E.M Forster's Oriental

 E.M Forster was a 27 year old Cambridge graduate when he was hired as the Latin tutor for a 17 year old Indian Muslim lad whose father had been a judge and whose grandfather had founded Aligarh Muslim University. The boy was a bit bumptious and preferred tickling his tutor to studying. It would be a feather in his cap to convert an Englishman to the true faith but to dominate, or merely patronize, an older man was an acceptable consolation prize. This involved saying this like-"My dear Forster, all Englishmen are Christians. It is very sad. The English are a tragic race. I feel deeply sorry for them. I would like to help them, but they are too numerous; there is nothing to be done.' The obvious riposte would be to say that Indians talk nonsense. This makes it easy for foreigners to rule them though they are too numerous to count. Incidentally, how much sand do you actually have in your vagina? Would it be enough to tempt T.E Lawrence to pitch his tent there? If not, perhaps you might try talking in a less effeminate manner. 

It appears that Ross Masood believed his own father, who suffered alcoholism and mental illness, may have been homosexual. His own family blamed an English friend of his for leading him into wicked ways. Indeed, he had named his son 'Ross' after this friend.

Ross Masood explained his rebuffing of Forster as involving his horror at 'de minoritate patris sui’- the 'minorism' (homosexuality) of his father. Whatever the truth of the matter, the British government was concerned that Ross be a worthy heir to his grandfather. For some reason they did not spell out, they didn't want Ross to go to Cambridge, as his father had done, but to go to Oxford instead. Sadly, though serving briefly and brilliantly as Vice Chancellor of Aligarh, factionalism in the College forced Ross out. He formed a close friendship with Iqbal but died young. As for his friendship with Forster, alas!, it was counterproductive to the great cause to which he and his grandfather had dedicated themselves to. 

Masood's good turn to his former tutor was to encourage him to write a novel set in India. Sadly, that novel showed the Indian Muslim in a very poor light. Forster did for them the complete reverse of what T.E Lawrence did for the Arab Muslim. The Indian Muslim was lazy, bigoted, and lived in a fantasy world. More even then the English, they were an alien element in India. Political power must pass to the Hindus.  The Arab Muslim had his faults. But they were the faults of a virile, if somewhat mercenary, tribe. David Lean would make a great film on Lawrence and his Arab friends. Lean's 'Passage' is beautiful to look at. But, as Ghalib had said, he depicts an Eden with no Adam in it. There are some old women and there are some men who are old women or who are on their way to becoming old women. There are no battles. There is merely a Court case which is badly conducted. In 'Lawrence', Alec Guinness portrays the dignity and diplomatic skills of the subtle Arab Sheikh. In 'Passage' he hams it up as Peter Sellers. The lowest blow is that Aziz is played by a Bengali Hindu. During Forster's own life-time, Zia Mohyeddin had taken that part in the stage and the BBC versions of the novel. 

I don't know if the young Ross Masood could be said to have led on the older man. What is certain is that Hell hath no fury like a homosexual scorned. Also, don't tell an Englishman he has an Oriental sensibility. Call him the Queen of Sheba and leave it at that. Otherwise he will create a fiction in which you transfer the love you denied him to his own, very ancient, mother. 

Early on in Forster's novel, Aziz gives the following definition of an Oriental. He had just met an elderly widow who listened sympathetically as he poured out his tale of woe to her. He exclaims

“You understand me, you know what others feel. Oh, if others resembled you!”

Rather surprised, she replied: “I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them.”

“Then you are an Oriental.”

The widow is English. It appears some English people are 'oriental' because they like some people and dislike others as if by instinct. However, in the Holy Quran, Muslims are warned against friendship (which is not the same as liking) even with other 'people of the Book'. 5:51 'Oh, believers, do not take the Jews or Christians as friends. They are but one another’s friends. If any one of you take them for his friends, he surely is one of them. Allah will not guide the evildoers.'

Interestingly, by the end of the Book, Mrs. Moore, the elderly widow, seems to have lost her Christian faith. It is suggested that, if, in limbo, her spiritual difficulties are dispelled, it is through some Hindu theistic ritual performed by the eccentric Prof. Godbole. Forster, it seems, had the certainty of being in the right which the Edwardians had inherited from the Victorians. There is a story about the Indian philosopher Surendra Nath Dasgupta who 'read a paper on the epistemology of Vedanta to a session of the Aristotelian Society in London. Moore’s only comment was: ‘I have nothing to offer myself. But I am sure that whatever Dasgupta says is absolutely false.’ The audience of British philosophers in attendance roared with laughter at the devastating ‘argument’ Moore had levelled against this Indian philosophical system.' Prior to the Great War, it was possible to believe that God was an Englishman and though the English could offer no explanation as to why this was so, they could be sure that anything foreigners thought or believed was absolutely false. 

Forster appears to have been influenced by Lowes Dickinson's jaundiced view of India- the Chinese were good chaps, the Japanese were a fine people, but the Indians were utterly shite- and he does sometimes use the term 'Oriental' in the racialist manner of the period. This is a typical expression of it.

Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.

The British in India were very hospitable to each other. Indeed, as Forster would show, in a crisis, hospitality triumphed over notions of hierarchy. But such hospitality never involved 'intimacy'. Forster was a classicist. He knew the ancient Greek code of Xenia. There were mutual obligations between Host and Guest. But baring your soul was neither required nor greatly desired. Still, it might happen after strong drink was taken. In that case, the polite thing was to pretend to have forgotten the entire matter the next morning. 

What Forster is actually commenting on is the desire of those lower down in the social hierarchy to play host to those of a superior station. There is an obvious materialist motive to such tuft-hunting hospitality. Aziz desires 'nadims' (boon companions) but munadamah has nothing to do with hospitality. If you are wealthy, people will come to you for food and shelter while creating bonds of munadamah among themselves. If the rich turn niggardly, they may have to resort to the Tavern or the Tea Shop. 

I suppose, even today, an African or European visiting India may be annexed by a noveau riche family. They will be paraded around to show their neighbours that the family is connected to Yurop Amrika, Afrika, Jaapaan. But we find this type of one-upmanship involving hospitality to the alien more acutely in Benson's Mapp & Lucia stories where a dark skinned Indian Yogi is briefly lionized. Sadly, the fellow turns out to be a low caste curry-cook. He flees when he hears the wife of a former Governor of Madras is due to visit.

Aziz was educated in India, but his friend Habibullah is a Cambridge man, just like Forster. Yet, after Adela recants her testimony, he remains unsympathetic to her. Let us see what Forster has to say about a Cantabrian Oriental- like his friend Ross Massood.

 Miss Quested had not appealed to Hamidullah.

Nobody liked her. Yet, she is the purest acolyte, in Forster's fiction, of what Keynes called G.E Moore's religion which had so influenced Russell, Forster and the Bloomsbury set. 'It was not, to my mind, an attractive creed because it 'closely followed the English puritan tradition of being chiefly concerned with the salvation of our own souls.... There was not a very intimate connection between "being good" and "doing good" ... But religions proper, as distinct from modern "social service" pseudo-religions, have always been of that character; and perhaps it was a sufficient offset that our religion was altogether unworldly -- with wealth, power, popularity or success it had no concern whatever, they were thoroughly despised.'

It is easy to despise what you have a sufficiency of. Adela, like Forster himself, had just enough money not to be obliged to take uncongenial work. 

If she had shown emotion in court, broke down, beat her breast, and invoked the name of God, she would have summoned forth his imagination and generosity—he had plenty of both. But while relieving the Oriental mind, she had chilled it, with the result that he could scarcely believe she was sincere, and indeed from his standpoint she was not.

For Fielding, she is sincere. For the 'Oriental', Hamidullah, she is not.  Why? It turns out, in Forster's muddled mind, this had something to do with the Islamic rejection of Incarnation. 

For her behaviour rested on cold justice and honesty; she had felt, while she recanted, no passion of love for those whom she had wronged. Truth is not truth in that exacting land unless there go with it kindness and more kindness and kindness again, unless the Word that was with God also is God.

 So, a Christian country can be content with 'cold justice and honesty'. Muslims however don't have an incarnate Lord and Pantocrator and thus must have truth sugar coated in kindness and then dipped in the honey of yet more kindness before being covered in the chocolate of a kindliness specially imported from Belgium. 

But Islam has a Khalilullah (Abraham as the friend of God) just as much as it has a Hamidullah (Praise- God Barebone). 

And the girl’s sacrifice—so creditable according to Western notions—was rightly rejected, because, though it came from her heart, it did not include her heart. A few garlands from students was all that India ever gave her in return.

Her fiancee's  Native Christian servant did try to blackmail her by alleging she had an affair with Fielding. She didn't pay him off and so he blackguarded her to her fellow passengers and thus ruined her voyage home. Still, Adela is the one character in the novel who succeeds in getting the fuck out of India. As Mahatma Gandhi was telling the Viceroy at that time, nothing good comes of the mixing of the Europeans and the Asiatics. They merely take on each others' worst qualities. But this was also B.V. Keskar's point about the manner in which Muslim musicians had destroyed the pure, spiritual, Hindu, Shastric, music. Taking over A.I.R, he would ensure that Godbole's successors would learn to sing Tukaram's hymns in a purer style. What had previously been muddled would now be magisterial. As for the English Courts and Colleges and Hospitals and Houses of Parliament, the Hindus would quietly take them over and impose Sanskrit names on everything. The English language too would be Indianized. As Forster would complain, it had become unintelligible to the Englishman. 

Returning to the question of who is Forster's Oriental, we find it is, it can only be, Mrs. Moore. Aziz is a Muslim and Islam is an international religion- albeit one which, like the Brits, might have to pack its bags and clear out of India. Habibullah is a Cambridge educated barrister. Indeed, like Forster, he may have been an Apostle.  He will end up a High Court Judge and write concurring or dissenting judgments alongside Brother Judges named Burton or Turton. Mrs. Moore is oriental. She dies in that Red and incarnadine Sea which the Jews crossed dry-shod with Moses. 

Released from prison, Aziz says of her-

“I have seen her but three times, but I know she is an Oriental.”

“You are so fantastic. . . . Miss Quested, you won’t treat her generously; while over Mrs. Moore there is this elaborate chivalry. Miss Quested anyhow behaved decently this morning, whereas the old lady never did anything for you at all, and it’s pure conjecture that she would have come forward in your favour, it only rests on servants’ gossip. Your emotions never seem in proportion to their objects, Aziz.”

If emotions are kept in proportion to their objects then Benthamite Utilitarianism is a good enough theory. Even if 'higher' emotions represent Moore's 'intrinsic values' and are 'non-natural' (i.e. not reducible to objects), still, because proportionality is maintained, there is 'correlation' (or what we now call Granger Causality) such that, for all practical purposes, Utilitarianism of a sufficiently perspicacious type is a true theory.  

“Is emotion a sack of potatoes, so much the pound, to be measured out? Am I a machine? 

Aziz is expressing the disquiet felt by Moore & Russell at Victorian Utilitarianism. Were they able to overcome it? Keynes came to the view that, though Moore's religion, as a private matter, had inoculated the Apostles against Marxism, it failed as a public philosophy. 

One reason for this is because emotions can be 'non-rival' and 'non-excludable'- just like public goods. This takes us into the theory of externalities and preference revelation etc. Keynes's own contribution to Economics to point out there was a 'fallacy of composition'. Normally, it is good to save money. But if everybody saves money, there will be too little spending. Incomes will fall. Everybody is worse off. 

Aziz says 'I shall be told I can use up my emotions by using them, next.”

Having an emotion is 'economic' in the sense that there is an opportunity cost. But you can broaden or restrict the scope of your emotion 'for no extra charge'. 

“I should have thought you could. It sounds common sense. You can’t eat your cake and have it, even in the world of the spirit.”

But that which is spiritual, or- indeed- epistemic may be non-rival and non-excludable. If Russell learns Einstein's theory, it does not stop anyone, or everyone, from learning it.  Economic theory suggests that 'public goods' will be undersupplied by the market. This is a matter for public policy. There is a collective action problem or opportunity. Could Moore's Religion help? No. It was useless. In the Thirties, some who adhered to Forster's philosophy of 'only connect' also decided, as he had counselled, to betray their country rather than betray their friends- except, there were no friends. There was only the KGB and, behind it, the Gulag. 

“If you are right, there is no point in any friendship;

i.e. the Sufi conception of God as the friend, or the practices of the 'Society of Friends' (Quakers),  are egregious.

it all comes down to give and take, or give and return, which is disgusting, and we had better all leap over this parapet and kill ourselves.

God forbids suicide.  

Is anything wrong with you this evening that you grow so materialistic?”

Something was wrong. Mrs. Moore was dead. 

“Your unfairness is worse than my materialism.”

Injustice is indeed worse than acquisitiveness.  

“I see. Anything further to complain of?”

Complaint- 'shikva'- is a sign of intimacy. You complain if your wife ceases to complain about you. She says 'shut up!' and puts the baby in your lap and goes for her bath. Baby bites your nose. You are happy. There is a new tyrant (zalim) in your life of whom you can complain when he is asleep and thus deaf to entreaty. 

He was good-tempered and affectionate but a little formidable. Imprisonment had made channels for his character, which would never fluctuate as widely now as in the past.

Would that were true. Forster is in love with Aziz and will make him caper about in antic fashion till the end of the book.  I suppose, Forster had heard G.E Moore singing Ich grolle nicht. Sir Syed Ross Masood, even when transformed into the lower middle class Dr. Aziz, remains the zalim whose heart is harder than a diamond. Ghalib could have taken up the conceit from Heine. What makes them different  is the passion and seriousness Schumann brings to the lyric. Otherwise, as both Ghalib & Heine well knew, there are few maiden hearts upon which a 20 carat diamond ring can't inscribe a pledge of troth. 

“Because it is far better you put all your difficulties before me, if we are to be friends for ever. You do not like Mrs. Moore, and are annoyed because I do;

You are jelly. That means you love me. But we can all love each other. Did you know 'raqib' which means 'rival', when applied to God, actually means 'protector'? The existence of the rival spurs us on. Otherwise, we would grow complacent and take love for granted.  

however, you will like her in time.”

This is the pure Aligarh creed explained to me by a young Banker in 1982. Two people become friends. Then each seeks one more friend. Now there are four friends. Soon there will eight and then 16 and, by and by, the whole world will be connected through friendship.  

When a person, really dead, is supposed to be alive, an unhealthiness infects the conversation.

Save when we hear 'Christ is risen!; and reply 'He is risen indeed!'  

Fielding could not stand the tension any longer and blurted out: “I’m sorry to say Mrs. Moore’s dead.”

Two months later Godbole would see her. Perhaps she is in limbo or what the Muslims call 'barzakh' and the Hindus 'antarabhava'. Godbole believes he is the instrument by which her Spiritual difficulties are dispelled.  

But Hamidullah, who had been listening to all their talk, and did not want the festive evening spoilt, cried from the adjoining bed: “Aziz, he is trying to pull your leg; don’t believe him, the villain.”

“I do not believe him,” said Aziz; he was inured to practical jokes, even of this type.

Fielding said no more. Facts are facts, and everyone would learn of Mrs. Moore’s death in the morning. But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality. An experience of his own confirmed this. Many years ago he had lost a great friend, a woman, who believed in the Christian heaven, and assured him that after the changes and chances of this mortal life they would meet in it again. Fielding was a blank, frank atheist, but he respected every opinion his friend held: to do this is essential in friendship. And it seemed to him for a time that the dead awaited him, and when the illusion faded it left behind it an emptiness that was almost guilt: “This really is the end,” he thought, “and I gave her the final blow.” He had tried to kill Mrs. Moore this evening, on the roof of the Nawab Bahadur’s house;

Why?  Aziz and the Indians seemed to be attributing Adela's recantation to Mrs. Moore's spiritual influence. But, that is the picture Forster himself conveys to his readers. Adela has an echo ringing in her ears. When she says 'maybe Aziz didn't do it' it eases. Mrs. Moore seems to understand the nature of the echo. She flatly declares that Aziz didn't do it. Her son bundles her out of the country lest she be called as a witness. The Superintendent of Police (who ought not to be prosecuting the case because a senior barrister was appearing for the Defence) made the mistake of mentioning Mrs. Moore. This meant the Defence could demand her appearance. The crowd takes up the demand 'Esmiss Esmoore!' Hearing this chant enables Adela to see more clearly, with her mind's eye, what actually happened. She recants and the echo disappears. 

Forster's character, Fielding, can't know what the author has told the reader. It appears he thinks that 'killing Mrs. Moore' will cause Aziz to think less of her and more of Adela. He will see that it was Adela who had restored his freedom. The problem here is that she- by virtue of belonging to the Occidental community- was the one who had put him in jail. This was a case where the Orientals had to stick together just as the Occidentals stuck together. Mrs. Moore, in this case, is Oriental. What of Fielding? He too affirmed Aziz's innocence and had to resign from the Club. Had the trial had a different outcome, his career in India would have been over. Instead, because Aziz was exonerated, his stock had risen. Yet, because he remains in India (as, sadly, Mrs. Moore's other two children now seem destined to do) his fate is to become more and more Occidental. Why? Godbole's school is a sham. The Indians are hopeless. The White Man must keep carrying his burden even if, ultimately, it crushes him. 

but she still eluded him, and the atmosphere remained tranquil. Presently the moon rose—the exhausted crescent that precedes the sun—and shortly after men and oxen

and Civil Servants and School Masters 

began their interminable labour, and the gracious interlude, which he had tried to curtail, came to its natural conclusion.

