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sciousness in Indian life---the alternate obliviousness to and worship of
that overwhelming material reality. In a typical Indian complex of ideas,
spirit seems to be both absent and immanent everywhere at the same
time; for the Indian there seems to be no sense of the contradiction, or
at least the unruliness, present in this notion, which at once disquiets
the Westerner. "The unseen was always close to him, even when he was
joking or intriguing. Red paint on a stone could evoke it.... It was
difficult to be sure what he did believe (outside the great mystic mo–
ments) or what h e thought right or wrong." In this garbled world oleo–
graphs of Krishna and the Archbishop of Canterbury can hang next
to each other on the wall, and men and cows can sleep, undisturbed, in
the same room. Forster, making decorations for the religious festival
Gokul Ashtami, the celebration of the birth of Krishna-the same ritual
described in
A Passage to India-took
some abandoned "glass battery
cases" and filled them with water and live fish, "into which some hu–
manitarian idiot dropped handfuls of flour so that the fish should not
starve. You couldn't have seen a whale." Not an idea or an object is
allowed to remain for a moment in an unassimilated state, but is at
once caught up in the swirling disorganization of the Court. (One
wonders just how long the beautiful geometrical patterns of Le Cor–
busier's new city in India will stand as they are, how soon it will be
before they begin to burgeon with festoons and votive images, and to
succumb to the static heterogeneity of Indian culture.)
Into this scene comes-as he has always done-the Englishman; but
in
The Hill of Devi
he is not a conqueror or a merchant, a missionary
or an educator. From Sir Walter Raleigh to Sir Evelyn Baring the
destiny of a considerable part of the English upper classes has been in–
volved with subjugated peoples, and the attitudes Englishmen have
developed toward them are almost as various as those they admit to
in the relations of the classes at home. But Forster is no T. E. Lawrence,
toying with his personality and acting the great white Sheikh, nor a
Mary Kingsley, with Bible and black bombazine umbrella, stalking
through the jungles, imperturbable in her convictions and her love. For–
ster has sundered all relations with the gunboats and the cotton mills;
he has deliberately renounced the shibboleth of the Colonial, the
aCivis
Romanus sum,"
that dreadful apostrophe by whose authority the battle–
ships were sent into the harbors of Piraeus and Canton, polo fields laid
out in every outpost, and Englishmen universally compelled to dress for
dinner in the tropics. Forster casts a jaundiced eye on everything Eng–
lish and everything the English have done. He squats with the Indians
until his legs cramp: "The courtiers saw that I was in pain, and told
