Orientalist Portryal of India inKimandA Passage to India: A Contrapuntal Reading

Abstract

Both the writers–Kipling and Forster have ambivalently presented Indian life and culture in their novelsKimandA Passage to Indiarespectively. Kipling's India, in Kim, has quality of permanence and inevitability that belongs not just to that wonderful novel, but of British India, its history, administrators, and apologists and, no less important, to the India fought for by Indian nationalists as their country to be won back. By giving an account of this seriesof pressures and counter pressures in Kipling’s India, the process of imperialism itself as the great work of art engages them. The issues that Forster raises inA Passage to Indiaare of enduring interest. It is unique among English fictions in its presentation of the complex problems which were to be found in the relationship between the British and the Indians and its portrayal of the Indian scene in all its magic and all its wretchedness. By applying the postcolonial theory the researcher claims thatboth the texts have dramatized the dialectics between native India and colonial Britain on orientalist ground.