The natural conclusion of the 'Sahib's' life was to return to a penurious retirement in England where the butcher and the baker would show him scant respect. 

Forster, thankfully, wasn't a Sahib. But, like Moore, he seems to have believed that what one knew must always accord with one's belief. Perhaps there really is an 'Oriental' type of mind capable of affirming 'Moorean sentences'.

Aziz did not believe his own suspicions—better if he had, for then he would have denounced and cleared the situation up.

Forster had shown White officials operating on the basis of suspicions which they did not themselves believe. Why? Their behaviour was strategic. Having a suspicion and it being common knowledge you have that suspicion alters outcomes. This was certainly the case for the Boarding School Master. Kipling and others have suggested that suspicion of 'beastliness' could itself create that which it sought to detect and curb. Boys who would not have thought of buggering each other might take up that hobby if the beaks keep banging on about it.     

Suspicion and belief could in his mind exist side by side.

As could morality and spirituality and a sense of humour. Fielding, however, tells Aziz that he himself is absolutely devoid of morals. Such statements provoke suspicion. Indeed, the beak who pretends to be friendly with the boys, may well be spying on them. 

They sprang from different sources, and need never intermingle.

This is always the case. Suspicion is aroused where things appear different from what they ought to be. We start considering why this is the case and formulate hypothesis. The one in which we place most credence is our belief. But beliefs can be strategic or imperative.  

Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady,

This is paranoia. It can afflict a person of any background.  

that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend.

Westerners, like Easterners, understand paranoia well enough. I suppose an alterity can become the object of intense suspicion even in the absence of any mental illness. What is more typical of paranoia, as Freud observed, is to believe one you love is trying to kill you. Perhaps, this is because that person has been replaced by a machine. I suppose the Moorean religion was a defence against our own ipseity being  replaced by a machine such that we do an injury to our friends. 

Apart from Mrs. Moore, there is one other 'Oriental' in the novel. It is her younger son- who seems a bit of a moon-calf. Aziz has been unkind to him. Abruptly, he says-

“Don’t you think me unkind any more?”
“No.”
“How can you tell, you strange fellow?”
“Not difficult, the one thing I always know.”
“Can you always tell whether a stranger is your friend?”

“Yes.”
“Then you are an Oriental.”

Some cats know whom they can trust to look after them. But not all such cats are Persian or Siamese.

He unclasped as he spoke, with a little shudder. Those words—he had said them to Mrs. Moore in the mosque in the beginning of the cycle, from which, after so much suffering, he had got free. Never be friends with the English! Mosque, caves, mosque, caves. And here he was starting again. He handed the magic ointment to him.

He had promised to return it to its owner but ends up giving it away. 

“Take this, think of me when you use it. I shall never want it back. I must give you one little present, and it is all I have got;

it wasn't his 

you are Mrs. Moore’s son.”

“I am that,” he murmured to himself; and a part of Aziz’ mind that had been hidden seemed to move and force its way to the top.

“But you are Heaslop’s brother also, and alas, the two nations cannot be friends.”

Heaslop may have ended up a Judge. Some such were asked to stay on after Independence. Why? They were trusted not to be partial to those of their own caste or creed. But this was only because no such people were left in India. 

“I know. Not yet.”

“Did your mother speak to you about me?”

“Yes.” And with a swerve of voice and body that Aziz did not follow he added, “In her letters, in her letters. She loved you.”

“Yes, your mother was my best friend in all the world.” He was silent, puzzled by his own great gratitude. What did this eternal goodness of Mrs. Moore amount to? To nothing, if brought to the test of thought. She had not borne witness in his favour, nor visited him in the prison, yet she had stolen to the depths of his heart, and he always adored her. “This is our monsoon, the best weather,” he said, while the lights of the procession waved as though embroidered on an agitated curtain. “How I wish she could have seen them, our rains. Now is the time when all things are happy, young and old. They are happy out there with their savage noise, though we cannot follow them; the tanks are all full so they dance, and this is India. 

It is a season. All countries are India in that respect. What makes it unique is Hinduism.

Fielding says to Aziz-

“I can’t explain, because it isn’t in words at all, but why do my wife and her brother like Hinduism, though they take no interest in its forms? They won’t talk to me about this. They know I think a certain side of their lives is a mistake, and are shy. That’s why I wish you would talk to them, for at all events you’re Oriental.”

Forster took passage to India thrice but Hindu India eluded him on the first two occasions. The third time was in 1945. He attended a PEN conference in Jaipur and rubbed shoulders with Nehru and Sarojini Naidu and Radhakrishnan- all of whom were Brahmin. Churchill had warned against Brahmin hegemony in 1931. The thing had never been elusive. It was just something better left unpursued unless, obviously, you happened to be George Harrison and Ravi Shankar was happy to teach you to play the sitar. 

After the trial, Fielding says he hopes Aziz will write poetry of a new type

“I was a child when you knew me first. Everyone was my friend then. The Friend: a Persian expression for God. But I do not want to be a religious poet either.”

Mithra is the Sanskrit word for Friend. Mithra is also the Indo-Iranian God of contracts. There was a temple to Mithra in London in Roman times. 

“I hoped you would be.”

“Why, when you yourself are an atheist?”

“There is something in religion that may not be true, but has not yet been sung.”

“Explain in detail.”

“Something that the Hindus have perhaps found.”

“Let them sing it.”

“Hindus are unable to sing.”

Yet, Godbole sang as G.E. Moore had sung. Still, 'Deccani Brahmins' like Keskar and Paluskar, ensured that Indian music would become more strictly 'Shastric'- that is orthodox and Hindu. 

Ray Monk, the biographer of Wittgenstein, met Frances Partridge- who was invariably described as “the last surviving member of the Bloomsbury Group”-  in the 1980s.  He tells us that' One day, the conversation got onto the Bloomsbury Group’s veneration of GE Moore and I confessed that I had never understood why Moore was regarded as a great philosopher. In response, she leaned across the table, placed her hand gently on mine and said, “Well, you see, my dear, he sang so beautifully!”

Forster describes Godbole's song thus- 

His thin voice rose, and gave out one sound after another. At times there seemed rhythm, at times there was the illusion of a Western melody.

Western music is harmonic though it permits the illusion of melody. Indian music is melodic though it can be harmonized easily enough. What Western ears may find baffling is 'pitch'.  

But the ear, baffled repeatedly, soon lost any clue, and wandered in a maze of noises, none harsh or unpleasant, none intelligible. It was the song of an unknown bird.

Not really. Outside the Western musical canon, pitch ratios aren't restricted to a major and a minor scale. The bird is familiar enough. It has merely been excluded from the regimented choir.  

Only the servants

the natives 

understood it. They began to whisper to one another. The man who was gathering water chestnut came naked out of the tank, his lips parted with delight, disclosing his scarlet tongue. The sounds continued and ceased after a few moments as casually as they had begun—apparently half through a bar, and upon the subdominant.

In other words, the raag ends on madhyama svara. But which one is it? Kalyan? 

Godbole explains his song- 

 “I will explain in detail. It was a religious song. I placed myself in the position of a milkmaiden. I say to Shri Krishna, ‘Come! come to me only.’ The god refuses to come. I grow humble and say: ‘Do not come to me only. Multiply yourself into a hundred Krishnas, and let one go to each of my hundred companions, but one, O Lord of the Universe, come to me.’ He refuses to come. This is repeated several times. The song is composed in a raga appropriate to the present hour, which is the evening.”

“But He comes in some other song, I hope?” said Mrs. Moore gently.

“Oh no, he refuses to come,” repeated Godbole, perhaps not understanding her question. “I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come.”

Both Godbole and Aziz fall ill after this soiree. When his friends come to visit him, Aziz provides them with the Islamic equivalent of the Hindu chant.

He held up his hand, palm outward, his eyes began to glow, his heart to fill with tenderness. Issuing still farther from his quilt, he recited a poem by Ghalib.

Who said Hind is an Eden with no Adam in it. 

It had no connection with anything that had gone before, but it came from his heart and spoke to theirs. They were overwhelmed by its pathos; pathos, they agreed, is the highest quality in art; a poem should touch the hearer with a sense of his own weakness, and should institute some comparison between mankind and flowers.

There are none such in Ghalib.  

The squalid bedroom grew quiet; the silly intrigues, the gossip, the shallow discontent were stilled, while words accepted as immortal filled the indifferent air. Not as a call to battle, but as a calm assurance came the feeling that India was one; Moslem; always had been; an assurance that lasted until they looked out of the door. Whatever Ghalib had felt, he had anyhow lived in India, and this consolidated it for them: he had gone with his own tulips and roses,

Ghalib says only a few manifested as tulips and roses. What other faces there may have been remain the close secret of the dust. 

but tulips and roses do not go.

Yes, they do. They are seasonal and, in any case, weeds and deserts encroach 

And the sister kingdoms of the north—

the West 

Arabia, Persia, Ferghana, Turkestan—stretched out their hands as he sang, sadly, because all beauty is sad, and greeted ridiculous Chandrapore, where every street and house was divided against itself, and told her that she was a continent and a unity.

Ghalib was a pensioner of the British. The Mutiny had been disastrous for him.  

The poem had done no “good” to anyone, but it was a passing reminder, a breath from the divine lips of beauty, a nightingale between two worlds of dust. Less explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved. 

Mohammad Ali Jauhar, the younger of the Ali brothers of Khilafat fame, would quote Browning- still very fashionable at Oxford in the 1890s- at even greater length. I suppose, had he buttonholed Forster, he'd given him an earful of Browning's 'Fears & Scruples' about the unseen friend whose letters are so beautiful but who might be- what? - not 'busied with our betters' but, more humiliatingly, just God. The Orient is merely where dawn strikes the horizon. When beheld, it is a reminder, that elsewhere there is darkness. Forster's book came out four or five years after Spengler's  Der Untergang des Abendlandes;  "The Going-Under of the Evening Lands". Meanwhile Ind's night was 'aabastan'- pregnant- with what Faiz would call the 'Night gnawed' Dawn- of a parturition that was Partition or as the Mahatma said, more of a vivisection than a Caesarean birth. With that, England could be done with Orientalism though no doubt, it needed wogs- more particularly those with Medical degrees- for its National Health Service. Nothing wrong with that at all. 

 

 

Was Adela Quested 'Post Impressionist'?

 Roger Fry- who had introduced 'Post Impressionism' to the Brits in 1910 with his exhibition titled 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists'- painted this portrait, the very next year, of, his, rather slovenly buttoned up, fellow Cambridge Apostle, E.M Forster. 

Between October 1912 and April 1913, Forster was in India- initially staying with Syed Ross Masood, an Oxonian, with whom Forster was in love. 

I should mention that a portion of literary England, at about this time, was deeply steeped in Persian poetry of a Sufi, mystical, type. Here, passionate, albeit Platonic, love between the adept and the aspirant- or even between two equals on the Sufi path- helped preserve the impassability of God while endowing a purely spiritual pursuit with colour, emotion and romance. 

Forster, like other members of the Bloomsbury group, revered G.E Moore who held that 

'the idea of a perfect activity of will and intellect, without any emotional faculty to take pleasure in their activities, seems to me absolutely incompatible with happiness.' This meant that to 'only connect' and thus maintain personal relationships grounded on a tender mutuality and candid reciprocity, was to advance ethically- i.e. have a better ethos- without your lived world turning into something arid or abstract. Impressions could be valued for their emotional content even if there was something deeper, more impersonal or hostile to individuality, beneath appearances and the moods in which they were apprehended.

Sir Syed Ross Masood was a descendant of the Ninth Shia Imam and was fully occupied in advancing his grandfather's scheme for spreading modern education and thus re-energising the Muslims of India. As we can see in the picture below, he was a man born to command and to achieve great things.

Some have suggested that Dr. Aziz has some similarities to Ross Masood. But Masood had been educated in England and was at ease with the English. I suppose, it is possible that he might ask if a particular young lady was 'Post Impressionist'- i.e. so ugly as to tempt the brush of a Van Gogh in the same manner that Forster had tempted Fry's brush.

There was another question Moore had raised in a paper he read out to the Apostles in 1894- 'how far in friendship it is necessary that one party should be active (erastés) and the other passive (erómenos), and what effects on the happiness of each follow from this activity or passivity – in sodomy or otherwise; this shall be afterwards discussed.' 

This is not a question I can myself shed any light. However, for the Sufi, it is a question which was settled by Ahmed Gazzali who pointed out that Sultan Mahmud took the first step on the path of love by becoming the slave of his slave Ayaz. This love-dialectic was the reverse of that of the Hegelian Master & Slave. I am surprised no contemporary of Forster's pointed this out.  

“You can talk to Miss Quested about the Peacock Throne if you like—she’s artistic, they say.”

“Is she a Post Impressionist?”

At an earlier period, a red-head might have been described as 'Pre-Raphaelite'.  

“Post Impressionism, indeed! Come along to tea. This world is getting too much for me altogether.”

Aziz was offended. The remark suggested that he, an obscure Indian, had no right to have heard of Post Impressionism—a privilege reserved for the Ruling Race, that.

Intellectuals speak of Ideological movements or Aesthetic trends. The Rulers don't bother. Fielding is making out that he is neither the one thing nor the other. The world has become too much for him. He has retreated to the cloisters from which the modern College- or, Degree Mill, in the case of India- had emerged. Forster visited India thrice. On the third occasion he remarked that Indian English had become unintelligible to the Englishman. His novel is set in a sunnier Edwardian age where even the Indians spoke in a gentlemanly enough manner and ideology was considered declasse.  

This raises the question, why does Forster put in a joke about 'Post Impressionism' which his own friends might have made against him? More particularly, why is it associated with Adela? The answer, I suppose is that Adela, not Fielding, corresponds to Forster. She, like him, is solicitous to elderly women. Perhaps, they hold some secret denied to the rest of us. Or, more poignantly, they are sphinxes without a secret. Freud's term 'the Oedipus complex' had only entered the English language in 1910. 

It is tempting to see Mrs. Moore,  or, perhaps, Professor Godbole as standing in some particular, wholly Spiritual, relationship to G.E Moore, whose ethical philosophy encrypted in certain personal relationships that undefinable summum bonum which Forster was foremost in championing. 

It is also tempting to ask if Bloomsbury's Post-Christian creed could reinvigorate the Empire? Forster arrived in an India where Theosophy had gained political salience. Motilal Nehru had hired an English theosophist to be his son's tutor. Then, in 1911, the Theosophists announced that a young South Indian boy- Jeddu Krishnamurti- was the new universal Messiah. Mary Lutyens- a grand-daughter of a Viceroy- was an eager convert to this creed. Annie Beasant became the President of the Indian National Congress in 1917. She and Tilak had launched the Home Rule League the previous year. Tagore, it must be said, was sceptical. He warned his Bengali readers that the departure of the British would mean the Hindus would lose their property, perhaps even their lives, in East Bengal. Still, like the Mahatma, Tagore too talked in terms of a Monist God and a universal spirituality. 

 When Mrs. Moore first comes to India, she finds herself constantly mentioning God. In particular, she detests her son, the District Magistrate's, belief that the English were in India to do a job- that of a House Master in an English Public School who needs to be irascible and to display a paranoid suspicion of 'beastliness'. The 'beaks' aren't meant to make themselves popular. India is not a drawing room. It is a Prep School dormitory to be tightly policed. 

Will Mrs. Moore shape up to be a sort of Annie Beasant without the Socialism, or the Feminism, or an earlier and vulgar Atheism which Beasant had recanted? 

“I’m going to argue, and indeed dictate,” she said, clinking her rings. “The English are out here to be pleasant.”

There had been Viceroys- like Ripon- and senior Royals, like the Duke of Connaught, who had that belief. Many a Prince was touchingly loyal towards an affectionate British tutor or Political Agent. Indeed, some senior Indian judges and engineers and medical men considered their British colleagues to be their intimate friends. Motilal Nehru was one such Indian.  

“How do you make that out, mother?” he asked, speaking gently again, for he was ashamed of his irritability.

“Because India is part of the earth. And God has put us on the earth in order to be pleasant to each other. God . . . is . . . love.” She hesitated, seeing how much he disliked the argument, but something made her go on. “God has put us on earth to love our neighbours and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.”

Some English women- like Mirabehn, who joined Gandhi in 1924- certainly thought so.  

He looked gloomy, and a little anxious. He knew this religious strain in her, and that it was a symptom of bad health; there had been much of it when his stepfather died. He thought, “She is certainly ageing, and I ought not to be vexed with anything she says.”

“The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God. . . The sincere if impotent desire wins His blessing. I think every one fails, but there are so many kinds of failure. Good will and more good will and more good will. Though I speak with the tongues of . . .”

He waited until she had done, and then said gently, “I quite see that. I suppose I ought to get off to my files now, and you’ll be going to bed.”

“I suppose so, I suppose so.” They did not part for a few minutes, but the conversation had become unreal since Christianity had entered it.

Though, for many in India and England, it was the realest thing in their lives. Still, I suppose there is a price to be paid for higher education and a concern with the modish, if not the modern.  

Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life. Then he would say in respectful yet decided tones, “I don’t think it does to talk about these things, every fellow has to work out his own religion,” and any fellow who heard him muttered, “Hear!”

