A passage to india
The Politics of Representation in A Passage to India
The discussion on A Passage to India as a political fiction has for long been dominated by the followers of a mimetic theory of literature, whose quest for empiricism tied to didacticism is achieved when they find the narrative content to be an authentic portrayal of India and a humanist critique of British-Indian relations during the last decades of the Empire. Since the accession of critical methods concerned with representation as an ideological construct, and not a truthful, morally inspired account of reality, however, the politics of the novel have demanded another mode of analysis, where the articulations of the fiction are related to the system of textual practices by which the metropolitan culture exercised its domination over the subordinate periphery; within this theoretical context, A Passage to India can be seen as at once inheriting and interrogating the discourses of the Raj. In common with other writings in the genre, this novel enunciates a strange meeting from a position of political privilege, and it is not difficult to find rhetorical instances where the other is designated within a set of essential and fixed characteristics: `Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy'; `Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour'; and so on. It is equally possible to demonstrate that while the idiom of Anglo-India is cruelly parodied, the overt criticism of colonialism is phrased in the feeblest of terms: `One touch of regretnot the canny substitute but the true regret from the heartwould have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.'
Yet to interpret the fiction as an act of recolonisation which reproduces the dominant colonial discourse would be to ignore egregiouslythe text's heterogeneous modes and its complex dialogic structure. Even the most superficial consideration of the `India' construed by Western texts, an India
The discussion on A Passage to India as a political fiction has for long been dominated by the followers of a mimetic theory of literature, whose quest for empiricism tied to didacticism is achieved when they find the narrative content to be an authentic portrayal of India and a humanist critique of British-Indian relations during the last decades of the Empire. Since the accession of critical methods concerned with representation as an ideological construct, and not a truthful, morally inspired account of reality, however, the politics of the novel have demanded another mode of analysis, where the articulations of the fiction are related to the system of textual practices by which the metropolitan culture exercised its domination over the subordinate periphery; within this theoretical context, A Passage to India can be seen as at once inheriting and interrogating the discourses of the Raj. In common with other writings in the genre, this novel enunciates a strange meeting from a position of political privilege, and it is not difficult to find rhetorical instances where the other is designated within a set of essential and fixed characteristics: `Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy'; `Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour'; and so on. It is equally possible to demonstrate that while the idiom of Anglo-India is cruelly parodied, the overt criticism of colonialism is phrased in the feeblest of terms: `One touch of regretnot the canny substitute but the true regret from the heartwould have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.'
Yet to interpret the fiction as an act of recolonisation which reproduces the dominant colonial discourse would be to ignore egregiouslythe text's heterogeneous modes and its complex dialogic structure. Even the most superficial consideration of the `India' construed by Western texts, an India