uncorrupted by evil, prostitutes have a becoming modesty, and even Russian spies are not killed but merely led cunningly astray. That is the magic and the charm of Kim. It is also its limitation.

While many of Kipling's stories depict India as alien and mysterious, the emphasis of his work as a whole is on subduing the subcontinent to description, on making it 'knowable,' whether through Kim's lessons in map drawing or through the use of native informants in stories like 'Tod's Amendment.' But it is only the least sympathetic of Forster's characters in A Passage to India who find India knowable, who speak authoritatively about such things as 'the educated native's latest dodge.' -640-

Forster's India is knowable only in its unknowability, for 'How can the mind take hold of such a country?' To his character Mrs. Moore India seems like the undecipherable echo she hears in the Marabar Caves, answering «ou-boum» to all sounds whatsoever. Yet later, as she takes ship at Bombay, Mrs. Moore hears the landscape say something else. 'So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as final?… What have we in common with them…?'

'Nothing embraces the whole of India,' says Dr. Aziz, 'nothing, nothing,' for it is a place that cannot be fully described, fully known. Forster's India is, in Edward Said's words, 'an Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from the West'-indeed, a place whose very essence lies in that estrangement. The schoolmaster Fielding has been given an open door into Indian life-Aziz shows him the picture of his dead wife, who had kept purdah when she was alive. But even Fielding can only stand on the threshhold; and India remains a mystery. If to Aziz the British 'pose of 'seeing India'… [is] only a form of ruling India,' the novel as a whole suggests something else: see India, and realize all we don't understand about this alien land; see it, and realize that we have no business here.

Seeing India's otherness as a reason why Britain ought not to control it is indeed a step toward liberation; most servants of the Raj had confidently believed it justified their rule ('The Oriental is not capable of self- government'). Yet for readers after the end of empire, those positions-India as unnowable-begin to seem the two sides of the same imperial coin. Each is an absolute, each an abstraction, and the novel finds no middle ground. As Aziz and Fielding cannot finally cross the gap that separates them, so too Forster himself has 'not yet, not [here]' found a way to talk about cultural difference without turning it into 'otherness.'

That makes A Passage to India a more problematic text than its traditional reputation as the great anti- imperialist novel would suggest. 'It's beginning at the wrong end, isn't it?' Fielding says to Aziz during a discussion of political reform. 'I know, but institutions and governments don't.' And Forster therefore insists on seeing British imperialism not in political terms but as a problem in individual human relations. The novel's scenario is perhaps too well known to require more than a brief account. Its central events grow from the Englishwoman Adela Quested's belief that Aziz has tried to rape her on a visit to the Marabar Caves. Forster lets his readers know that she is mistaken, but -641- Aziz is nonetheless committed for trial, and Fielding, the only Englishman to believe in his innocence, breaks with the British community. On the witness stand, however, Adela realizes she is wrong and recants, though what did in fact happen remains a mystery; and some critics have seen in that ambiguity a modernist's characterisic preference for the symbolic over the actual. Yet Adela's recantation also makes the trial much simpler. For it means that Forster doesn't have to pursue the political conflicts and complications her charge evokes, doesn't actually have to weigh the affront to Adela against the affront of British rule.

Aziz is set free, and the novel's last hundred pages dramatize the difficulties he and Fielding have in remaining friends, difficulties far greater than those usually faced by people from different cultures. For 'Every human act in the East is tainted with officialism… [and] where there is officialism every human relation suffers.' The tension in their friendship grows from the essential inequity between them that Britain's possession of India creates. Aziz cannot forget that in racial terms he is the ruled and Fielding the ruler, and he grows suspicious, for all the latter's willingness to break with the Raj. Finally they each retreat into their own people, the one into a nascent sense of Indian nationalism, the other into an English marriage. For as Aziz says at the end of the novel, India will have to drive the last Englishman into the sea before they can be friends once more. And indeed in the novel's closing image their whole world-'the horses… rocks… the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds… the sky'-weighs in against that friendship, so that imperialism comes to seem a force of nature, driving them apart, no matter how much they want to stay together.

