‘The orient was almost a European invention and had been
since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and
landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing: in a sense it had
happened, its time was over’ Said, Introduction to Orientalism. Said speaks of
the Orient as ‘European invention’ with nostalgia, not the true India, as a
place, a country. The ‘exotic’ ideal, nostalgic from a western point of view,
from an eastern, excitement perhaps over the end of the ‘orient’ and the birth
of an India. Said is assertive as the Orient as a construct; the colonisers
relaying back to the homeland exotic
tales and artefacts.
I want to look at representations of India
before and after the Empire, changing, uncertain conditions through Forster’s A Passage to India and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
There is a running theme throughout both of the difficulty
of grasping India’s true identity; a hybrid identity because of imperialism –
should it accept its imperial past and embrace? Or revert to India ’s history
before colonialism? Rushdie calls for the re-discovering of a totally new India , taking
into account of its rich and varied, often turbulent history. Cronin, in Imagining India states that ‘to write
about India in any of its vernaculars, even in Hindi its national language, is
inevitably to divide it’.
In A Passage to India
there is the idea that the subaltern is being spoken for. Forster assumes the
position of an unbiased narrator but I shall show that many factors come in to
show otherwise. It is a novel about the coming together of cultures, examining
the relations between east and west, and interracial relationships. Inevitably
when one has power over the other it causes suffocation, suppression.
Forster shows India to have an unknown identity, a mystery
for the Western colonisers who find it difficult to comprehend, therefore must
create their own construct ie The Orient, a construct with which they have more
control.
The western reaction
to the ‘Indian experience’
India is conveyed in
spiritual terms, the British women experience India within the Marabar caves,
these women represent the space inbetween, they are not as such the coloniser,
the british other more sympathetic towards the east. They are the ‘other’
belonging totally to neither, though often on the verge of the coloniser.
Forster, perhaps shows through India ’s
massive spiritual influence on the West, critiques the west’s lack of
spirituality? Each of the three sections of the novel have a spiritual
significance: Mosque, Caves and Temple .
The caves are a particularly significant section, though, as they involve a
full on confrontation to the coloniser, confronting their own sense of self and
spirituality. The caves come the closest to represent Forster’s vision of India;
they are a mysterious entity, of which the whole of which cannot be grasped at
once, something that Rushdie hints at in Midnight’s
Children. They embody darkness and danger, shelter and safety, mystery and
ancientness, with a history before time.
The Mosque, Caves and Temple are all sacred; each section
occupied mostly by British thought, the true Indian narrative is oppressed.
Sharpe, in The
Unspeakable Limits of Rape exposes the ‘real crime of imperialism to be an
abuse of power that can only lead to its demise’ predicts the end of the empire
by showing the tensions between the two nations and a time of unrest. The myths
surrounding the ‘mutiny’ are then linked with the alleged rape of Adela; the
gap in the narrative is permeated with tales from the rebellion. All at once
she becomes the victim of the rebellion, she becomes the publicity surrounding
it and becomes the myths that that became of it represent it. It is not Adela
as a woman abusing her position of power but her nation, the colonisers who
surround her; she, like Aziz, becomes a victim of this power struggle, caught
inbetween. Thus, in the process of securing international power, the British
put in danger their own kind. The minor sacrificed for the greater good.
Adela’s perceived experience in the caves is pounced upon, like a group of
vultures, waiting for an excuse to cast the native in a negative, dangerous
light. This works to further the distance between the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of the
novel, the nations pushed apart where characters are forced to take sides.
Fielding’s decision to stand by his Indian friend is seen as a betrayal of his
race, of his ‘women and children’.
Adela, for the British, is a symbol of innocence and
womanhood, a moral compass for the English; the supposed objectification of her
body thus causes disruption in society, ‘each felt that all he loved best in
the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing
glow, in which the chilly and half known features of Miss Quested vanished, and
were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in the private life’ As an
individual, she fades into the background whilst revenge, anger and the symbol
of a ruined British woman shine in the foreground. The narrative here begins to
move away towards sensationalism, rational thought is abandoned much like the
‘tales of terror’ brought to England concerning the events of 1857 had little
or no historical basis, Fielding is told to look towards them for an impression
of the Indian character. The horrific mutinies work as a myth to steer negative
attention away from an image of a weak England , of weak Englishmen.
Adela’s allegations are a symbol for the counter-insurgency of the nineteenth
century; a fear that Britain was losing its grasp upon the empire and actively
fought, through education of British children, to remain powerful and
influential.
Quentin Bailey touches upon this, stressing the importance
of education in rebuilding a British ego, damaging the image of the east in the
process. The power of the empire taught to children so as to keep the British
ego in place. This instance is in fact a reaffirming of power hidden as a cry
for revenge, to restore the lost honour of the British.
British identity prevails over and above Indian identity in A Passage to India, with a British
author, inevitable. The India of the
title is the western view, it has no claim of its name on its own, an ironic
title, a passage of England to the country of India. Ronny’s education is
described that ‘wherever he entered mosque, cave or temple, he retained the
spiritual outlook of the fifth form, and condemned as a weakening any attempt
to understand them’ He remains the coloniser, one of those seeking to make a
Britain within India without allowing for any change to themselves or their
ideals. Both Ronny’s stubbornness as an Englishman, his politics and his lack
of spirituality that becomes an obstacle to friendships. This reluctance is a
barrier for all interracial relationships in the novel.
The caves are
described as such: ‘there is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the
visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another
flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an
imprisoned spirit; the walls of the circular chamber have been most
marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot,
because one of them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaid with lovely
colours divides the lovers’.
