The Politics of Representation of the Colony A Critical Study of A Passage to India and Twilight in Delhi

Abstract

The current study aims to investigate the colony and its representation by the colonizer and the colonized. By applying the theoretical insights of postcolonialism, this paper will focus on the politics of representation. In regard to this, A Passage to India is a record of the British colony by the colonizer E. M. Forster, whereas, Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali too deals with the same but from the perspective of the colonized. Arguably, the authors present the same colony in two different ways which exhibit their cultural and political positions. The representation of the same colony by the two authors one from the colonizing civilization and the other from the colonized is always reflective of their individual voices. For Edward W. Said, the West represents the East in a way that helps in presenting a dominating a position of the West and it represents the East as inferior, superstitious, uncivilized and evil. Moreover, the current study has probed the issue of cultural representation by employing textual analyses and applied Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Said’s theoretical works on representation in postcolonial theoretic paradigm. The analyses have shown that both the texts represent colonial India quite differently because of the cultural positions of the writers as the colonizer and the colonized.