Colonialism In P. Forster's A Passage To India

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The British always looked forward to supplementing their control of the Indian empire through a web of hegemonic practices involving subtle strategies of cultural manipulation. Knowledge of Indian culture, ideology, ethnology, ethnography, anthropology and the geography of India assisted the British colonizers to reinforce and build up a powerful discourse. Very often books of science, fiction, technology and even the Bible were used as epistemological techniques for control. Books of literature also helped provide the bourgeois epistemological knowledge for colonialists. They were used to exploiting the people intellectually. They were also used to shaping the style of thoughts of the colonized. Colonial literature mostly reflects …show more content…

A Passage to India is the story of relationships between the rulers and the ruled. Forster has very dexterously highlighted different factors, social, political and religious which determine how they came together and had to live together. In this connection Mahood says:

"The development of the story in A Passage to India is thus in many ways the development, or rather the deterioration, of the relationship between rulers and ruled in the sub-continent between 1912 and 1922: perhaps the most formative decade in Indian history". ( A Passage.P.74).

when we speak of context, it comes to our thinking that it was an age during which political unrest was intensifying and the English could feel themselves more unsafe in India than ever before. Though Forster emphatically said that he had not written this novel on a political theme, it is obvious that even at the outset of the novel he produced an atmosphere of political tension in India. The ups and downs in the geography of Chandrapore seem to suggest the disequilibria between the rulers and the ruled. "Houses belonging to Eurasians stand on the high ground by the railway station. Beyond the railway – which runs parallel to the river- the land sinks, then rises again rather steeply"( A Passage.P. 9). Upper land that remained unaffected by the flood or other related natural calamities and was well ventilated and it had been habitable for the

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