The "bridge party" of E.M. Forster's 'A passage to India': where Apollo and Kali yearn to embrace from opposite sides of the gulf

Mark Undeberg
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:51:29 PDT

In 1978, Edward Said published 'Orientalism, ' a revolutionary study that invited new interpretations of literature and particularly of works written by Western authors about the East. Postcolonialist and feminist critics embraced many of Said's theories, including one that implies that the West equates the East with femininity and that such a view necessarily reveals the West's prejudice against both the East and with femininity in general. This thesis does not argue the overall validity of Said's theories. Rather, it explores the treatment of 'femininity' in E.M. Forster's 'A passage to India' with the aim of determining the validity of postcolonialist and feminist critiques of that novel. This study found that the femininity does not play a subservient role in the novel but that it is an essential half of an androgynous whole that Forster constructs as an ideal to promise hope in a troubled universe.