Gospel & Universe 🦖 At The Wild & Fog
A Passage to Forster
19 Going on 20 - 1924: A Passage to India
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19 Going on 20
A society is fortunate if, in modernizing an outdated system, it has at hand a new, overarching system — in this case liberal democracy — which can accommodate new facts and realities while saving or recuperating helpful things that the old system contained. Otherwise, the society experiences revolution without direction, as in the French madness of 1793. England was more fortunate than France since it benefitted from a gradual shift from conservative to liberal politics after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, where parliament secured the upper hand in sharing power with the monarchy. In the 17th and 18th centuries it moved from Hobbes’ authoritarian vision to Locke’s democratic one, although power remained in the hands of a very few wealthy men.
In the 19th century English society goes from a very limited conservative democracy to an early version of a liberal democracy, one that advanced the abolition of slavery world-wide and exported the idea of universal suffrage. It’s partly for this reason that I include Forster’s novel about early 20th century India: at this time Britain was in the midst of giving women the vote, yet it was still to give India their own parliament. The liberal agenda wouldn’t be complete until 1947, when England releases its control of the Indian subcontinent, and until the 1960s, when it releases its control over large chunks of Africa.
The advances of liberal democracy come hand in hand with the development of 20th century agnosticism, which might be defined as an overarching epistemological system which accommodates changes in both religion and science. In this sense I see Dickens’ giant lizard as a harbinger of Darwin’s evolution, of Huxley’s agnosticism, and of the demise of antiquated illiberal institutions. Dickens’ image challenges the Divine Plan Pope celebrates, and it also anticipates the perspective of Forster, who expresses a Modern alienated sensibility, yet also a modern agnosticism which cherishes science, liberalism, and religion.
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1924: A Passage to India
Forster’s A Passage to India was published several decades after Ramón y Cajal identified the neuron in 1888 and roughly around the time genetics and DNA was explored (from Mendel in 1865 to Watson and Crick in 1953). It was also published the same year Hubble demonstrated the immensity of the universe.
Forster wasn’t puzzled about many of the scientific things that puzzled Pope and Dickens, yet the fundamental questions of soul and deity were still infinitely debatable. Forster knew that the Bible couldn’t be understood literally, at least not by people who insisted on rational, historical, verifiable explanations. He knew that the scientific explanation initiated by Copernicus, Hutton, Lamarck, and Darwin was so extensive that it overwhelmed the older religious explanations which lacked historical accuracy and detailed information about the structure and functioning of the universe. Yet still, religious questions remained, especially about those religions that weren’t hindered by literal or historical claims.
This is perhaps why he portrays Hinduism in the novel in both a skeptical and mystical way — in brief in an agnostic way. Religion isn’t the implicit answer to everything, as it is in Pope’s Essay on Man. Nor is it a system that’s implicitly true yet also an implicit parallel to outdated and irrational systems, as in Bleak House. Rather, Forster’s Hinduism is a detached entity, unburdened by history, dogma, or social constraint. It allows him to look into the questions of theology without the baggage that comes from the type of deeper personal, psychological, sociological, and historical understanding he has of Christianity.
I should note that Indian writings of that time — such as Premchand’s “Deliverance” (1931) and Anand’s Untouchable (1935) — didn’t separate religious idealism from religious practice. In other words, they didn’t let Hinduism off so lightly. To the contrary, they drilled away at the injustice of caste and at the elite indifference of brahmins. Although in this sense Forster’s Hinduism is a sort of fantasy Hinduism, it nevertheless fits the bill for his agnostic exploration of religion unburdened by the type of literalism and historical baggage we find in Abrahamic religions. Forster’s Hinduism allows him to explore the claims of transcendental or spiritual meaning without the politics, sociology, or history.
A Passage to India (1924) operates less ambiguously on the level of race, politics, and nationality. Although Forster doesn’t even mention the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 in the novel (five years prior to its publication), he nevertheless pushes liberalism — with its respect for personal and national sovereignty — into a global forum, challenging the assumptions of the British Empire. Through his characters of Fielding, Aziz, and Mrs. Moore, Forster argues that it’s not only White European Males who should get to control their own destiny. While Dickens mocks Miss Wisk’s pre-Suffragette feminism, Forster suggests that Mrs Moore and Adela aren’t nearly as doddering or frivolous as they first appear.
I should note more of the historical context here: A Passage to India is published many decades after Mill’s 1869 tract The Subjection of Women, and exactly between the 1918 and 1928 Acts which ensured the franchise of all women in the UK. While Dickens mocks Mrs Jellyby’s obsession with Africa, Forster shines the spotlight on the inconsistent application of English democracy abroad by championing equality with Aziz and the other Indians who Fielding befriends. While Forster is in sympathy with his female characters, he isn’t in advance of them politically. Yet he is in advance of his characters in the realm of global politics and Empire, since the equality he suggests isn’t realized until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.
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