foster and empire

 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3199513?seq=1

E M Forster and the British Raj in a Passage to India Essay

E.M. Forster made a mark in the literature of his age through his last novel A

Passage to India (1924), which was entirely different from Forster's other novels in

that it dealt with the political occupation of India by the British, colonial

domination that ended soon after the publication of this novel. Forster, a liberal and

humanist in outlook emphasized the importance of love and understanding at the

personal level in this novel.

The novel dealt with the misunderstandings between the English and the Indians in the British India of 1910-20. The British East India Company, which had come to India in 1600, established themselves as the rulers of India. Though the natives revolted against the foreign rule during the Revolt of 1857, they were suppressed and India was made a colony of the British Empire in 1858.

A bureaucratic colonial system was established in India known as the British Raj with Queen Victoria as the Empress of India. The British Raj divided India into British India under the control of the British government and independent Indian states ruled by the Indian princes. The growth of nationalism made the Hindus and Muslims unite in a campaign of non-cooperation against the British Government. With the First World War, the power of Britain as an imperial nation decreased and led to the dissolution of the British Raj in India.

Many observations about race and culture in colonial India are threaded throughout the

novel. 

 A Passage to India is in some ways a sort of ethnography or an examination of the customs

of different cultures. On the English

side, many cultural forces affect the characters. One character  Ronny is naturally

goodhearted and

sympathetic, but his “public school mindset” and the influence of his English peers compel him

to become hardened and unkind to Indians. The other English expatriates view the

character, Adela, as strange and as if she is not one of them but above all

naïve for sympathizing with the Indians, and they even admit that they too felt the

same at first before realizing the “truth.” Overall the pervading culture of the English

in India is that one must adopt a racist, patronizing attitude to survive and thrive,

and that one’s very Englishness makes one superior to the Indians. Forster also

examines the English tendency to be rational without emotion, and what is

perceived as the English lack of imagination.