The Fictionalization Of The Colonial Settlement Of Frantz Fanon In Edward M. Fortser's A Passage To India (1924)

Abstract

The paper examines Edward Morgan Forster’s representation of colonial space in A passage to India (1924), with a particular emphasis on the fictional settlement of Chandrapore, the Civil Station and the Marabar Caves. It argues that Forster’s spacial descriptions function as narrative structures through which the Manichean logic of British colonial power characterized by rigid binaries, is produced and sustained. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s elaboration of the colonial zone in Black skin and white masks (1967) and The wretched of the earth (1968), the study reads Forster’s literary description of colonial space through postcolonial lens. By establishing a critical dialogue between Forster’s narrative form and Fanon’s critiques of the colonial zone, the paper demonstrates how spatial organization operates as an ideological and psychological instrument that maintains segregation, hierarchy and exclusion. The analysis reveals that Fanon’s conceptualization of the Manichean colonial world is embedded in A Passage to India, where spatial divisions simultaneously consolidate imperial authority and generate psychological alienation for both the colonizers and the colonized. The paper argues also that these spacial and psychological divisions render human reconciliations and cross-cultural friendships structurally impossible under colonial rule. Ultimately, the study contends that A Passage to India exposes the colonial settlement not merely as a socio-political system but as a Manichean structure that fragments identity, perpetuates psychic trauma and forecloses the possibility of true human connections within colonial order.