SOURCE: Lin, Wen-Chi. “Law and (Anti-)Colonialism in A Passage to India.” Tamkang Review 25, no. 3-4 (spring-summer 1995): 362-75.

In the following essay, Lin discusses the role of the central legal case in A Passage to India in terms of Forster's depiction of the “oftentimes self-contradictory role law plays in the colonial context.”

E. M. Forster's A Passage to India has not been a novel known for its observation of colonial politics. Critical attentions have been drawn more to issues of its aesthetic form like structure and language, reflecting the dominant critical trend of the New Criticism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction as the history of criticism has developed. Those scholars who do pay attention to the issue of colonialism are generally dissatisfied with its depiction of India under the British Raj. Although they generally give credit to Forster's criticism on the British colonial officers, they find the novel subscribed to...