When West Meets East in E. M. Forster’s Hill of Devi

Abstract

The Hill of Devi relates Forster's experience of deterritorialisation in India; in spite of his efforts to adapt to the country, thus making cross-cultural encounters possible, his letters convey a paradoxical sense of belonging and un-belonging. The Hill of Devi reveals a gap between the author’s cultural background, his Englishness which seeps through the narrative frame, theatricality, tongue-in-cheek humour, comedy, and his winks at the reader, and the “queerness” of India. The eurocentric, distorting gaze of the foreign observer, prone to focus on anomaly, reveals a gap between a cultural model or center (Englishness) and what deviates from it, i.e. ex-centricity. India undergoes a paradoxical process of exaggeration and reduction which turns it into a stage or a carnival. Intertextuality (Gilbert and Sullivan, Alice in Wonderland) casts light on reversal, incongruity and blurred boundaries. India in The Hill of Devi is both a cultural, an ideological and an aesthetic construct. The gap between East and West can finally be measured in terms of differing, between perception and representation, writing and editing. India is not a maieutic space but remains a “muddle”. Yet Forster’s encounter with India had a poietic function and he turned it into a mythic and aesthetic representation of otherness in A Passage to India, supported by a political reflection on imperialism.

Keywords

• The Hill of Devi
• E.M. Forster
• belonging
• deterritorialisation
• eurocentrism
• exclusion