Bathos, Architecture and Knowing

India: E.M. Forsters A Passage to

India and Nineteenth-Century
British Ethnology and the
Romance Quest
1
Javed Majeed
Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster
wrote in a letter to G.L. Dickinson, I am bored not only by my creative
impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of the ction-
form.
2
In many ways, A Passage to India articulated Forsters dissatis-
faction with the genre of the novel as a whole. Stephen K. Land reads
Forsters novels in terms of the ways in which their protagonists either
embody or challenge social conventions.
3
The aesthetic form and subject-
matter of A Passage to India can also be read in similar terms as a set of
challenges to novelistic conventions. This is evident in the way the novel
self-consciously plays with conventional literary expectations on a variety
of levels. The key here is the deliberate uncertainty of what happens in
the caves, which is the open question that structures the novel as a whole.
Famously, Forster refused to clarify this, suggesting that neither the
narrator nor the protagonists, and so neither the readers also, can ever
know what happened in the Marabar caves. It is clear that the notion that
a novel with a supposedly third-person omniscient narrator who can
inform the reader of what happens within the world of the text is under-
mined by the absent centre of A Passage to India, in which the status of
its central event, and even the nature of what constitutes an event, is left
ambiguous and uncertain. But Forster argued that this uncertainty was
linked to his theme of India itself. In a letter of June 1924 he wrote:
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications www.sagepublications.com
(London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi)
Vol 40(1):2136. DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050663
In the caves it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion. If I say,
it becomes whatever the answer a different book. And even if I know!
My writing is a blur here i.e I will it to remain a blur, and to be uncer-
tain, as I am of many facts in daily life. This isnt a philosophy of aes-
thetics. Its a particular trick I felt justied in trying because my theme was
India. It sprang straight from my subject matter. I wouldnt have attempted
it in other countries . . . I call it trick: but voluntary surrender to infec-
tion better expresses my state. (p. 26)
In this essay I will consider why Forsters trick might spring from his
subject-matter of India. I shall also consider how both literary conven-
tions and the undermining of them in his text might be read in terms of
a larger archive of British texts whose subject-matter was India. These
texts embody a project to know India, but they also reveal how the
desire to know India was always entangled with a project for self-
knowledge. The trip to the caves stems from Adela Questeds pose of
seeing India and the courtroom scene is described as the wreckage of
her silly attempt to see India (pp. 301, 223) In part, the playing with
literary conventions in the novel is also a confounding of the expectations
built on the previous poses of writing about India, expectations which
built on but also evaded the difcult relationships between knowing
India and self-knowledge.
Christopher Bayly has written in detail on the production of knowl-
edge in colonial India in his important Empire and Information.
4
My aim
here is to examine how this production of knowledge was always imbri-
cated with problems of self-knowledge. I will also try to distinguish
between different styles or modes of knowing India, as exemplied by
ethnography, comparative ethno-historiography and the romance quest,
although there were clear overlaps between these genres, each of which
was anyway already composite. I will briey consider these three kinds
of texts in relation to A Passage to India and will argue that each exem-
plies particular styles of knowing, distinctive concepts of knowledge and
specic problems of self-knowledge. First, I consider Herbert Risleys
The People of India (1908) as a key example of an ethnographic text.
Then I examine Henry Sumner Maines Village Communities in the East
and West (1871) and Ancient Law (1861) as examples of a new style of
comparative knowledge in which complex analogies and differences
were set up between classical Greece and Rome and present-day India
and Britain. And nally, I briey consider the genre of the romance
quest, by looking at the general features of such texts as Wilkie Collinss
The Moonstone (1868) and Rudyard Kiplings Kim (1901).
Risleys The People of India tries to dene the expertise of what he
calls the modern science of ethnology.
5
He begins by using the
enabling ction of the ordinary untravelled European whose
22 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
untrained eye cannot tell Indians apart,
6
as opposed to the ethnogra-
pher who can perceive heterogeneity in the apparently homogenous
mass of Indians. This distinction between the apparent superciality of
the travel writer and the depth of the ethnographers eldwork lies in the
latters competence to detect and uncover differences mapped along the
axes of regional, linguistic, religious, social and ultimately physical differ-
ences.
7
So from the outset two poses of seeing India are juxtaposed,
but what is key here is Risleys attempt to secure the ethnographers view
of India in a scientistic vocabulary,
8
against the view of an observer
recently arrived from Europe.
