Exotic Other: Western representation of India in English literature and film

Abstract

Abstract: This paper seeks to point out the power of language and the power of the visual image in determining and constituting thought and imagination, and to demonstrate how this power operates within a certain knowledge system and cultural discourse. This paper focuses attention on Western representations of India in creative literature and film. One could have illustrated this by selecting for analysis works of literature and cinema which do not enjoy a wide reputation as creative and serious efforts and which present obvious stereotypes. However, such a course of action would not have allowed the opportunity to examine the complex implications of the thesis explored in this study. Instead this investigation is based on an outstanding novelist and a well respected filmmaker—E. M. Forster and David Lean. The work analyzed in this paper is the novel, A Passage to India, and its film version. Forster is considered to be one of the most important English novelists of the twentieth century, and David Lean is a highly gifted film director who has successfully translated into cinema distinguished novels of Dickens and Pasternak. This study shows that even such highly esteemed creative artists as E. M. Forster and David Lean were unable to rise above the dictating and determining power of language and image, and the discourse that it instituted.