Fon eats a}9¥ 332009. 12. 31) BEI S 167-195 A Passage to India: Cultural Hybridity Seogkwang Lee 1. Introduction On what ground has the British positioned itself in India? This is one of the questions in recent years writers have bombarded with. E. M. Forster was one of the first British writers to question the right of the British to be in India and, hereby, to doubt the disparate connections which all colonial relations imply. Amongst numerous critical views, this essay seeks to view that in his novel, A Passage to India (1924), Forster attempted to take a step towards dissolving the rigid binarisms which had dominated, and continued to dominate colonial relations, creating an opening for their complexity and plurality instead. In this way, even though he belonged to the age of colonial discourse, E. criticism and A Passage to India touches on one of the most Forster nevertheless predicted the field of post-colonial central issues of today, for instance the notion of hybridity. Bearing this in mind, this paper seeks to discuss E. M. Forster's anticipation of the hybridity inherent in the nature of post-colonial relations and identities. A Passage to India, arguably, reaches out towards a new space into which both the West and its Other can exist simultaneously and on an equal basis; a space where the creation of a self-governing identity is possible for the post-colonial subject. Colonial representation and the early notions of postcolonial168. Seogkwang Lee resistance emphasised a binary relationship between the coloniser and colonised, between the West and its subjugated Other, but E. M. Forster and critics such as Homi K. Bhabha, question this. Instead, they move towards “a notion of cultural exchange” opening up “for more complex analyses of colonial relations”(Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 86). Il. The Third Space Bhabha opposes the rather elementary polarizing tendency of critics, like Benita Parry. She believes that the oppositions between the West and its Other should be emphasised as they allow the colonised to obtain “a unified consciousness or speaking voice which will enable [them] to stand in unmitigated antagonism to the "(quoted in Anne Maxwell 71); the colonised stand united against the West and are, therefore, much stronger than they would be where they to be separated. However, Homi K. Bhabha, a deconstructionist argues that the colonised have other possibilities of oppress creating social change and independent identities. He claims that by dissolving the oppositions, the former colonies can be freed from the grip of Eurocentrism blending the polarities to create something new, something other than simplified oppositions, creates something closer to the actual “structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representation”: Must we always polarise in order to polemicise? Are we trapped in a politics of struggle where the representation of social antagonisms and historical contradictions can take no other form than a binarism of theory vs. politics? . .. . Can the aim of freedom or knowledge be the simple inversion of the relation of oppressor and oppressed,A Passage to India: Cultural Hybridity 169 negative image and positive image? .. . . Must the project of our liberationist aesthetics be for ever part of a totalising, Utopian vision of Being and History that seeks to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representation? . . . [No, it is the] language of critique [which] is effective . . . to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of “translation”; a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the Other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the “moment” of politics(my italics, Maxwell 72). Breaking free from the rigid polarity may result in confusion and possibly even a displacement of post-colonial discourse. However, this does not necessarily mean that post-colonial literature becomes unidealistic and compromising. Rather, it opens up for a “colourful, paradoxical and radical production”which, according to Gareth Griffiths and David Moody, can create a; powerful and creative synthesis of disparate and contradictory elements - a synthesis which embraces difference as a sign of possibility, not as a marker of closure. The presence of these hybridities suggests . . . the “complexity of freedom”: of how a writer limited, constrained and shaped by the historical conditions of his or her literary production manages within these limits to go some way towards expanding the borders(Griffiths and Moody 78-79). Tt seems that E. M. Forster was a writer who did try to expand the borders. Even though he belongs to colonial discourse and throughout his novel depicts the oppositions between England and India, he is mindful of the Other as he gives the Indians a voice and critically views the British and their right to be in India. It can be said that he manages to bring locality and Eurocentrism closer together, creating an awareness about the colonial subject's170 Seogkwang Lee presence. Moreover, A Passage to India is very much a novel which _ predic fragmentation, displacement, and desperate search for identity, and it points at how one could learn to handle these factors and cope in the consciousness of today’s world, _ its an increasingly international society. Undoubtedly, the novel suggests that it is not impossible for the Other to create a self-governing identity; it reveals that denying the universal, i.e. the Eurocentric, values by creating a “counter-myth of radical purity”(Maxwell 72), and supporting a rigid polarity is not the way to develop an identity. Rather, it suggests that a better way would be the one leading to the “complexity of freedom”, ie. trying to make use of the contradictions and conflicts inherent in a hybrid world. This is what several of the characters in A Passage to India try to do. Even though they do not succeed entirely, they are still aware that the promise of a future is only for those who attain