9
The performance of this scientistic
idiom is enacted in the texts combination of cartography with the
language of statistics, especially the enumeration of the ofcial census,
and the craniometrical and anthropometric measurements of the
physical features of the inhabitants of India. This data appears in tabular
form in the long appendices to the text, but the pose of seeing India in a
scientistic fashion is illustrated by the use of maps in particular. Risley
tries to map onto the map of India the seven physical types he dis-
covers by using rectangles. The area, base and height of each rectangle
shows the strength of the caste in each province, the population of the
province as a whole and the proportion of the caste in question to the
population of the province.
10
Even the geographical outline of India itself
is seen as a geometrical shape: the triangular aspect seems to catch the
eye more as one looks at a map and is thus better suited for descriptive
purposes.
11
In this sense, the ethnologist is mapping data in the form of
rectangles onto the already existing shape of a triangle. This visual
display of statistical data within geometrical shapes exemplies the
trained eye of the ethnologist with his scientic methodology. This
scientistic methodology extends to other parts of the book when, for
example, Indian proverbs regarding caste are described as the algebra
of popular pessimism.
12
Thus, the maps in Risleys text illustrate a specic style of seeing and
knowing India as well as a distinctive concept of knowledge. There are a
number of points where the contradictions of this project come to the
fore, but for my purposes what is important here is the specic category
of caste. It is clear from the outset that Risleys project to dene the
people of India is also a project of self-denition; the other key term in
the phrase the modern science of ethnology is modern. Throughout
the text there is both an explicit and implicit attempt to dene the dis-
tinctive character of modern Europe against the antiquity of India.
13
Risley argues that what is distinctive about India is that it is a contem-
porary form of the ancient,
14
and what has enabled it to survive in this
form is the institution of caste. Moreover, it is caste with its distinctive
feature of endogamy, which means that India is uniquely able to provide
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India 23
data for the discipline of anthropometry, because, unlike elsewhere and
especially unlike in Europe, there has been no constant intermixture of
types obscuring and confusing the data ascertained by measurements.
15
It is for this reason that Risleys project to know the people of India is
rooted in the category of caste; caste is unique to India such that we nd
the population of a large continent broken up into an innite number
of mutually exclusive aggregates. The very nature of caste means that
we can discover in India physical types by using anthropometry.
16
Furthermore, such is the contagion of caste, that even Muslims in India
have caste on characteristically Hindu lines. This is also true of Chris-
tianity in India, which also has not escaped the subtle contagion of
caste in India.
17
However, to adopt Forsters phrase, Risleys text is strewn with the
wreckage of his attempt to see India. This wreckage demonstrates not
just the difculty of knowing India but also the problems of and lacunae
in self-knowledge which this poses. First, the gure of India as para-
doxically both ancient and contemporary undermines what it is supposed
to secure. The very nature of Indias temporality as dened in the text
destabilizes the linear temporality from which the idea of the modern as
the contemporary moment emerges, supposedly in sharp contrast to the
ancient as something safely left behind. The problematic nature of this
formulation of modern and ancient comes to the fore in one passage
where Risley writes of how in India these mighty opposites are mixed
and jumbled up together in a fantastic medley and how one sees a sort
of disordered kaleidoscope in which the oldest and the newest . . . whirl
round together in the most bewildering fashion.
18
It is as though the
theme of India defeats the very possibility of knowledge itself, because
India becomes a collage rather than a coherent narrative. In doing so, it
reveals how Risleys own text is a composite work, a collage of maps,
statistics, racial science, anthropometry, craniometry and census reports
and debates. It is not so much that India becomes unreadable, but that it
reects back and unravels the supposedly scientic character of Risleys
project as a fantastic medley itself.
Secondly, this extends to the very idea of caste itself. There seems to
be an innite number of sub-castes within each caste group and caste
itself is categorized according to a number of different organizational
principles such as tribal identity, occupation, sectarian identity, castes
formed by crossing, national castes, castes formed by migration and
castes formed by changes of custom.
