Difficulties of connection in India: Kipling and Forster

Margery Perham, the distinguished authority on imperial affairs, has spoken of her feelings when she was about to enter Somaliland for the first time:

I had an overwhelming spasm of recoil, of something more than physical fear. I referred to this in one of my Reith Lectures: a revulsion against the thought that I, so white, so vulnerable, so sensitive, so complex, was about to commit myself to that continent across the water, one among tens of thousands of strange, dark, fierce, uncomprehending people, and live away on that far frontier, utterly cut off from my own race. It was like a nightmare. I suppose it was racial fear. It passed.¹

This kind of nightmarish experience was a characteristic aspect of European life in the colonies, and I propose to examine its presence in Kipling’s earliest stories and Forster’s A Passage to India Probably, ‘racial fear’ is only a part of this experience; the cultural fear of the alien and the invaders’ fear of their subjects are more or less important causes.