There are many issues of gender and sexuality in A Passage to India: the novel includes an “alleged sexual assault on a British woman by an Indian man” (Childs 1999: 348), and the intimate, homoerotic, relationship between Fielding and Aziz, plays an important part. As Childs states, the novel analyses issues of control and resistance in terms of gender, race and sex (Childs 1999: 348.). Colonisation has, as mentioned above, been described as an example of the survival of the fittest, where the colonialists, the strong ones, use their power over the inferior, colonized people. The colonized people were perceived as secondary, abject, weak and feminine. Colonisation could be seen as a struggle of the British to become the superior race. It
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Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls ‘Come’ through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal (Forster 1979: 148,149).
Even though it is Adela talking, Forster is expressing her thoughts through a masculine …show more content…
Forster sees India “as a seductive female, through his eyes, she is all appeal and not substance, and her meaning is made dependent on the masculine mind that apprehends her” (Childs 1999: 358).
However, Forster also sees Indian men as explicitly masculine: for example, the punkah puller and the servitor symbolise Indian males. Their appearance plays an important part in bringing the novel to a conclusion. It is the duty of the servitor to bring the celebration of Krishna’s birthday to an end by pushing the clay images of Krishnas’s family into the water. At this point, the two boats containing Fielding and his wife, Aziz and Stella’s brother, collide with each other and these boats drifted towards the servitor; “who awaited them, his beautiful dark face expressionless, and as the last morsels melted on his tray it struck them” (Forster 1979:
Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls ‘Come’ through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal (Forster 1979: 148,149).
Even though it is Adela talking, Forster is expressing her thoughts through a masculine …show more content…
Forster sees India “as a seductive female, through his eyes, she is all appeal and not substance, and her meaning is made dependent on the masculine mind that apprehends her” (Childs 1999: 358).
However, Forster also sees Indian men as explicitly masculine: for example, the punkah puller and the servitor symbolise Indian males. Their appearance plays an important part in bringing the novel to a conclusion. It is the duty of the servitor to bring the celebration of Krishna’s birthday to an end by pushing the clay images of Krishnas’s family into the water. At this point, the two boats containing Fielding and his wife, Aziz and Stella’s brother, collide with each other and these boats drifted towards the servitor; “who awaited them, his beautiful dark face expressionless, and as the last morsels melted on his tray it struck them” (Forster 1979: