“Theme of Post Colonialism in Passage to India”

Saiyed Farheen

About Post-colonialism

The term “decolonisation” seems to be of particular importance while talking about post-colonialism. In this case it means an intellectual process that persistently transfers the independence of former-colonial countries into people’s minds. The basic idea of this process is the deconstruction of old-fashioned perceptions and attitudes of power and oppression that were adopted adopted during the time of colonialism. First attempts to put this long-term policy of “decolonising the minds” into practice could be regarded in the Indian population after India became independent from the British Empire in 1947.

However, post-colonialism has increasingly become an object of scientific examination since 1950 when Western intellectuals began to get interested in the “Third World countries”. In the seventies, this interest lead to an integration of discussions about post-colonialism in various study courses at American Universities. Nowadays it also plays a remarkable role at European Universities.

A major aspect of post-colonialism is the rather violent-like, unbuffered contact or clash of cultures as an inevitable result of former colonial times; the relationship of the colonial power to the (formerly) colonised country, its population and culture and vice versa seems extremely ambiguous and contradictory. This contradiction of two clashing cultures and the wide scale of problems resulting from it must be regarded as a major theme in post-colonialism: For centuries the colonial suppressor often had been forcing his civilised values on the natives. But when the native populations finally gained independence, the colonial relicts were still omnipresent, deeply integrated in the natives’ minds and were supposed to be removed. Post-colonialism also deals with conflicts of identity and cultural belonging. Colonial powers came to foreign states and destroyed main parts of native tradition and culture; furthermore, they continuously replaced them with their own ones. This often lead to conflicts when countries became independent and suddenly faced the challenge of developing a new nationwide identity and self-confidence. A lot of Indian books that can be attached to the era of post-colonialism, for instance, are written in English. The cross-border exchange of thoughts from both parties of the post-colonial conflict is supported by the use of a shared language. (Nilsole web)

Other writers have used the opportunity afforded by the historical novel to concentrate on and respond to the cultural, political and social lodegacies and mechanism of empire and colony. Much of this work has been written in the light of the critical writings of Edward said and other theorists of post-colonialism. Post-colonialist theorists study work produced both by those under colonial rule and by the coloniallists themslves; they furthermore analyse reaction to the collapse of colonialism and also interroate contemporary Western attitudes to other cultures. (Groot 159)

The word ‘Postcolonial’ has perhaps an even shorter history of general usage than the word ‘intercultural’. But that sort history has been enough for a similar set of problems to emerge. As the editors of the 1995 Post-colonial studies reader say, ‘Post-colonial studies are based in the “historical fact”, of European colonialism, and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise. Over a decade, however, a steadily more unfocused use of the term has made it less effective. (Shepherd & Wallis 203)

Just as some Post colonial novelists used myth, magic, and fable as a stylistic throwing-off of what they considered the alien supremacy of Anglo-Saxon realistic fiction, so numerous feminist novelists took to gothic, fairy tale, and fantasy as counter effects to the “Patriarchal discourse” of rationality, logic, and linear narrative. The most gifted exponent of this kind of writing, which sought immediate access to the realm of the subconscious, was Angela Carter, whose exotic and erotic imagination unrolled most eerily and resplendently in her, short-story collection. The Bloody Chamber and other stories. Jeanette Winterson also wrote in this vein having distinguished herself earlier in a realistic mode, as did authors such as Drabble and Pat Barker, Doris Lessing published a sequence of science fiction novels about issues of gender and colonialism, Canopus in Argos-Archives. Typically, through, fiction in the 1980’s and 90’s was not futuristic but retrospective. As the end of the century approached, an urge to look back at starting points, previous eras, fictional prototypes was widely evident. (Dewani 254-255)

Post colonialism which is often referred to as the “theory” of migrancy, does not necessarily equip one with adequate means of approaching and interpreting diasporic writing for two very important reasons (1) writing generates its own parameters for aesthetic evaluation as the act of writing itself is a negotiation with cultural constracts; (2) post colonialism is variously defined through political and historical condition as well as aesthetic, and its legitimacy needs is in of being to be questioned in itself. The whole questioned of post colonial aesthetic subjected to a careful scrutiny. (Begum 17)

In Arif Dirlik’s view Post colonialism is the child of Post modernism and it marks the arrival of the third world intellectuals in first world academe. The transition is viewed from ‘colony’ to third world to ‘postcolonial’ societies. In all such perceptions the margins are understood, the affiliations with post modernist aesthetics bypassed, and the world situation perceived through fragmented approaches rather than locate the beginnings, of both post modernism and post colonialism in the post world war 2 political situation. The point of origin is not power, but the collapse of empires not the west but Asia and Africa. (Begum 18)

“Nations like narratives lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizon in the mind’s eye”. ….. Homi.K.Bhabha

The concepts of nation and nationalism have become ambivalent in the context of post colonial internationalism and multinationalism. Immigration and settlement have heightened the protean nature of nationhood. Nationalism can, today, only be understood by aligning it, not with just political ideologies or physical spaces, but with larger concepts of “rootings” and cultural systems. Traditions, beliefs and temporalities of transitional and evolving societies together with the language that gives expression to its living force engender a multifaceted discourse of the nation. (Begum 23)

