Yarrow, Alexandra. "Sympathy in the Novels of E. M. Forster.” Aspects of E. M. Forster. Ed. Heiko Zimmermann. 21 Apr. 2002 <http:// emforster.de/ pdf/ yarrow.pdf>. Sympathy in the Novels of E. M. Forster Alexandra Yarrow V. S. Naipaul, in an interview with Farrukh English people, are shits, and I am not interested Dhondy in the August 2001 edition of Literary Review, whether they sympathise with one another or not” discusses E. M. Forster’s attempts to represent the (Furbank xx). Indeed, the novel avoids simplistic people of India and their religious and philosophical idealisations of Anglo-Indian relations; it compels its beliefs in A Passage to India. “People like E. M. Forster,” readers to confront truths, however uncomfortable, Naipaul conjectures, “make a pretense of making poetry about their inner selves and their relation to the world. of the three religions. […] It’s utter rubbish” (33). Balachandra Rajan proposes that the act of Furthermore, Naipaul associates Forster’s reading about an imperial context may not always be homosexuality, and his friendship with Syed Ross pleasant, but that “it should be enlightening” (49). From Masood, with the processes of imperial economic Milton’s Paradise Lost through to Virginia Woolf’s The exploitation: “[Forster was] a homosexual and he [had] Voyage Out, texts dealing with perceptions of the Orient his time in India, exploiting poor people, which his have been constructed from a Western point of view. friend Keynes also did” (33). Naipaul adds dismissively As a consequence, they have focussed largely on that, with respect to the position of A Passage to India in monetary or natural riches, the peculiar Otherness of the literary canon, “I think people don’t actually read it, local inhabitants, or the corrupting desire to possess and you know” (33). control both riches and inhabitants. Joseph Conrad Coming from the winner of the 2001 Nobel wrote of a hidden treasure in Nostromo; H. Rider Prize for Literature, these ramblings can easily be taken Haggard wrote of a beautiful white African queen in as the definitive critical word on Forster. As P. J. M. She; and George Orwell, almost forty years later, wrote Scott says in his study of Forster’s literary contributions, of the corruption of the imperial civil service in Burmese “perspective needs restoring” (151). A Passage to India Days. Western writers’ inability, historically, to “is not free of serious flaw,” as Scott admits, and it has acknowledge the perspective of the Other is an been fashionable at certain moments in history to avoid extension of British historian David Cannadine’s studying writers whose values may be problematic, proposal that the British Empire was as much “about whose characters may be stereotypical, or whose the replication of sameness and similarities originating cultural and historical context may seem antiquated from home as it was about the insistence on difference (151). That being said, Naipaul’s immediate association and dissimilarities originating from overseas” (xix). of Forster’s and Keynes’s interest in India with their Inasmuch as Cannadine hypothesises that the British homosexuality is to look at less than one side of a Empire was an expansive realm of social structures complex issue. To associate homosexuality with the which sought to construct contrived affinities across processes of exploitation, and to conclude that Forster boundaries, the literature of empire was similarly about “belonged to this kind of nastiness,” is questionable at the construction of sameness to the exclusion of best (33). Naipaul’s conclusion that Forster Otherness. According to Rajan, reading today about “encouraged people to lie” about India is misleading empire from these Western perspectives requires an (33). Forster’s work is characterised by a search for assessment of that which is omitted from the narrative paths towards individual truths and an opening up of (49). Forster stands unique among his contemporaries the deeper corners of consciousness. The themes and because his interest in the way that shared emotion can subject matter of A Passage to India distinguish it among act as a bridge for intimate sympathetic relationships other novels of the time, both in its exploration of the challenges the imperial model in which the perspective new human connections in the diverse modern world, of the coloniser is privileged over that of the colonised. and in its determination to avoid privileging one Forster’s understanding of sympathy arises worldview above another. Forster’s time in India, and from the writings of Conrad and Haggard, as well as the relationships he formed there, are relevant to his from the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray, writing. Forster himself, however, said bluntly in a letter Rudyard Kipling, and Virginia Woolf. All of these to Masood that although he began A Passage to India as a writers were to some extent preoccupied with the bridge of sympathy, he later abandoned this course processes of ordering and controlling the imperial because “my sense of truth forbids anything so world. Forster’s belief in the importance of establishing comfortable. I think that most Indians, like most sympathetic connections across cultural boundaries 2 arises largely from the traditional imperial habit of dishearten readers, but it demonstrates uniquely the controlling the colonised peoples by encouraging them modern struggle to find personal truth in the space to conform to a specific cultural paradigm. This between the disharmony of misunderstanding and the tradition links sympathy to the construction of artificial impossibility of full union. affinities, and to the idea of speaking for the Other. Strangely enough, having dismissed Forster and Forster, however, moves beyond the tentative “that kind of nastiness,” Naipaul goes on in his explorations of his predecessors. Masood defined interview to extol the value of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian sympathy, for which he uses the word tarass, literally tales, categorizing Kipling as one of the “writers who thirst, as “the capacity to enter the feelings of another have done something new” (36). Indisputably, Kipling’s and absorb the atmosphere of a place” in a letter to writings on India explore the far corners of the empire Forster(Bharucha 107). By departing completely from innovatively. In many senses, Forster is the literary England for India, thereby entering the physical space inheritor of both a manner of constructing imperial of another, Forster constructs sympathetic relationships relations in a novel and of representing human within, and as a consequence of, a foreign, inhospitable, interaction in colonial space pioneered by Kipling. As setting. British society faced upheaval in the last years of the Ultimately, sympathy cannot overcome all nineteenth century, Anglo-Indian society, populated by boundaries, in Forster’s opinion. In the pursuit of long-time traditionalists and xenophobes, clung truths, Forster is the first to admit the unknowable. He resolutely to their community. Edwardes writes, Anglo- is preoccupied with the question, posed at the Indians “slowly began to realise that the tide was beginning of the novel, of whether or not it is possible running irresistibly against the old order” (167). Both for an Indian and an Englishman to be friends. The before and after the Great War, Anglo-India continued reply echoes at the end of the novel, ambiguous to the to keep an eye on “some British [who] tried to break last, “no, not yet [….] No, not here” (293). It is through the barriers between themselves and the significant, nonetheless, that Forster addresses the Indians, but [since] few had much success,” not much possibility for genuine sympathy between individuals of was made of these attempts at sympathetic such different cultural backgrounds. While other writers fraternisation (167). In the literary world, novels such as examine sympathetic relationships between genders or Rudyard Kipling’s Kim of 1901 questioned the position classes, Forster uses the novel form to explore the of Anglo-Indians in society, much as Forster, twenty possibilities, and limitations, of sympathy in a much years later, would question the mere presence of Anglo- larger context. Indians in an imperial context that was beginning to When Forster wrote to Masood about decay. sympathy in A Passage to India, he added that he wasn’t Kim has been described as a novel in which interested in sympathy as an artist, although perhaps as “brotherhood and despotism keep uneasy company”; a journalist (Furbank xx). In a certain sense, he may Kipling’s story of an Irish orphan who becomes the have meant that the novel is not an artistic record of an “friend of all the world” is at the same time both immutable truth; rather, it is a report of how things are, optimistic about relations between coloniser and and how they are changing, according to a particular colonised and deeply conflicted about the limits of artist. In his introduction to the Everyman edition of A these relations (McClure 70). Kim grows up in a world Passage to India, Furbank writes that the novel is full of entirely unlike that into which he was born: he is an the phenomenon of change, and that it is precisely this English child in India, raised by a half-caste Indian “profound concern with change which gives [the novel] woman and befriended by a Tibetan lama. He masters the force of historical truth” (xviii). Forster’s characters the empire by becoming what S. P. Mohanty aptly calls are, at times, somewhat one-dimensional and “an accomplished insider” in the various Indian stereotypical, and the fact that he is ultimately doubtful communities, “without having given up any of his about the possibility of forging human connections privileges as an outsider” (243). Kim’s life, in fact, is across racial or cultural boundaries is potentially even more complicated than that. He, in effect, puts his discouraging.