Forster thinks Ronny is intellectually sub-par. He went to a good enough Public School but wasn't smart enough to go to Oxford or Cambridge. He was the product of London University and a year at a crammer. In other words, the fellow had no soul worth speaking of.  Worse yet, he lacked savoir faire. He should have mobilized his considerable 'social capital' to seal the deal with the fair English maiden- or if not 'fair' exactly, then one with a decent enough pecuniary 'competence'.  If she wants caves get the Nawab Sahib or some other such dignitary to provide the elephants and mahouts while sending your own munshi to make sure the bundobust is pukka. See if the Collector's Sahib's Mem will grace the occasion. Hint this will help push forward the marriage. Miss Quested is bound to have an Uncle who was a Bishop or a Director of the Great Western Railway or something of that sort. That's the sort of thing a rising young man on the Judicial side should play up.

 What harmed Ronny was the fact that he had let his own mother and intended bride go gallivanting off with a junior Indian Doctor disliked by his boss, the Civil Surgeon. The fact is Ronny belonged to the ICS. The Indian Medical Service was a lower cadre as was the IPS and Fielding's Education Service. The only bigger faux pas Ronny could have made was to let his Mother befriend an Eurasian lady. 

Mrs. Moore felt that she had made a mistake in mentioning God, but she found him increasingly difficult to avoid as she grew older, and he had been constantly in her thoughts since she entered India, though oddly enough he satisfied her less. She must needs pronounce his name frequently, as the greatest she knew, yet she had never found it less efficacious. Outside the arch there seemed always an arch, beyond the remotest echo a silence. And she regretted afterwards that she had not kept to the real serious subject that had caused her to visit India—namely the relationship between Ronny and Adela. Would they, or would they not, succeed in becoming engaged to be married?

Something happens to both Mrs. Moore & Adela at the Marabar caves. They become infected with an echo. Mrs Moore knows what it is- and it causes her to cease to be Christian. She even stops caring about personal relationships. She just wants to go home. Sadly, she dies somewhere on the Red Sea. Sadder yet, her two other children are consigned to India's fiery maw. They will be part of the English establishment in India. Fielding too will turn into a typical servant of the Raj.  

Mrs. Moore, thanks to the Governor's wife's sympathy for Adela, is able to get a good cabin on a homeward bound ship.

So Mrs. Moore had all she wished; she escaped the trial, the marriage, and the hot weather; she would return to England in comfort and distinction, and see her other children. At her son’s suggestion, and by her own desire, she departed. But she accepted her good luck without enthusiasm. She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time

England was little. India was wider than the world- which is why it was littler. Little England, on the other hand, might be made merrier and there was some point in working towards that end. 

I suppose Forster's generation had a horror of Victorianism's horror vacui. Theism was over ornamental. It left no space for 'a room of one's own'.  

—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air.

Which our horror vacui has called into being. But, what's so wrong with empty space? Why should it terrify?  

All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity. Mrs. Moore had always inclined to resignation. As soon as she landed in India it seemed to her good, and when she saw the water flowing through the mosque-tank, or the Ganges, or the moon, caught in the shawl of night with all the other stars, it seemed a beautiful goal and an easy one. To be one with the universe! So dignified and simple. But there was always some little duty to be performed first, some new card to be turned up from the diminishing pack and placed, and while she was pottering about, the Marabar struck its gong.

What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed,

i.e. non-Aryan 

incapable of generosity—the undying worm itself. Since hearing its voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, “and if it had,” she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, “if it had, there are worse evils than love.” The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church—Boum,

Oum is the sacred syllable in Hinduism. 'Bum' is the sound of the dhumru drum associated with Lord Shiva and signifies annihilation. Forster has run them together because having a Godbole say 'bum bum bole' would be fucking hilarious even though it just means 'Praise to the Lord!'

it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but—— Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots; her constant thought was: “Less attention should be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no sorrow like my sorrow,” although when the attention was paid she rejected it irritably.

This was not G.E Moore's- or Forster's- credo. Both remained Pacifists- Forster was a conscientious objector during the Great War while Russell, who, along with Moore, had overturned the Hegelian idealism previously in vogue, had been sent to jail for trying to persuade the Americans not to come to the aid of the British and the French. 

If Mrs. Moore does not stand for G.E Moore, what of Prof. Godbole? Like G.E Moore, he was a very good singer- or so his own people thought. It was his song which created the ontological anxiety Adela complained of. He is a devotee of Tukaram- the poet-Saint most associated with the rise of the Marathas. The Brits had taken over custodianship of the Grand Moghul from the Marathas. If Britain left India, perhaps they would take over the place once again- or so Aziz fears. Forster's own ancestral Evangelical Christianity, together with Benthamite Utilitarianism, had provided the ideology of the Raj. The Tagore family's 'Brahmo Samaj' was a Unitarian sect which expressed this ideology in an Upanishadic idiom. But, perhaps, the thing was un-Indian and was bound to be swept away. What Forster does not mention is the Bolshevik threat which, by the time his book was published, had become apparent to all. Indeed, Forster himself, as a vice-president of the Society for Cultural Relations, was spied upon by British Intelligence. I suppose, Forster was hinting that if the English could get rid of the 'colour bar' (as Viceroy Reading wanted) and conciliated the Aligarh Muslim and the Deccani  acolytes of Tukaram, then there could be a united front against the Red Menace. 

Godbole, however, is a Theist. Like Mrs. Moore, when she first arrived in India, he thinks we serve each other when we pray or, in his case, sing and dance the ecstatic hymns of Tukaram. 

It was long before the tiny fragment of Professor Godbole that attended to outside things decided that his pince-nez was in trouble, and that until it was adjusted he could not choose a new hymn. He laid down one cymbal, with the other he clashed the air, with his free hand he fumbled at the flowers round his neck. A colleague assisted him. Singing into one another’s grey moustaches, they disentangled the chain from the tinsel into which it had sunk. Godbole consulted the music-book, said a word to the drummer, who broke rhythm, made a thick little blur of sound, and produced a new rhythm. This was more exciting, the inner images it evoked more definite, and the singers’ expressions became fatuous and languid. They loved all men, the whole universe, and scraps of their past, tiny splinters of detail, emerged for a moment to melt into the universal warmth. Thus Godbole, though she was not important to him, remembered an old woman he had met in Chandrapore days. Chance brought her into his mind while it was in this heated state, he did not select her, she happened to occur among the throng of soliciting images, a tiny splinter, and he impelled her by his spiritual force to that place where completeness can be found. Completeness, not reconstruction. His senses grew thinner, he remembered a wasp seen he forgot where, perhaps on a stone.

It was Mrs. Moore who had seen the wasp. Is Forster's novel about telepathy? But why stop there? Why not speak of 'tuirgen'- or investigative birth seeking?  All must become every other soul before any can exit the maze. I suppose, the novel is a sort of 'tuirgen'. We glimpse the inward life of the inhabitants of its make-believe world. 

Going to hang up her cloak, she found that the tip of the peg was occupied by a small wasp. She had known this wasp or his relatives by day; they were not as English wasps, but had long yellow legs which hung down behind when they flew. Perhaps he mistook the peg for a branch—no Indian animal has any sense of an interior. Bats, rats, birds, insects will as soon nest inside a house as out; it is to them a normal growth of the eternal jungle, which alternately produces houses trees, houses trees. There he clung, asleep, while jackals in the plain bayed their desires and mingled with the percussion of drums.

“Pretty dear,” said Mrs. Moore to the wasp. He did not wake, but her voice floated out, to swell the night’s uneasiness.

Perhaps, Godbole had seen a different wasp or perhaps there is only one Consciousness which pervades the Universe. Godbole had participated in Mrs. Moore benediction of the wasp or was it the other way around? According to the Brahma Sutras, methexis is reciprocal. Heraclitus put it differently, Gods and men live each others' deaths, die each others' lives.  

He loved the wasp equally, he impelled it likewise, he was imitating God.

No. He was an 'amsha'- a limb- of the Lord 

And the stone where the wasp clung—could he . . . no, he could not, he had been wrong to attempt the stone, logic and conscious effort had seduced, he came back to the strip of red carpet and discovered that he was dancing upon it. Up and down, a third of the way to the altar and back again, clashing his cymbals, his little legs twinkling, his companions dancing with him and each other.

Forster's ancestors had been ultra-respectable members of the Clapham Sect. Godbole's religion is more like that of the 'Shaking Quakers' or 'Shakers'.  His was a 'Society of Friends' which danced in ecstasy as an imitatio Dei. 

Covered with grease and dust, Professor Godbole had once more developed the life of his spirit. He had, with increasing vividness, again seen Mrs. Moore, and round her faintly clinging forms of trouble. He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made no difference, it made no difference whether she was a trick of his memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God, “Come, come, come, come.” This was all he could do. How inadequate! But each according to his own capacities, and he knew that his own were small. “One old Englishwoman and one little, little wasp,” he thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pouring wet morning. “It does not seem much, still it is more than I am myself.”

This is the problem with Godbole. He diminishes himself. The school he was supposed to preside over in this Princely State has been turned into a granary. He is a teacher who has no students. Instead his job is to arrange, or improvise, religious ceremonies. Perhaps that is for the best. Stalin got his start as a seminary student.  It would have been better for everybody if the only instruction he had received was in dancing and singing. 

Adela, it seems to me, better represents G.E. Moore. She gains impressions but can go beyond them or, rather, she can return to the place where she was at home before receiving those impressions. 

(Fielding) learnt that the engagement had been broken by Ronny. “Far wiser of him,” she said pathetically. “I ought to have spoken myself, but I drifted on wondering what would happen. I would willingly have gone on spoiling his life through inertia—

this is the 'contatus' of the Scholastics. Moore's 'personal relationships' offer a dialectic which is not 'idealist' (i.e. there is only one Spirit pervading all) such that what is valuable in itself can burgeon. But this is an ideographic, not a nomothetic, matter. Common sense can prevail only where people have something in common. 

one has nothing to do, one belongs nowhere

one lacks 'oikeiosis'- i.e. some natural way of appropriation.  

and becomes a public nuisance without realizing it.”

I suppose, the Bloomsbury group were acutely conscious that some of the new ideas they entertained had that potential.  

In order to reassure him, she added: “I speak only of India. I am not astray in England. I fit in there—no, don’t think I shall do harm in England. When I am forced back there, I shall settle down to some career. I have sufficient money left to start myself, and heaps of friends of my own type. I shall be quite all right.” Then sighing: “But oh, the trouble I’ve brought on everyone here. . . . I can never get over it. My carefulness as to whether we should marry or not . . . and in the end Ronny and I part and aren’t even sorry.

Adela was going to make a bad marriage. Godbole's song unsettled her and then there was the echo in the cave which infected her with some ghastly type of ontological dysphoria. But, the outcome is happy. She returns to England and, henceforth, will be at home there.

 Ronny's mistake was to bundle his mother out of the country. He was a Magistrate. The proper thing to do was to bring in a public prosecutor from the State Capital. The fact that the Defence had hired a clever barrister was warrant enough to do so. The Superintendent of Police made a hash of the prosecution. He gratuitously mentioned Mrs. Moore though, by the Rules of Evidence, this opened the door for the Defence to insist she be called to the stand. Justice must be seen to be done. If the D.M gets his own mother out of the way so that a prosecution against someone he might be jealous of can proceed, then the Court over which he presides is brought into disrepute. Had an experienced prosecutor been brought in, he would have reported that Adela was not fit to take the stand. Either the case must be dropped for that reason or it must stand or fall upon other testimony.  

The Superintendent's legal mistake causes the cry 'Esmiss Esmoor!' (i.e. the demand that Mrs. Moore be produced as a 'witness' (which is what the word 'martyr' or 'shaheed' means) to be taken up by the crowd. Hearing this invocation, Adela's mind clears. She is able to visualize what happened when she entered the cave. Oh dear. She had been mistaken. She says as much. Her echo disappears. 

In this manner, Adela, with whom the reader is just as annoyed as they are with Aziz and Godbole, redeems herself more particularly when she reveals she will return and be at home in England. She had been foolish to think she could make a life for herself in India. Britain's role there was ending. But, in England, women were taking up more and more social and political responsibilities. Adela, herself, might prepare herself for a profession. There is something of the school-mistress about her but there were other professions opening their doors for women.  Forster suggests that Adela, by her candour, has risen to a position of equality with Fielding- a man in forties.

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air.

In Howard's End, Helen hears the 'fate knocking on the door' motif of Beethoven's fifth, as 'goblins walking quietly over the universe'. One is tempted to see this as an Analytical 'factorization' of German Idealism. Fate is merely the activity of little goblins or gremlins prowling around.

Both man and woman were at the height of their powers

they had little in the way of power. One was a School Principal. The other had the air of a particularly obtuse school-mistress.  

—sensible, honest, even subtle. They spoke the same language, and held the same opinions, and the variety of age and sex did not divide them. Yet they were dissatisfied. When they agreed, “I want to go on living a bit,” or, “I don’t believe in God,” the words were followed by a curious backwash as though the universe had displaced itself to fill up a tiny void, or as though they had seen their own gestures from an immense height—dwarfs talking, shaking hands and assuring each other that they stood on the same footing of insight.

Dwarves are jolly creatures. Let them shake hands by all means. It is goblins or gremlins that we fear.  

They did not think they were wrong, because as soon as honest people think they are wrong instability sets up.

Moore was very down on scepticism. But, when you keep attacking a thing, people get the idea that it must be very powerful.  

Not for them was an infinite goal behind the stars, and they never sought it.

The Cambridge Apostles was founded as the "Conversazione Society" at the University of Cambridge on 1 April 1820. At that time, the English did not know of the Qingtan 清談. 'pure conversation' Chinese philosophical school. One conceit- made famous by Pound's translation of Li Po was that of the tavern at the end of the river of stars where all such pure conversations, interrupted in this life, can be taken up again and continued indefinitely. 

But wistfulness descended on them now, as on other occasions; the shadow of the shadow of a dream fell over their clear-cut interests, and objects never seen again seemed messages from another world.

The Japanese art critic, Okakura- a student of Fenelossa whose manuscripts Pound used for 'Cathay'- had been instrumental in putting Rothenstein and Tagore in touch. The cult of Tagore spread very quickly thereafter. But, everywhere you looked, Oriental mysticism was in the air. Christendom had destroyed itself in a fratricidal war between Emperors.  By 1922, England had to admit defeat in Ireland, Egypt, Afghanistan, Turkey and Russia. It was merely a matter of time before Dyarchy in India was replaced by autonomy and then full independence. Messages from other worlds had been piling up in England's letter box. What they had to say was unsettling. England may be at home to itself. It could no longer be at home everywhere across the seven seas. 

Other Nations may have a rendezvous with Destiny- even Nehru's India made such a tryst six years after Forster's book was published. But what England had was a 'faux-bond'- a stood up date. Adela had come to India to meet 'real Indians'. There were none to be found- every thing and every body was imaginary or oneiric. Aziz is the sort of Islamic fantasist of whom Akbar Illahabadi said

Payt masroof hai clerki mein
Dil hai Iran aur Turki mein.

'tis but the belly makes necessary the clerk's white collar
The Heart never forsakes Janissary & Ayatollah.

If Aziz is obsessed with Aurangazeb, Godbole remains rapt in Tukaram's ecstatic vision. These are not real people. They are creatures of a day- the dreams of a shadow, as Pindar says. 

Returning to England, Adela becomes real. She acquires substance. It appears she has been helpful to Mrs. Moore's two other children. Even Ronny seeks to make things up with her. He has his own troubles. He writes to Fielding 'You are lucky to be out of British India at the present moment. Incident after incident, all due to propaganda, but we can’t lay our hands on the connecting thread. The longer one lives here, the more certain one gets that everything hangs together. My personal opinion is, it’s the Jews.' 

At one time, for the British in India, everything did hang together- that too by a single thread represented by the son of a Jewish carpenter. Perhaps, if England was to become more Christian, one had first to let go of that Levantine thread. The ideal may communicate itself to us as impressions. There may be a post-impressionism which is more abstract and which points to some higher geometry beyond  Euclidean intuition. Forster's genius is to orchestrate a typically Doestoevskian 'scandal scene', where what is private becomes public and social chaos ensues- in the dusty Court Room of a moffusil town. 

Fortunately, a brand snatched from the burning, the little England to which Adela returns will be empirical and Fabian and, save to such as labour in its vineyard, about as Dionysian as a cup of strong tea. 

Professor Shiv K. Kumar, whose Doctorate was on 'Bergson & the stream of consciousness novel' met EM Forster in Cambridge in the mid Fifties. Forster was happy to give him an interview for which the young Indian student would be paid 20 pounds. Later Forster asked Kumar to tea so as to discuss Niradh Chaudhuri's 'Autobiography of an Unknown Indian'. Kumar had worked with both Niradh and Ravi Shankar at All India Radio. Being from the Punjab, he took a dim view of both. Kumar also met Radhakrishnan- who said something mean about the ugliness of Kumar's tutor- but then Kumar too had his prejudices. Indeed, on the evidence of Kumar's article, Indians had, with the passage of time, become more like Aziz- though, if occupying positions of authority, they also had become more like the Burtons & Turtons- while the English, having relinquished the White Man's burden, had achieved an oriental equanimity and freedom from bigotry.

“I think it’s a marvelous piece of writing. Don’t you agree with me?”

