Conflict and Reconciliation of Binary Opposition in a Passage to India and a Passage to England

Abstract

The well-known myth of binary- England and India creates a conflict for the contrastive attitude in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Nirad C Chaudhuri’s travelogue A Passage to England. The binary opposition of Anglo-Indian as colonizers and Indians as colonized leads to another set of binary, white-colored, and civilized-primitive in A Passage to India. This binary contradicts each other to form them in another set of binary, controller-controlled during the British imperial rule in India. The contrastive structure is in the form of conflict reflected in their outlook, behavior, and lifestyle in this novel. On the other hand, by an eight-week-journey in western countries, Chaudhuri, as an Indian in England, exposes what he observes in the west together with the reality of India in the travelogue. He recognizes the social binaries upholded by Jacques Derrida in A Passage to England. Chaudhuri in his book has executed this binary sense as England-India, British-Indians possessing two independent entities of the world. The two writers, through Hegel’s dialectic process, place the binary opposition implanting Derrida’s view. The article focuses on the nature of the conflict and tries to explore reconciliation of the conflicts based on the comparative analysis of two books.