an independent sense of being in the world - for those who the local as Relen Tiffin stresses: Post-colonial cultures are inevitably hybridised, involving a dialectical relationship between European ontology and epistemology and the impulse to create or recreate independent local identity. Decolonisation is process, not arrival; it invokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them; between European or British discourses and their post-colonial dis/mantling(95). In this way, cultural and individual identity becomes an ongoing process; it is not “an already accomplished fact . . . instead, [it is] a “production” which is never complete”(Hall 392). The sense of a common history and cultural conventions does not mean that the people of a nation have a united and fixed identity. The attempt toA Passage to India. Cultural Hybridity 171 create an “underlying unity"can only ever be an illusion because it disregards the fragmentation and diversity of reality. There is no doubt that it is important to try to create a certain unity, a certain sense of belonging, but it can be more crucial to recognise that “there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute what we really are or rather - since history has intervened - what we have become”(Hall 394). In this sense, as Stuart Hall points out, identity “belongs to the future as much as to the past” because it, “like everything which is_ historical undergoles] constant transformation’ and cannot free itself from the grips of ‘history, culture and power’ (Hall, 394). Recognising the diversity of reality means recognising the ambivalence of story, culture and power” and this is what seemingly both E. M. Forster and Homi K. Bhabha are seeking. Bhabha does not deny that colonial discourse is the way in which the West produces and codifies knowledge about its Other,!) but at sion to the same time, he stre that there is another dimer colonial discourse: it is also ambivalent. He reaches his idea of ambivalence through a linguistic analogy. It is the difference inherent in language which produces ambiguous meanings; to quote Bhabha, “[t]he pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in [al statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilised in the passage through a Third Space, which 1) As Edward Said points out in Orientalism (1978), the objective of colonial discourse is to create Oriental stereotypes, classifying the colonies as ‘underdeveloped, pagan, irrational and effeminate’ and hereby justifying the act of colonization and its attempt to civilize and cultivate. (Neloufer de Mel, ‘Woman as Gendered Subject and Other Discourses in Contemporary Sri Lankan Fiction in English’, Kunapipi, 16, no. 1 (1994), p. 248.172 Seogkwang Lee represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and_ institutional strategy of which it cannot in itself be conscious”(Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences’, 207-208). Accordingly, the act of inter tation becomes an ambivalent one. With a focus on colonial relations, the passage through an in-between space necessarily becomes one that opens up for the complexity of culture. Thus, colonial authority cannot be absolute; colonial discourse is no longer the relation between oppressor and oppressed. Instead, the “Third Space’ offers a fertile ground for the creation of new identities. As Bhabha puts it, the rethinking of the identity of culture “suggestls] a possible critique of the positive aesthetic and political values we ascribe to the unity or totality of cultures... the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity”(Bhabha 207-208). The ambivalence means that there is a certain excess inherent in colonial relations, an extra space where the power of the West can be subverted and the Other can intervene. In this way, the ambivalence of colonial discourse and the productive space which it opens up gives the colonized a more active and powerful role, historically, culturally as well as individually. Daring to enter the ambivalent ‘Third Space’ will give way to the recognition of “an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity’ and, Bhabha concludes, “by exploring this hybridity, this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves”(Bhabha 209). Acknowledging the ambivalence in colonial discourse is crucial to Bhabha’s theory of hybridity. Hybridity is to do with how fruitful colonial discourse can be revealing “its shifting forces andA Passage to India. Cultural Hybridity 173 ftxities’(Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ 34). The colonisers'’ discriminatory act of creating degrading stereotypes of their Other is reassessed by the colonized in the “Third Space’, enabling him to subvert the domination of his coloniser and redefine colonial power. For it is in this extra space that the colonised grabs hold of his oppressor’s power and appropriates it to his own needs, In Bhabha’s own words, hybridity “displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination . . . the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory”(Bhabha 34-35). Hybridity, then, allows for something other than past binarisms and offers new, promising examples of cultural exchange and cultural identities - it stresses that relations between different cultures are based on mutual processes. As a result of this, the relationship between coloni ind colonised ceases to be an unequal one as the colonised receives a voice and “becomels] an integral part of the new formations which arise from the clash of cultures”(Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 183). This idea of cross-fertilisation is present below the surface of A Passage to India and emerges as a possible future solution at the end of the book when the attempt to transcend to a level of unity and oneness has failed. . A Passage to India E. M. Forster's novel is set in the first quarter of 20th century?) 