The Root Of Separation: A Postcolonial Study Of E.M. Forster And A Passage To India

Lionel Trilling, the canonical literary critic for Forster, says,'E.M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again, and who after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something.'Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on 1 January, 1879. He wrote altogether six novels, five of which were published in the early half of his life. He ceased to write novels at an early age when most of his contemporary British writers were just about approaching their prime. A Passage to India, the fifth of his novels, was published in June 1924, and is generally regarded as the greatest one. With the publication of A Passage to India, Forster achieved international recognition, and critics and commentators readily acknowledged his artistic talent.Since its publication in 1924, A Passage to India has been variously received in the West as an existential meditation and a liberal criticism of politics and life in British India. It has been interpreted as an anti-colonial text from the very beginning. In the 1970s, with the introduction and rapid development in postcolonial theories and criticism, literary critics started to analyse Forster's masterpiece from a fresh perspective—the fiction's place in the rhetoric of empire has been examined, and the novel has been read as another exercise in Orientalism. Praise for A Passage to India as a poised and sympathetic account of the subcontinent's landscape, history and culture which critics of older generations had offered, has since been repudiated by younger generations as emanating from a colonized consciousness.This paper intends to use postcolonial methods to study the colonial influence on Forster and his narrative and analyze the ambiguity and contradictory ideas of him. The thesis will mainly employ Edward Said'theory of Orientalism to interpret the colonial discourse reflected in the novel. Though anti-colonialism is also evident in the novel, the thesis is intended to expose Forster's subconscious revelation of his Empire awareness and Orientalist mentality which are the product of the deep-rooted Western collective unconsciousness of colonialism and Eurocentrism.This thesis consists of five parts:Part one serves as the introduction to Forster and his A Passage to IndiaChapter One aims at introducing the origin and development of postcolonialism—an approach to literary analysis that particularly concerns itself with literature written in English in formerly colonized countries, thus lays the theoretical foundation for the interpretation of E.M. Forster and A Passage to India.Chapter Two explores E.M. Forster's stance of anti-colonialism evident in the text and his identity as a liberal humanist and the limitations for being so.Chapter Three analyzes E.M. Forster's subconscious revelation of his Empire awareness and superiority when confronted with Indian culture, thus discovers the root cause that separates the two peoples.Part five serves as the conclusion to summarize the whole thesis.