Forster didn't know that this was also J.C Squire's opinion. Both appreciated Chaudhuri's mastery of Latinate diction and his deep immersion in European literature.  Yet what was priceless about his work was that he could lift the veil on village life. He noticed the very things we would want to notice but which the 'emic' narrator would not find worthy of mention- if he noticed them at all. 

At once it came to me that he’d fallen for it. I couldn’t help saying to myself that Forster was no different from any other Englishman. The book had obviously pleased him, satiating his desire to read something that idealised British culture, and denigrated Indian tradition and heritage.

Chaudhri's book is valuable to urban Indians. It gives us the material by which we can imaginatively reconstruct our own rural origins. A great-grandfather of ours is bound to have been an advocate in some such village. It is from there that we got our start.  

The rain had started to batter the window panes with a drumming sound made me come out candidly without any reservation.
“I beg to differ, Sir. I honestly feel it is a horrific piece of writing — almost blasphemous.”

Chaudhuri ends his book by pleading with the White Man to come back and rule over Bengal. But then, his family was from East Bengal just as Kumar's family was from West Punjab. The price of Independence, for tens of millions, was having to run away from one's ancestral land. 'Habb al-watan'- love of your natal place- may be part of the true Faith, but if it means your love is over here and your watan is over there- what good is it? 

My statement made him sit up, face glowing with a tinge of petulance.
“You have a right to your opinion, Mr. Kumar, and I understand your feelings.

Forster's question is 'does Chaudhuri write well?' There is only one possible answer. He writes very well.  

'Don’t forget that I love India, but we should take a book for what it is. I repeat that it is an outstanding piece of work, regardless of its harshness towards Indian sentiments.”

Forster was right. I suppose it was a bitter pill for Public School, Oxbridge graduates like Forster or Squires that an 'unknown' Indian should write with such erudition and precision in their own language.  

I responded, “Sir, before I explain my reaction to the book, let me say that I happen to know the author personally. He was my colleague at the All India Radio, where he was Talks Officer, with his office next to my room. I used to have tea with him almost every day, and we used to engage in long conversations. Nirad is a dwarfish man, not more than four feet two inches who tries to appear larger than life. He would always come to office dressed in a three-piece suit, a hat on his head and neatly polished suede shoes.

Chaudhuri understood that literary 'dandyism' went hand in hand with the creation of an authorial persona. This was a familiar theme to English writers. Max Beerbohm had explored it in some depth.  

Most of my colleagues used to call him a bore, because he'd often pull out a bunch of photographs of his children. I remember how he once took out a photograph of his son, Dhruv. ‘This is my son who is now eighteen. Even when he was five, he enjoyed listening to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. And he could enumerate all the elements in the solar system. When he grew up to be sixteen, he began to play the piano, and his favourite music was Western. He could talk about British painters, musicians and philosophers.’”

Dhruv was an excellent photographer. His second son, Kirti, became a Professor of Economic History at London University. Being Bengali, he naturally misunderstood mathematics. He held that 'the "axiom of choice" in mathematical set theory can used to show that even the great deserts of Asia can be included in the "set" Indian Ocean through the logic of dialectical opposition.' Sadly, it can also be used to turn anything into an infinite collection of itself. This is the Banach Tarski paradox which is very mystical. I suppose, from the strictly mathematical point of view, it is merely counter-intuitive and not a paradox at all. 

At this point, I paused for a while as I’d almost run out of breath.

Just say 'Bengali Kayasthas are too fucking brainy for their own good. Still, at least they aren't Baidyas- like the Sens.' 

Pulling myself together, I continued, ‘let me at this point say that I don’t agree with T.S. Eliot when he says, ‘Honest criticism should confine itself to a work of art, not the man behind it.” No, I won't buy that statement because I earnestly believe that the man behind a book is as important, if not more than his work.

Niradh's two volumes of autobiography were about himself. Was he a good man? Yes. He was a faithful husband and gave his children a good start in life. The English came to adore him more particularly after he settled in England.  

Let me here add that if Macaulay had been alive today, he would have adopted Nirad as his dream child.

No. He'd have adopted Jawaharlal Nehru. Macaulay was a politician. He wrote books so as to make enough money to stay in Parliament. Indeed, it was the need for money which caused him to take up an appointment in India. But the view he was championing was that of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore.  

I assume you'd recall Macaulay's historic minute of 1838 which said that ‘By imposing English upon Indians, we’d rear up a crop of Indians who would be Indian in colour but British in thought and temperament.’

But, Niradh could not understand English, as spoken by Englishmen, when he first came to Calcutta as a student of Ripon College. He had more in common with his batchmate- Bibhuti Bhushan (author or the Apu trilogy filmed by Satyajit Ray)- than with 'Brown Sahibs' like the Nehrus.  

So here is a typical child of the British colonial dream.”

He was a typical child of the Brahmo dream of Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore. The Brits preferred aristocratic polo-players whose English would be just sufficient for military purposes. They came to hate the educated Bengali 'Babu'. 

I paused for a moment. “But I haven’t explained to you Nirad’s real motivation in writing this book. Indeed, he’s a man of encyclopedic breadth of knowledge, and he handles the English language with superb skill and confidence.

This is a tribute to the Bengali education system. The 'Gaudas' had been revered for their erudition and 'navya nyaya' logical thinking for many centuries.  

I once asked him, as executive officer at All India Radio, to write a talk on Panini. Instantly he asked me, ‘Which Panini? There are two Paninis, one the grammarian and the other the sage.

Chaudhuri was wrong. There is only the grammarian who may also have been a wandering sage.  

So which one do you want me to write on? I was indeed amazed by this man's learning. Mildly I said, ‘let it be Panini, the sage’. On another day, I requested him to write an article on Indian birds. The very next day, he brought a six-page piece on all kinds of birds.

The Punjabi is paying an honest tribute to the erudite Bengali. Yet, he wants Forster to think ill of him. Why?  

But in spite of his skill at writing and his versatility, he was ignored by his principals at All India Radio. For several years, he held the same position, with no promotion or increment.

Ronny Heaslop may mention this to Burton or Turton as an indication that the man in question was not 'pukka'.  

It made him feel he’d been brushed aside by the establishment as non-entity. He wanted to rocket into fame by writing this book, and bring himself into the limelight — an ‘unknown’ Indian now too well-known.

He could have simply have written a book about the suffering of the East Bengali Hindu. That way, he would have got his point across. Indian independence may have been a wonderful thing for India's new masters. But it had meant poverty and exile- if not a fate worse than death- for tens of millions.  

Since he’d been ignored by his Indian friends and bosses, he decided to take shelter in British culture and tradition.

Actually, it was the French who first came to his aid when All India Radio refused to give him an extension of service.   

To him, the Englishman and the British empire were his pedestal on which rested all his loyalty and dedication.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore had lobbied Westminster to send more White people to Bengal. Why? This would keep the Hindus safe from the Muslims. But Dwarkanath's grandson, Rabindranath, makes the same point in 'Ghare Bhaire'.  

No wonder, his Autobiography of An Unknown Indian was dedicated to the British Empire. The venomous things he’d to say against India! Permit me to read out from the book a paragraph.”

To be fair, like most Bengalis, it was the shortcomings of the Bengali bhadralok which envenomed his quill.  He thought Nehru might be all right because he wore pajamas- which were almost trousers- rather than a dhoti. To his credit, Niradh continued to wear a dhoti while working in his garden in Oxford. 

I understood that Mr. Forster did not interrupt me in the seemingly interminable stream of words because he was a very courteous Englishman. I also divined that Mr. Forster was more with Nirad, than with me.
“I beg your pardon again, Mr. Forster, for blabbering away. But being a sensitive Indian, I had to open out my heart to a gracious person like you.

Forster smiled. “Mr. Kumar, you say you’ve come here to do your doctorate. I feel you should take to writing instead. Your graphic description of Nirad C. Chaudhuri sounded like an interesting character portrayal in a novel.”

Forster is right. Kumar could be a character from 'Passage'.  Like Aziz, he impulsively invites Forster to his lodgings but then remembers that they are too squalid and ill furnished to provide hospitality to a great man of letters. Fortunately, Forster has too much tact to take up the invitation. Later, Kumar was elected President of the Cambridge Majlis and was able to invite Forster to a banquet it hosted. He discussed his aversion to Radhakrishnan  with Forster. 

Mr. Forster too had reservations about the esteemed guest from India. “Do you know, I never thought much of him as a philosopher.”

Radhakrishnan was an old fashioned idealist. The ideas of Russell & Moore hadn't reached India when he was doing his Masters. Later, he rose thanks to Tagore. At a later point, he unexpectedly hit it off with Stalin in Moscow where he had been sent as India's Ambassador. That made him worthy of promotion to the Presidency.  

I then told him about another  Indian personage who had disappointed me like Nirad C. Chaudhuri and Sir Radhakrishnan. “I’ll tell you about my experience with Pandit Ravi Shankar, the sitar maestro. You are interested in music, so you must have heard of him.” I remembered Ravi Shankar because he had been my colleague at All India Radio from 1948 to 1949. If Nirad C. Chaudhuri had his room to my left, Ravi Shankar had his office to my right. A wooden signboard outside his office announced him as Music Producer. Since we shared a love of music, I used to meet him quite often. During our conversations, he would blow his own trumpet, like Nirad C. Chaudhuri, about his creative talent. He’d tell me about the new ragas he’d created for All India Radio. 

He had already composed the music for a film by Chetan Anand which won a prize at Cannes. Still, from the point of view of bureaucratic New Delhi, he was merely of the rank of Under-Secretary. If he kept his nose clean, he might retire at the level of Director. It would be going too far to appoint a strummer of sitars to a Joint Secretary level post.  

During my stay at Cambridge, I learnt that he’d resigned from All India Radio and had become something of a travelling performer.

What sort of fellow gives up Gazetted employment to become a nautanki-wallah? Chee, chee!  

He gave concerts in London, New York and Paris. An year later, when I went to attend a seminar in Santiago, I learnt that Ravi Shankar was staying there. I wanted to revive my association with him that went back to our stint at All India Radio. To my great disappointment, when I telephoned Ravi Shankar, someone from his family came on the line: “Of course, Pandit Ravi Shankar remembers you. But he regrets he cannot spare any time for you.”

That's harsh. The Shankar family was highly educated. Perhaps, what was meant was 'on this occasion, Punditji's crowded programs forbids him the pleasure of meeting you and reviving warm memories.' 

It was another disillusionment about human beings that came to me in Santiago. Back at Cambridge, I got absorbed in my research, though I took time out for the Majlis. As President of the Majlis, I decided to invite E.M. Forster to our Diwali celebrations. He readily accepted my invitation. He said he would be delighted to revive memories of the festival of lights he had enjoyed when he was in the Dewas State. With the approach of Diwali, I made the arrangements for a banquet and cultural programmes. A variety of Indian sweet dishes were ordered. On Diwali evening, I took personal care to have candles lit both outside and inside the Taj restaurant which we used as a venue for our public functions. While my friends lit the candles inside the central hall, I stepped out to have the candles lit all along the pavement facing Trinity. Passersby stopped to watch. An elderly Englishman walked up to me to wish “Happy Diwali.”

I invited him, “Thank you, Sir, and please join in our festivities.”

“My dear young man, I’d love to but I’ve an appointment.” He looked at his watch. “I must move on.” A few minutes later, an octogenarian English lady stopped in front of the hotel. She stared at the signboard outside the Taj Restaurant.

“A nice name,” she said. “You know, I’ve been to the Taj in Agra. The mausoleum raised in marble by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, is an immortal symbol of pure love.” I felt like telling her that it was not pure love, but lust. The Moghul Emperor let his wife bleed through thirteen pregnancies till she died in childbirth.

That is love, not lust. Women want to have babies with the husband whom they love. Death in child-birth is more glorious than death on the battlefield.  

Another hiatus between illusion and reality. I held myself back, because Diwali is not the time to say anything unkind about anyone. “Yes, ma’am, the Taj will always be looked upon as an enduring symbol of love.” I smiled at her. “Won’t you come in to taste some Indian sweets?”

“Oh, I’d love to! What do you’ve inside? Rasgullas, Jalebis, Burtis and papadams?'

“Everything for you, ma’am. Just walk in. We’ll be honoured to have you as our guest.”

Punjabis are chivalrous and courteous. Sadly, they have to share a country with Bengalis and Madrasis.  

It was time to start the Diwali celebrations. The crowd had gathered inside the restaurant. But I still waited outside to receive E.M. Forster, our chief guest. When he appeared round the comer, I was bowled over to see him dressed in a sherwani, with Jaipur shoes on his feet.

“You look an Indian prince, Sir,” I complimented him.

Forster gently inclined his head in acceptance of the compliment. “Thank you. I wanted to look like one of you,

he would have looked more like Pundit Nehru. 

especially on a great occasion like this.” I led him inside to his chair on the dais. Next to him was a chair for me as President of the Majlis. The first item on the programme was a scene from the love episode between Jawaharlal and Edwina Mountbatten. I’d identified an Indian friend of mine who bore a close resemblance to Nehru. He appeared in a Nehru jacket, a rose in his third buttonhole and a Nehru cap on his head. On the other side of the table sat an English young lady who was to act as Edwina. The entire audience was thrilled to see the couple. Edwina opened up, saying, “Very painful  to feel that we’d be leaving India tomorrow. Will it be the end of our love affair?”

“It was never an affair,” mumbled Jawaharlal Nehru. “My love for you will remain eternal till the snows on the Himalayas melt away and the Ganges dries up.”

“Beautiful!,” she sighed. “You know, darling, Louis could never say such a beautiful  thing.”

“Well, husbands tend to take certain emotions for granted. I’ve always looked upon Louis as a gentleman.”

“That’s a gentleman speaking. That’s my Jawahar, my lover poet, not the Prime Minister of India. I also never came to you as the wife of the first Governor-General.” 

Smiling, she quipped, “I know, Jawahar, it was you who held him back in India as the first Governor-General of the free republic, otherwise, both of us would have been packed off just a day after you got your Independence.”

Mountbatten, a Naval man, was very good at getting through the files in double quick time. Even Azad, very grudgingly, had to admit his efficiency. Nehru retained him because he was very good at his work. Jolly Jack Tar had created the Empire. Now a Naval man was winding it up with dignity and dispatch. Mountbatten remained Nehru's closest adviser on defence policy till Nehru died. After that, neither India nor the UK had much use for him.  

As the scene ended, Forster turned to me to ask, “Who wrote this piece?” Crimsoning, I responded, “I wrote it.”

Crimsoning is Babu. I don't 'crimson'. On the other hand, my complexion retain tints of strawberries and cream- but only because I am a messy eater.  

“So I wasn't wrong when I said the other day that you had in you the making of a writer — a poet or a novelist.”

Forster also liked 'the dark dancer'- a silly novel written by an IFS officer belonging to my caste. It features an Iyer bride and groom sleeping with a naked sword between them. Apparently he had been a fellow at Trinity, Cambridge, before taking up diplomatic assignments. I like to think that his wife beat him. But then, I like to think that everybody's wife beats them. Marriage, it seems to me, offers little to a woman above and beyond the secretive pleasures of spousal abuse. 

The audience applauded with the clapping of hands. A voice came from the gathering asking me to recite a ghazal. Instantly, I recited a love ghazal from Mirza Ghalib in which the poet accepts his beloved as his goddess, and assigns to god a secondary place.

There is no such ghazal. The Punjabi Hindu did not understand the Haqiqi/Majazi distinction. Uranian love transcends the physical. It is the ultimate 'personal relationship' which ends when everything goes to destruction save the face of God. It is this to great end that we should 'only connect'. Did Forster grasp this? His creed shared a common Platonic lineage with that of the Sufi. He would have known the story of Sarmad and Abhay Chand. Ghalib, under the influence of Ross Masood's grandfather, was more rational and supportive of Western science. The question was whether Iqbal and the new nation of Pakistan would converge to the Western model in the manner of Ataturk's Turkey. Under Ayub Khan this appeared to be happening. West Pakistan was growing more rapidly than Nehruvian India. But, it must be said, the Punjabi refugee in India rose up through hard work and enterprise. One such young man at Cambridge in the mid Fifties was Manmohan Singh. If India has greatly overtaken Pakistan, thanks must go to him. History will remember him kindly.

As for Forster, he was a gentleman. If 'Passage' is unkind when it isn't clownish, the fault lies with those portrayed. The British Raj had been utilitarian and it had created an oikumene for Indians. But did they want it? I believe one branch of Ross Masood's family is in Pakistan while the other has achieved equal distinction in India. I hope they remain connected. Forster would certainly have wished it. Adela, on the other hand, if she attained as great an age as Forster, would have been involved in Social Work- perhaps helping working class women from the sub-continent or Ugandan refugees- and whatever unpleasant 'impressions' she received in India would have been sublated by useful work for her own 'little' England, whose greatness would only gradually unfold. My reference, of course, is to the great British freedom struggle during which I fasted to death three times a day. Then Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister and I started to wonder whether I should apply for a German passport. It isn't that I have any prejudice against Punjabis. It's just Hindus I can't abide. 

 

Mridula Nath Chakraborty on Spivak & E.M Forster

Some 15 years ago, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, currently a Professor in Australia, wrote an article titled 'Who is afraid of Gayatri Spivak' in a magazine called 'Signs'. I extract the following. No. It isn't meant to be satire.  

Spivak inhabits the site of the interview as a postcolonial critic and, in the process, presents a body that is both in service of and in excess of critical postcolonial theory.

