“...and the Twentieth Century Took Over from the Sixteenth”: Literary Modernism and the Colonial World in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster is a significant modernist novel and emerged as a benchmark for representing the colonial world. The novel is simultaneously embedded within the “ideologies of the Raj” and orientalist framework mediated with modernist ethos that determined the dynamics of representation. Forster challenges the certitudes of empire building and utilitarian values of Victorian and Edwardian England in crucial ways. This paper interrogates the contradictions in Forster’s literary aesthetic of modernism and political ideology of imperialism. This paper also explores the conflicted relationship between the colonial state and Indian nationalism in the context of early twentieth century India.