“Scant attention has been paid to texts which deal with unequal division of resources in post colonial societies, aboriginal and settler relations, religious and ethnic turmoil and gender ideologies, an pre-colonial history. These are issues that would force us to pay attention to the specific histories of societies and which might lead us to conclude that ethnic relations in Nigeria are different from ethnic relations in India.” (Arun Mukherjee.1998. Post colonialism: My Living. Toronto: Tsar, 56) (Begum 28)

Post colonial writing is something more than just resistance or “writing back” more than the breakdown of indigenous cultures under the onslaught of colonialism, and the alienated individual who searches for his or authentic self.(Begum 29)

Post colonialism or Post colonial discourse is a current movement of thought or a theory that deals mainly with the effects of colonization on the culture and thoughts of the colonized societies. After the Second World War, the historians used the term to denote the former European colonies as the Post colonial states. Gayatri Spivak in her collection of interviews which were published in 1990 first used the term Post colonial although Ashcroft has used this term long before it was coined by Spivak. The term was extended to signify extensively the political, linguistic and cultural effects on the former European colonies. In short, the Post colonial studies in literature characterize the nature and impact of inherited power relations between the colonizer and the colonized people, and their persistent effect in modern global culture, historiography and social and political system of a nation state.(Agrawal 1)

Definition of Post-colonialism

(1)  Post-colonialism is an intellectual direction that exists since around the middle of the 20^th century. It developed from and mainly refers to the time after colonialism. The post-colonial direction was created as colonial countries became independent. Nowadays, aspects of post-colonialism can be found not only in sciences concerning history, literature and politics, but also in approach to culture and identity of both the countries that were colonized and the former colonial powers. However, post-colonialism can take the colonial time as well as the time after colonialism into consideration. (Nisole web)

(2)   As an epistemology, as an ethics, and as a politics, the field of post colonialism address the politics of knowledge—the matters that constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonised people, which derives from: (i) the coloniser's generation of cultural knowledge about the colonised people; and (ii) how that Western cultural knowledge was applied to subjugate a non–European people into a colony of the European Mother Country, which, after initial invasion, was effected by means of the cultural identities of "coloniser" and "colonised".(Wikipedia web)

(3)   Post-colonialism encompasses a range of artistic movements, political projects and research agendas developed in reference to the end of the European colonial system. It refers not only to a temporal marker, signaling a shift in mentalities and metaphilosopical questioning, but also to a decolonizing movement and to a theoretical and philosophical methodology. (Questia web)

Introduction to Passage to India

The Novelist E.M.Forster was also concerned with questions of sexuality in his novels, although in his works the subject receives a much more subtle treatment than in Lawrence’s. The only novel he ever wrote which treated the subject of homosexuality frankly, Maurice, did not appear until after his death. Forster began his literary career in 1903 as a writer for The Independent Review, a liberal periodical with anti-imperialist sympathies. His first novel, where Angels fear to Tread, explored the emotional and sensual deficiencies of the English upper middle class, a theme he was to repeat in the novels that established his reputation as one of England’s leading novelists, A Room with a view and Howard’s End. The last novel he wrote, A Passage to India, is probably also his most enduring. (Dewani 14)   

The resolution is a precarious one, and World War 1 was to undermine it still further. Forster spent three wartime years in Alexandria, doing civilian war work, and visited India twice, in 1912-13 and 1921. When he returned to former themes in his postwar novel. A Passage to India, they presented themselves in a negative form: against the vaster scale of India, in which the earth itself seems alien, a resolution between it and the imagination could appear as almost impossible to achieve. Only Adela Quested, the young girl who is most open to experience, can glimpse their possible concord, and then only momentarily, in the courtroom during the trial at which she is the central witness. (Dewani 109)

Much of the novel is devoted to less spectacular values: those of seriousness and truthfulness and of an outgoing and benevolent sensibility. Neither Fielding nor Mrs. Moore is totally successful; neither totally fails. The novel ends in an uneasy equilibrium. Immediate reconciliation between Indians and British is ruled out, but the further possibilities inherent in Adela’s experience, along with the surrounding uncertainties, are echoed in the ritual birth of confusion at a Hindu Festival. (Dewani 109)

Post Colonial Literature

A category devised to replace and expand upon what was once in Britain called Commonwealth Literature. As a wide range of writings from countries that were once colonies or dependencies of the European powers. Critical attention to this large body of work in academic contexts is often influenced by distinct school of postcolonial theory which developed in the 1980s and 1990s, under the influence of Edward W said’s landmark study Orientalsm (1978). Post colonial theory considers vexed cultural political questions of national and ethnic identity, ‘otherness’ race, imperialism, and languages, during and after the colonial periods. The principal luminaries of post colonial theory after said have been Gayatri C Spivak and Homi K Bhabha for fller accounts, consult A.Loomba, colonialism/Post colonialism (1998) and Bart Moore Gilbert, Post colonial Theory (1997). (Baldick 265)

