What kind of picture does Forster present of British rule in India?

A Passage to India was written
between 1912 and 1921, at a time when the British domination in India started to be
strongly questioned. (India did not, however, achieve its independence until 1949, after
more than thirty years from the novel’s publication). The debates on colonization found
their way into the novel and went on to constitute its narrative core. Much of the
praise or criticism that the novel has garnered since its publication has focused on the
representation of British colonialism in India. Anglo-Indians felt caricatured by the
book and, as Paul Scott recalled when reassessing A Passage to India
in the 1960s, “threw copies overboard from the P. and O.
into the Red Sea.” As Scott went on, the novel had a clear impact on society as “it gave
vivid dramatic evidence to justify the direction of a swing that had already begun”
(Scott 15). The swing that Scott talks about is that against colonialism and
colonization.

A Passage to India
documents the racial oppression institutionalized by the British Empire and
the cultural and social misunderstandings that create a deep gulf between the
Anglo-Indian colonizers and the Indian colonized. Colonial rule is indicted as the
institution that renders impossible any type of significant relationship between
colonizer and colonized. However, several passages in the novel also suggest that
Forster’s position towards the policies of the British Empire is more ambiguous and that
A Passage to India is not completely critical of colonialism. On
the contrary, Forster’s attitude toward British domination is marked by as much
criticism as by the notion that Indians are not yet capable of self-rule. Taking the
character of Fielding as a mouth-piece for the author, for example, Ahmad M. S. Abu
Baker has argued that “Forster could not help but feel the ‘gulf’ that separates him
from Indians” (68). Fielding and Forster share the same position: they criticize
colonization, but, at the same time, they are in a position of privilege thanks to it.
While they both realize that the colonial model is quickly becoming untenable, they are
unwilling to offer Indian self-rule as a viable option and alternative. A
Passage to India is anti-imperial in its refutation of Western colonialism as
an agent of global civilization: the novel clearly rejects the idea that the West had a
civilizing mission to carry out in the East. Yet, the novel also conceptualizes India as
the site of mystery and enchantment, of chaos and magic, thus perpetrating the Western
tradition of viewing colonial subjects as irremediably “other” and different. As Edward
Said has pointed out, Forster’s novel represents India as a vast and incomprehensible
country, a chaotic agglomerate of races and sects, which, in the end, is unable to form
a political entity “as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain” (Said
246).

Baker, Abu Ahmad. “Rethinking Identity:
The Colonizer in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.”
Nebula 3.2-3 (September 2006)
68-85.

Said, Edward W. Culture and
Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus,
1993.

Scott, Paul. “How Well Have They Worn?”,
The Times, 6 January 1966. 15.