2) The first edition was written in two phases, the first in 1913-14, the second in 1922-4,174 Seogkwang Lee at the time when British rule in India was on the decline. At this a number of whom had been influenced by G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903), began to regard the idea of the Empire as morally unjustified (Crane 82). One of the writers who time, intellectual: criticised British behaviour in India was George Orwell whose personal experiences in Burma and India in the first quarter of the century made him write fervent attacks on the British Empire in the 19% And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd seemingly the leading actor of the piece: but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule ‘that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “‘natives’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the natives" expect of him (Shooting an Elephant’ 2231). Forster also perceived the futility of colonialism. He disavowed the imperial right of the British and his liberal humanism led him to believe in ‘good will’ as a solution to the culture-clash in India; he knew that the “Empire was going to be lost whatever happened, and... [his] point was that with a different kind of attitude the loss might have been transformed into a greater gain for both sides”(Das, E. M Forster's India xiv). A Passage to India deals with the cultural conflicts between the two nationalities and sets out to search for a unity of the two, “an over-arching perfection”(.xii). Initially, Forster seems to be leaning towards universality, and it is clear that one of the main questionsA Passage to India. Cultural Hybridity 175 in his novel is whether or not it is possible to transcend the complexity of India (and symbolically, the whole world) and unite both sides. His inquiry into this question is visualised in the various attempts of personal friendship, for instance between the young Muslim, Dr. Aziz, and the middle-aged Englishman Cyril Fielding, who is Principal of the Government College; can two cultures, especially when one dominates the other, exist on an equal basis? IV. Personal relationships Forster “was interested in India primarily as a rich and suggestive context, or even symbol, for human relationships”(Crane 76), and writing a historical document was not his main aim. As a humanist, Forster is deeply affected by the fact that it is seemingly impossible to have personal relationships between two different peoples, in this case between an Englishman and an Indian. Central to liberal humanism, which Forster adhered to throughout his life, is “the sanctity of the individual, respect for nonconformity, the love of rural traditions, of art, of the inner life and personal relations”(Beauman 220), but such a view became increasingly difficult to maintain as Victorian liberalism and optimism gave way to the pessimism and disillusion of the twentieth century. The abstract notion of power and its consequences entered the life of the individual to an unprecedented degree, entangling him in an ideological, historical, cultural, and social network with no space left for individual thought. Nevertheless, Forster upheld his views and argued passionately for them. In ‘What I Believe'(1939), Forster ‘s, as Wilfred Stone expresses it, that “[tIhe great social176 Seogkwang Lee need of the modem world is to keep bureaucracy human, to bring bigness down to size, to keep power from becoming abstract”(Stone, ‘E. M. Forster's Subversive Individualism’ 32). In Forster’s view, the power of the state/the nation - be it political or cultural - was a serious threat, impinging on personal relationships and causing them severe damage: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”(Stone 30). As a representative of Forster's humanist figure, Fielding comes very close to betraying his country for the sake of his friendship with Aziz. The two men meet for the first time at Fielding's house where the principal has arranged a tea party in order to introduce Adela Quested and Mrs Moore, two newcomers, to the ‘true India’. As opposed to the formal and unsuccessful Bridge Party earlier in the novel, Fielding’s tea party promises to be relaxed and ‘unconventional’; maybe here, the Indians and the British can become intimate socially and exist on equal terms. When Aziz arrives as the first of the guests, he is encouraged to make himself feel at home and the two men take an instant liking to each other. However, Aziz's willingness to please Fielding still leaves a possibility of the imperial relationship between coloniser and colonised - a presence which perhaps Aziz feels most of all! “Aziz was offended. The remark suggested that he, an obscure Indian, had no right to have heard of Post Impressionism - a privilege reserved for the Ruling Race... . In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning... . Fielding, for instance, had not meant that Indians are ob: but that Post-Impressionism is”) Nevertheless, in spite 3) E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, ed. by Oliver Sta 1924: Edward Arnold, 1924; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1936; Arbinger Edition, 1979), p. 84. This paper uses Arbinger Editon. Further reference to this edition willA Passage to India. Cultural Hybridity 17 of several misunderstandings like this one, they do become closer friends in the course of the novel, and when Aziz shows Fielding a picture of his dead wife, they have become as close as brothers. (128). However, the involvement with Aziz disrupts Fielding’s rational life, pulling him into an emotional and personal relationship which makes it increasingly difficult for him to ‘travel light’. Until now, he has not worried much about belonging to the periphery of Anglo-Indian life, but when Aziz is accused of assaulting Miss Quested4), Fielding openly sides with Aziz and he is alienated completely. On his way home from the Superintendent's office, Fielding realises his position: He regretted taking sides. To slink through India unlabelled was his aim. Henceforward he would be called ‘anti-British’, ‘seditious’ - terms that bored him, and diminished his utility. He foresaw that besides being a tragedy there would be a muddle; already he saw several tiresome little knots, and each time his eye returned to them they were larger. Born in freedom, he was not afraid of muddle, but he recognized its existence. (183) It is obvious that his choice affirms the doubts which the Anglo-Indian community have about him. They are now sure that Fielding and his ideas are “a disruptive force... for ideas are fatal to caste, and he [uses them] by that most potent method - interchange”; in other words, he does not possess the “herd-instinct”, (80) be given in parentheses in the text. 4) Forster surely struggled as to how to dramatise the assualt, and according to Kermode “Forster eventually had the excellent idea of faking it by leaving everything about it in doubt” (Kermode 69). In doing so, it can be said that Forster successfully dramatises the event up to the trial scene where the West and the East crash.178 Seogkwang Lee Even though the episode praises Fielding for making an individual choice, it also embodies a critique. Wanting to “slink through” life is not the answer if you are to be “successful as a human being”(197). This involves dealing with the ‘muddle’ head on, being prepared to follow your heart and stand up to the consequences which such a choice might bring. It can be claimed that by becoming friends with Aziz and defending him against the Anglo-Indians, Fielding has taken a first step towards the ‘Third Space’ of hybridity, but he has not yet entered it. On his voyage back to England for an official visit, Fielding lands in Venice where “a cup of beauty [is] lifted to his lips, and he [drinks] with a sense of disloyalty’(277) - he rejoices to be in “the civilisation that has escaped muddle"(278) and is, therefore, yet to be found on one side of the colonial binarism ~ he has failed to reach out and unite with his Other. Fielding cannot pinpoint this himself, but he senses it after the Marabar incident. Standing on the veranda of the British Club, he watches the Marabar Hills in the sunset and suddenly feels “dubious and discontented”. He feels that he “ought to have been working at something else the whole time - he didn’t know at what, never would know, never could know, and that was why he felt sad”(197). Forster gives both a positive and a negative answer to the question of friendship. As a humanist, Forster asserts — that Englishmen and Indians can be friends, and not only in the protected intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge where Hamidullah is received “long ago”(.33-34), but also in the middle of India's ‘muddle’ where Fielding and Aziz have several meetings and become close friends. However, there is a negative undercurrent in the friendship - they do not overcome the cultural and racial problems entirely. Aziz has, on several occasions, thought thatA Passage to India. Cultural Hybridity 179 Fielding abandoned him: at the excursion to the Caves; when he is arrested after the picnic; after the trial; and, finally, when Fielding has to go to England. The incident in the Caves and its aftermath destroy something which had been built up - as Hamidullah tells Fielding after the trial, “A great deal has been broken, more than will ever be mended”(243). Aziz, who, until now, has always compromised his Indian and Muslim identity in order to please the English, becomes more Indian and, finally, manages to “shake the dust of Anglo-India off his feet"(40). For Fielding, the personal involvement brings on too many worries and results in his failure to admit his devotion to Aziz. So it seems that the humanism which Fielding represents (“The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of good will plus culture and intelligence” 80) is not strong enough to disregard cultural differences and sustain a personal friendship. As Crane expr it, “in A Passage to India . . . Forster dramatises through Aziz and Fielding that the legacy of the Mutiny and imperial rule meant there could be no genuine friendship between nations or even between individuals until some future resolution of differences”(Crane 191). Just as Fielding and Aziz are disillusioned with their hope of a true relationship, so is Adela Quested. Adela, an intellectual, “queer, [and] cautious girl” (46), newly arrived in India with her possible mother-in-law, Mrs Moore, wants to see “the real India”; she has been expecting to find a romantic and exotic country, but is disappointed when she only sees “a gridiron of bungalows” and a performance of Cousin Kate (46). Adela’s romantic idea of India rings of the Western stereotyped representation of the Other and, hereby, anticipates her lack of appreciation when she is finally180 Seogkwang Lee offered a glimpse of the actual India. When Aziz invites them on a sstic” (140) and finds that the “various odd objects” which surround her on the train, will not “bite into her mind”(146). She is disillusioned with her dream of India which also contains her dream of a marriage picnic to the Marabar Caves, she is no longer “enthus with Ronny Heaslop. At this point in the novel, she does not quite realise the extent of the ‘muddle’ in her life, but she does sense a disenchantment setting in as well as her fiasco regarding relationships while witnessing “the false dawn”on the train to Marabar: But at the supreme moment, when night should have died and day lived, nothing occurred. It was as if virtue had failed in the celestial fount. The hues in the east decayed, the hills seemed dimmer though in fact better lit, and a profound disappointment entered with the morning breeze. Why, when the chamber was prepared, did the bridegroom not enter with trumpets and shawms, as humanity expects? (149-50) This moment is similar to the one mentioned above when Fielding is viewing the Marabar Hills and is realising that he “ought to have been working at something else the whole time”(197). Adela’s vision of an