused and formless: interiors blend into exterior gardens, earth and buildings compete with each other, and structures appear unfinished or drab. As such, Indian architecture mirrors the muddle of India itself and what Forster sees as the Indians’ characteristic inattention to form and logic.

Occasionally, however, Forster takes a positive view of Indian architecture. The mosque in Part I and the temple in Part III represent the promise of Indian openness, mysticism, and friendship. Western architecture is described during Fielding’s stop in Venice on his way to England. Venice’s structures, which Fielding sees as representative of Western architecture in general, honour form and proportion and complement the earth on which they are built. Fielding reads in this architecture the self-evident correctness of Western reason – an order that, he laments, his Indian friends would not recognize or