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151 CHAPTER FOU R At the Mouth of the Caves A Passage to India and the Language of Re-vision In 1922, the year that Forster wrote “The Life to Come” and resumed A Passage to India, he also wrote a short essay entitled “Pan.”1 Impelled by many of the concerns that underlie both the story and the novel, this essay offers a whimsical disquisition on the green leaf pan, or the Indian condiment (pronounced “paan”). Punning on the name of Forster’s favorite Greek god, it recalls his important first story, “The Story of a Panic,” in which English bourgeois complacency is violently disrupted by the emergence of Pan, the bringer of bodily truth.2 Haunted by a similar notion of Pan, A Passage to India articulates Forster’s sexual politics through a coded evocation of the suppressed body. Interrogating the intertwining of racial oppression and heterosexual desire, the novel crafts a new language as an agent of political intervention , seeking to disrupt English hegemonic codes of imperial, linguistic, and sexual oppression through the materialization of unspeakable bodily truth. As a paradigm for Forster’s work in this novel, “Pan” can serve as a useful segue for reading A Passage to India: like pan, the potent work of art that is offered for the intake of friends and enemies, the novel enfolds multiple contents, purposes, and meanings, and is intended to produce bodily effects and material change in human relations. The essay begins as a self-knowing narrative of colonial arrival and discovery —of a mysterious sylvan refuge that seems to foster a peculiar unknown crop. This mystery is grounded in earthiness, in a fertility of “warmth and manure” (319). Leading us on, refusing to name what it is that the Forster traveler-narrator has “come” upon (318), the writing is sensuous, sexually suggestive, exuding a desire to know that projects desire on what it observes: “Round each pillar a convulvus twines, aromatic and lush, with heart-shaped leaves that yearn towards the sun” (319). These pan leaves, grown in a delicately controlled darkness that evokes the beginning of “The Life to Come,” suggest a desired art, as the narrator echoes Keats’s address to the Grecian urn in overt tones of Hellenic homoeroticism: “Oh, and are those men? Naked and manure-coloured, can they be men? . . . What acolytes, serving what nameless deity?” But then Forster the essayist ironizes his past epistolary self, the orientalizing traveler whose colonizing desire to name and know is rebuked by the effect the leaf induces on his tongue: “I think I know now; but to make sure, I stretch out my hand, I pluck a leaf and eat. My tongue is stabbed by a hot and angry orange in alliance with pepper. Exactly; I am in the presence of Pan” (319–20). Pan-ic, as Forster’s first published story tells us, can bring painful truths and re-vision. As if a symptom of India and its effects on Forster’s writing, the leaf refuses to surrender its name: leading the seeker to a cross-lingual pun on Pan the god, apparently its presiding deity; inducing violent bodily effects, which release that tongue into tongue-twisting play. “Pan; pan-supari; beetle, bittle, bettle, betl, betel: what an impression it made upon the early visitors to the East.” Rolling off in tactile sounds various colonial and indigenous names for this startling leaf, Forster’s wit soon makes clear that what he is after is not really “pan,” or the “real India,” but the history of naming, knowing, and treating pan, the history of European colonial discourse and language of power that he will attempt to counter. Tracing various European and other “visitors” who encountered and wrote about pan, he concludes with the British and their prohibitions : “Anglo-India will have no truck with Pan, and roundly condemns the ‘natives filthy chewing betel nut,’ although the natives would rather not be called natives, and what they chew is not the betel or filthy or even a nut. . . . [But] to consume the mixture would be un-British. What a pity!” (320). Pan here becomes a signifier of the proscribed, racially other colonized body, proximity with which is forbidden across racial boundaries, and which is At the Mouth of the Caves 152 used by the British in India to constitute their identity through negation. To eat it would be “un-British.” But having eaten of it, Forster strives through this essay entitled “Pan” to que(e...

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