‘Nothing is Performed in Isolation’: The Individual and the Group in Forster's A Passage to India

The paper explores, through the analysis of A Passage to India, the way in which being positioned on the boundary of a social group can lead an individual to an extreme action that, although in opposition to the group and even endangering it, might at times also be seen to be enacted on its behalf. It also aims to demonstrate that, when read in the light of group psychoanalytic theory as developed in the twentieth century by Bion and others, the plot of the novel, although overtly insisting on the tragic socio-political divide between East and West, in fact provides fascinating evidence of the contrary: a striking affinity between these theories and the Hindu view of the world (as represented by Forster) emerges. This may indicate, along the lines of Homi Bhaba's concept of hybridity, that mutual influences between East and West are at work here in terms of Forster's encounter with India (and perhaps also in terms of Bion's Indian background).

Drawing on Freud's ideas on mass psychology, Bion's theories on groups as developed from Melanie Klein, Jaques’ writing on social systems, Tourquet's studies of large groups, and Erlich's writing on the concept of the enemy, it shows that the inner personal struggle of Adela Quested, one of the protagonists of A Passage to India, is augmented by a powerful process of projective identification: her position on the boundary and the valency created by her individual predicament engender a situation in which powerful unconscious group fears and anxieties are projected on to her and internalized. The pressure of both the personal conflict and the introjected group anxieties builds up until an action is taken, an irrational action that brings both her and the society around her to the brink of disaster. This blurring of the boundary between self and other and between groups in the novel seems to confirm the Hindu concept of Oneness as it is stated in the novel.