Forever The "Other"

A Passage to India, drawing on Edward Morgan Forster's (1879-1970) own experiences in India during visits there in 1912 and 1921, is set in the British colony of India in the final phase of imperialism. The immediate critical responses on its publication mostly tend to laud its anti-colonial elements, and this tendency somewhat goes on to such extremes that the book has even become a popular and powerful weapon in the hands of anti-imperialists both in England and in India.In the mid and late 1980s, with the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), the storm engendered by the reinterpretation of A Passage to India and numerous works of western literature within a postcolonial critique began to prevail. Forster's depiction of the two parties of the colonized and the colonizer, as well as their relationship, then manifests that the self-proclaimed"civilizing mission"of the British Empire was morally bankrupt; however, A Passage to India is also seen as a part of a group of imaginative and scholarly texts that implicitly justify imperialism by creating Eurocentric ideology about India. This paper puts emphasis on the postcolonial perspectives that dominate the novel, with a combination of the themes, symbols and characters, suggesting that the author's attitude in the novel reflects an Englishman whose ideology belongs to the colonizer in nature, only with sympathy to the colonized. What the author condemns as colonial discourse actually is shown unconsciously in his anti-colonial discourse, making the novel echoes disharmoniously, revealing Forster's identity as an English colonizer.