A Voluntary Surrender: Imperialism and Imagination in A Passage to India

JEFFREY HEATH A Voluntary Surrender: Imperialism and Imagination in A Passage to India A Passage to India is a book about latecomers and invaders on foreign soil. The intruders are the Hindus, the Moslems, and the British in India, but they can also be seen as novelists attempting to find shape in regions as yet uncolonized by the imagination.1 Critics themselves have made many forays into Forster's India, and as a result, we now have many different Passages: the socio-political, the biographical, the anthropological-religiouspsychological , the textual, the linguistic.2 In 1943, Lionel Trilling wrote of A Passage, 'the pattern remains public, simple, and entirely easy to grasp.'} Since then, Forster criticism has come a long way, and by the 1980s his novel had become as elusive as the heart of the cloud at the end of its own penultimate chapter. Like the faces Aziz encounters while cycling through the bazaar ('just before he collides with each it vanishes '),4 A Passage has had a tendency to dissolve as its readers have moved closer. Like India itself during Forster's first visit in 1912, it invites through its hundred voices, but if we respond reductively - only to part of it rather than to the whole - India will not accommodate us. Indeed, to the fully responsive reader, it must often seem that silence is the best reply. The novel's core action (or non-action, since nothing may have happened) is the alleged assault on Adela Quested.5 Seeking to corroborate her story, the police ransack Aziz's home for evidence and force open the drawer where he keeps the photograph of his now-deceased wife. We learn little about their relationship except that Aziz had overcome his westernized distaste for arranged marriages to believe, in the end, that 'there was no one like her, and what is that uniqueness but love?'(73). In a novel in which universal inclusion is so important, the reader might wish to question Aziz's equating of love and uniqueness; nevertheless, it is the image ofhis wife, charged with associations with love, beauty, home, and the afterlife, which is 'borne with triumph' in its shrine-like drawer, to be exposed in court, along with embarrassing private letters (180, 182). This violation damages Aziz's health and ruins his prospects. Yet it is only one example of the invasion of home which comes to be one of A Passage's most familiar gestures. The novel contains other homes which are less easily infiltrated. India itself is the prime example, but so, by metaphorical extension, are the 'extraordinary' Marabar Hills and the universe itself. Depending on UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1989/90 288 JEFFREY HEATH which arch of the metaphor we choose, A Passage is a political novel or a poetic, philosophical novel, and it is fascinating to watch how the narrative snaps back and forth in focus as our interest in one aspect or the other prevails.6 Forster rings the changes on the motif of invasion in a spectrum ofvariations which extends even to its mirror-image, invitation. Here we meet a problem: the sky 'settles everything' (32), but will it settle us? How do we make ourselves physically and imaginatively at home in India, or in that larger India, the universe - through invitation or invasion? Are those large places hospitable, or are they merely unwelcoming chaos? The characters give varying answers. Acceptance of things as they are characterizes that'sly and charming' Hindu, Professor Godbole. He does not interfere with the course of events except by omission: other people's 'arrangements' mean nothing to him. He is not a story-teller: he does not describe the caves, nor does he tell Aziz that Fielding has married Stella, not Adela. But he does inform Fielding, in the tones of one who accepts the will bf the universe, that 'all perform a good action, when one is performed, and when an evil action is performed, all perform it' (185-6). Good and evil 'are not what we think them, they are what they are, and each of us has contributed to both.' Moreover, 'they are both of them...