19
Thus, not only is caste a uid and
variable institution, hence its ability to spread to both Indian Christians
and Muslims,
20
but it can never be mapped completely. This is best illus-
trated in Appendix Two to The People of India, where census statistics
are given for each for each caste in each geographical area, racially
24 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
dened. But every single subdivision contains a group called Others,
21
and sometimes this group amounts to more in numerical terms than any
other single group. This sizeable category of others is a clear sign of
how the taxonomy of caste breaks down in Risleys text and also how it
leaves large gaps which cannot be scanned according to the census
categories of caste and religion. But once again, Risleys text can only
perform its scientism by remaining blind to how the contagion of caste
has infected the British themselves. At the most general level, this con-
tagion is responsible for the very existence of Risleys text itself, in so
far as its most basic organizing category is caste. But more importantly,
in his enumeration of castes the term British is left out. It is clear that
the ofcial British community in India was itself caste-like; it was as
endogamous as could be, had its own rituals and customs, its own
complex hierarchy of sub-groups and maintained its distance from other
groups in Indian society. It has been repeatedly stressed by historians
that the dening feature of the British elite in India was that it never
became creolized and that it maintained social distance from Indian
society. What was key here was the regulation of the relationships
between English women and Indian men.
22
In all these aspects, the
British were performing the same caste-like behaviour which commen-
tators like Risley saw as the organizing principle of Indian society. Para-
doxically, by resolutely remaining as British as possible, the ofcial
community in British India was fullling the very criteria of caste-like
behaviour as Risley denes them. Staying British meant becoming yet
another Indian caste in an already very long list of castes, and in this
sense, Britishness and Indianness continue to merge together even
as Risley tries to separate them. Risleys deployment of caste to know
India and its peoples as a contrasting opposite to the modern West
begins to read like a failure in self-understanding, a disavowal on a grand
scale of the extent to which the British in India constituted themselves as
a kind of caste, infected by the contagion they observed in others. As
Risley memorably wrote, in India caste is in the air,
23
but he seemed
to forget that the British were breathing the same air as the Indians.
Thus, we can see in Risley both a specic pose of seeing India and the
wreckage of his distinctive attempt to understand it. Both are mired in
an attempt at self-denition and the difcult nature of self-knowledge; in
a sense what motivates the text is the desire to block self-knowledge,
even as its project is to dene others in order to dene ones self. The
complex work of Henry Sumner Maine also articulates a project to know
India and therefore also Europe. Unlike Risley, though, Maine was much
more explicit about the project of self-denition in his work and he put
a comparative approach at the centre of his interpretative strategies. In
doing so, he articulated a style of comparative knowledge, a kind of
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India 25
ethno-historiography, in which complex analogies and differences were
set up between Greece and Rome, and present-day India and Britain.
24
In Maines Ancient Law Roman law is compared and contrasted to
what is perceived to be Hindu law. The overriding purpose is to demon-
strate the superiority of Roman law, the study of which illuminates the
differences between what Maine calls stationary and progressive
societies.
25
The measure of Roman laws superiority is, according to the
author, the fate of the Hindoo [sic] law.
26
By the same token, some-
times these comparisons and contrasts were made between historical
eras, as well as between societies in the same era, and sometimes both
types of comparisons and contrasts were conducted simultaneously. For
example, in the context of explaining the differences between contem-
porary Western and Indian society, what were perceived to be features
of contemporary Hindu law were used to help explain the development
of aspects of ancient Roman law.
27
When considering the question as to
why primogeniture became the custom of Europe, Maine resorts to what
he describes as a valuable hint from contemporary India.
28
Similarly,
the author argues that as far as archaic institutions of joint property
ownership are concerned, a study of Roman law does not yield any
results. But the village community of contemporary India provides an
example of this lost institution of primeval society.
29
It is clear that
Maines Ancient Lawis radically comparative, such that very few subjects
are discussed without reference to multiple cultural or historical points
of reference. But at the same time, the shifting nature of the compara-
tive framework is demonstrated by his attempt to argue from the con-
temporary and the ancient simultaneously. In part, the unstable nature
of this comparative project is also illustrated by the frequent recourse to
ancient India as a hermeneutic strategy. As a result, at times the text
reads as though it is Roman law which has been moved to a marginal
position from the perspective of the other points of reference which are
supposedly used to highlight Roman laws, and so European modernitys,
superiority.
This ambivalence towards the gure of the ancient is clearer in
Maines Village Communities in the East and West. Once again, Maine is
explicit about the relationship between self-knowledge and understand-
ing India. He makes it clear that his lectures are designed to ll in the
gaps in European historical self-perceptions,
30
so his investigation into
the Indian village community is part of a project of European self-
denition. At one level the modern and the ancient are deployed as
binary oppositions. England and India are disentangled from each other
as opposite extremes: the social constitution of India is of the extreme
ancient, that of England of the extreme modern type.
31
The vague and
oating order of primitive societies stands in contrast to the denition
26 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
of rights in modern societies and the sources of law in primitive com-
munities are Authority, Custom, or Chance, not as in modern law,
Contract.
