Improbability Of "Only Connect"

In 1924, E. M. Forster published his famous novel A Passage to India, a popular and critical success in literary history. For more than eighty years, critics have read and interpreted it from considerably diverse perspectives of politics, religion, race and culture. This novel was written after Forster's two trips at the beginning of the 20th century to India. Forster is famous for his theme of"only connect"in most of his novels. The thesis holds that Forster's good will is the hope of connecting the West and the East, but, as a British writer, he cannot avoid being affected by the deep-rooted Western thought of colonialism and Euro-centrism.A Passage to India explores the barriers to the inter-racial friendship in a colonial context. The cultural clashes are notably represented by Fielding, a British College Principal and Aziz, an Indian Moslem Doctor. Although both of them want to establish true friendship, their endeavors comes to a failure. At the end of the novel, the echoing sound"No, not yet"signifies that without political equality between countries, the harmony and friendship between individuals and races cannot be achieved.Forster is an Englishman whose ideology belongs to the orientalists in nature. Though the novelist intends to build connection between the East and the West, he cannot escape the colonizers'ideology, which takes the Western superiority to the East for granted. By mainly applying the postcolonial criticism, this thesis is an attempt of cultural interpretation of the novel. The author finds that the novelist is aligned with such a colonizer's ideology, which is reflected in the biased representation of the Indian landscape and the marginalization of the native people. Therefore, Forster can not find a sufficient way to connect the West with the East, and the theme of the novel presents itself in the division between the two rather than their"only connect".