A Passage to India, Colonial Humanism and Recent Postcolonial Theory: A Response to Lidan Lin (Response to Article "the Irony of Colonial Humanism: A Passage to India and the Politics of Posthumanism," Published October 1997‪)‬

1. Lin's Argument This essay is a response to Lidan Lin's "The Irony of Colonial Humanism: A Passage to India and the Politics of Posthumanism," published in Ariel in October 1997. Lin's founding premise, based on her analysis of the encounter between the novel's Anglo-Indian and native Indian characters, is that "Forster's ideological indeterminacy is primarily rooted in the humanist perception of cultural identity, a perception that tends to reinforce cultural distinctiveness, difference and distance in the arena of intercultural positioning and in so doing provides the epistemic basis for the historical emergence of colonial expansion" (133). Forster, that is to say, depicts Indians as inferior to the British so that he can justify imperial domination.