32
This attempt to x modernity and antiquity at arms length
from each other is secured by the representation of the Indian village as
the repository of the ancient, untouched by European modernity. In his
The Effects of Observation of Indian on Modern European Thought,
Maine juxtaposes the vast interior mass of India, this great interior
block where the real India is to be found, with the Westernized Indian
population of the coastal cities.
33
It is this interior mass with its authen-
tically primitive village communities which drives Maines argument and
his comparative method in Village Communities.
But, as Maines lectures develop his argument, it becomes clear that
just as the Indian village is a form of the contemporary ancient so too
traces and fragments of the ancient are to be found in contemporary
Britain and Europe. The powerfully evocative language of fragments,
traces, footprints, vestiges and relics of the ancient is nearly always
focussed on contemporary Britain and Europe.
34
This rhetoric has a
cumulative effect in so far as the initial depiction of India as an assem-
blage of fragments of ancient society could just as well serve as the
description of contemporary Britain which emerges from Maines
lectures. When in his third lecture Maine writes the lands which repre-
sent the cultivated portion of the domain of the ancient Teutonic village-
communities are found more or less in all parts of England,
35
it becomes
difcult to know where exactly to locate the modern in England. The
initial opposition between England and India as extremes of the modern
and the ancient becomes unsustainable and the cumulative effect of
Maines lectures is to undercut his characterization of primitive society
as vague and oating and to suggest instead that this would better
apply to modern society itself. When Maine writes these footprints of
the past [primitive modes of ownership] were quite recently found close
to the capital and to the seats of both Universities,
36
his lectures seem
to have turned themselves inside out. The Indian primitive, far from
being a gure of the exotic, safely located in the East, is revisiting the
imperial capital and the recruiting grounds of the Indian Civil Service,
but in fact this revisit is just a reminder of how the primitive was always
already there but couldnt be seen.
37
The instability of the distance
between India and Britain, the ancient and modern, is further reinforced
by the assumption of a common Aryan origin to both Indians and
Europeans which runs through the lectures as a whole and which also
underpins Maines Effects of the Observation of India on European
Thought.
38
The more Maine tries to dene the progressive societies of
the West against ancient India, the more he seems to uncover the ancient
and the archaic in their midst. In Maines texts the project to see India in
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India 27
order to dene the distinctiveness of the West is reversed. Maine demon-
strates not just how India is a contemporary form of the ancient, but how
Britain itself is like India in this respect. The project to know and dene
Europe as distinctively modern becomes instead an understanding of
Europe as rooted in an ancient past which it cannot shake off.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Maines texts begin to read
like a quest for the primitive and the ancient within contemporary Britain
and Europe itself. Maine refers to the way in which Britains conquest
and government of India are romantic achievements;
39
England as the
community which is stigmatised . . . as a nation of shopkeepers has a
halo of romance spread around it by its great possession.
40
There are
two ctional recreations of this halo of romance in the Indian empire
which not only demonstrate the characteristic features of the romance
quest but also emerge from narratives of self-knowledge.
41
There are multiple ways in which the quest for self-knowledge and
knowing others is central to Kiplings Kim. In keeping with the formal
conventions of the romance quest as a whole,
42
both the chief pro-
tagonists embark on a quest for identity, but what marks Kim himself out
is his striking facility for disguise, in contrast to the Indian gures in the
text.
43
The ambiguous nature of his identity, which leaves other pro-
tagonists trying to guess who he really is, is in striking contrast to the
ethnographic tableaux in the novel, where individual Indians are pre-
sented as representative of xed groups of caste, linguistic community
and religion.
44
However, the Lamas centrality to the text is exemplied
by the fullment of his quest more importantly by his articulation of a
climactic vision of the whole of India: At that point, exalted in contem-
plation, I saw all Hind, from Ceylon in the sea to the Hills, and my own
Painted Rocks at Such-Zen; I saw every camp and village, to the least,
where we have ever rested.
45
The signicance of this vision being articu-
lated by a Tibetan Buddhist monk within India needs to be underlined.
First, given the fact of his Buddhism, the Lama repeatedly suggests that
forms of identity, especially caste identity, are at some level illusory.
46
And secondly, as an outsider in India who has renounced the world and
all forms of power, he is granted an entirety of vision which the British
ofcials and protagonists in the text cannot articulate. On one level at
least, the text appears to pointedly suggest that it is only powerless out-
siders within India who can grasp India in its entirety.
