Emilio Salgari and E. M. Forster: Two Indias, Multiple Imaginaries

My comparative analysis of two major texts dealing with pre-Independence India produced by two European writers at the turn of the past century – I misteri della jungla nera (The Mysteries of the Black Jungle, 1895) by Emilio Salgari and A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster – stems from the basic assumption stated in Lisa Lowe’s 1991 seminal study on Forster’s novel, namely the “ruling British perspective that traditionally considered India a colorful backdrop to the central British drama, and Indians as peripheral objects to be colonized and scrutinized rather than as possessing a point of view themselves.” In Salgari’s novel, this perspective will be challenged through the creation of a Hindu hero involved in a passionate love relationship with an English girl gone hybrid, while in Forster’s plot, strictly set within the boundaries of An glo-India, a Muslim co-protagonist ineffectually woos a forbidden object of de sire, a young lady traveler from the mother country. Since the plots of the two novels proceed along divergent lines and in different historical contexts – Salgari’s on the eve of the 1857 Great Mutiny and Forster’s in the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre of 1919 – both authors conceive and appropriate in a different way the pre-Independence India they want to describe. If we keep in mind that in 1895, when Salgari published his novel, Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, had just passed a code that severely punished any sexual contact between white women and Indian men we can fully appreciate the extent of Salgari’s writing strategy as opposed to contemporary Victorian authors like Kipling, Conrad, and Forster, who adopted by comparison the sexually biased interpretation that forbade interaction between individuals who were considered racially different, a view that considered all ‘natives’ anywhere in the empire as “niggers”, whether they belonged to the Irish whites or to the South African Hottentots. Two different Indias thus come to life: Salgari’s anticipates a postcolonial scenario, while Forster’s confirms the existing prejudices and stereotypes contained in Kipling’s imperialistic outlook.