A Passage to India

Without quite planning it, the children and I took a literary turn to India over our Christmas break. We had been working on Rudyard Kipling's collection of stories, The Jungle Book, and somewhere along the line I started E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. The elephants had the day!

Having not read adult fiction in months and months---a respite after the Ph.D. perhaps?---Forster provided a thoughtful homecoming. As with all of Forster's novels, this one too provides keen insight into human relationships and missed connections. My dissertation focused on the evolving intersections of food and religion in Victorian British literature, thereby titled The Great (Food) Chain of Being---and Forster's novel does much to reinforce the central tenets of my thesis. In Forster's case, he (like H. G. Wells before him) errs on the side of a "muddle" or a "mystery" in a world in which all hierarchical arrangements have been upended and overthrown by evolutionary debates and the rise of secular humanism.  Forster's novel offers a political view (rather than a dystopic one as in the case of Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, for example) in contemplating the Great Chain of Being. In Forster's novel, the English Christian missionaries in caste-dominated India discuss the scala naturae and the possibility of future inhabitants of heaven. Where the older generation draws a line at the primates, the young Mr. Sorley considers insects, plants, rocks, bacteria, and dirt as possible redemptive matter. Old Mr. Graysford "saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss...And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to [his] mind, but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals, and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing" (29). The nothing that Old Mr. Graysford fears is similar to the nothing that Mrs. Moore deduces from the Marabar's echo: "'Pathos, piety, courage---they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.' If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same---'ou-boum'" (134). And "What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also" (188).

This little wasp in the missionaries' scala nature similarly returns and returns throughout the novel in typical Forsterian fashion---from the wasp on Adela's cloak hook to the wasp that Professor Godbole envisions through the lens of his Hindu faith: "His senses grew thinner, he remembered a wasp seen he forgot where, perhaps on a stone. He loved the wasp equally, he impelled it likewise, he was imitating God. And the stone where the wasp clung---could he...no, he could not, he had been wrong to attempt the stone, logic and conscious effort had seduced" (260). So it would seem that the Hindi Godbole also draws a line at the level of sentience not unlike the Christian Mr. Sorley. Throughout the novel, Forster examines a colonial landscape in which the British Empire imposes intrinsically English values and laws and aesthetics on an Oriental India resulting in false accusations, misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and cultural chasms difficult if not impossible to overcome. Indeed, the wasp also subtly references the acronymic WASP of England’s colonializing purview. Yet somehow, the lingering whispers and exclamations of "Esmiss Esmoor!" (as though she were some kind of Hindu deity) suggest Mrs. Moore's continuing sentience and ameliorating influence even after her portentous death and burial at sea in the Indian Ocean; "But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddle is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action; we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity....To be one with the Universe! So dignified and simple" (188).

Meanwhile, Kipling's stories of jungle adventures, island habitats, and colonial mishaps opened a door to another world for the children and for me. I think about Jane Austen's groundbreaking free indirect discourse that she perfected at the beginning of the nineteenth century---at century's end, Kipling runs wild with Austen's narratival inventiveness and narrates from the anthropomorphic perspective of elephants (Two-Tail), mongooses (Riki Tiki Tavi), and baby seals (Kotick).  The Jungle Book is so much more than Mowgli's story as a human boy in a wolf pack. The short stories that follow are perhaps even more memorable and depictive of nineteenth-century India than is the novella that precedes them. "Riki Tiki Tavi" is a masterpiece. The last time I read it was in Mrs. Nichols' junior high English class, but I'm so glad the children and I encountered it together this past Christmas. And "Toomai of the Elephants" and "Her Majesty's Servants" depict an India under Queen Victoria's rule and the ensuing plight of cultural hegemony imposed on human and animal alike. The little boys loved the adventures in the jungle, the elephant dance that little Toomai witnesses in the clearing, and the brave and heroic albino seal, Kotick, who discovers a new and safe habitat for his fellow seals. Overall, we enjoyed our virtual travel to India via some beautiful English novels...