idealised India, and her subsequent disillusion, prevent her from venturing into Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’ as well. For getting to know the real India properly takes an effort and requires sacrifice and compromise. Adela appears unprepared for this, particularly because she has left her relationship with her future husband and his s jal circle unresolved. This accounts for her panic reaction in the Marabar Caves; while she is surrounded by the infinite echo, the primordial Hindu sound and symbol, ‘om’', Adela is confronted with the lack of substance in her life and it causes her to have a breakdown. In the court-room, Adela finallyA Passage to India: Cultural Hybridity 181 realises why she reacted as she did: it seems that she is a failure regarding personal relationships. At the trial, she also comes to realise that every gathering, every act in Anglo-India has “an official tinge’(49) which means that there is no possibility of finding truth unless you break away from the British colonial attitude - unfortunately, Adela does not succeed in doing so. She detests institutions and the power they contain, but does not know how to avoid them or use them for her own means, (Beauman, p. 324.) so she must necessarily succumb to them. But even though she gives up her struggle against the “immovable traditions”(Beauman, 324.), and power structures of Anglo-India, she does now have the courage to tell the truth about Aziz and, hereby, “renouncels] her own people”. In this sense, arguably Adela does manage to distance herself from the colonial dualism of oppressor vs. oppressed. However, just as Fielding, she reaches out, but reaches out into a void where personal relations and equality between two different cultures are still not feasible. The trial is more than just Aziz’s trial, and it is more than Adela’s sudden insight into the truth of her relationship with Heaslop and with India. It is really the trial of the Anglo-Indians: do they or do they not have a right to be in India? Ultimately, it questions the right of one people to dominate another. Through Adela, Forster apparently criticises the British and their imperialistic attitudes - “by what right did they claim so much importance in the world, and assume the title of civilisation?”(221) The scene is a clear example of Forster's dis te for power and the control it has over human relations. He depicts the absurdity of the trial and the Englishmen’s unfair treatment of all Indians present - even the authority of the magistrate, Mr. Das is undermined by the British. Looking closer at the scene, however, it can be noticed that Forster182 Seogkwang Lee does not only portray the unequal relationship between coloniser and colonised but he also opens up for a space in between. The punkah-wallah leads the way into this space. His presence is the presence of the Other who is capable of opposing his coloniser, and to Adela, he seems “to control the proceedings entirely”(220). He has been created by nature “to prove to society how little its categories impress her”(220) and in this way, makes Adela realise the instability of British rule in India - the Indians will not continue to put up with being categorised as ‘untouchable’ and unimportant for, after all, they have been in the country much longer than the British. The spell of the Marabar Caves is present in the court-room, giving the Indians strength to go against the British - by making use of Mrs Moore so she becomes “Indianised into Esmiss Esmoor”(227), they prove the existence of a colonised subject who can play an active role in defying the British attempt to control his country. V. The British-Indian relationship From the beginning, the British-Indian relationship ruled out any hope of creating an equal relationship between the two cultures. In Benita Parry's words, the relationship was a “confrontation between philosophical systems, ethical doctrines and styles of life which were sufficiently different to imperil mutual understanding”(Parry 3). But she goes on to say that ‘the Anglo-Indians did not join in Indian society, were unresponsive to its values and uneasy about the peoples they dominated (3). In A Passage to India, the British still act in this way and continue to make it impossible to bridge any cultural gap. Everything that the British do not understand isA Passage to India Cultural Hybridity 183 conveniently categorised under the ‘mystery’ of the sub-continent and adds to the fear of the strange, uncivilised Other. This polarisation is portrayed throughout Forster's novel; a good example is Fielding’s tea party. Even though it is meant to bring the two cultures closer together, the tea party only ends up with revealing their differences. The Hindu Brahman, Professor Godbole seems to be the only one who has managed to unite both sides. Certainly, his appearance suggests harmony - “as if he hals]l reconciled the products of East and West, mental as well as physical, and [can] never be discomposed”(89). His philosophy too is an all-embracing one, one “swallow[s] up everything”(95), and it turns out that it holds the key to why the British continuously veer away from the ‘mystery’ of India. Hindu mythology lays emphasis on the unseen, the sense of ‘not-being’, and incorporates it into the individual’s sense of ‘being’. They become two sides of the same thing and provide a step ‘to the eternal’ (Das, ‘E. M. Forster and Hindu Mythology’ 247). This idea fascinated Forster and he felt that it showed “how individual beings and objects constantly participate in the eternal, and how barriers between high and low, good and evil . . ., etc. are broken in this universal process”(Das 250). The individual and God are united and, hereby, the individual becomes capable of grasping the eternal as well as acknowledging its ungraspable nature. As Godbole explains to Fielding, “absence implies presence, absence is not non-existence”(186) - facts which are the nucleus of Godbole’s song at the tea party where he invokes Krishna, asking him to “come, come, come” although the god “neglects to come”(96); he cannot come when he is already one with the individual. Hindus understand this and accept it without. further question, whereas the westerner is at a loss when confronted with it. Mrs Moore’s response to the song, “But He184 Seogkwang Lee comes in some other song, I hope?"