The gure of the Lama might therefore suggest that power does not
create self- and other-understanding but in fact impedes it; and at one
level, the very notion of the self might be illusory. The complicated
relationship between power and understanding in the quest for identity
is also dramatized in Wilkie Collinss earlier novel The Moonstone. One
of the key gures, Murthwaite, is an ethnographer traveller with a facility
28 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
for disguise, a facility which is again denied to the Indian Brahmin
jugglers themselves. The novel ends with Murthwaites eyewitness
account of the restoration of the diamond to the temple in India, which
is only possible because of his success in passing himself off as a Hindoo-
Boodhist pilgrim.
47
But at the same time, the novel dramatizes powerful
ambiguities which destabilize the project of self- and other-knowledge.
On a fundamental level, the question of what constitutes ownership, and
therefore theft, is left open. The paradoxical nature of the text is articu-
lated in the statement I had discovered myself as the thief,
48
when
Franklin Blake as the main editorial gure in the text, who also takes
upon himself the burden of the detective,
49
discovers himself to be the
criminal that he is pursuing. This self-discovery underlines the difcult
nature of agency in the text. The central dening act of the text is an
unconscious one, committed by an agent unaware of his own actions.
50
The very possibility of self-knowledge is therefore destabilized by the
unknowing self-pursuit and self-discovery which structures the novel as
a whole. Furthermore, the attempt to safely relocate the diamond in the
East in order to contain its unsettling presence is undermined by the
open-ended questions which form the nal lines of the novel: What will
be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell?
51
The text
works towards separating the East from the West, but they keep
merging together. More worryingly, the East erupts in the most
intimate spaces of the West such as the bedroom cabinet of the young
lady in that most quintessential of English places, the country house.
52
As Barry Milligan concludes, just as Franklin Blake arrogantly and mis-
takenly searches around himself for the thief of the Moonstone only to
nd the culprit inside himself in the end, so do Britons deludedly locate
India in the East only to nd that it is after all an inextricable part of their
culture at home.
53
We can now return to Forsters A Passage to India and consider how
it emerges against the background of the characteristic preoccupations
and motifs of the texts I have considered. A Passage to India knowingly
dramatizes both the pose of seeing India and the wreckage of that
attempt; the very name Quested is evocative of how Adela enacts and
bears the consequences of the failed promise of the romance quest in
empire. The India which offers sublime possibilities of self- and other-
understanding becomes here a space in which bathos is the inevitable
outcome, the pursuing shadow, of such sublime projects. As the narrator
notes, nothing in India is identiable, the mere asking of a question
causes it to disappear or to merge in something else (p. 101). To a certain
extent, the bathos of the novel also needs to be read in larger terms of a
shift in literary representations of the empire as a whole, from an arena
of heroic enterprise articulated within the romance quest, to the reaction
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India 29
against this attempt to align the values of the novel as a form with
imperial preoccupations.
54
Both Martin Green and Patrick Brantlinger
have examined how the adventure narrative of imperial ction gave way
in the late nineteenth century to ironic adventure tales or blotched
adventure romances.
55
As such, Forsters text represents a transitional
phase to the nal aesthetic failure of empire to provide adequate subject-
matter for serious literary consideration. Hence failure is central to the
book as a whole and literary expectations are set up only to be con-
founded. This includes the ironic tone of direct addresses to the reader,
which captures the bathetic reversal of sublime possibilities that struc-
tures the novel as a whole: Visions are supposed to entail profundity,
but wait till you get one dear reader! The abyss may be petty, the
serpent of eternity made of maggots (p. 213). Here the theme of India
becomes less a motivation for writing and more an ironic self-reection
on the limitations of writing: Most of life is so dull that there is nothing
to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as inter-
esting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own exist-
ence (p. 145). Thus, the passage from adventure narrative and romance
quest to bathetic dullness rehearses the failure of empire in aesthetic
terms as part of the interplay between form and content in the text itself.
In part, this failure of heroic discoveries is reected in the complete
absence of the motif of disguise in the text, a motif which operated in
colonial ction as a sign of European protagonists ability to penetrate
into the exotic East in order to codify it into a manageable archive
which can be brought back to the metropolis at the end of a journey
of discovery.
56
The passage in The Passage to India is also a journey of
self-discovery, but it is one in which what is discovered is that the notion
of discovery itself is an empty one. Once again, the bathetic nihilism of
the novel can be seen in terms of a larger intellectual and literary trajec-
tory, in which as Patrick Brantlinger argues, with the increasing mapping
of the globe in the nineteenth century, there were fewer geographical
territories left to discover and explore. Hence the shift in metropolitan
literature to the inward exploration of the nature of the self and the
psyche, manifested in the popularity of such movements as theosophy,
whose texts utilized motifs of travel, emigration and journeys.
