The Dislocation Of Identity And An Elegy For Empire

A Passage to India is the last and the most successful novel of E.M. Forster. It was published in 1924, with a gap of 12 years in its creation process. The novel is based on Forster's two visits to India in 1912 and 1921 respectively. During these two visits, the situations in India change a lot, and the First World War brings serious effects on Forster, who has to make alteration in his draft and original plan for the novel. The change in his thought can also be traced in the novel.Forster is a British middle-class intellectual with liberal humanism ideal, mainly expressed in his "only connect" motto. In Forster's eyes, personal relations and art are the most important things in life. Forster's "only connect" ideal develops at Cambridge and is influenced greatly by the Bloomsbury Group. It becomes his life-long creed. Forster holds the belief that the British middle class have "undeveloped hearts" under the public-school system which poses as the barriers in the establishing of the good personal relations.Forster's liberal humanism ideal is incompatible with the contemporary imperialism. He swims against the current and lets out his unique voice in his time. While the imperialistic writers and the empire builders, with Rudyard Kipling as the typical example, are singing hymns and are complacent with their "white man's burden" and the glorious mission of civilizing the Dark Continent, Forster takes the opposite road. He criticizes the inhuman imperialistic behavior and condemns it for its undermining of the cross-racial personal relations. As a firm anti-imperialist and liberal humanist, Forster's identity is a dislocated and embarrassing one. On the one hand, he stands at the margin of the empire to gaze at the centre; on the other hand, he can not assimilate himself with the camp of "the other". In the novel, Fielding is Forster's mouthpiece and also experiences a dilemma of the dislocation of identity.Racial prejudice and discrimination is a powerful weapon in the expansion and ruling process of the imperialists. They apply all kinds of pseudo-science to the term "race" and put themselves in a superior position; they use the superiority of racial quality to make up the deficiency of quantity in their colonization. Their sense of racial superiority and prejudice to the Indians can be found everywhere in the novel, and reaches its peak after the Marabar caves incident and during the trial. Club is the gathering place for the Anglo-Indians; it becomes the preaching place for racism and the outpost of the empire. A Passage to India reflects the strong sense of responsibility and dilemma of the liberal humanistic intellectuals, with Forster as the representative.Although Forster emphasizes that A Passage to India is not a political novel, and...