Orientalist Portryal of India inKimandA Passage to India: A Contrapuntal Reading
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Department of English
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.