Forster's ironic portrait of the Raj is a powerful one, and yet the novel's readers can easily draw the conclusion that its greatest evil lies in keeping these two men apart. Politics stand for Forster as an intrusion into private life. He has always been admired for the sane and skeptical humanity of his attack on the priggish and the closed-minded, and there is never any doubt about his opposition to imperialism as a system. Yet his account of British India increasingly seems a limited one. He began the novel after his first visit to the subcontinent in 1912 and 1913; it was interrupted by the Great War, and he resumed work on it after his second visit in 1921. In the intervening decade Indian nationalism coalesced around two events: Gandhi's emergence as a national leader, and the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which a British general ordered his -642- troops to open fire on an unarmed crowd. Those developments made Forster resist the temptation to cast the book 'as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West,' and therefore shaped its dispiriting conclusion. But his India, like Kipling's, is essentially abstracted from history. His characters' manners remain those of the prewar years, and yet the novel's protracted composition led Forster to cut it free from contemporary reference. A Passage to India seems to float in time, unconnected to any sense of a continuously unfolding-indeed a rapidly changing-present, with its characters' lives unaffected by Amritsar, Congress, legislative reform, or the growth of communal tensions.

Because Forster's Raj seems incapable of change, it is in a sense as eternal as Kipling's; indeed one reads with the sense that neither of them could imagine it ending. The wit and playfulness of his narrative voice and the ease with which he unrolls his narrative are unmatched in the fiction of empire, and A Passage to India remains the canonical statement of liberal opposition to imperialism. Yet because Forster's empire remains frozen in time, that opposition emerges in emotional rather than political terms-as attitude, not action. It takes the form of an outraged fellow feeling and it has the peculiar effect of making imperialism seem more an English crisis than an Indian one. For like Heart of Darkness, Forster's novel is at its most acute in its analysis of what colonialism does to the colonizer. Aziz's trial aside, the greatest danger imperialism poses in A Passage to India is its power to make everyone, even its readers, into people like the butts of its satire, its collectors and magistrates and memsahibs. 'I give any Englishman two years,' says Aziz's cousin Hamidullah; after that, 'they all become exactly the same,' warped and bent by officialism. 'When the white man turns tyrant,' Orwell wrote, 'it is his own freedom that he destroys… He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.' No novel of its period did more to show just how ghastly the empire-born mask of Britishness could be.

Forster's successors continued that analysis of what imperialism did to the English themselves. It is, for example, a major concern in Orwell's Burmese Days (1934), in many of Doris Lessing's superb African stories, and in J. G. Farrell's dissection of the twin myths of progress and empire in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973). It is also at issue in the richest narrative of English India, Scott's tetralogy about the end of British rule, The Raj Quartet. In its last volume, A Division of the Spoils (1975), the historian Guy Perron charts the ways in which -643- India has formed part of England's idea about herself and… been forced into… being a reflection of that idea. Up to say 1900 the part India played in our idea about ourselves was the part played by anything we possessed which we believed it was right to possess… Since 1900, certainly since 1918, the reverse has obtained. The part played since then by India in the English idea of Englishness has been that of something we feel it does us no credit to have. Our idea about ourselves will now not accommodate any idea about India except the idea of returning it… in order to prove that we are English… [But] India itself, as itself… has played no part [in that idea] whatsoever.

Perron's acute analysis of the complex interrelations of England and empire suggests the difficulty that even the Raj's greatest critics face in writing about 'India itself' rather than about the British in India. And Scott has been attacked for doing just that, most notably by Salman Rushdie, who sees in the Quartet a form of imaginative recolonization in which Indians remain 'bit players in their own history.' Yet Rushdie misses the degree to which passages like this one mount a critique of that Orientalism; the Quartet has a self-consciousness about its own representation of India that in many ways anticipates recent work in cultural studies.

Moreover Scott shows the effect that the British inability to see 'India itself' has had on Indian history. In an essay called 'After Marabar' (1972) he argued that until mid-century not only India but England had been locked in a 'conflict between Turtonism and Fieldingism.' Turton is the District Collector in Forster's novel, the schoolmaster's emblematic conservative counterpart, and their names point to a confrontation between the status quo of class and country on the one hand and reform on the other. It was, Scott wrote, the last time one could feel an 'absolute conviction about the right direction to take.' Yet in retrospect he believed that conviction had been simplistic. For

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