I first read A Passage to India in high school, just a bit more than ten years ago. Upon rereading it, I kept discovering charming little words and phrases that fascinated me as a teenager and that have been “echoing” in the cave of my mind ever since without my being quite sure where I first heard them. For example there’s the friendly dialogue between Aziz and Mrs. Moore just before things deteriorate, in which Aziz discusses their first chance encounter in the Marabar Caves in chapter fourteen (“…how rough and rude I was and how good you were.” “And how happy we both were.”). Rummaging through high school papers recently, I discovered an essay titled “Broken Wings,” which I now recall is a reference to a bit of figurative language used to describe Aziz just after his arrest in chapter sixteen (“…he gasped, his wings broken.”).
The questions the book raises about colonialism (and my own family’s past in apartheid Africa) have stayed with me also. It is easy to resent the sort of old-fashioned British Imperialism that the book illustrates. However, Forster touches on challenges that are still very much with us. Still today, there is no easy answer for how two cultures should interact. The Anglo-Indians in the books throw “Bridge Parties,” intending to “bridge” the gulf between east and west, but, of course, this cannot be so easily done. Mr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz each begin the book with seeming earnestness and open-mindedness, complete willingness to interact civilly with an unfamiliar population, but in time their connection is strained, and the book ends with the two having a moment of friendly rivalry before parting. Here we see another phrase (the very last sentence of the book) that has haunted my memory “…the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House…they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’” Except I remembered it wrong until I checked the phrase once in college near graduation. I had in mind “The Sky said, ‘No, not yet.” As if it were God Himself who had forbid friendship between east and west (not “the palace, the birds” as Forster implies), which left me with the question, “Well, God, how about now?”
The book is nuanced in its depiction of westerners, and it becomes difficult to say exactly how Miss Quested, who began so well-intentioned it seemed, went wrong. Forster describes Miss Quested as erring in that she “wanted to see India, not Indians…” (elsewhere “seeing India” is described by the narrator as “a form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it.”). She attends “Bridge Parties” in which Anglo-Indians intend to bridge the gulf between East and West. Miss Quested embodies, it seems, the cavalier attitude of westerners who imagine that the two cultures can be blended in such a way as to benefit both parties—the disadvantages of the arrangement upon the native Indians go unnoticed. Instead, she is drawn to an India for capitalists and sight-seers; she imagines an India united in religion, a “Universal Brotherhood,” which Forster scoffs at as something to be “dreamed of,” but which “as soon as it was put into prose… became untrue.”
It becomes difficult to say exactly what interaction between cultures A Passage to India might endorse. The answer, of course, is not an isolation of cultures, certainly not segregation. But Forster firmly rebukes the kind of dramatic overlapping—conquest, under the smiling guise of civility—that the book’s British characters mean to impose. India remains a land “which the West can disturb, but never acquire.”
No comments:
Post a Comment