(96), shows this ‘inability of the Western mind to accommodate withdrawal, absence and negation within its world-view (Colmer 123). The second part of the novel elaborates on this difference between the British and the Indians. The visit to the Marabar Caves stages the most dramatic of the confrontations between East and West, a confrontation which ends with mental breakdown and the disintegration of western values. Adela experiences a severe disillusion at Marabar, but it is Mrs Moore who suffers the worst. Earlier in the novel, the Indian moon has given her a universal sense of being, a “sense of unity, of kinship with the heavenly bodies” (51), but the visit to the caves shows her the other side of India. It “leads her to [the] vision of universal “not-being”, which to her Christian mind appears nihilistic: “Everything exists, nothing has value"(Das 253). The collapse of her values is simultaneously the collapse of western values and it arguably epitomises the failure of the British in India - they cannot and will not comprehend the duplicity which is embedded in the Indian sub-continent. The caves have “neither ceiling nor floor, and [mirror their] own darkness in every direction infinitely”.(39) As G. K. Das expresses, they embody “the Hindu vision of the absolute, the infinite and the unaccountable which precedes and comprehends all creation”(252). The “terrifying echo"in the caves is precisely this. ‘Bourn’ as Mrs Moore calls it, or om according to Stephen Cross, is the sound “from which the entire universe came forth” and which is itself ‘Brahman’, i.e. ultimate reality. Hindus believe that it symbolizes the “inner being of man, and indeed of totality itself"(Cross, 69). The letter, om consists of four parts. Three are curves which are joined together and represent the different levels of reality which the consciousness can move between. The fourth part is removed fromA Passage to India Cultural Hybridity 185 these curves and placed above them. It consists of a dot with an arc underneath it and symbolises “that other order of reality which lies altogether outside manifestation, and can never be grasped by the mind. It is simply called Turiya, ‘the Fourth’ However, by concentrating, the individual can be “gathered together and then precipitated into the Turiya, . . . the final dissolution of the universe, the blissful non-dual principle”(Cross, 69-71). The sound does not have a blissful effect on the English women though. Mrs Moore is horror-stricken to find that everything only amounts to ‘boum’ ~ even Christianity and that makes her; terrified over an area larger than usual; the universe, never comprehensible to her intellect, offered no response to her soul, the mood of the last two months took definite form at last, and she realised that she didn't want to write to her children, didn’t want to communicate with anyone, not even with God. She sat motionless with horror . . . then she surrender to the vision. She lost all interest. (161) This moment of revelation, similar in kind to the ones Fielding and Adela have experienced, is Forster's comment “on the failure of Christianity to deal with the unknown, the unseen and the unnamable [sic]”(Das, ‘E. M. Forster and Hindu Mythology’ 253). It seems to be the failure of the West to deal with its Other, which menas that a friendship cannot possibly be established because the western mind is afraid of nothingness, the sense of “not-being” - it fears “a world of no difference’(Tambling 6), a world with no clearly defined boundaries or categories. All Mrs Moore's boundaries and beliefs look now destroyed when she meets India's ‘mystery’ and as a result, she degenerates at an alarming pace. Thus, she does not succeed in entering the ‘Third Space’ either. Is there, then, a solution to the conflict between the two cultures186 Seogkwang Lee or are we to take the dismal message in ‘Caves’ as the final sm, but Mrs Moore's vision or anti-vision is not meant to be the last word in the novel. verdict? Forster is renowned for his pe: Rather, it is there surely to point the way forward. The incident the failure of the human mind to encompass negation, its incapacity to invest what is alien to itself with beauty and significance’(Colmer, 121), and by showing us this, Forster is encouraging us to invest our Other with “beauty and significance”. He is rightly urging his readers to engage in an exchange with the unknown. We have seen that none of the British characters in A Passage to India mange to enter Bhabha’s in-between space successfully, but Forster seems to be suggesting that courage to enter the ambivalent “Third Space’ is necessary - it is the only way “the gap is ever going to be bridged, or . . . any relationship is ever to be successful”(Crane 86), The last part of the novel, ‘Temple’, is an attempt to bridge the gap, to reconcile the two sides, although it is a very vague one. Whereas the imagery of the second part is dry and barren, the imagery of ‘Temple’ has to do with water and fertility. According to Barbara Resecrance, “[wlater imagery is associated in all the Forster novels with fecundity and a regenerative power’ (Rosecrance 240), This may mean that the final part of the book then brings hope of new beginnings. Appropriately, the scene that takes place is a Hindu ceremony celebrating the birth of Krishna. Krishna is the embodiment of “the Hindu vision of complete being”(Das, ‘E. M. Forster and Hindu Mythology’ 254), and Krishna’s presence annihilates all sorrow, and eliminates “doubt, misunderstanding, cruelty, [and] fear”(285). While Godbole and his colleagues are singing, “scraps of their past, tiny splinters of detail, [emerge] for a moment to melt into the universal warmth"(283). AnA Passage to India Cultural Hybridity 187, image of Mrs Moore suddenly appears in Godbole’s mind and the readers sense that there is still reason to hope for a_ better relationship between the two sides: He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made no difference, it made no difference whether she was a trick of his memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God, ‘Come, come, come, come.’ This was all he could do. How inadequate! But each according to his own capacities. (287) VI. A Passage to Cultural Hybridity As Professor Godbole is the reconciling figure in the novel, Aziz and Fielding consequently need to meet again at Mau where Godbole goes after the incident at Marabar. During the two years which have passed since the trial, Aziz has grown to hate the English and refuses to have anything to do with them ~- he has ended his “foolish experiment”(289), Fielding has married Mrs Moore's daughter and, hereby, “thrown in his lot with Anglo-India”(313). So it would seem that they have moved further away from each other and fallen back into the polarities of East and West, into fixed cultural identities. But, as mentioned earlier in this paper, cultural identity is not fixed. It is a flux, an ever-changing paradigm of history and culture, past and present, from which the individual can pick and choose. And it is the constant tension between the past and present which enables the individual to create a future. As Stuart Hall says, [ihe past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a188. Seogkwang Lee simple, factual “past”, since our relation to it . . . is always-already “after the break’. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. (Hall 395) This gives us a notion of identity “which lives with and through, not despite, difference” (Hall 402). What is there to fear from difference after all? Surely, it can only be a positive asset as the exchange between cultures provides plenty of opportunities for creating something new and better} the interest lies in the “cultural lating and transvaluing cultural differences’(Bhabha, The Location of enunciations in the act of hybridity, in the process of tr Culture 252). Forster was acutely aware of this and seemingly made it the driving force behind his whole novel. Several places, there are references to the complexity and diversity of India, of India’s hundred voices: “Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing’(156) - even Hinduism, the universal and transcendentalist philosophy, is disparate and fragmented! (289) Forster realises that it is an impossible task to try to understand India (and, symbolically, the world) as a unity. It is simply too contradictory and conflict-ridden. So the readers are left at the level of the individual; it is here that a cross-cultural friendship would be able to last and from here, a future can be built. Aziz and Fielding almost succeed in doing so, but their friendship must be sacrificed in order to show us “the path to freedom”(265). Aziz's “song of the and about the necessity for the individual to enter this space. Here, the readers future” is about the hybrid space between culture are reminded that hybridity works with difference; it is not a question of destroying traditional categories and denying your entireA Passage to India Cultural Hybridity 189 self. history and culture; the question is neither one of giving up everything you have and plunging into an abyss of uncertainty and fear nor an idealistic and painless act of merging together into something better. Rather, hybridity is a complex but productive process of cross-fertilisation which involves entering into a dialogue with someone other than yourself and trying to create alternative categories as well as recreate traditional ones. In the context of the Caribbean, E. K. Brathwaite makes clear that “the creole [i.e. the hybrid] is not predicated upon the idea of the disappearance of independent cultural traditions but rather on their continual and mutual development. The interleaving of practices will produce new forms even as older forms continue to exist”(quoted by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 184). Thus, the ending of the novel is a positive one despite the two friends parting. Edward Said is of the opposite belief. According to him, A Passage to India leaves no hope for the future, succeeding only in bringing the East and West together for a brief moment. The East “is brought tantalisingly close to the West, but only for a brief moment. We are left at the end with a sense of the pathetic difference separating “us” from an Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from the West"(Tambling, 8). But it can be said that calling it a permanent estrangement is very much a negative and extreme view. For behind the apparent action in the novel, Forster very subtly points towards the possibility for friendship and mutual respect. As Rustom Bharucha argues, “Yes, there is separation in the final moments of A Passage to India, but it is so subtly juxtaposed with intimacy that one might say that Aziz and Fielding have acquired a mutual understanding of each other for the first time”. Forster's novel is not one built upon the traditional and190 Seogkwang Lee unchangeable polarity of East and West, it is “attempting something a great deal more complex”(Bharucha 128). Vi. Conclusion This paper sought to investigate Homi Bhabha’s ‘the Third Space’ with his idea of cultural hybridity lurking A Passage to India. What is discovered in this work is that A Passage to India recognises there is no simple solution to uniting East and West. They cannot be united completely because the world is based on difference. “The novel's burden is the demonstration of discord, the search for unity and its motive power”. Forster sees the individual a key to the creation of a new form of unity. If we are willing to accept the presence of difference and live