57
But in A
Passage to India even these heroic narratives of inner travel which
promise self-understanding founder. What the bathos of the novel offers
is a radically negative kind of knowledge, a sort of spiritual muddledom
. . . for which no high-sounding words can be found, a vision of innity
and eternity robbed of their vastness (pp. 212, 161).
Thus, the passage in A Passage to India is not the journey from the
mundane to the sublime, but the return to the bathetic as the outcome
of those earlier heroic enterprises in self- and other-knowledge which
30 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
the theme of India afforded. The novel enacts the legacy of India both
as a theme which grounds the project of self-knowledge as one tried to
know the country and as a space which bears the imprint of the failures
of that project. But the problems of managing bathos through the theme
of India prove to be perhaps even more difcult than the unsettling
possibilities of the sublime. These problems of the management of
bathos are in part articulated through the image of architecture in the
text, through the way in which the architectonics of British rule in India
are inscribed in the very tripartite structure of the text. The rst and
third part are named after an architectural form, the mosque and the
temple, with the caves themselves represented in terms of their repeti-
tive pattern (p. 138), which recalls the structure of the mosque in the
rst section and foreshadows the structure of the temple in the last
section. One scholar has pointed out that Forster derived much of his
knowledge of Islam and Hinduism not from their primary sources, but
from scholarly treatments of architecture, such as Ernest Havells The
Ideals of Indian Art (1911) and G.T. Rivorias Moslem Architecture
(1918).
58
The interplay between architectural forms and inner experi-
ence is captured in Azizs dream with which the rst section of the novel
ends (p. 133) and in the temple section, by the careful evocation of the
ways in which the festival, the moods of the participants and the feelings
of the onlooker interact with the architectural forms of the temple itself.
So, too, the architecture of Fieldings room is brought to our attention,
when Aziz describes the audience hall as embodying the forms of
Question and Answer (p. 87). But there is also a sense in the novel
that architectural forms are unambiguous expressions of two clearly
separate and monolithic entities, Islam and Hinduism. Moreover, this
extends to Aziz and Godbole as representative individuals who exem-
plify the psyches and dispositions of the already given and clearly
demarcated group identities of Muslims and Hindus in British India. At
a fundamental level, the history of the British states intervention in the
subcontinent, with its deployment of what Washbrook has called a soci-
ology of multiple ethnicity which was most clearly apparent in the
organizing categories of the census,
59
is elided. The categories Hindu
and Muslim are taken to be self-evident and ready made, and
moreover, it is only Europeans as outsiders who can mediate between
the two. Godbole and Aziz remain trapped in their ethnicities in India
in a way in which Fielding does not. Fielding as the narrators focalizer
is the structural pivot of the story and, once again, the term structure
here has architectural as well as aesthetic implications. His return to
England becomes the story of his recovery of the joys of form, which
his Indian friends cannot experience. When he alights in Italy, he sees
that the:
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India 31
buildings of Venice . . . stood in the right place, whereas in poor India
everything was placed wrong. He had forgotten the beauty of form among
idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be
beauty? Form stammered here and there in a mosque, became rigid
through nervousness even, but oh! those Italian churches! . . . the
harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the
civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with
esh and blood subsisting. Writing picture-postcards to his Indian friends,
he felt that all of them would miss the joys of form and that constituted a
serious barrier. They would see the sumptuousness of Venice, not its
shape . . . the Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that
exquisite lake . . . they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the
southern exit leads to the strangest experience of all. (p. 278)
Thus, the emptiness of the caves and the failure of the sublime underpin
the recovery of the joys of European aesthetic forms, a recovery which
is enacted through the carefully shaped form of A Passage to India itself.
Partha Mitter has shown how in the attempt to come to terms with Indian
art, it was the category of the sublime rather than that of the beautiful
which enabled European commentators and scholars to re-evaluate
Indian artistic and architectural endeavour in the nineteenth century.
60
In this sense, the defeat of the sublime in A Passage to India is not just
the bathetic outcome of the impossible pose to see India, but also the re-
inscription of the aesthetic values of classical form against which the
formlessness of India is contrasted.
This parallels the revived classicism which gave visible shape to
imperial styles of architecture at the turn of the twentieth century in
India. The use of classical forms to express the spirit of empire was appro-
priate, because such forms with their reminders of Rome and Greece
were the medium through which Europeans, and especially the British,
apprehended empire. This revival of classical forms of architecture was
embodied in the construction of New Delhi as the new capital of British
India.
