A study on the mingling of the east and the west in E.M. Forster's a passage to India

The theme of the mingling of the East and the West has been dealt by many literary artists.

E. M. Forster took the title of the novel from American author Walt Whitman's poem “Passage to India,” published in 1871. The word passage refers to the Suez Canal, the 121-mile-waterway that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. When the canal opened on November 17, 1869, ships from England and other European countries could reach the Orient without sailing around Africa. Whitman's poem celebrates the canal as a great engineering achievement. More important, though, it hails the canal as a means to improve communication between East and West and thereby foster cultural, spiritual, and social interaction benefiting everyone. Whitman's poem also hails the 1866 completion of the transatlantic cable between North America and Europe and the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad between the eastern and western United States.

The general theme of the novel is that in spite of engineering achievements, such as the canal, the world has a long way to go before people of different cultures, religions, and social systems can live side by side peacefully as coequals. Only sincere goodwill can bring them together as brothers, as Forster points out through his character Cyril Fielding, an Englishman who sympathizes with Indians. This paper focuses on a study of the mingling of the Indians and the Europeans, the mingling of the East and the West as expressed by E. M. Forster in his famous novel, A Passage To India.