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Roger Takla

Research Methodology Dr. Talal Wehbe

General Context, Research Question, and Rationale

E.M Forster has been seen by many critics as the Westerner who wrote of the East to

critique the imperial oppression practiced by England (Hawkins 1). As a result, he is often

heralded as the anti-imperial humanist liberal who not only sides by the colonized East but also

destroys the very foundations of Edward Saids theory of innate and/or direct Orientalism (Said

41). His most famous work,A Passage to India, tells the story of how the desire of the Indian Dr.

Aziz to bond and form a friendship with the English colonizers is an impossible task because

there cannot be any sort of bond between those who have assumed power over the other and

practiced a sense of cultural hegemony. In the Marabar Caves, Adela Questeds nave and

hegemonic desire to explore the real India leads the plot to an alleged attempted rape, and this

rape swings between reality and imagination without ever settling on a side (Forster 1921).

Consequently,A Passage to India depicts, according to these critics, the support of the rights of

the colonized and an open attack on the unethical, impractical, and inhuman practices of

empirical England. Therefore, Forster is seen as the socio-political reformer who writes to give

voice to the voiceless colonized allowing them to express what years of empirical tyranny has

veiled. Despite the many claims of his altruistic attempts to aid the helpless, contemporary critics

claim that Foresters the Marabar Caves chapters of A Passage to India raises questions

regarding the anti-empirical claims (Armstrong 13)

This paper aims to investigate, through a sociological approach to literary criticism,

whether Forsters Marabar Caves chapters of A Passage to India depict an Orientalist

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perspective of India through the depiction of the caves as the imagined, geographically mystified

space of the other, or it actually highlights his refusal of the practices of empirical England in

India.

Edward Saids theory of Orientalism argues that the western culture produced a view of

the Orient based on a particular imagination, popularized through academic Oriental studies,

travel writing and a colonial view of the Orient. The area was feminized as an open, virgin

territory, with no ability or concept of organized rule and government. Imagined geographies are

seen as a tool of power, of a means of controlling and subordinating areas. Power is seen as

being in the hands of those who have the right to objectify those that they are imagining. (Said,

90) Said claims that the Islamic world is portrayed as uncivilized; it is labeled as backward and

failing. This justifies, in the view of those imagining, military intervention. (Said, 101) Springer

argues that virulent imaginative geographies erase the interconnectedness of the places where

violence occurs by assuming violence sits in particular places. Virulent imaginative geographies

are argued to employ a sense of virility to code Oriental males as pre-oedipal and/or feminine.

Imagined geographies show the problems created by the use of popular discourse to construct

views of other regions or societies. All landscapes are seen as being imagined there is no real

geography to which the imagined ones can be compared. Thus when being analyzed, these

geographies should not be measured for their accuracy, but de-constructed so that the power

invested in them can be revealed (Springer 90 98).