Faith, Empire, and Fragmented Selves: Religious Symbolism and Cultural Conflict in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Abstract

1. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) is both a critique of Colonialism and a spiritual analysis that shows how British imperialism creates epistemic, cultural, and psychological rifts and reveals India's irreducible sacredness. The novel, set against the historical context of the Amritsar Massacre (1919) and the Non-Cooperation Movement of Gandhi (1920-22), dramatizes the ineffectiveness of liberal humanism in mediating cross-cultural understanding during the Empire. To analyze the intersection of faith, Empire, and fragmented subjectivity, this research paper takes a two-fold theoretical perspective, combining postcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha, Fanon, Spivak) with symbolic-phenomenological approaches to religion (Eliade, Ricoeur, Geertz). The close readings of the mosque, the Marabar Caves, and the temple reveal how sacred spaces act as hierophanies, limit-symbols, and locations of cultural performance that are resistant to colonial rationalization and epistemic absorption. Dr. Aziz, who moves between friendship and resentment, Mrs. Moore, who experiences a spiritual burst, and Adela Quested, who is psychologically thrown into confusion by the domination of the imperial power, are all examples of the zones of nonbeing, where Fanon focuses his attention, and can be seen as an illustration of the psychic impact of imperial domination. Rituals like the Gokul Ashtami festival are interpreted as Geertzian deep play that performs polysemic resistance against the simplification of the Orient. The paper sheds light on how Forster anticipates both the existential vulnerability and toughness of people during Colonialism by foregrounding epistemic violence, gendered power, and performative spirituality as the novel's primary themes. After all, A Passage to India stands as an essential reflection on the boundaries of Empire, the inexplicability of faith, and the ever-present possibilities of intercultural comprehension, and it presents a crucial understanding of the ongoing interventions of religion, politics, and the self in the postcolonial world.