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149 In Growing, an account of his years as a civil servant in Ceylon, Leonard Woolf—the Bloomsbury affiliate, Hogarth Press publisher, and eminent internationalist—describes imperial society in terms of a typical London suburb : “White society in India and Ceylon, as you can see in Kipling’s stories, was always suburban. In Calcutta and Simla, in Colombo and Nuwara Eliya . . . relations between Europeans rested on the same kind of snobbery, pretentiousness , and false pretensions as they did in Putney or Peckham. . . . The flavour or climate of one’s life was enormously affected, even though one might not always be aware of it, both by this circumambient air of a tropical suburbia and by the complete social exclusion from our social suburbia of all Sinhalese and Tamils” (17–18). Besides Kipling, Woolf might have also cited his contemporaries George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh or his friend E. M. Forster, whose late-imperial novels similarly exude the “circumambient air of a tropical suburbia .” In A Passage to India Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore discover that their “romantic voyage” to the subcontinent has led them to “a gridiron of bungalows ” (23), where philistine sahibs discourage any contact with the “real” India. Likewise, residents of an English legation in the satirical east Africa of Waugh’s Black Mischief immerse themselves in gardening, cards, and cheap periodicals, blissfully unaware that rebellion foments around them. And in Burmese Days Orwell’s liberal protagonist foresees suburbia’s wholesale obliteration of Burma’s indigenous culture: “Sometimes I think that in two hundred years . . . all this will be gone—forests, villages, monasteries, pagodas all vanished. And instead pink villas fifty yards apart; all over those hills, as far as you can see, villa after villa, with all the gramophones playing the same tune” (42). Like Woolf, whose autobiography records his gradual disillusionment with imperialism, Forster, Waugh, and Orwell distance themselves from Britain’s 6 Ressentiment and Late-Imperial Fiction 150 Semi-Detachment mission civilisatrice by deriding colonial society as inherently and unforgivably suburban. Cataloging the clichés of villadom with particular venom, their portrayals of imperial civil stations and clubs reflect suburbia’s long-standing association with the pretentious and second-rate. Indeed, such late-imperial fiction often reads like a diatribe against the shallowness of British middle-class life, evoking a litany of suburban ills that, according to J. B. Priestley, included “miles of semi-detached bungalows, all with their little garages, their wireless sets, their periodicals about film stars, their swimming costumes and tennis rackets” (319–20). In the long weekend between the two world wars, the British suburb’s dubious reputation was particularly pronounced. An unprecedented four million new homes sprang up in England and Wales during this period, and the area of Greater London doubled in size, making epithets for suburbia like “bungaloid growth” and “ribbon rash” virtually ubiquitous among the urbane. While such widespread scorn undoubtedly influenced Forster, Waugh, and Orwell, their depictions of suburban colonial society also bespeak the decline in imperial confidence during the 1920s and 1930s, decades that witnessed the founding of the Irish Free State, the rise of Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement, and the spread of mass labor strikes across Africa. “Never had a larger area of the globe been under the formal and informal control of Britain than between the two world wars,” as Eric Hobsbawm suggests, “but never before had the rulers of Britain felt less confident about maintaining their old imperial supremacy” (Age of Extremes 211). Implicit in what follows is the claim that by projecting the pervasive disdain for suburbia on white colonial society, the fiction of Forster, Waugh, and Orwell prepares Britain to divest itself of imperial rule. Equating white colonial communities with mediocre if not despicable suburbs, their novels seek to justify Britain’s detachment from its imperial possessions and thereby to facilitate the impending end of empire. More specifically, I want to show how the suburban subtext of such fiction, particularly A Passage to India, intimates imperial dissolution by reflecting a shift in the organization of colonial cities during the early twentieth century, when town planning principles inspired by British suburbs in the Edwardian era were exported across the empire. Such principles, which established or consolidated a regime of spatial divisions between colonizer and colonized, exert themselves on both the content and the form of Forster’s novel. Obsessed with replicating middle-class British values, Forster’s colonial society appears increasingly incapacitated by...

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