in a hybrid world, we might be able to “transcend the prevailing chaos and isolation of human existence’(Rosecrance 242), The individual must find foothold somewhere between East and West, somewhere between the rational and irrational. Both the Eurocentric tradition and the local tradition of the colonised regard their Other as irrational, and the conflict of values leads to a disorder - “the confusion of racial, cultural and political loyalties [Which seems to be] the universal legacy of colonialism’(Langran 132). Only the individual and his active participation in the creation of a personal identity and personal relations can find a way out of this chaotic state. So, the way ahead is to find a place somewhere between the many conflicting values in the world, by using the “complexity of freedom”, which is the only kind of freedom obtainable. The determining factor relies on whether or not the individual can turn into a cosmopolitan, whether or not he can survive in anA Passage to India: Cultural Hybridity 191 increasingly international world in which the individual seems to be losing all definitive ties. In Hinduism, Forster found a philosophy which acknowledged life’s chaos and fragmentation and recognised it as being “the fecund, harmonious disorder of creation”(Crane 84), not a “muddle” and “frustration of reason” (282). Hinduism became the perfect symbol for life in all its complexity as well as the importance of the individual. In a broadcast twenty years after A Passage to India was published, Forster explained this. Talking about an exhibition of photographs of Hindu temples, he demonstrated that “the Hindu temple symbolises the world-mountain, on whose sides gods, men and animals are sculptured in all their complexity... . The inside is a... sanctuary, where the individual worshipper makes contact with the divine principle”(Forster, “The Individual and His God’ 809). The broadcast was given during the Blitz and was one of Forster's endless attacks on power and the restrictions which it entails. Hinduism and India provided him with a passage to a more civilised reality, to his vision of the active individual in a hybrid world, “Besides our war against totalitarianism, we have also an inner war, a struggle for truer values, a struggle of the individual towards the dark, secret place where he may find reality”(Beauman 269). (University of Oxford)192 Seogkwang Lee Work Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth, Griffiths, and Relen, Tiffin, Ed, The Post-Coloniai Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Beauman, Nicola, Morgan? A Biography of E. M Forster. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. Bhabha, Homi K, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995, .206-209. “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995, 29-35, -----, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bharucha, Rustom, “Forster's Friends.” EM. Forster. London: Macmillan, 1995, 115-132. Crane, Ralph J. Inventing India’ A History of India in English-Language Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992. Colmer, John, “Promise and Withdrawal in A Passage to India" EM Forster’ A Human Exploration, ed. G. K. Das and John Beer. London: Macmillan, 1979, 117-128. Cross, Stephen, The Elements of Hinduism. Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1994. Das, G. K. E. M Forster’s India. London: Macmillan, 1977. . “E. M. Forster and Hindu Mythology.” EM Forster: Centenary Revaluations. London: Macmillan, 1982. Forster, E. M.A Passage to India. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1936. ----, “The Individual and His God,” The Listener, 1940. 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London: The Penguin Press, 1972. Rosecrance, Barbara, “A Passage to India’ The Dominant Voice." EM. Forster’ Centenary Revaluations. ed., Herz, Judith Scherer and Martin, Robert K. London: Macmillan, 1982,. 234-243. Stone, Wilfred, “E. M. Forster's Subversive Individualism.” E. M Forster: Centenary Revaluations. Ed. Judith Scherer Herz and Robert K. Martin. London: Macmillan, 1982, 15 Tambling, Jeremy, E. M. Forster. London: Macmillan, 1995. Tiffin, Helen, “Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed., Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995, 95-98.194, Seogkwang Lee Abstract. A Passage to India: Cultural Hybridity Seogkwang Lee (University of Oxford) This paper will consider the way in which Homi Bhabha’s idea of hybridity is represented in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. What Bhabha suggests through the idea of hybridity is the Third Space where, according to him, two or more different cultures clash in an amicable way recognising each voice and moving on from there. Seemingly Bhabha’s intention is to get over the dichotomy of black and white, or West and East, and see any feasible ways of cultural exchange and of creating independent identities embedded in in-depth understanding of the Other. This paper uses A Passage to India to see how his idea can be applicable and how the characters in the novel try to work out the polarity of their views which is derived from their emotionally and physically out-of-contact cultural hermitage. This paper analyses some characters in the novel such as Aziz, Godbole, Mrs Moor and Adela who, with their unique understanding and interest in each other, try to acquire an enhanced understanding of different ways of life. All of them are typically nurtured in a totally different culture to each other, Even though they end up with having some forms of fragmented understanding on other culture, and find it difficult to piece them together in a fresh plance of understanding, they open up a space of hybrid and provide a way forward from it. As this paper argues, ‘the ThirdA Passage to India Cultural Hybridity 195 Space’, which Bhabha suggests, is where they are meant to get at and start from. Key words: Hybrid, culture, the Third Space, polarity, difference. 2000 LLY 23a 204 128 7A 2 200944 128 10a