To 'inhabit' means 'to occupy as a place of settled residence or habitat'. Mridula is saying Spivak only exists when being interviewed. It is not the case that she occasionally gives interviews (or visits the 'site of the interview' to use Madrooler's jargon) whereas her habitation is elsewhere- perhaps in her office or her study. Moreover, her body does not serve her own interests- e.g. to gain nutrition by eating or to get rid of waste products by defecating- but is in bondage to some stupid theory which, however, she exceeds in stupidity. 

Let me trace the path by which I arrive at this formulation. If colonial discourse was cemented in India in 1835 with Sir Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Education,”

It wasn't. Macaulay didn't matter in the slightest. Clive and Hastings and Wellesley and Napier and Outram mattered. Macaulay had lost money and needed a well paid sinecure in India to repair his fortunes and thus return to Parliament. While in India, he wrote 'Lays of Ancient Rome' which was a best seller. He had zero influence on the Raj.  

then in the post- colonial critic we have the putative product of that formulation, the descendant of those “native subjects” (Macaulay [1835] 1995, 429) who were to belong to “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Macaulay [1835] 1995, 430).

Macaulay was talking about 'Prince' Dwarkanath whose grandson won the Nobel Prize for literature. He wasn't talking about literary critics- i.e. Grub Street hacks- but people who owned vast estates and who had invested profitably in business enterprises engaged in Oceanic commerce.  

Of course, here I exaggerate, generalize, and collapse into simplicity what is actually a wrought (sic) and complex process of historical formation that leads to such a descendant also being the agent of the empire busily talking and writing back.

The Empire disappeared long ago. 'Talking back' ended at the Third Round Table Conference. The Brits had to proceed unilaterally in getting shot of the Raj.  

So well has Caliban internalized Prospero’s speech that (s)he can curse back fluently in it.

This dim bint does not know that Thomas Coryate, James the First's jester, became so fluent in all the languages of India that, on one occasion, when a slave woman who wouldn't stop jabbering away in some unknown lingo was brought before him, he was able to scream such filth at her, in her own dialect, that she shut her mouth and became reconciled to her lot in life. 

Spivak argues that it is not Caliban who holds the power of speech, however, but Ariel.

Both can talk. Indeed, everybody in the play can talk.  

It is here that Ariel, Macaulay, and Spivak meet for me: to form a class of interpreters to mediate between the governing classes and the millions governed by a rising and burgeoning postcoloniality.

Madroola went to Delhi University. She knew India's governing class consists of elected politicians few of whom are fluent in English or have much interest in European culture. Some need interpreters when speaking to foreign dignitaries. They need none when addressing the voter. 

Perhaps Madroola is unaware that British civil servants and soldiers, when serving in India, were obliged to pass exams in Indian languages so as to get their salary increment? There was no class of interpreters. Even the Court Maulvi or Pundit had been dismissed by about 1860. India wasn't a 'settler' colony. Moreover, one third of it was under Princely Rule while large chunks of directly ruled India was in the hands of feudal lords whose whim was law.  

In the hallowed arena of the academy,

only STEM subjects are taught. If you are doing Subaltern or Queer or Queer Subaltern Studies, you are well and truly fucked.  

the pride of place currently goes to the subject who inhabits the space of both metropolis and periphery,

but does not inhabit the interview or the toilet 

the subject who discourses and holds forth, with authority, on Enlightenment texts and offers embodied critiques

as opposed to ghostly critiques by means of an ouija board 

of their epistemological narratives, the subject who occupies the position of speech and strength by virtue of being one of the voiceless dispossessed,

i.e. the person who can't stop talking because her tongue has been cut out and her jaw has been smashed. Moreover she occupies the position of shitting on Madroola's head because she does not have an arsehole and, in any case, does not exist. This narrative of mine is totes 'epistemological'- isn't it? Mummy would be so proud.  

the subject who moves effortlessly between the positions of Ariel and Caliban.

Who the fuck would want to?  

This point has been made with equal and elegant force by Varadharajan: “The object, product, and survivor of this necessarily incomplete process [of decolonization] is the postcolonial subject.

Varadharajan discovered her Mummy was still being colonized by a tiny Viceroy. She screamed and screamed. The University of Saskatchewan gave her tenure probably because they thought she was a Sasquatch. 

Her ‘otherness’ in the discourse of Western empire

which doesn't exist. To her credit, the young Gayatri kept her sari on over her ski pants because she didn't want Americans to smile at her and offer her a peace pipe or a tomahawk.  

serves to consolidate the identity of her colonizers

Who died long ago.  

even as it reifies her own, and her perceived tendency to elude the categories of Western rationality

fuck off! Western rationality categorizes her as a stupid pseudo-lefty whose major grievance is that she has to sit down to pee. True, White Wimmin may also have to sit down to pee. But they iz White! That's totes triggering to me coz I iz a Darkie. Why can't White Wimmin paint stripes on themselves like zebras? Better yet, why don't they all just take a fucking hint and fuck off and die already?  

renders her dear to mosaics, melting pots, and postmoderns” (Varadharajan 1995b, xv).

Mosaics and melting pots often send her Valentine Cards. The Postmodern asked her to the Prom. She sagely replied- 'the catechresis of the constipation of the scotomy of the Post-Singur sublime is the deconstruction of its own inhabitation as the infestation of the scotomy of the catachresis of the thing I talked about in my next book which is anterior to the posterior of Hauntalogy as a fart. Have a nice day.'  

The theoretical acumen of this postcolonial critic is evoked repeatedly within a university and within disciplines that want to reinvent themselves;

because they are shit. But shit is just shit. It doesn't reinvent itself. It just gets smellier and attracts more flies.  

however, her embodied presence is contentious within exigencies of the institution

Nonsense! Spivak is an upper-middle class Bengali- i.e. toilet trained. It is not the case that her embodied presence leaves large turds on the carpet of the faculty lounge.  

as well as within the larger discourses of the multicultural nation. In her interviews, Spivak occupies and comes to sit in this volatile and contested space that brings to surface immediately the flesh-and-blood incantation of her postcolonial status.

Indira Gandhi could be said to have been such a flesh-and-blood incarnation and if, meeting the Queen, she had started singing 'Jana Gana Mana' then there would have been an incantation as well. This is because Indira took over the powers of the King-Emperor and showed she could use them with greater ruthlessness. Spivak taught worthless shite to American imbeciles. Nobody gives a shit about her. Mamta, on the other hand, was and is important. 

Her theorizations gather force not only by virtue of her examinations of the imperial project

she is incapable of any such thing. She is too stupid and ignorant. She thinks there was a 'Pathan King of Delhi' and a 'distant Mughal Emperor' as well as a 'Nazim' of Sirhind.  

and her unerring grasp of its underpinning ideologies

fuck does she know about Mercantilism or Cobden & Bright?  

but also because she is the historical object of imperialism’s narrative.

Nope. Nobody gave a shit about her or her ancestors. If daddy and gramps wanted to study medicine in England, they were welcome to spend their own money to that end.  

The experience of being a particularly marked body within contemporary identitarian movements becomes poignantly pronounced in her interviews, as she walks the razor’s edge between being a privileged literary critic and theorist,

as opposed to an underprivileged novelist like JK Rowling who has  only a paltry billion or two in the Bank 

on the one hand, and a racialized and gendered body from the global South, on the other.

She has a vagina. Maybe it is a radicalized vagina. But nobody is interested in it. Sad.  

Spivak’s interviews spotlight the subterranean core of embodiment

it would only do so if she were actually buried six feet under.  

and corporeality that underlies the

utterly stupid and useless not 

involved and intricate categories of difference and identity, authenticity and appropriation, hyphenation and hybridity, and dramatizes the presence of postcolonial bodies in the West.

Fuck off! Nobody gives a shit if you come from what was a colony. What they care about is your skills or your ability to create wealth. True, if all you have is a radicalized vagina, you may dramatize it as being drenched in mystic lore so as to get punters to cough up a couple of extra quid.  

Like lost baggage that arrives late, or not at all, these categories accompany and negotiate diasporic conditions,

Lost baggage does not accompany you. Even if it did, it couldn't negotiate a better price for access to your radicalized vagina which is dripping with mystic lore.  

but because they are constantly mobile and mutable, it is impossible to pin down “the post-colonial critic” (Harasym 1990)

It is illegal to pin them down or even to chop off their legs.  

to one consolidated identity, as becomes clear in the course of the myriad interviews that Spivak has given.

What becomes clear is that she is stupid, ignorant, but has a certain zest for life. If worthless shit must be taught, let it be taught by a worthless shithead who enjoys doing so.  

On the one hand, the definitive and defining aspect of being an essentialized body in white settler nations

is becoming CEO of Pepsi, if you are Indra Nooyi, or becoming a partner at McKinsey while also releasing a Grammy winning CD of Hindustani religious music, if you are Nooyi's sister.  

is made opaque in mere disembodied theory that can shift and skirmish, fit and fix, stretch and compress, and generally play putty with technologies of marking the other.

Why not go to Biz Skool and become a billionaire instead of wasting your time writing nonsense?  

On the other hand, the postcolonial critic also constantly mediates between insider and outsider status with respect to the history of her origin. The raison d’eˆtre of her location within the Anglo-Western/Northern academy, with its easy access to global publishing regimes, marks her as an outsider in the originary nation, the less privileged nation that nevertheless supplies her with much of the cultural material and theoretical momentum to justify her postcoloniality.

Nonsense. The 'postcolonial critic' is like the immigrant cleaning toilets. So long as they get paid and can save up a bit of money, we feel they are doing well for themselves. True, the toilet cleaner may be perfectly sane whereas the 'critic' may be as daft as a brush, but what matters is that they are not having to rent out their radicalized rectums or vaginas to pay for groceries.  

At the same time, she is the prodigal daughter who will be claimed by the mother country whenever she wins accolades in the adopted one.

Sen, yes. Spivak, no. Why? Econ is almost a STEM subject. Literature is shit. Also Spivak translated the cretin Mahashweta.  

Thus questions about the relevance of origins and the nation refuse to die,

worse yet, they refuse to fuck off to Florida 

and cosmopolitan mobility and globe-trotting theory cannot be contained within the confines of the loose interview.

loose motion. 

They carry all the traces of an extended journey that spans forty years and four continents in the life of the postcolonial critic.

But those traces are shit. 

This untidiness, uncontainability, and slippage is what Spivak consciously and constantly mimics in the self-referential, self-citational, and footnoting style of her densely theoretical, consolidated work in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 1999a).

Which doesn't critique shit. We understand that people from Colonies abandoned by the Brits lost the ability to Reason. This is because they were darkies.  

The embodied nature of the interaction between two interlocuting bodies brings to the fore the prime issues around exclusion and belonging, racialization and essentialism, that are central to postcolonial and post second-wave feminist theory.

Sadly, as technology improves, lots of our interactions are no longer 'embodied'.  

The interviews thereby provide the frame in which the postcolonial critic hotfoots between her disembodied work and her all-too-present identity.

She is a hot mess. That's true enough.  

They hyperrealize the persona of the public intellectual who narrates her life and times, acting as a barometer of social chronology and historical discourse.

That isn't Spivak's persona. She has been saying exactly the same thing decade after decade. Initially, she could be seen as 'representing' women from the ex-colonies. But, she didn't really. Indira Gandhi and Srimao Bandarnaike and Benazir Bhutto represented the people of their respective countries. A pedant teaching nonsense is not a barometer. She is a backed up toilet. 

Within the volatile site of the interview, interlocutors are bound in a dynamics of responsibility and mutuality, both physical and psychic, that Mary Zournazi calls a “creative practice that opens up the possibilities of writing and hearing differently” .

Not in Spivak's case. She just repeats herself endlessly.  

Interviewer and interviewee bring their affiliations, backgrounds, and contexts to bear upon the issue in question, thereby “coming together” in “an otherness” that provides “an ethics” for “working together to transform what we know” 

Shit remains shit even if it arises by coprophagic injestion.  

The space has a topicality, a temporality that makes the interview form a mode of locating as well as limiting contemporaneous times.

I suppose this would be true of interviews with politicians or senior journalists. They say different things at different times because they understand that the world has changed and things are now moving in a different direction.  

Space and time become uniquely designed for question and answer, interrogation and response, emergency and contingency.

Also the planet is uniquely designed for folks to bump into each other and get chatting.  

Even in the tightly controlled space of the after-interview edit, the response of the interviewee is not simply one of arbitrary theorizing or free-floating suggestion but one that arises out of the particularity of the interview, in the specific nature of the exchange between two subjects and subject positions.

Sadly, there is no evidence that any thought has gone into 'after-interview edits' with respect to Spivak.  

In Spivak’s own words: “We all know that when we engage profoundly with one person, the responses—the answers—come from both sides.

This is not the case. We may engage profoundly with a person who can't communicate.  

Let us call this responsibility. And ‘answer’ability or accountability” 

The word respondere in Latin means to reply. In the Magna Carta, it means to answer for or render an account of something in a legal context. However, some responsibilities don't have to be accounted for to anybody.  

Spivak’s interviews delineate the space between us and them that demands a politics of ethical engagement with the other.

Space causes space between us and others. Sadly, baryonic matter is subject to an exclusion principle such that two different bodies can't occupy the same space.  

They offer fascinating insight into the way in which postcolonial encounters of the embodied kind

i.e. any physical or communicative interaction on the part of anyone who comes from an ex-colony 

constantly dance around issues of representation and merge “the means of representation” with “the representation itself ”.

Because representation only occurs when its means are used.  

In addition, the interviews do offer gestures “toward a vanishing present” in that they are “an always singular address” whereby “an ‘I’ is ‘seized,’ conscripted, held to the pledge” of a particular time, a context, a “dated situation” 

The warmed up sick of the Seventies is indeed dated. But no one was conscripted to that shite. They were too stupid to do anything useful and thus pretended to teach that nonsense. In Spivak's case, the mischief she wrought was that smart young University students from India became brainwashed into thinking that there was some terrible 'post-colonial' trauma which still afflicted them. Perhaps they should emigrate to a 'Settler Colony'- like US or Australia- to whine about it there.  

Consider the following essay, by Mridula, on E.M Forster's 'Passage to India'- which is very good at depicting conversations as failures to connect or what Spivak, following Derrida, calls a 'stood up date' or faux-bond. 

I was aware of David Lean’s cinematic adaptation of A Passage to India (1984) before I encountered E.M. Forster’s original novel,

Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is one of the finest cinematic works ever created. The link between Lawrence & Forster is that England had acquired Arabic speaking mandates at just around the time it began preparing India for self-rule. Lawrence, a Classicist, wrote in a highly wrought style and his big book came out a couple of years after Forster's. Lawrence then set off for India's North West frontier. By contrast, Forster was deliberately dim and sub fusc. But his ear for dialogue of a particular middle class type was unmatchable. His book was published in 1924, just when Labour had come to power. But, by then, it appeared that India's internal divisions would prolong British rule which would just become a little more boring and pointless. Arabia however was a different kettle of fish. What's more Britain needed Persian oil and Egyptian cotton and control of the Suez Canal. I think Forster's message was reassuring. Keep the Mem Sahibs out of our new Arab possessions. Treat the Sheikh in a manly and honourable manner. Don't try to get him to pay for sewers and schools and a vast network of government clerks. Things will work out well enough if you have capable men on the spot who aren't interfered with too much by the 'frocks' in Whitehall.  

which celebrated its centenary in 2024. While the film was being shot on location, I had a vague sense of the ambition as well as the arrogance of those Britishers making a film in the heat and dust of India.

Attenborough's Gandhi- backed by Indira Gandhi- had been a big hit. Indians were hanging their heads in shame. Why couldn't they themselves have made a movie of that calibre? After all, Attenborough had come to India to star in Ray's 'Chess Players'- which was boring and stupid. Perhaps Ray's 'Ghare Bhaire' ,which starred Victor Bannerjee just like Lean's 'Passage', would rival it in quality. Sadly, it did not. It was shit.  

Heat and Dust – the title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 Booker Prize-winning novel, adapted for the screen by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1983 – seemed to be synonymous with the nation that became independent as India in 1947 and was muddling along with its millions.

Ruth was a European Jew. Ivory was American. True, they made films in India but those films weren't all utterly shit. Sad.  

Along with Richard Attenborough’s epic biopic Gandhi (1982)

Made with the support of the Indian Government. It made Ben Kingsley- whose father was Gujarati- into an international star. He just keeps getting better and better. 

and The Jewel in the Crown,

which made Art Malik a star 

the Granada Television miniseries based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels (1965-75) – also broadcast in 1984 – these films gave me my first taste of how British storytellers were seeking to recreate Raj nostalgia and recuperate colonial history, while examining a central concern of Forster’s novel: the problem of the British in India.

Why not mention 'Octopussy' and 'Temple of Doom'?  

India in the 1980s looms large for me in this reappraisal of A Passage to India.

