Orientals were considered passive, weak, illogical, and morally corrupt with a tendency toward despotism. Variously called Britain's "civilizing mission" or, in Rudyard Kipling 's famous line, the "white man's burden," British imperialism was motivated by the idea that the British were a superior, enlightened, and more advanced race than non-European peoples, and thus had a duty to "civilize" these people, by force if necessary ( source).īritish imperialism in India entailed a fundamentally racist set of beliefs about "Orientals," a term which denoted anyone living east of western Europe, from North Africa to China. Set in India in the early 20th century when it was still a British colony, the novel challenges the claim that British had a right to colonize India.
One of the reasons that Forster's novel is so amazing is that it takes an individual case – a rape trial – and shows how it sets off network of social, political, and cultural forces that reverberates across the British Empire. So, a girl walks into a cave.and an empire trembles.
Informed by Forster's own travels to India in 1912-, A Passage to India has been lauded not only for its critique of the British Empire, but also for its stylistic innovation and philosophical density. Previous novels such as A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910) stayed in Europe, focusing on the familiar Edwardian theme of the individual's struggle against the stifling conventions of society. The work was the last of Forster's novels, and a thematic departure for him as well. Published in 1924 when the cracks in the British Empire were just emerging, the novel centers on the trial of an Indian doctor accused of raping an Englishwoman. But we humbly offer up this mantra as our homage to Forster's novel, as a passage into his Passage to India. Forster 's A Passage to India, a complex and multi-faceted work considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, to such a concise formula.
A girl walks into a cave.and an empire trembles.
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