Wong / 1

Lily Wong 翁笠

Orientalism of the Senses in A Passage to India

At the turn of the eighteenth century, an age of imperial colonization of the “Orient,” the epistemic discourse of Orientalism was mainly a scholarship of imperialist nations that concerned itself with the study of culture. Such studies tended to depict these cultures as unexplainably backward, unsophisticatedly thoughtless, and basely sensual.

As these cultures began to resist European colonization, Orientalist representations became more polemical. Conservative Orientalists intensified their objectification of the Orient, while progressive writers began to present more sympathy towards the

Orient and started to reveal the cultural politics of past Orientalist thoughts to bring a critical eye towards Orientalism itself, a critical project Abdel-Malek has termed as

“Neo-Orientalism” (quoted in Sardar 59). Among the more famous Neo-Orientalist representations that emerged in the early twentieth century that was both critical to the

Orientalist legacy and sympathetic towards its oriental subject is E.M Forster’s A

Passage to India , which has been hailed by many Indian critics as being “an emblem of

British understanding of the Indian, and the first ‘successful’ representation of Indian culture” (Lowe 123). In her book Critical Terrains , Lisa Lowe argues that Forster’s novel is successful because it stimulates critical debates about the Orientalist legacy.

She also has shown criticism that “the fluctuations [of its] narrative perspective provide some illustrations of the novel’s ambivalent relation to the earlier stances of British orientalism” (Lowe 114). In other words, Forster’s novel is implicated in the

Orientalist debate it criticizes, as such, it behooves us to bring a critical eye to it.

Forster’s A Passage to India portrays a culturally conflicting journey of both

English colonizers and Indian colonized in the city of Chandrapore in British occupied

India around the turn of the 20 th century. Forster represents himself as a sympathetic Wong / 2 spokesman for the Raj and is critical of the British presence in India as well as the way that the British have represented their presence there. His tale is one that ventures to depict “the real India” (16) but without the superficial idealism he dramatizes in the character of Adela. Although Forster does let Indians have a sympathetic place and voice as protagonists within the novel, there is a limit to his efforts to resist the traditional Orientalist tendency to objectify India as an other . Like his focal character and spokesman Fielding, Forster shares the fundamental Orientalist presumption that, in contrast to Europe and Europeans, India and its people are essentially incomprehensible, that both can never really be understood but only encountered. As I will show in this paper, Forster’s Orientalism is evident not just in the comments of his spokesman

Fielding, but evident at the level of his own descriptive language. In contrast to

Forster’s representations of the Europeans in India, who are depicted as psychological subjects, his representations of Indians and India itself reduces to objects of sensuous description, something to be seen but never seen through, something to be smelt, heard, and touched but never understood as fully realized subjects. However, as Forster misrepresents India through sensual illustrations, such an act not only reflects the cultural politics of traditional Orientalism, but also pulls the epistemic theories of

Neo-Orientalism down to the fundamental level of human senses which can be felt and understood cross culturally.

Forster’s representation of India forecloses the possibility that it may be comprehended, because he himself believes that it is incomprehensible. Writing to

William Plomer in 1934, Forster acknowledged that in A Passage To India he had “tried to show that India is an unexplainable muddle by introducing an unexplainable muddle”

(quoted in P. N. Furbank, xxvi ). In another letter to Lowes Dickinson of 26 June

1924, he stated that his attempt to mystify his subject was “a particular trick [he] felt Wong / 3 justified in trying because [his] theme was India. It sprang straight from [his] subject matter” and that he “wouldn’t have attempted it in other countries” (quoted in P. N.

Furbank, xxvi ). Despite his inability to understand his subject he writes about India, speaking for its residents, not in their own words but in his own. But since he cannot explain his subjects except to say that India is a muddle, he winds up repeating the typical Orientalist move, which is to approach the Orient only to withdraw from it. For, as Edward Said has pointed out, “We are left at the end with a sense of the pathetic distance still separating ‘us’ from an Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from the West” (244).

Forster’s stand that India is incomprehensible can be found through his narrative descriptions of his characters’ psychology within the tale. Besides the similarity of their names, like Forster, Fielding is not only a middle aged British male who is seemingly highly sympathetic towards India and its people, but also a symbolic figure which implies Forster’s awareness that he is caught up within a tide of cultural difference which is beyond his logical understandings. For, while Forster attempts to reason out India by writing a tale about it, an act based on analytical intelligence;

Fielding also ventures to sort out the truth of the muddled crisis within Indo-British relations through his “goodwill plus culture and intelligence” (52). However, at the end they both reveal the limits of their sympathy, both giving up the possibility of connecting with or understanding their Indian objects through their minds. For, at the very end of the tale, despite his eagerness to reconcile and connect with the Indian protagonist, Aziz, Fielding is unable to do so because “the temples, the tanks, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion… they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices,

‘No, not yet’, and the sky said, ‘No, not there,’” (293) in other words, mystical forces of

India that are different from what his western mind can comprehend or control. Wong / 4

In contrast to the condescendingly sympathetic voice of Forster through the character of Fielding, the female protagonist of the tale, Adela Quested, is purposely created as having a rather naively sympathetic perspective towards the object of India.

Upon her arrival, she ventured to “ see the real India,”(my italics16) believing that it is actually transparent, and was eager to perceive images of Forster’s recuperated India, which in his perspective is a “muddle”(258) and can never be seen or analyzed clearly.

For, in the tale, Adela’s naïve enthusiasm was at first disdained by Fielding, accounting her as a “pathetic [product] of Western education…[going] on and on as if she’s at a lecture – trying ever so hard to understand India…occasionally taking a note”(104).

Although in the story she eventually complies to Forster’s logical stand that India is actually impossible to be understood clearly, unlike his spokesman Fielding, Adela isn’t allowed to retreat from her sympathetic connections with India from the same rational distance. For, by entering the dark chambers of the Marabra caves, not only is she literally unable to see within it, she also hears its haunting echo that is unable to penetrate clearly through her mind. It is at this point that she turns her curiosity towards the unidentifiable India into a hysterical sense of fear. Thus, by portraying

Adela’s hysteria, sprung from her anxiety of not being able to “see” India, she is presented as a scapegoat for Forster to criticize traditional Orientalist’s simple assumption that the Orient can be fully comprehended through their dominating perspectives, going as far as implying that merely trying would drive one insane.

We can see Forster’s thesis that India is psychologically incomprehensible, not only through his careful descriptions of his western character’s fully analyzed psychology, but also through his contrasting representation of his Indian character’s defective psychology. By describing Indians in general, Forster doesn’t illustrate their thoughts as much as portray them through their “smell of tobacco” (131) and their “sound of Wong / 5 spitting.” The character of Professor Godbole, who should be thoughtfully intelligent, is never truly explained through his assumed sophisticated psychology, but introduced by his “queer little song”(118) which strangely haunts the two female protagonists throughout their stay, being characterized as mysteriously deep and incomprehensible to the western mind. Even the Indian protagonist Aziz, who is given the most psychological analysis of all the Indian characters, is not granted the possibility to be fully understood through his thoughts. While being portrayed as being an intellectual, he is still regarded by Fielding as often being strangely sensitive, with “emotions never

[seeming to be] in proportion” (230). Faced with his incontrollable emotionality, which is commonly assumed as an ethnic trait of the Orient within Orientalist tradition,

Aziz is not given the ability to deal with it completely through his rational mind, but depicted as often hysterically breaking out into tears or eagerly chanting sentiments through aesthetic expressions of singing songs, reciting pathos, or narrating ancient myths that “[come] from [ones] heart …and [touch] the hearer” (91). For, through

Forster’s description, his Indian characters can not be fully discerned or rationally understood through the reasonable level of psychology, but rather more completely smelled through their “scented…tradition,” (209) heard through chants, and touched by the heart through emotion.

As we can see from Forster’s representations of Indian characters as being without a fully understandable psychology, but rather a more complete sensual identity, his epistemological constraint is shown not only through the narrative descriptions of his characters’ psychology, but also on the level of his descriptive language, which contrasts between illustrations of Europeans with Indians. It is a contrast which forms a familiar binary opposition in traditional Orientalist thought stating: due to natural differences, the occident can be psychologically analyzed, whereas the orient can not be fully Wong / 6 understood but sensually depicted, the two being unable to connect on the same psychological level. For, by doing so Forster exemplifies, to paraphrase Said, a pathetic distance between the East and the West reflected through western representations of its Oriental subjects.

This binary of representation can also be detected in Forster’s representation of the

Indian terrain. By exclaiming, “How can the mind take hold of such a country,” (my italics 121) the speaker depicts India, not by the intelligence of its prestigious culture, but the foreign scent of its culture, and mystical feel of its landscapes. The nation’s traditional culture, which is one of the oldest in the world, is described as being “[a] faint, indescribable smell of the bazaars,” (my italics 209) which seemingly represents

“the scented east of tradition.” For, in Diana Ackerman’s A Natural History of The

Senses , the sense of smell is one that implies the image of the ancient Silk Road, a scented road which first connected the West and the East with its trade of exotic odors.

Not only does Forster illustrate the country through its olfactory sense of smell, but also through its sense of hearing. The mysterious experience of journeying to the Marabra caves is portrayed as being “a spiritual silence which invaded more senses than the ear”

(125). India’s soil itself is also mystically illustrated as if being hostile, alive, and interacting with the human sense of touch , by “either [yielding] and the foot sinks into a depression, or else [being] unexpectedly rigid and sharp, pressing stones or crystals against the tread,” (11) being in lack of a solid form or structure from which concrete comprehensions can be grounded. For, through Forster’s representation, India is described as an incomprehensible “muddle,…a frustration of reason and form,” (258) that can only be sensed, and not interpreted through the mind.

