Dialogue between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

& Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

Reader: Suganthi Senapati
Respondent: Brenda K. Rambarran
Recorder: Linton Gilling

June 21, 2001

Literature is a conditioned creation shaped from diverse resources, concepts and materials in a specified society at a specified time. Generally the creation bears close relation to contemporary attitudes and prevalent ideas. The making and flowing of human thoughts and feelings are reflected by the social changes and tribulations. Thus Forster’s and Roy’s novels are oblique witnesses, not an imitation of life in the photographic sense.

In my opinion, Forster is the novelist of nature. He had kept watch over "human mortality", and in his eyes life now took on "sober coloring." Love of nature now fused with the love of man and he could hear in nature. His interpretation of life became spiritual and mystical in the novel. He felt that there is one soul, the supreme or god immanent through the universe, but it objectifies itself into the various forms and phenomena perceived by the senses. The reality is one, only the forms are countless. This is the so-called pantheism of Forster, a belief in the basic oneness of all.

Forster’s attitude is well reflected throughout the novel. He made nature the teacher of man. Since there is an essential kinship between the soul of man and the indwelling soul of the universe, since the external world and the mind of man are exquisitely fitted to each other, communion between the two is possible.

One of Forster’s most famous lines is from an essay on literary form: "Only connect", he wrote, and that call to make connection, whether in narrative form or between classes, races, sexes and countries, is the hall mark of his fiction and essays alike. (The Longman Anthology of British Literature – p: 2543). This holds true with Roy but she tries to connect it in her own way.

"The God of Small Things", is an example which shows a change in literature. Roy is surely involved in experimentation with language, leading to a rejection of familiar, ‘ordinary language’, that is language used primarily to communicate some content or message, in ordinary language and affect our communication, but are repressed or de-emphasized. The result was often a less accessible language of disrupted, fragmented syntax, swirling of semantics, ambiguities compounded by deliberate punnings, connotations, innuendoes, repetitions- but with suggestive variations- sexual insinuations, sinister hints, jokes and other devices to draw attention to the materiality of language. In this context Roy largely differ from Forster.

The class discussion focused mostly on Arundhati Roy’s "attitude". Most of the students responded that in Forster’s novel the subject was conceived by humanist, enlightenment thinkers as predominantly rational, capable of self-knowledge and self-control, and living in a society constantly progressing towards a better, more just human community. Roy’s conception, by contrast, was of a human being only partly conscious of her or his being, only partly capable of control of knowledge, and very vulnerable to powerful, unconscious drives and forces within.

In my opinion, this ‘new’ human, profoundly sexual, violently aggressive, innately selfish, inhabited by a death instinct as strong as any life force, split into warring ‘selves’ and full of ambivalent impulses, and potentially irrational to an unpredictable degree.

To conclude, as Dr. White mentioned in the class, the new literature by women, through the imaginative variations they embody, provide people with the insights they need to penetrate that complex prejudices we have named the ‘natural attitude’. Thus Roy’s novel challenge dominant notions of genuine literature, purity of English, individual worth, and sexist, racist or nationalist assumptions of status.