Representation of Indian Women in A Passage to India: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

Representation of people and their land from non-European territories as 'others' has been a powerful tool used by the European writers in their works. These Europeans, who were often the colonizers, went to non-European regions to colonize the people and their resources. The colonizers made strenuous efforts to represent these people of the colonized regions as inferior, uncultured and uncivilized in their literature(s). Colonial writers aimed to show to their own people that people living in other parts of the world, whom they call 'Orient', did not have their own civilization; and it is the responsibility of the West to civilize them, which can best be summed up in the words of Kipling, 'The White Man's Burden'.¹ E. M. Forster, a prominent English writer, represented  India and its people as degenerate, strange and feminine in his novel A Passage to India (1924). Forster showed females in India to be strange, timid and uncivilized who had nothing else to do except fill the blank spaces in the lives of their men. To unearth the hidden underpinnings in the colonial literature, postcolonial theory is the best counter discourse to respond to such misrepresentation of the colonized. The scope of this research paper is restricted to the representation of female gender as 'Others' in A Passage to India. The objective of this research article is to analyze the despicable motive(s) of Forster behind his representation of the Indian females as worthless human beings.