Adela struggles to cope with a confrontation of her
spirituality in the caves. Upon entering she is struggling with her role as a
wife, thinking about her forthcoming loveless marriage, so troubled by this
role she rejects it and chooses not to fulfil the role of coloniser. Once in
the cave, her fears, her conscious and unconscious confront her in the expanse
of nothingness. Adela responds to her experience in the caves physically while
Mrs. Moore, spiritually. What Adela sees as a muddle which disorientates her,
Mrs. Moore sees as a mystery, not to be solved, but to be accepted. Mrs.
Moore’s experience in the cave confronts her idealistic belief in goodwill and
the friendliness of the world, in the vast nothingness of the cave she sees and
accepts that with the good there is evil, with something there is nothing and
vice versa. In doing so Mrs. Moore, in a sense, becomes a spiritual being, more
in tune with India than any other British person; both women are confronted by
the sense of oneness but it is Mrs. Moore who, though troubled by it, comes to
understand that ‘everything is anything and nothing something’ her spiritual
presence lurks in the corners of the narrative after her death. Her name
remains an echo until the end.
Midnight’s Children makes use of magic realism to give the reader
an alternative experience of reality, blurring the boundaries between fiction
and reality.
Rushdie breaks away from western traditions, so prominent
and tied down in A Passage to India. The
novel favours the fantastic as a way to show reality more truly; it deals with
oppressive colonial forces by rejecting the western way of constructing
reality, it is a reaction to the limiting realism of western thought. Rushdie
tells us that ‘an oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the middle
to the end of a story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or in loops,
it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and
then takes you off again, sometimes summarized itself, it frequently digresses
off into something that the storyteller appears just to have thought of, then
it comes back to the main thrust of the narrative’
Because of this, the fantastic is distinctively Indian.
Rushdie’s conscious concern is with depicting an India both in past, present
and a possible future. The magic realism, the powers of the Midnight’s
Children, are used to separate the birth of a new nation from reality and
history of British India . Through miraculous
events, Rushdie emphasises the possibilities of India in its independence.
Several cultures exist at once in India, including those
moulded by western images that conflict with and merge with the Indian ‘there
were Radna and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because
we are not affected by the west) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and
Katherine Hepburn’ by using a multitude of cultural references he highlights
the fact that India’s independence does not erase the colonial influences upon
the nation. Rushdie also stresses that with independence, with the birth of a
new nation, India must almost ‘invent itself’, create a new identity separate
from the previous shared one weighed down by colonialism. The whole novel is a
reconstruction and reinvention of the self, in a time of fluctuation the
emphasis is on the present therefore history becomes subjective, it becomes
myth, memory. Truth is not privileged so cannot be limiting. Saleem explains how
the past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to
encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they
occurred. Here once again western rationalism is being subverted.
Within this plurality of cultures, Rushdie explores the
boundaries of a national, cultural and religious identity. The birth of a child
coinciding with the birth of the nation means that the child is not fixed
firmly in either period of time, he simultaneously belongs to both, or rather
he belongs in the undecided space in-between, where a nation has ended, but a
new one is yet to begin. Saleem speaks of the rest of the midnight children as
‘a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues of Babel; they
were the very essence of multiplicity’, that he saw no point in dividing them.
The children were seen as one, one monster who is a coming together of parts;
viewing all the children as one is was the closest he could get to a full identity.
The children, including Saleem encapsulate everything and nothing at the
same time. For all the midnight children, it is impossible to be one thing; an
attempt to do so results in a many headed monster. Saleem describes how, ‘I am
the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have seen done,
of everything done to me…To understand just one life, you’ll have to swallow
the world’ he embodies multiplicity with a ‘Hindu mother, English father,
brought up Muslim by a catholic ayah’ a product of culture, of nature and
nurture every child is saturated with familial and cultural history before he
even exists. Saleem, as a man is a metaphor for India , struggling for an identity
of his own through a complex history. In creating a character so ‘handcuffed to
history’, Rushdie explores the responsibilities of the first generation of a
post colonial nation, seeing it as both a privilege and a curse.
With A Passage to
India it is an attempt to represent something that he could not something
that he could not understand. Rushdie is
a part of India ,
intrinsically linked. As well as Saleem, his history is continued down the
family, familial and cultural history walk hand in hand. He embraces the past,
embraces western influences all of which coagulate to produce him as a person.
Orientalism works to highlight the differences between the
east and west. For the western Forster,
India is a muddle, and mystery. At the time of writing, Forster has a clear
authority over the Orient, can we experience Forster’s India without prejudice?
Saleem explores his origins, cultural and familial, whilst
Adela explores an unfamiliar India. Midnight’s
Children is a coming of age for India, we witness the process of
re-invention, Rushdie analyses the history of his country in segments.
Until next time, JT.
Bailey, Quentin – ‘Heroes and Homosexuals: Education and
Empire in E. M. Forster’ Twentieth Centuy
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India
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Peter Lang, 1999)
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E. M. – A Passage to India (London:
Penguin Books, 1985, c1924)
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Rushdie, Salman – Midnight’s
Children (London: Picador, 1981)
Rushdie, Salman – Imaginary
Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta Books, 1992)
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West (London: Vintage Books, 1995)
The Cambridge
Companion to Salman Rushdie ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge: Cambridge
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Rushdie ,Salman India
Today (Interview, 1997) http://www.india-today.com/itoday/18081997/rushdie.html
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Said, Edward – Orientalism
(London: Penguin Books, 1978, 2003
Shape, Jenny – ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial
Violence and Counter-Insurgency’ Gemders 10
1991 pp.25-46
Strobl, Gerwin - The
Challenge of Cross-Cultural Interpretations in the Anglo-Indian Novel: The Raj
Revisited.
(New York, Austria: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995)
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moore- gilbert, Stanton and maley eds.
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