Carol Ashey

ENGL 356
Dr. Duffus
Sept. 18, 2013

Bridge Building Presentation

A Passage to India
What I think we should take away from this text is how complex and complicated the relationship between
colonizer and colonized is. We see this with every character we meet in the book; we know from reading it
that everyone (not just the white people) is racist in some form or other. I think we should also keep that
relationship in mind as we move forward into postcolonial India and the challenges that relationship
produced. As writers, we can take away the unconventional writing style of Forster as a unique way of
telling a story and compare/contrast it with the other authors.
The God of Small Things
Our next text is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy; it is a novel and focuses on twins Estha and
Rahel, and how their world changes when their cousin Sophie shows up. The story is set in a place called
Ayemenem, in the late 1960s. Since it is a work of fiction, liberties were taken with the place names. The
back of the book says that the story is part family saga, political drama, and forbidden love story. In light of
the latter two I think those will easily connect with Passage to India, just from the colonized perspective. I
think we should be on the lookout for social and cultural challenges because of colonization.