Because she saw the movie before she read the novel. I must admit, I loved Alec Guinness as Prof. Godbole who affirms that when an evil act is done all have done it- himself, the guide, Aziz, Fielding, even Adela. But the same is true when good is done. This is a 'field theory' of the sort first uncovered to Western Metaphysics by Boskovich and which may originate in a Jesuit translation of the Chinese Vimalakriti. It chimed with the new theories of the Mathematical Physicists but also, perhaps, with the new politics of the collective as against the individual. Forster was influenced by G.E Moore- a logical atomist, like Russell, who subscribed to a doctrine of external relations which suggests that the world is made up of independent facts. It is not an interdependent whole. Moreover, for Moore, the intrinsic value of anything must be determined solely by its intrinsic properties. Personal relationships were important if they were truthful and created an 'organic unity'- i.e. there was synergy- which was intrinsically better than the sum of its parts. I may mention that G.E Moore sang beautifully. Frances Partridge, the last survivor of the Bloomsbury group, thought this was the explanation for why Moore was so revered. This suggests a relationship between Moore and Godbole. But what that is precisely we can as little conjecture as what song the Siren's sang or the name by which Achilles was known when he hid himself among women. Moore says Truth is simple and not subject to further analysis. For Tukaram it is something found within oneself as the presence of the divine on the basis of unwavering Faith. But Tukaram's truth is a song anyone can sing. Moore was an academician who, perhaps because he hadn't been taught mathematics at Dulwich, did not have an algorithmic method. It is said that Russell, who valued him as an interlocutor, asked if he liked him. Moore reflected for a moment and said 'no'. Their conversation continued. Perhaps Forster thought this was an Occidental quality. Orientals would consider it pointless to converse with those they did not like. Was this the reason the Raj seemed so futile a project? 

Forster suggests there might be a 'truth of mood' which is not a lie- e.g. inviting a person to dinner without wanting the invitation to take effect because your house is a pigsty- and Godbole might say it is 'mithya'- neither true nor false. We may say it is 'imperative' not alethic. It is a gesture, nothing more. 

Nevertheless, Forster can't resist the temptation of throwing a scare into his reader. What if the caves are supernatural? Perhaps, in their dark recesses, everything really is interconnected. Atomistic individuality is an error and a delusion. Mrs. Moore is George Moore's ultimate nightmare. Why? In the cave, what the echo said to her was “Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.” In other words, the intuition that there is good is real but it is the same as the intuition of its opposite. There is 'synergy' or 'organic unity', but it cancels itself out. 

Mrs Moore is presented as writing a letter to her two younger children while waiting for Adela and Aziz to return from the cave. This is supposed to be her stream of consciousness. 

'Devils are of the North,

the word is Indo-Iranian. The Iranians decided the devas where devils while the Hindus decided they were gods.  

and poems can be written about them,

Paradise Lost? 

but no one could romanticize the Marabar

they are places of pilgrimage where 'prayer has been valid'.  

because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness,

both are tiny to God 

the only quality that accommodates them to mankind.'

They aren't accommodated to mankind. Forster may have noticed that man does not live for ever roaming across the Galaxies. Perhaps, he thought elderly women felt that moral values must exist independently of the hic et nunc- the here and now- and thus Eternity and Infinity must be annexed for their Lebensraum. Otherwise, moral values would all be squashed up together and end up having an orgy. It is a different matter that a elderly woman in poor health may feel that her time is running out and she hasn't yet settled her affairs rather than gotten to the bottom of life's mystery. The Moorean horror of the Caves is that questions remain 'open' but only as suppurating wounds. This may be a scandal for an analytical philosophy. But why would an elderly English lady be blighted by it? Indeed, why would a novelist hold this view? 

G.E Moore did say something rather queer about those who 'profess to tell us the nature not of a future reality, but of one that is eternal and which therefore no actions of ours can have power to alter. Such information may indeed have relevance to practical Ethics, but it must be of a purely negative kind. For, if it holds, not only that such an eternal reality exists, but also, as is commonly the case, that nothing else is real—that nothing either has been, is now, or will be real in time—then truly it will follow that nothing we can do will ever bring any good to pass. For it is certain that our actions can only affect the future; and if nothing can be real in the future, we can certainly not hope ever to make any good thing real. It would follow, then, that there can be nothing which we ought to do'. The problem here is that a 'block universe' which is eternal would be one where we would feel we ought to do the good that has been assigned us to do. Perhaps, the fear that gripped Forster and Russell and Moore (all were pacifists or conscientious objectors at a time when 'conshies' were abhorred) was that they would end up doing the duties assigned to them on the basis of their birth and social standing. Maybe, what Forster means is that the Victorians had a 'horror vacui'- they didn't like empty spaces and would fill them up with decorations- while the Bloomsbury group had embraced a modernism which emphasized the need for empty space- 'a room of one's own', 'personal relationships' which represented a higher duty than anything 'social' or customary. Still, this passage is odd and bears further examination. 

 I suppose, the least marked way of reading it is to say that Mrs. Moore's final days are marked by a spiritual exhaustion which we may term the absence of God. But that is the property Godbole accords to Evil, in which case the Good too has a property- viz. the presence of God. This property, if not 'natural', is supernatural. Perhaps Forster was thinking of the dark night of the soul which afflicts great Saints. Elderly English ladies can be perfectly saintly precisely because they give themselves no such airs. But they may be subject to illness, to fatigue, to accidie, to despair. Mrs. Moore's passage out of the world may have been more painful to her than that by which she brought three children into the world. Still, these things happen. Perhaps there is an eternal reward for those who die in torment. Perhaps there isn't. Life is its own reward and into each life some rain must fall.  Forster does not embrace one view or the other. Some Indians think Esmiss Esmoor is a Saint or spiritual intercessor. Godbole, it appears, completing kirtan, thinks he has been God's instrument to dispel Mrs. Moore's spiritual unease. 

 Covered with grease and dust, Professor Godbole had once more developed the life of his spirit. He had, with increasing vividness, again seen Mrs. Moore, and round her faintly clinging forms of trouble. He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made no difference, it made no difference whether she was a trick of his memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God, “Come, come, come, come.” This was all he could do. How inadequate! But each according to his own capacities, and he knew that his own were small. “One old Englishwoman and one little, little wasp,” he thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pouring wet morning. “It does not seem much, still it is more than I am myself.”

At the beginning of the novel, Mrs. Moore had shown compassion for a sleeping wasp. Godbole is a devotee of Saint Tukaram who is closely related to the rise to power of the great Shivaji- who represented the common people of Maharashtra. Perhaps, if the Marathas had developed their naval power and sought to raise the productivity of their realms through oceanic commerce on the Western European pattern, India would have transitioned from feudalism to modernity in the same manner as England. 

One might say, that like the 39 Articles- the theology of Tukaram's abhang is muddled but it isn't really. It is spontaneous and embraces the notion of reciprocity between worshiper and worshiped. Indeed, Faith creates the deity.  Thankfully for his readers, Forster does not turn Godbole into a Mahatma. He remains firmly in the agnostic camp. But there is a price to be paid- a failure to connect- for this 'Avidya'. Interestingly, it is an economic price. Being unconnected to the wider world through trade condemns you to stagnation and involution. 

India, in the Eighties, failed to jump with both feet on the 'export led' growth bandwagon. It failed to connect with the world and its Socialism turned into a faux bond- a stood up date with Destiny. Nevertheless for a young person at University-

Those were heady days.

Unless you were a Sikh in Delhi being chased by a crazed mob.  

The breezes of postcolonialism were beginning to reach us in our developing nation,

they had well and truly reached India by 1937 when elected Indians took charge of the Provinces. If Congress had been able to reach an agreement with the League, a Federal Government would have been formed. India would have become a de facto Dominion- like Canada or Australia.  

deemed peripheral to the metropolitan corridors of Anglo-American academia,

British academia was always interested in India though it was the India Office which had most knowledge of the country. After Independence, the Cambridge school of Indian historiography-  John Andrew Gallagher, Ronald Robinson, and Anil Seal- was particularly influential.  But it was John Keay, Patrick French and William Dalrymple whose books sold well in India. They had the gift of making Indian history come alive. Still, it was the Frenchman, Dominique Lapierre whose two Indian books had the biggest impact. 

where theorists were interrogating what historian Ranajit Guha later defined as the “dominance without hegemony” of British colonisers.

They had hegemony even when they were not dominant- e.g. in Japan. On the other hand, it was a settled principle of British rule that India be ruled according to its own hoary traditions and laws.  

India was also facing the headwinds of perestroika and glasnost.

No. It wasn't a Communist country. What it faced was a type of Dynasticism where autocracy was tempered by assassination.  

The approaching end of the Cold War would soon herald an economic liberalisation that ushered us into a new commercial-cultural firmament.

That was irrelevant. India was bankrupt. It had no choice but to liberalize trade policy. But the 'Bombay Club' was able to claw back some degree of protection.  

Satellite television and MTV wedged out Doordarshan, the one and only national television broadcaster. Coca-Cola – banned since 1977

by the Janata Government.  

– would soon re-enliven our palates, seriously denting the market for local carbonated drinks like Gold Spot, Thums Up, Limca, Citra and Maaza.

This is misleading. Pepsi was the rival for Thums Up (which replaced Coke in 1977). So Coca Cola bought it and Gold Spot & Limca. Their mistake was to promote Coke over Thums Up but discovered that this helped Pepsi. Thus they had to invest in marketing Thums Up, as a drink for mature men, which is why it is now a billion dollar brand.  

We were feeling very fizzy.

Gassy. Indian food can have that quality.  

SPIC MACAY – the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth – ruled our social lives with its performance seasons at colleges. At Delhi University, Levi’s jeans hobnobbed with crisp cotton sarees. Pupul Jayakar’s Festival of India was inaugurated with much fanfare in Britain in 1982; it would go on to present “India through Indian eyes” in China, Japan, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Sweden and the USA. Oh yes, Indian fever was high.

No. The place was as boring as shit, till Indira Gandhi pissed off the Sikhs and got assassinated.  

It was in this internationalist milieu, during my masters program in English literature at Delhi University, that I encountered Forster’s novel in a syllabus with the colonial “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” script embedded in its suite of courses.

This wasn't a colonial syllabus. It was just the syllabus for a literature which begins with Beowulf and becomes extremely boring with the Bloomsbury Group. 

We had already been introduced to A House for Mr Biswas (1961) by the Trinidadian-Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul. His quaint yet acerbic tone posed considerable challenges.

'Biswas' is easily grasped by kids. 'Area of Darkness' & 'Wounded Civilization' were 'challenging' but most Hindus felt that Naipaul and Ved Mehta were right about the idiocy of Gandhi and Nehru.  Naipaul's 'Million Mutinies' came out in 1990 and was well received. 

He invited us to imagine a Caribbean that few of us could locate on the map, let alone in our imaginations.

His rural Trinidad is just like rural Bihar.  

But any pretensions that we, in the erstwhile colony, might have had a nascent postcolonial authority

Niradh Chaudhri? The ultra British J.C Squires swooned over him.  

were lost in excited genuflections to Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Eagleton was a Marxist and wrote very well. His essay on Spivak- 'in the gaudy supermarket'- is excellent. 

and Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985).

My memory is that Spivak was considered smarter than her. The problem was that nobody could understand a word Spivak wrote. This was because she actually was an imbecile. 

Into my life came A Passage to India, introduced by Dr Sanjay Kumar, a freshly-minted young lecturer, who seemed to herald radical winds of change in university teaching.

Spivak's Professor in Calcutta told his students not to do an MA in English. The certificate was not worth the paper it was printed on.  

We were held by his theatrical hands and ushered into the world of the Mosque, Caves and Temple of Forster’s novel.

Though Indians have access to all three. They don't need to find them in Forster.  

Scrawled all over my Permanent Penguins copy of the novel are pencilled notes that attest to the rigorous education in close reading we received. Some of those notes still stand the test of time. This was the first time I encountered India as a subject of English literary studies, the first time I stumbled upon the Indian imaginary in British fiction.

It is amazing that she hadn't read Kipling.  

The ‘great opportunity’

A Passage to India was not the world of genteel Edwardian angst Forster had depicted in A Room with a View (1908) and Howard’s End (1910).

It was located in India, not England or Europe.  

He was writing against the backdrop of rising demands from the Indian Home Rule Movement,

Forster was aware that intellectuals in England were turning against Imperialism. As H.G Wells put it, the Brits had no plan for India. They might as well clear out. It was foolish for Westminster to spend so much time passing laws about 'peshkesh' and 'takavvi' when not a single MP had any clue as to what these terms might mean.  

already gathering momentum during his first visit to India in 1912-13, and active when he subsequently served as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas in 1921-22.

By then, the Labour Party had put Indian and Irish independence into their manifestos. But for Gandhi's unconditional surrender, India would have got what Egypt and Ireland and Afghanistan got in that year.  

The novel is based on these two visits, which Forster deemed the “great opportunity” of his life, though the letters he wrote home, mainly to his mother, were (he later admitted) “too prone to turn remote and rare matters into suburban jokes”.

Rather than focus on what it was like to bugger the punkah-wallah.  

His epistolary “record of a vanished civilization” was published as The Hill of Devi (1953).

There wasn't much civilization in it and what there was didn't vanish. The Maharaja remained the Maharaja till Indira Gandhi snatched away his title and privy purse. 

In the preface, he says:

In editing I have had to cut out a great deal of “How I wish you were all here!” or “Aren’t Indians quaint!” I did not really think the Indians quaint, and my deepest wish was to be alone with them.

Buggery is best done when alone with the punkahwallah. Mummy's presence might put a dampener on things.  

A Passage to India is not a far cry from this sentiment.

What made it topical was the American obsession with miscegenation. Darkies have ginormous dicks. They will totes wreck the vaginas of White Women.  

But by the time the novel was published, Gandhi’s nonviolent civil-disobedience movement against colonial rule, informed by his philosophy of satyagraha (insistence on truth), had been underway for five years. As a study of prevailing social-sexual mores among British potentates from a decade earlier, Forster’s novel was already dated.

That was its charm. What made it topical was the rise of Racialist ideologies consequent to the dissolution of the great multi-ethnic Empires.  

In his own words, the “gap between India remembered and India experienced was too wide”.

He wasn't an 'old India hand'- like Edmund Candler. But he wrote well.  

So, the mise en scène.

Chandrapore: a fictional Indian town that is presented as “nothing extraordinary”, a place where the Ganges happened “not to be holy”, where an “indestructible form of life” lies flat under the “overarching sky”.

So this a convoluted tale from the plains as opposed to the Hills where the divine Mrs. Hawksbee patronizes the Viceroy. 

This is India “under Western eyes”,

Adela Quested may see with Western eyes because she has just come from the West. But Fielding is an 'old India hand'- a member of the Indian Education Service, like PG Woodhouse's elder brother who was the tutor to Jeddu Krishnamurthi- the Messiah of the Theosophists.  

to borrow from Chandra Talpade Mohanty (not Joseph Conrad’s novel) – an India that Forster concedes, in his prefatory note to the 1957 Everyman edition, “no longer exists politically or socially”.

The Anglo-Indian official class had ceased to exist. But they had always been birds of passage.  

The bare bones of the plot: Adela Quested, a plain schoolmistress,

She has a bit of money of her own and thus is a suitable bride for an ICS man. Contextually, she can't be a schoolmistress because that would be a mesalliance. True, there were Girton bluestockings who might teach at Roedean or Cheltenham- but they wouldn't marry an Indian Civilian and spend the next 20 years playing the Mem Sahib in dusty mofussil towns. What Forster says about her is that she had a 'hard schoolmistressy manner'. But this did not mean she was a School Mistress. Had she been so, she would have known her place. In particular, she would have been very deferential to Fielding who was of the Indian Education Service. 

and Mrs Moore, her chaperone, arrive in Chandrapore to cement a possible marriage with Mrs Moore’s son Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate.

Mrs Moore has a younger son who may not be quite right in the head. Perhaps some 'bundobust' could be made for him in India by Heaslop who was after all a 'Heaven Born' ICS officer. There was also a daughter to be married off. Much depended on Adela making a good wife for Ronny. Someone up in Simla might take a shine to the couple and bring them to the Central Secretariat. But, perhaps Adela is not a 'suitable girl'. The Collector's wife thinks she isn't 'pukka'. 

The two women are befriended by Cyril Fielding, principal of the local government-run college churning out English-speaking Indians, as per Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Education (1835).

Macaulay was merely repeating the demand made by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore that the EIC stop subsidizing education in Sanskrit and Arabic. What ambitious people wanted was English education. Twenty years later the first Indian Universities were created.  

Macaulay’s memorandum argued for a British Education Act that would shape “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”.

He said such people already existed- indeed, Roy had been very well received three years previously when he visited England. Dwarkanath was made even more welcome. Queen Victoria and the French King showed him every courtesy.  

Students would be forced to jettison studies customarily conducted in Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, all the better to perform the role of “interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern”.

Nobody was forced to jettison anything. On the contrary, Indians were expected to study one Classical and one Vernacular Indian language at School in order to matriculate. To practice as advocates, they had to learn the 'shikast' Persian script even though the Courts used the English language. One reason Indian people qualified as barristers in the UK was so as to get the right of audience without having to know anything about Indian scripts or even Indian laws. After all, your Munshi could do that type of donkey work for you.  

Miss Quested and Mrs Moore are desirous to meet “Indians”, much to the horror of the resident English, who are loath to allow “natives” within striking distance.

Forster's second visit to India coincided with the Viceroyalty of a Jew who did much to remove racial restrictions save in wholly private clubs.  

“Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die,” remarks one of the many memsahibs, whom Forster unfailingly paints in the most offensive colours.

There was a widespread belief, back then, that the Mem Sahibs had ruined India- i.e. prevented their husbands from fucking the washer-woman.  

Ronny, a public-school boy to his core, hardened by his job “to hold this wretched country by force”,

He is on the Judicial side. Contextually, this means he is a dim bulb. Still, with the right wife, he might get desirable postings.  

tries to rein in the two women by letting them know in no uncertain terms that “India isn’t a drawing room”.