61
It may be useful here to consider the paradoxes of progress and
decline in this context. Thomas Metcalf has argued that the monumental
nature of the classical forms of architecture in New Delhi with their evo-
cations of the glories of Rome were intended to be reassuring to a declin-
ing imperial power.
62
Similarly, I have argued elsewhere that while the
study of ancient Roman history was becoming more technical as a subject
in its own right from the late nineteenth century onwards, its existence
was at the same time justied on the grounds of its relevance to the
history of the British empire itself and in particular to British India.
While one scholar has argued that allusions to Rome in late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century works on the Roman and British empires,
were a heuristic reinforcement in British imperial thought,
63
I have
32 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
argued that these same works also indicate how comparisons and con-
trasts with the ancient Roman empire sometimes clustered around prob-
lematic areas of race and identity, in which allusions to Rome are more
anxious than reinforcing.
64
In the same way, the complexities of bathos
in A Passage to India need to be read in terms of how the recovery of the
joys of aesthetic form was entangled with the consciousness of imperial
decline. The bathos of decline is aesthetically productive in so far as it
leads to the recovery of the joys of form, but by the same token, this rein-
forces the bathetic nature of the text as repeating the architectonics of
British rule in India in the very structure of the text itself. Managing
bathos turns out to be about both exemplifying and repeating it. Perhaps
Europeans no longer need to disguise themselves in A Passage to India
because there is in fact nothing left to know, there are no forbidden
spaces left to penetrate. The silliness of the attempt to know India may
reside in the assumption that there is something to see which has not yet
been seen, categorized and codied. The exotic has become banal and
dull (Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it [p.
145]) and there is nothing left to see and do in the empire. What we are
left with is not the arena of heroic endeavour, with the seductive promise
of the exotic, but the suburbs of England recreated within India. This
recreated English suburb, rather than revealing the ridiculousness of
English suburbia, becomes a measure of the ridiculousness of the East
instead: The East had returned to the East via the suburbs of England,
and had become ridiculous during the detour (p. 116).
Thus, Forsters A Passage to India is a difcult exercise in bathos
which paradoxically succeeds not only by enacting bathos but by
becoming bathetic itself. The puzzling nature of the novel, at once chal-
lenging and unsurprising, can perhaps be explained in terms of this
bathetic success. The text bears testimony to how bathos was always
inscribed in the sublime project to know India and ones self and while
the novel touts itself as a challenge to the Britishness of British India, it
is more deeply and even simply inscribed in its determining structures
than it dares to admit. This, too, may be yet further testimony to its
bathetic success.
NOTES
1 This paper was presented at LOriente Storia di una gura nelle arti occi-
dentali 17002000 at the University of Naples, 1718 October 2003. I am
grateful to the speakers and participants for their comments on that
occasion.
2 Cited by Oliver Stallybrass in his edition of A Passage to India (1924),
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, pp. 1516, henceforth incorporated in the
main text.
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India 33
3 Stephen K. Land, Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E.M.
Forster, New York: AMS Press, 1990, pp. xivxv.
4 C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information. Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 17801870, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. See
also his Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India, Modern
Asian Studies 27, 1 (1993), 343.
5 Herbert Risley, The People of India, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1908,
p. 6.
6 ibid., p. 5.
7 ibid., p. 6.
8 I rely on Habermas denition of scientism here: Scientism means
sciences belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer under-
stand science as one form of possible knowledge, but rather must identify
knowledge with science, Jrgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Inter-
ests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, London: Heinemann, 1972, p. 4.
9 Risley, The People of India, p. 270.
10 ibid., Appendix 3, p. xlix.
11 ibid., p. 1, f.n.
12 ibid., p. 125.
13 ibid., p. 148, where Risley draws a contrast between the stationary East
and the progressive West.
14 ibid., p. 4.
15 ibid., p. 25.
16 Risley enumerates seven physical types: ibid., p. 33 ff.
17 ibid., pp. 118, 79.
18 ibid., p. 270.
19 ibid., pp. 7193.
20 ibid., p. 241.
21 ibid., pp. xxiixxxiii.
22 For example, see K. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj:Imperial
Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics 17931905, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1980, pp. 56, 121.
23 Risley, The People of India, p. 118.
24 For a fuller discussion of this, see J. Majeed, Comparativism and Refer-
ences to Rome in British Imperial Attitudes to India, in Roman Presences.
Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 17891945, ed. Catharine
Edwards, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 88109.
25 Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History
of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas, 1861; Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1986, p. 23.
26 ibid., p. 19.
27 ibid., pp. 2023, where the distinction between progressive and stationary
societies is made on the basis of contemporary Hindu law and ancient Roman
law; and pp. 2216, where a gap in the history of primogeniture in European
legal history is lled by an examination of contemporary Hindu law.
28 ibid., p. 226.
29 ibid., pp. 2512. The argument is pursued pp. 2539.
34 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
30 This assumption grounds the course of his lectures as a whole but for some
explicit statements of this, see Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities
in the East and West: Six Lectures Delivered at Oxford, 1871; London: John
Murray, 1887, pp. 15, 478, 154, 161, 200. This is also the assumption which
grounds Maines Ancient Law, p. 23.
31 Maine, Village Communities, p. 56.
32 ibid., pp. 150, 111.
33 Maine, Effects of Observation in Village Communities, pp. 214, 216.
34 Maine, Village Communities, pp. 9, 778, 823, 85, 889, 9097, 1267,
19091.
35 ibid., p. 85.
36 ibid., p. 89.
37 The threatening proximity of the exotic and the domestic resonates in a
number of important nineteenth-century novels, such as Wilkie Collinss
The Moonstone (1868) and Bram Stokers Dracula (1897).
38 Maine, Village Communities, p. 82; Effects of Observation, pp. 211, 230.
39 Maine, Village Communities, p. 23.
40 Maine, Effects of Observation, p. 206.
41 For a lucid treatment of the Victorian quest romance in nineteenth-century
colonial ction, see Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson,
Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle, Plymouth: Northcote House Publish-
ers, 1998.
42 Robert Fraser remarks that the chief quest in the romance adventure genre
is the quest for identity, Victorian Quest Romance, p. 26.
43 In Lurgans shop, the narrator stresses how the Hindu child played this
game [of masquerading as various Indian gures] clumsily. See Rudyard
Kipling, Kim (1901), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p. 207.
44 Kipling, Kim, pp. 7577, p. 105.
45 ibid., p. 337.
46 ibid., p. 68.
47 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994,
pp. 4614. In contrast, Murthwaite is able to see through the Indian
jugglers, and when he speaks to them in their own language, the effect is
described by Betteredge as if he had pricked them with a bayonet, Collins,
The Moonstone, p. 79.
48 ibid., p. 310.
49 For some comments on the signicance of this, see D.A. Miller, The Novel
and the Police, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, pp. 412.
50 For an important study of the category of the unconscious in Wilkie Collinss
ction, see Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie
Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth Century Psychology, London:
Routledge, 1988.
51 Collins, The Moonstone, p. 464.
52 ibid., pp. 845.
53 Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pain: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-
Century British Culture, Charlottesville and London: University Press of
Virginia, 1995, p. 82.
Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India 35
54 Martin Greens argument in The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: The
Doom of Empire, London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1984, remains a crucial
intervention in this respect. See also Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness:
British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988,
pp. 3944, 239, 253, which examines in detail how the perception of the
waning possibilities of heroic adventure in the empire led to ironic handlings
of the adventure narrative.
55 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness. British Literature and Imperialism,
18301914, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988, pp. 3944, 239, 253, and Martin Green,
Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1980, pp. 264, 27880, 3245, 337.
56 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Context, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 30.
57 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 24053.
58 C.R. Devadawson, Indian Thought, Myth, and Folklore in the Fiction of
Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster, Cambridge University PhD thesis 1992,
p. 45.
59 David Washbrook, Ethnicity and Racism in Colonial Indian Society, in
Robert Ross, ed., Racism and Colonialism, The Hague: Nijhoff for the
Leiden University, 1982, p. 157; for an examination of the organizing
categories of the census and its impact on British Indian society, see Kenneth
Jones, Religious Identity and the Indian Census, in The Census in British
India: New Perspectives, ed. N.G. Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981,
pp. 7399.
60 Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions
to Indian Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, pp. 11923.
61 Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision. Indian Architecture and Britains Raj,
London: Faber & Faber, 1989, Chapter 6.
62 ibid., p. 246.
63 R.F. Betts, The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Victorian Studies (1971) p. 158.
64 J. Majeed, Comparativism and References to Rome in British Imperial
Attitudes to India, in Roman Presences. Receptions of Rome in European
Culture, 17891945, ed. Catharine Edwards, Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
pp. 88109.
36 Journal of Commonwealth Literature