From Forster’s sensual representations of India and the female protagonist’s attempt to see it, he echoes biased conceptions of traditional Orientalism, but at the Wong / 7 same time brings the theory of Neo-Orientalism, which is generally thought as an epistemic discourse, down to the fundamental level of human senses. The power hierarchy between the Occident and the Orient, which is stated in Said’s Orientalist theory, may be detected by dividing Forster’s representations of the sense of vision, from the other senses of hearing, smell, and touch. As in his book, The Rhetoric of

Empire , David Spurr notes that “the look…not only implies a position of authority; it also constitutes the commanding act itself” (14). For, the power of surveillance is one that can be controlled by ones consciousness, choosing what to see, how it is to be seen, and from what distance. It is a power of distinguishing an object, not necessarily as how it really is, but as how the observer chooses to see it. Thus, while Adela ventures to “ see the real India,” (my italics 16) the pose is in itself another “form of ruling India,”

(278) of discerning it through her chosen perspective and comfortable distance. For from this mental and physical distance, the object can be easily subjected, and interpreted as being the Other in relation to the observer.

Opposed to the privileged sense of vision which Forster portrays his Occident characters as using under the control of their minds; the senses of smell, touch, and hearing which he uses to depict India are all ones that distribute a more powerless notion. We can see this hierarchy of the senses through the sequence in which

Ackerman discusses the senses in her book. She starts off with the fundamental sense of smell, which people are completely powerless to control; following with the sense of touch, a sense that is more in the hands of the imposer than the receiver; then is the sense of hearing, which one may have little but not full power in directing; finally is the sense of vision which one has most control over. For, while with the sophisticated authority of sight, one may direct his or her vision to what is desirous, and remain within a consciously comfortable distance from its object; with the other more Wong / 8 fundamental senses, one has no complete authority over where it is to be directed, and is rather powerless against what is to be penetrated. This sense of uncontrollability implies an encroachment of ones self consciousness, and alarms one to consolidate it, an act which may be detected from the tale’s two female protagonists’ hysterical turn of sympathy towards India within the Marabra Caves, in which these senses are amplified by their inability to see within it.

It is through their trip to the Marabra Caves’s dark chambers that both Mrs. Moore and Adela eventually give up their naïve stand of comprehending India, due to the haunting experience of encountering it not through the authority of surveillance, but through senses that are relatively vulnerable and out of ones control. For while Mrs.

Moore “lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, [she] didn’t know who touched her,…[and] not only did the crush and the stench alarm her; there was also a terrifying echo,” (my italics 131) which was “entirely devoid of distinction” (132). As Ackerman states that the sense of touch is harbored in our skin which “protects us from invaders,”(68) and that by losing the sense of hearing, one “[loses] track of life’s logic,”(175) the unexpected touch and undistinguishable sound encountered by Mrs. Moore within the dark caves may therefore be felt as a kind of aggressive invasion. It is at this moment of weakness that she loses her amiable curiosity, vilifying the Indian villagers and

“[going] mad, hitting and gasping like a fanatic” (131). For, Mrs. Moore became hysterically irrational, when losing her authoritative powers of vision, which could be dominated from the distance of ones logical mind.

Similar to Mrs. Moore’s dramatic scene, is Adela’s hysterical turn of sympathy. It is after Aziz held her hand that she goes into the dark cave alone. Their act of physical touch, which can be felt as a sense of invasion beyond fixed boundaries of race and gender in itself, also elicit discussions that invade issues of their personal lives, making Wong / 9 them both uncomfortable. After entering the dark chambers of the Marabra caves and hearing its echo, Adela realizes the incomprehensibility of it and drops her field glasses.

It is after this sensual encounter that she turns her naïve curiosity into a hysterical fear which draws her back to the shelter of her own discernable kind. For, in the cave,

Adela’s sense of hearing is bottled up by its haunting sound that “prolonged over the surface of her life,” (my italics 175) and made her “[lose] track of life’s logic,”

(Ackerman, 175) ending up accusing Aziz of rape, or in other words, transgressing rightful boundaries. For the sensual experience of hearing and touching India and

Indians, is in fact a sense of transgression, compared to her distanced, and more leveled sense of sight.

As Forster misrepresents India as a sensual object that can only be encountered and not comprehended, he demonstrates epistemic power politics between cultures that parallel our own human senses. For, while in the theories of Neo-Orientalism, the

Occident dominates and secures their own sense of identity from the Orient by determining them through their own perspectives, and rejecting them through a deliberately established distance of Otherness; human beings also secure this sense of self consciousness from their senses that are vulnerably exposed to the world around them, with their authority to survey the world through their sense of vision. Thus, by reading Forster’s sensual descriptions of India, which seems to Orientalize and alienate one culture from the other, we may also find that the power politics which are involved through the relationship of the East and West, are ones that not only clash between cultures, but also collide within the fundamental relationship of a human being and its surroundings. Wong / 10

Works Cited

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of The Senses . New York: Vintage Books A Division of Random House Inc, 1990.

Forster, E. M. A Passage To India . London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd., 1991.

Furbank, P. N. “Introduction.” A Passage To India . E. M. Forster. London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd., 1991. xxvi-xxvii

Lowe, Lisa. “Orientalism as Literary Criticism: The Reception of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India .” Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. 114-115.

Sadar, Ziauddin. Orientalism . Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books a Division of Random House, 1978.

Sered, Danielle. Orientalism. 25 Nov. 2001. Emory University. 20 May. 2004.

Spurr, David. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1993. 102, 104.