He is afraid that his mother or his fiancee will do something discreditable to him- e.g. befriend a Eurasian lady. 

Despite pettifogging objections, Ronny’s mother and his “much too individual” prospective wife are soon acquainted with a Hindu professor, Narayan Godbole, and a Muslim physician, Dr Aziz. As a “Mohammedan”, Dr Aziz is not allowed entry into the Chandrapore Club, even though a “few flabby Hindus” have been admitted.

No. Aziz says no Indians were admitted to the Club even as guests. What the author says is that 'flabby Hindus' had preceded Aziz's Muslims in India and 'chilly Englishmen' had succeeded them as the rulers.

 As he strolled downhill beneath the lovely moon, and again saw the lovely mosque, he seemed to own the land as much as anyone owned it. What did it matter if a few flabby Hindus had preceded him there, and a few chilly English succeeded?

It seems the 'close reading' Mridula was taught did not involve actually reading a book written in simple enough English.  

This signalling of a colonial divide and rule policy cannot go unnoticed.

But, Forster tells us, through Aziz, that no Indians were admitted. There was no 'divide and rule'. There was 'unify and rule'.  As the sub-continent moved to self-government, first Buddhist Burma and then Muslim majority Pakistan broke away. The Hindus decided to hang together rather than wait to be hanged apart. 

The British were attempting to supplant the grand abiding influence of 500 years of the Muslim Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.

Which had been supplanted by the Hindu Marathas. The Brits took over Delhi and its puppet Emperor from the Peshwa.  

Scenes of British bigotry unfold “while the true India slid by unnoticed”.

No. Adela is thinking about the narrow social life she, as the wife of a Magistrate, would be condemned to. But this had a lot to do with her fiancee's limitations. There had been English women- e.g. the mother of William Beveridge- who had worked for the upliftment of Indian women while married to ICS officers.  

Sadly, the realization Adela comes to before entering the fatal cave is that she does not love Ronnie. She believes in personal relationships. They create the Good. What happens to Adela in the cave brings Evil into the world of both the Indians and the British. At a later point she will say to Ronnie 'What is the use of personal relationships when everyone brings less and less to them? I feel we ought all to go back into the desert for centuries and try and get good. I want to begin at the beginning. All the things I thought I’d learnt are just a hindrance, they’re not knowledge at all. I’m not fit for personal relationships.' It is plausible that Adela would hold to the Moorean creed that was also Forster's. As Keynes said, there was a public policy aspect to that ethical system. In Howard's End, good could come from bad through truthfulness and mutuality. But, in India, there was Evil because the system was rotten. It was an Evil all equally authored and were afflicted by. Adela escapes it. She returns to England. Fielding and Mrs. Moore's three children are condemned to India. But India will go backwards. The new High School will be turned into a storehouse or granary. The Muslims will revert to dreams of Jihad while the Hindus will wax yet more mystical. Turtons and Burtons will go through the motions being ground down by machine in which they are interchangeable cogs. 

Giving us the temperature of the times, Aziz and his friends, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali, discuss whether “it is possible to be friends with an Englishman”.

Or with a kaffir.  'O you who believe! Do not take the jews and christians as friends; they are friends of each other; and he amongst you who develops affinities with them, is from amongst them; indeed Allah does not guide the transgressors.' [Holy Quran 5:51]

In particular, they interrogate the nature of the “ladies” of Empire, examining them for ingrained imperial prejudices.

No. That would be foolish. Women are supposed to subscribe to the values of their fathers or husbands.  

Forster quickly brings us to the crisis that becomes the fulcrum of the narrative.

No. He dawdles. But that is his charm.  

A chord is struck between Aziz and Mrs Moore in an unexpected early meeting where both drop their guard.

Why? That is the question which gives the novel its interest. The simplest explanation is that Christianity had become too fussy and over-ornamented and spiritually enervating. Perhaps it could have renewed itself by proselytizing among the heathen hordes of the sub-continent.

When Mrs. Moore first comes to India, she lectures her son, a Magistrate, on his Christian duty to the heathen

“I’m going to argue, and indeed dictate,” she said, clinking her rings. “The English are out here to be pleasant.”

Queen Victoria had issued a proclamation of some such sort before becoming the Empress of India. 

“How do you make that out, mother?” he asked, speaking gently again, for he was ashamed of his irritability.

“Because India is part of the earth. And God has put us on the earth in order to be pleasant to each other. God . . . is . . . love.” She hesitated, seeing how much he disliked the argument, but something made her go on. “God has put us on earth to love our neighbours and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.”

He looked gloomy, and a little anxious. He knew this religious strain in her, and that it was a symptom of bad health; there had been much of it when his stepfather died. He thought, “She is certainly ageing, and I ought not to be vexed with anything she says.”

“The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God. . . The sincere if impotent desire wins His blessing. I think every one fails, but there are so many kinds of failure. Good will and more good will and more good will. Though I speak with the tongues of . . .”

He waited until she had done, and then said gently, “I quite see that. I suppose I ought to get off to my files now, and you’ll be going to bed.”

Forster's novel is about the de-Christianizing of Mrs. Moore. His generation had as great a horror of Victorian Evangelism as they did of Utilitarianism. But knocking both down left nothing but the perpetuation of a naked Racialism as the Raj's raison d'etre. That game was so not worth the candle. Empires must either pay for themselves or else, the metropole must be willing to squander blood and treasure on its defence and upkeep. Salazar's Portugal may have been prepared to do so. Atlee's England would have none of it. 

 Like the British Raj, Mrs. Moore is close to death. She says she likes a mystery- Faith is founded on nothing else- but dislikes muddles. Fielding, speaking for Forster, assures her that a mystery is just a muddle. The attractive 'simplicity' of Islam, to the Englishman, is that there are no theological mysteries. God knows best. All is pre-ordained. What appears a muddle is God's superbly wrought plot into which it would be foolish to inquire. Sadly, for Christians, there is, if not a mystery, if not an 'open question', then, yet, Christ's open wounds. 

 For Forster, at the other pole from Islam- from which, at an earlier period, the West acquired atomism- was the ineffable, perhaps obscene, dizzying multiplicity of the henotheistic Hindu pantheon. If India was a muddle, it was the Hindus who had made it so. 

Consider Godbole. Perhaps, he knows the secret of the Marabar caves or, better yet, can reveal what it is precisely because he does not know it. Aziz tries to tease it out of him to no avail. The caves remain a mystery save to the Archaeological Survey. Their only function in Forster's novel is to further muddle what was already muddled. 

Aziz then offers to take Mrs Moore and Miss Quested on a trip to the famed Marabar Caves, based on the real Barabar Caves, the oldest surviving rock-cut caves in India, located in the state now known as Bihar.

The Brits were big fans of Emperor Ashoka who created those caves. Forster was writing at a time when Buddhism and Hinduism and a hybrid Theosophy appeared a threat to Christendom. Islam was considered a simple religion for very simple people.  

“The caves are readily described,” writes Forster:

A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills. […] Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation – for they have one – does not depend upon human speech.

It depended on Ashokan inscriptions which the Archaeological Survey of India had done a lot to investigate and publicize. Forster, I suppose, was showing loyalty to his beloved Ross Massood and the Aligarh movement. Alternatively, since Ashoka was an Emperor who embraced non-violence- the caves conjure up an irenic, if not immaculate, conception of Pax Britannica which the Caiaphas custodians of its cultus- Turtons and Burtons- would have no truck with.  Forster had been a conscientious objector during the war. Russell had gone to jail. 

A metaphor for the deep dark dive into the womb and the untramelled psyche,

would affect everybody- not just Adela 

for the supposed unknowability of India

to Indians? 

and its putative arcane spirituality,

routine to Hindus like Godbole 

for the inability of speech to match up to the liberal-humanist credo by which Forster lived:

because of the inhibitions of the English middle class 

all of this and more might be justifiably attached to the Marabar Caves.

Or it is simply Forster taking the side of the Aligarh Muslims against the idolatrous Hindus and the Ahimsa of their Emperor Ashoka. He would do the same with respect to Iqbal vs Tagore.  Ian Stephens, whom Forster would get to know after the War in Cambridge, was a similar type of homosexual. Sardar Patel threw him out of India because he was pro-Pakistan.  

At the caves, the well worn colonial trope of “an English girl fresh from England” attacked and sexually violated by a devious Oriental man is introduced.

Sadly, it is not a colonial trope. Tourists in India have been raped even if they are not 'fresh' at all.  

Aziz is arrested on unspecified charges, Adela is returned into the bosom of a pernicious social apartheid, and the empire casts its racialised net over all its actors.

But British Justice prevails. Aziz is given a fair trial. The charge against him is based on the victim's deposition. The clinching evidence is that Aziz had picked up the girl's binoculars which she had dropped while fleeing the cave. 

“Miss Quested was only a victim, but young Heaslop was a martyr,” writes Forster; “he was the recipient of all the evil intended against them by the country they had tried to serve; he was bearing the sahib’s cross.”

He was on the Judicial side. Had he been an Army officer he would have been acquitted if he had beaten Aziz to death in the presence of witnesses. True, he'd have been cashiered but a collection would have been taken up for him.  

Forster offers a poor, rather inadequate, if dramatic and well-meaning, resolution to his Shakespearean master-slave dialectic, which mandates that Caliban can only ever ravish Miranda, his coloniser Prospero’s daughter.

This is nonsense. Aziz is a cultured man but temperamental. That's what makes him attractive.  

There is a public trial. An Indian judge is appointed to preside over the case. Two nationalisms rear their heads. Adela admits to making a mistake at the critical juncture of her testimony. Aziz is acquitted.

An English woman does not lie under oath. Forster wasn't an utter scoundrel.  

At the conclusion of the court case, there are “shouts of derision and rage […] people screamed and cursed, kissed one another, wept passionately.” Aziz faints into the arms of Hamidullah. “Victory on this side, defeat on that – complete for one moment was the antithesis,” writes Forster. “Then life returned to its complexities.”

Could Dr. Aziz be retained in Government employment? The case had thrown doubt on his moral character. In the event, Aziz takes service in a Native State. The remaining question is whether Aziz will press for damages, rather than settle for costs. Adela has some money but it is a 'competence' rather than a 'fortune'. If she has to pay heavy damages she might actually have to become a School-Mistress.  

Then the courtroom empties until no one remained on the scene of the fantasy but the beautiful naked god.

If Kipling mentions a punkahwallah, he will tell us his name and the name of his daughter and sketch out the stories he tells her to get her to go to sleep. Forster wasn't Kipling. The latter had Mrs. Hawksbee, who can mould a drudge to be an Imperial proconsul. The former had Mrs. Moore for whom everything was a muddle.  

Unaware that anything unusual had occurred, he continued to pull the chord of his punkah, to gaze at the empty dais and the overturned special chairs, and rhythmically to agitate the clouds of the descending dust.

So who is this “god”?

The sort of dude, Forster liked to fuck.  

A swagger of influencers

Forster was part of the intellectual aristocracy of the Bloomsbury Group, which included artists and writers like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

We may see the influence of G.E Moore behind them. But, the more we learn of them, the less we like them.  

Wealthy, privileged bohemians

they were upper middle class- barely.  

out to smash pieties of polite society and Victorian sexual mores, this swagger of “influencers” (in contemporary parlance) shaped the era’s emerging feminism and modernism.

No. That existed in stronger form before they left School.  

Forster was openly gay within his private circle, though not publicly.

So he wasn't 'openly' gay at all.  

Maurice, his novel about love between two men, was written in 1913 but withheld from publication until after his death in 1970.

Once sodomy was decriminalized.  

Yet A Passage to India, this oddest of odd works, presages the homosexuality Forster could not express in print during his lifetime.

No. It comes after Forster's homosexual 'awakening'. Edward Carpenter is usually mentioned in this connection.  

A scene during the trial, narrated through Adela’s eyes, gives voice to Forster’s heart. Adela notices a man, “the humblest of all who were present”, who has “no bearing officially on the trial: the man who pulled the punkah”:… he seemed to control the proceedings. He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god – not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her […]

It does not occur to Forster that punkahwallahs might be chosen for their good looks and lack of foul odour.  

he stood out as divine, yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish-heaps […] he seemed apart from human destinies, a male Fate, a winnower of souls.

Interestingly, the Nawabs of Awadh had a steam powered punkah by 1819. Electric fans were available in India after 1906. Indeed, Forster mentions them as being in use in the houses of his characters. The first wholly indigenous electric fan was produced in 1930. I suppose, if the District Court had retained the traditional punkah it was because the palki bearers and punkah wallahs had some countervailing power. Abolishing a salaried government post involved a lot of red tape. Still, the atmosphere Forster evokes is pre-War. Moreover, it must be said, the punkah as 'winnower of souls' is an arresting image. Sadly, it is meaningless.  

Race and gender, caste and class, sex and desire coalesce in this passage, which goes on to provide the most penetrating critique yet of the empire to which Foster fully belonged, and repudiated.

He did not belong to the Empire. He was English and the subject of a King, not an Emperor.  

In the face of the punkah-walla’s “aloofness,” Adela questions her “particular brand of opinions, and the suburban Jehovah who sanctified them – by what right did they claim so much importance in the world, and assume the title of civilization?”

She had previously knelt down and prayed to Jehovah, not Lord Jesus, that Aziz be convicted. 'Just as the Hindu clerks asked Lakshmi for an increase in pay, so did she implore Jehovah for a favourable verdict. God who saves the King will surely support the police.' Forster equates English Christianity with idolatrous Hinduism. Moreover, mention of the 'untouchable' punkahwallah was part and parcel of the Aligarh Muslim dream of getting the support of that community so as to outflank the Caste Hindus. 

Forster even manages to get us to sympathize with Ronny- whose Mother has been turned into a Hindu deity 'Esmiss Esmoor'. But she is no longer Christian. To Adela she is pitiless

“Oh, what of the echo?” asked Mrs. Moore, paying attention to her for the first time.

“I can’t get rid of it.”

“I don’t suppose you ever will.”

Ronny had emphasized to his mother that Adela would arrive in a morbid state, yet she was being positively malicious.

“Mrs. Moore, what is this echo?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No—what is it? oh, do say! I felt you would be able to explain it . . . this will comfort me so. . . .”

“If you don’t know, you don’t know; I can’t tell you.”

“I think you’re rather unkind not to say.”

“Say, say, say,” said the old lady bitterly. “As if anything can be said! I have spent my life in saying or in listening to sayings; I have listened too much. It is time I was left in peace. Not to die,” she added sourly. “No doubt you expect me to die, but when I have seen you and Ronny married, and seen the other two and whether they want to be married—I’ll retire then into a cave of my own.” She smiled, to bring down her remark into ordinary life and thus add to its bitterness. “Somewhere where no young people will come asking questions and expecting answers. Some shelf.”

Mrs. Moore, when the novel opened, was good. She was kind. She was able to connect to people. If Evil had entered the cave with Adela, then Good had been taken away from Mrs. Moore at that same moment. Perhaps, that Good became a Hindu deity. Perhaps that Evil became an additional straw which, sooner or later, break the back of the camel that was British Rule in the desert that was India. It may be that the Cosmic books balanced or that there was no book. Debit means the same thing as Credit. Despair means the same thing as Hope. 

Mrs Moore finds an unexpected way to speak of the futility of 'organic unities' as arising from 'personal relationships'- 

'Why has anything to be done, I cannot see. Why all this marriage, marriage? . . . The human race would have become a single person centuries ago if marriage was any use. And all this rubbish about love, love in a church, love in a cave, as if there is the least difference, and I held up from my business over such trifles!”

Adela’s confrontation with an overwhelming sense of infinitude in the Caves section of the novel leaves her with a persistent echo,

She says to Fielding 'My echo has gone—I call the buzzing sound in my ears an echo. You see, I have been unwell ever since that expedition to the caves, and possibly before it.' In other words, the buzzing was part of an illness which, she thinks, preceded her visit to the cave. There was no 'overwhelming sense of infinitude' in the caves. The fact is, when she tells Ronnie she might be mistaken, Aziz might be innocent, her echo gets better. 

What clinches matters is Mrs. Moore's saying Aziz is innocent. Her son demands what proof she has. 

“Oh, how tedious . . . trivial . . .” and as when she had scoffed at love, love, love, her mind seemed to move towards them from a great distance and out of darkness. “Oh, why is everything still my duty? when shall I be free from your fuss? Was he in the cave and were you in the cave and on and on . . . and Unto us a Son is born, unto us a Child is given . . . and am I good and is he bad and are we saved? . . . and ending everything the echo.”

“I don’t hear it so much,” said Adela, moving towards her. “You send it away, you do nothing but good, you are so good.”

“I am not good, no, bad.” She spoke more calmly and resumed her cards, saying as she turned them up, “A bad old woman, bad, bad, detestable. I used to be good with the children growing up, also I meet this young man in his mosque, I wanted him to be happy. Good, happy, small people. They do not exist, they were a dream. . . . But I will not help you to torture him for what he never did. There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.”

“Have you any evidence in the prisoner’s favour?” said Ronny in the tones of the just official. “If so, it is your bounden duty to go into the witness-box for him instead of for us. No one will stop you.”

“One knows people’s characters, as you call them,” she retorted disdainfully, as if she really knew more than character but could not impart it. “I have heard both English and Indians speak well of him, and I felt it isn’t the sort of thing he would do.”