Salman Ruhdie is an Indian who lives in England. This leads us on to the fact that alongside British and American literature there is also what has come to be called Post colonial literature. The term Post colonial is used to refer to all those literatures and cultures affected by the experience of colonization. This can be seen, for example, in the novels of Patrick White, such as The Eye of the Storm (1973). As well as a search for a new kind of order, however, what is also evident in great deal of Post colonial Literature. If there is one theme that could be said to dominate Post colonial literature it is perhaps the meeting of two cultures, and in particular the way which an indigenous order has been usurped by alien and intrusive values. It is at the center of such novels as The Grass is Singing (1950) by Doris Lessing, and also at the heart of the work of the radical dramatist Athol Fugard in plays such as Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) other Post colonial writers, such as the Trinidadian novelist V.S.Naipaul author of A house for Mr. Biswas (1961). (Peck & Coyle 8-9)

Post Colonial Studies

Novelists associated with postcolonial literature include Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, 1958), Wole Soyinka (A Dance of the Forests, 1960), and Salman rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981). Well Known Post colonial critics include Gaytri Spivak (In other Worlds, 1987), Henry Louis Gates (The Signifying Monkey, 1980), and Kwame Appiah (In My Father’s House, 1992). These critics have integrated their studies with techniques derived from contemporary theory and, in varying degrees from Marxist criticism. (Quinn 265)

The Post colonial theory, deriving its contents mostly from post-structuralist and post modern debates, has more or less replaced the older modes of reading from New Criticism, Existentialism and Marxist-oriented studies. (Inder Singh 32)

Gareth Griffiths has explained the process of post colonial reading in more elaborate terms:

“Post-coloniality of a text depends not on any simple qualification of theme or subject-matter, but on the degree to which it displays post-colonial discursive features. What these features may be is again open to interpretation as are those of any discourse which seeks to constitute itself as ‘direct, but I might suggest that such concerns as linguistic displacement, physical exile, cross-culturality and aythenticity or inauthenticity of experience are among the features which one might identify as characteristically post-colonial.”(Inder Singh 39)     

In Passage to India the novel is around the major character Aziz, Adela, Mrs. Moore, Cyril Fielding, Rony Heaslop, and other characters. In this novel the British people came in India and to establish their own colony and they rulled over to India but some British people established the Court, Post Office, Railway, Education, Law, etc. But they did for own means they lived by comfortable because their habit to live lifestyle by Luxurious style and they are not satisfied with Indian Lifestyle.

“Vassudhaiv Kutumbakkam”

But Indian people are very soft hearted and they are welcome all people and they welcomed gently and that was the big problem to them in Passage to India. Aziz was the Physician and he was very close to British people and his best friend was Cyril Fielding and their friendship was very strong but it didn’t last for many days. The trip was to see marabar caves and start the mess Adela was to said in court that Aziz assault her. The court was establish by British people and it was true that they all were in Adeal’s favour and that was not true that Aziz assault to Adela and last many confusion Adela claimed that all the charges submitted by her are fake and Aziz was not guilty.

The Theme of Post Colonialism in Passage to India that all British people to establish their colony and they are to rulled over India and Aziz was innocent but all British people are not trust him and to punished him that thing suggest that they are punished to an Indian and that was they are to think all Indian people are slave of British people. But that wrong and last that whatever bad deeds you do however truth always wins. And that Aziz was discharge. To give a conclusion of it all, one might say that post-colonialism is a vivid discussion about what happened with the colonial thinking at the end of the colonial era. What legacy arouse from this era? What social, cultural and economical consequences could be seen and are still visible today? In these contexts, one examines alternating experiences of suppression, resistance, gender, migration and so forth. While doing so, both the colonising and colonised side are taken into consideration and related to each other. The main target of post-colonialism remains the same: To review and to deconstruct one-sided, worn-out attitudes in a lively discussion of colonisation. (Nilsole web)

Works Cited

Post colonialism definition development and examples from India, Nilsole.net, 7 September 2015.web.

Post colonialism, Wikipedia.org, 7 September 2015. web.

Imperialism, Post colonialism, Questia.com, 7 September 2015. web.

Dewani, Dr.Richa. Modern English Literature: Jaipur, RBSA Publishers, 2013, print.

Groot, Jerome de. The Historical Novel: New York, Taylor and Fruncis Group, 2010, print.

Shepherd, Simon &  Wallis, Mick. Drama, Theatre, Performance: New York, Routtedge, Taylor and Fruncis Group, 2004, print.

Begum, Jameela. Writers of the Indian Diaspora Cyril Dabydeen: Jaipur, Rawat Publication, 2000, print.

Agrawal, Krishna Avtar. Post colonial Indian English Literature: Jaipur, Book Enclave, 2007, print.

Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms: New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, print.

Peck, John & Coyle, Martin. Literary Terms and Criticism: London, The Macmillan Press LTD, 1993, print.

Quinn, Edward. Literary Terms: Glasgow, Harper Collins Publishers, 2004, print.

Inder Singh, Manjit. Writers of the Indian Diaspora. V.S.Niapaul: Jaipur, Rawat Publication, 2002, print.