“Feeble, mother, feeble.”

“Most feeble.”

“And most inconsiderate to Adela.”

Adela said: “It would be so appalling if I was wrong. I should take my own life.”

He turned on her with: “What was I warning you just now? You know you’re right, and the whole station knows it.”

“Yes, he . . . This is very, very awful. I’m as certain as ever he followed me . . . only, wouldn’t it be possible to withdraw the case? I dread the idea of giving evidence more and more, and you are all so good to women here and you have so much more power than in England—look at Miss Derek’s motor-car. Oh, of course it’s out of the question, I’m ashamed to have mentioned it; please forgive me.”

“That’s all right,” he said inadequately. “Of course I forgive you, as you call it. But the case has to come before a magistrate now; it really must, the machinery has started.”

“She has started the machinery; it will work to its end.”

Adela inclined towards tears in consequence of this unkind remark, and Ronny picked up the list of steamship sailings with an excellent notion in his head. His mother ought to leave India at once: she was doing no good to herself or to anyone else there.

The old woman goes but Adela's echo remains. Then, outside the court there is the cry 'Esmiss Esmoor!- the crowd believes a witness for the defence has been bundled out of the country. The stage is set for the extinction of the echo.  

which disappears at this moment.

It disappears when, under cross-examination, she replays the scene in her mind. Did Aziz enter the cave? No. She has made a mistake. Perhaps she had suffered a hallucination. But what might have caused it? She tells Fielding that she had begun to feel unwell after a party where the Hindu Professor sang.

“Can you remember when you first felt out of sorts?”

“When I came to tea with you there, in that garden-house.”

“A somewhat unlucky party. Aziz and old Godbole were both ill after it too.”

Perhaps, some hallucinogenic herb had found its way into the tea. 

“I was not ill—it is far too vague to mention: it is all mixed up with my private affairs. I enjoyed the singing . . . but just about then a sort of sadness began that I couldn’t detect at the time . . . no, nothing as solid as sadness: living at half pressure expresses it best. Half pressure. I remember going on to polo with Mr. Heaslop at the Maidan. Various other things happened—it doesn’t matter what, but I was under par for all of them. I was certainly in that state when I saw the caves, and you suggest (nothing shocks or hurts me)—you suggest that I had an hallucination there, the sort of thing—though in an awful form—that makes some women think they’ve had an offer of marriage when none was made.”

She was in a suggestible state. But what triggered it? She tells us that her 'sadness' began at just about the time of Godbole's singing. I may mention that the raag would have been appropriate to the hour. Some such raags- e.g. Malkauns- are said to have supernatural effects. I think Alec Guinness grasped this. There was a mystical side to him- as there often is amongst great actors- and he expresses it in his otherwise over the top performance in 'Passage'.  

Having given us his perspicacious insight into interracial relationships as a key site of colonial anxieties,

This is silly. The key site of colonial anxiety was losing your job or your pension. 

Forster provides a strange reconciliation, via the “ragged edges of religion”, in the last section of the novel, titled Temple. Occupying a mere 30 pages in an almost 300-page novel, Temple relies heavily on the Hindu religious practices Forster had observed during his second sojourn in Dewas.

Why had Aziz not taken service in a Muslim state? I suppose his failure to gain exemplary damages from Adela was considered cowardly by his co-religionists. Meanwhile, he is under the impression that Fielding married Adela and kept her money for himself.  

In The Hill of Devi, Forster devotes a section to what he deems “the most important of [his] letters home”. These described the Gokulashtami Festival, which celebrates the birth of Lord Krishna.

He was born in jail. Aziz would have been in the Cellular jail in the Andamans if Adela hadn't recanted.  

The festival appears in A Passage to India, where it is described as a “wild and sincere” occasion, during which “all men loved each other, and avoided by instinct whatever could cause inconvenience or pain”.

Perhaps Ind had been an Eden before the Turk or the European snaked their way in.  

There is a moment during the festivities when the music is silenced, for this was ritually the moment of the Despised and the Rejected; the God could not issue from His temple until the unclean sweepers played their tune, they were the spot of filth without which the spirit cannot cohere.

Such music, of course, was abomination to Islam. Plenty of riots occurred because music was played in front of a mosque.  

Like Adela Quested’s observation of the punkah wallah at the trial, Forster’s sedulous sense of the despised appears within the divine. It provides an intimate insight into how he thought of bodies within the hierarchical and ideological morass of imperialism.

Did Forster think of English bodies differently? On the evidence of his earlier novels, no. There is class and there is hierarchy and an ideological muddle or morass. India was different because there was but a light topsoil of Englishry in the mofussil towns scattered across its vastness.  

A passage through India?

A Passage to India has been subjected to charges of mediocrity as a work of modernism.

It is middle-brow. But it is well written and, because of the interracial sex angle, had a ready market in America. 

It has been critiqued – most astringently by Edward Said – for perpetuating orientalist tropes.

It perpetuates certain Aligarh Muslim tropes. But that was par for the course for Anglo-Indian writing. You picked a side and stuck with it. Kipling was for the Punjabi and against the Bengali. Forster was for the Aligarh Muslim and against the cunning Brahmin. Said- a White American Protestant- knew nothing about India.  

Benita Parry has criticised it for mystifying the idea of India.

Forster was reacting to India's admission to the League of Nations. Prior to the Great War, while yet great Empires existed, a private gentleman needed no passport to cross borders. Nor did he require Government permission to buy foreign currency. It was a golden age for cosmopolitan Liberals. With the resignation of Morley at the outbreak of war in 1914, Forster's world was shattered. The long nineteenth century had ended. Nationalism was the cuckoo in the nest of Liberalism. 

 'India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps!'

          Postcolonial feminists have pilloried it for fetishising racialised bodies.

Forster had a dick. True he only used it for homosexual purposes. Still, dicks are very evil. Ban them immediately. 

The most charitable theorists understand the novel as

of its time. Racialized Nationalism had triumphed over universalist Empires- save perhaps in Bolshevik Russia. But Lenin's brand of Universalist homonoia could only be established by cutting off the heads of people like Forster whose hands were soft and unused to manual labour.  Perhaps Islam would be immune to the lure of Marx. After all, Muslims are very very stupid. Still, they are decent enough chaps if taught to play cricket. That's where Aziz fell down. Cricketers soon get out of the habit of telling stupid lies. True, they become incapable of saying anything interesting but you can generally stop their spate of words by asking if a googly is the same thing as a birdie. 

a treatise on how colonisation damages the coloniser’s mind,

There are no 'colonisers' in the novel. There are administrators and judges and police officers and Civil Surgeons. But they are dull and deeply provincial. Young Englishmen were no longer keen to go out to India. They knew they would be bored to death unless they first died of dysentery.  

as well as that of the colonised, and as an impassioned plea for intercultural, interracial friendships.

Of which the Indian National Congress- founded by an ICS Scotsman and recently headed by Annie Besant- had plenty. Forster himself was close to Ross Massood.  

In its 100th year, A Passage to India may also be interrogated for holding on to Forster’s liberal-humanist credo “only connect”.

But Kipling did it better. His credo was- work as part of a team and even the most boring job in India becomes rewarding. Kim, as Borges reminds us, has taken up an ignoble profession- that of a spy. But his work does not matter. What matters is his loyalty and esprit de corps.  

The question lingers, with even more urgency now, if such a hope of connection obfuscates the extractive economic and political conditions on which colonisation rests.

Colonisation ended long ago. Even Indians like Mridula are welcome to settle in 'settler colonies' so as to teach nonsense to imbeciles.  

What if the colonised and the coloniser cannot understand each other in any way?

They can still trade or enforce the payment of tribute.  

The title of Forster’s novel is derived from Walt Whitman’s 1869 poem A Passage to India, where the American poet sees the opening of the Suez Canal “as both a reason for celebration and an opportunity to connect with the spiritual traditions of faraway lands”.

 Whitman had worked in the Bureau of Indian affairs and lamented the passing away of much of their ancient lore and traditional way of life. India, for him, contained Indians of another sort- ones with ancient books and temples. 

Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.        

Forster’s evocation of Suez is truer and darker. Mrs Moore dies on her passage home “across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea” via the Suez, leaving the novel to claim that “no poetry adorns it, because disillusionment cannot be beautiful”.

Mridula is mistaken. Forster says that Mrs. Moore left before the hot season when 'electric fans hummed and spat'. 

 'In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but here the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful.'

I don't suppose the Arabian deserts described by T.E Lawrence were cool and shady. Yet, there is no disillusionment with 'the garden of Allah'. It was the politics of Damascus which repelled Lawrence.  

'Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

India accommodated Kipling well enough. His poetry is entertaining and puts new life into you when the drought comes and you have to spend your days under canvass organizing food-for-work programs and are bone tired. 

'The annual helter-skelter of April, when irritability and lust spread like a canker, is one of her comments on the orderly hopes of humanity.'

 And yet order was and is kept. 

Fish manage better; fish, as the tanks dry, wriggle into the mud and wait for the rains to uncake them. But men try to be harmonious all the year round, and the results are occasionally disastrous.

The more senior people went off to Simla. Even the middling sort sent their wives and children to Hill Stations.  

The triumphant machine of civilization may suddenly hitch and be immobilized into a car of stone, and at such moments the destiny of the English seems to resemble their predecessors’, who also entered the country with intent to refashion it, but were in the end worked into its pattern and covered with its dust.

England was able to use the resources of India to win two world wars. Admittedly, the second time around, England did as much to defend India as India had done for Britain in the Great War.  

“Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it,” writes Forster;

Tagore had won a Nobel Prize for supplying poetry. This was a great consolation to some English soldiers in the trenches.  

“they desire that joy shall be graceful, 

don't shove a radish up your bum and run around naked when you are happy 

and sorrow august,

don't scream loudly and shit yourself when Mummy dies.  

and infinity have a form,

No. Nobody wants that.  

and India fails to accommodate them.”

Kipling and Tagore won the Nobel Prize. India accommodated them very well.  

Thus his belief in the “undeveloped heart […] the heart untrained and untutored”, as he wrote of in his 1936 essay Notes on the English Character, fails to achieve any ethical connection through personal salvation.

He was writing only about the English, public school educated, middle class. He says that Aligarh is on the English public school model. Sadly, Ross Massood was straight even though his grandfather set the place up. Perhaps this was because his Dad was an Oxford educated Judge rather than an 'untrained and untutored' catamite. 

The heartbeat of Howard’s End, the ultimate manifesto of liberal humanism, was “only connect”. A Passage to India puts paid to any such possibility. Two years after the trial, after Cyril Fielding has married Mrs Moore’s daughter Stella, he visits Aziz in Mau. He asks him: “Why can’t we be friends now? […] It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” The answer comes from the very earth:

“No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”

It may be that Forster had heard the story of Ross's father's difficulties with his British brother Judges. It was also said that he was an alcoholic. It often happened that the son of a person who, by popular report, had been unfairly treated by the Brits (e.g. Salman Rushdie's father), would be hold himself a little aloof from such people.  

Attempting the impossible

In his 1909 manifesto, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Gandhi wrote:

I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbours, but in my conceit I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded.

This passage occurs in a chapter titled Hindus and Muhammadans. Gandhi begins by saying railways are very evil. God ordained us to walk everywhere. The Steam Engine is a satanic innovation. His interlocutor asks if the introduction of Islam into India hadn't been equally disastrous. Gandhi says- Brits invented this story about 'inborn enmity'. Gandhi was correct. That is why there is no such country as Pakistan.  

Forster may be seen to be such a man.

Very true. Buggering the Punkahwallah is the pastime of every true Gandhian.  

He was striving to achieve an idealistic, pure connection of friendship, untrammelled by the contingencies of race, religion and language.

He found it with a  Egyptian bus driver.  

But his individual sense of egalitarianism and fraternity was negated by an India that was being swept by the winds of nationalism.

As was Egypt, not to mention England, France, Germany, China, Hungary, Guatemala etc.  

Forster himself signals that, within the realm of the political, the personal may not survive: “socially they had no meeting-place.”

Lord Reading threw open officially sponsored clubs to 'natives'. But the INC already had plenty of White people. Indeed, it was twice headed by White ladies.  

Forster traced an ancestral connection to the late-18th century abolitionist Clapham Sect. He was shaped by a reformist Edwardian milieu and was soaked in the charmed bohemianism of the Bloomsbury Group.

He was a little dowdy and old womanish. Still, his talent was obvious.  

And he was deeply attached to a mythic liberal humanism – which was confounded by what he encountered in revolutionary India.

Moscow was revolutionary. India- not so much.  

With A Passage to India, his reputation in the fraught stratosphere of early 20th century English literature is both sealed and soiled.

No. It is a major work of a minor writer. Somerset Maugham was far more successful. 

In pedagogical, philosophical and political terms, Forster’s ambition was to show us competing beliefs and contradictory positions.

He makes no such attempt. But, unlike Maugham who sometimes wrote like a Frenchman, Forster's English is pellucid. His ear for dialogue is unmatchable. His handling of the Court scene is masterly. Is it plausible? No. The Superintendent of Police would not cross-examine a witness he had previously deposed more particularly if a barrister was appearing for the Defence. If no public prosecutor had been appointed for the District, then a lawyer would have been hired for the task. It is obvious that the Defence will raise a hue and cry about 'leading questions' and the witness having been coached by the very man to whom she had given the original deposition or 'first information report'. Moreover, the Superintendent is foolish enough to mention Mrs. Moore, which would be bound to cause the Defence to demand that she be produced for cross examination. Forster gets away with this travestu by focussing our attention of the thoroughly rattled European community. Thus, psychological plausibility is maintained. 

 Apparently, Forster himself was in doubt as to whether a trial of this sort would be conducted in a subordinate court. He asked Massood to check the details. Massood said what he had written was magnificent. Not one word should be changed. It appears Massood was a bit like Aziz. Still, Massood was right. There is drama in the courthouse- this is 'truth of mood' not 'truth of fact' and, in any case, the plot is gossamer thin. 

To be clear, the trial could be held in a subordinate court but, because the Defence had brought in a leading barrister, an experienced prosecutor would have been called in. He would have deposed the accuser and spotted the weaknesses in her testimony. Then a medical report would have been commissioned. The trial could have gone ahead on the basis of that old standby of the Indian police- the false witness paid for the purpose. The Defence may have tried to get Adela on the stand and this could have been a point on which they appealed the case. Still, what happened in the High Court was no concern of the District Commissioner. 

His novel expresses a desire to reach out to the other, sit with biases and discomforts, humilities and hostilities – but not lose sight of civilisational injustices that make dialogue seem not only impossible, but unimaginable.

But Kipling had already settled the hash of the 'can East & West meet' question. The answer was- sure, if you contest with each other for an honourable prize or, better yet, work together as a team. Whining about Civilizational injustices- the greatest of which is having to pay taxes (which are the price of civilization)- is best left to poltroons.  

Forty years from when I first read A Passage to India, a desire for connection without attending to the contingencies of history and geography seems jejune.

Mridula is unaware of the history of her own country.  

At this historical moment, when the world is entirely flammable, I cannot but be aware of the continuing fires of colonialism

where? Israel? Is that what she means?  

and the desire to break free of the horrendous Enlightenment binary that created it.

Colonies existed long before there was an Enlightenment. No doubt, this lady thinks Vasco da Gama was a pal of Voltaire.  

If it is difficult to reconcile opposed ideas and positions today,

what is difficult is to get a visa and to settle in the USA. Fuck you Trump! Fuck you very much! I hope the Greenlanders kill all your Green Berets.  

to struggle between human identity and alterity,

ipseity and alterity. Mridula has to struggle not to become a wallaby.  

A Passage to India reminds me of how we got here.

To Australia? I suppose you swam over there from Delhi and killed and displaced the aboriginal wallabies. I believe Purushottam Billimoria first set this trend. 

Today, Gandhi and Forster seem to be at the irreconcilable ends of the legacy of empire:

Forster was on the side of the Muslims. Gandhi wanted to bamboozle them. But Pakistanis like Kipling not Forster.  

one arguing for

Enemas 

satyagraha, non-violence and civil disobedience; the other pleading for liberal humanism and psychic integration.

Sodomy.  

What their visions and works demand of us is

sodomy in the one case and sleeping naked with young girls in the other.  

an acute consideration of what Forster calls the “unsatisfactory and undramatic tangles” of human interaction – flawed and ineffectual, broken and unbridgeable.

But those tangles and muddles were of a middle-class Englishman whose 'love could not speak its name'.  

A Passage to India is a reminder that we have not yet forded the gap.

Islam remains Islam. Hinduism remains Hinduism. But, nowadays, a gay bloke who went to an English Public School is welcome to be as gay as fuck. He doesn't have to pretend to be a genteel old maid. As for Britain, after its non-violent struggle for independence from Brussels, it had a Hindu Prime Minister. If Indians play the Raj card, us true blue Brits can play the Rishi card. Under his rule, trillions of wee Scottish bairns starved to death. I myself became seriously malnourished during the great Cornish Pasty dearth of 2023. Still, we survived. I hope the Indians will not spurn the offer of my hand in friendship unless, obviously, they try to stick their dicks on it. It's one thing if Mahatma Gandhi pulls that trick on you- after all, that's just the sort of high jinks barristers get up to. But when Mamta Bannerjee does it, you look a fool when you complain about it. People, rather meanly, suggest that you might be an alcoholic.