Among the many novels dealing with the colonial experience, two rank among the fictional masterpieces of the 20th century, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924). Each of these works incorporates a powerful theme, emerging out of the history of colonialism. Conrad's story examines the moral disintegration that the colonizer undergoes, while Forster explores the tragic gap, the failure "to connect," that inevitably emerges in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The two works also describe two different forms of colonialism: in Conrad's, the rapacious exploitation of the resources of the colony for the benefit of the colonizer; in Forster's, "settler colonialism," in which Europeans occupy the colony, constituting a separate and privileged class within it.

Conrad's short but unforgettable novel, one that has much affected the course of modern fiction, is set in the Belgian Congo and narrated by a ship's captain in the Congo, Charles Marlow. At the core of Marlow's tale is the company's chief agent, Mr. Kurtz, whom Marlow has been sent to rescue from the interior. As he travels down the river, Marlow gathers fragmentary impressions of Kurtz. He hears company functionaries speak at once admiringly and bitterly of Kurtz's genius at collecting ivory and complain that everything belongs to him: It is his station, his river, his "Intended" (the woman left behind in London). Marlow's purpose, however, is to discover not what belongs to Kurtz but what he belongs to, "how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own."

Marlow discovers a partial answer in an essay Kurtz wrote to teach Europeans facing savage customs how to "exert a power for good practically unbounded" and to which he later added the postscript, "Exterminate all the brutes!" Increasingly, Marlow thinks of Kurtz as mad, more so when, looking through his glass from aboard the ship, he sees knobs atop the fence posts outside Kurtz's house--knobs he soon recognizes as human heads. Appalled, Marlow concludes that Kurtz has become dehumanized, "hollow at the core," but he fails to consider that, despite everything, the natives adore Kurtz and want him to remain. What Marlow will ultimately recognize is that Kurtz, however mad, "had kicked himself loose of the earth" and had become for the natives a kind of existential force they both dread and worship.

Terminally ill, Kurtz is carried to Marlow's ship, where he registers his eloquent protestations about his plans, his ivory, and his Intended. At last, he breathes his final words: "The horror! The horror!" Later, a native attendant enters, saying, "in a tone of scathing contempt: 'Mistah Kurtz--he dead.'" (In 1925, T. S. Eliot was to use the phrase as the epigraph to his poem "The Hollow Men," one example among many of the novel’s influence on later literature.) A year after his return to England, Marlow visits Kurtz's Intended, finding her in mourning. She begs to hear Kurtz's last words; Marlow replies that Kurtz spoke her name.

For most of the 20th century, Heart of Darkness has been read as a powerful attack on the rapacious greed and hypocrisy that characterized the type of colonialism exhibited in the Belgian Congo.

However, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's (b. 1930) stinging critique of the novel as racist marks a significant chapter in the ongoing debate over the historical limitations of certain works of art. Although literature lays claim to a kind of universal truth in its depiction of human nature, it is true that literary artists, for the most part, share the limited vision of their own culture. Achebe acknowledges that Heart of Darkness attacks European colonialism, but he argues that it betrays a view of Africa and Africans as primitive and barbaric that is not only typical of 19th- (and 20th-) century Europe, but also a distinctive feature of Conrad's personal psychology. Defenders of the novel hold that the prejudices it displays do not displace the essential truth of the human condition that it explores. Others maintain that readers, like authors, are also limited by their historical/personal frameworks and that their reactions should be seen within those frameworks.

"Only connect! . . . Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height." Those hopeful but unspoken thoughts in E. M. Forster's (1897-1976) Howards End (1910) form a mantra that echoes silently through the tragicomic pages of A Passage to India. The novel is divided into three sections: Mosque, Caves, and Temple, and it is in the Caves of Marabar that the risks, frustrations, and possibilities of connection are exposed for the reader to contemplate. The novel's central characters are Dr. Aziz, a young Muslim doctor, cautiously pro-English, offended by, but willing to accommodate, the arrogance and rudeness of the Raj, the English settlers; Cyril Fielding, a middle-aged teacher and former head of the Government College who is Aziz's close friend among the British; Mrs. Moore, an elderly woman, newly arrived in India to attend the wedding of her racist son, the City Magistrate; and her son's fiancee, Adela Quested, also newly arrived, a plain, well-intentioned, but priggish, young Englishwoman. Another significant character is Professor Narayan Godbole, a wizened, elegantly clad, gracious, and articulate Brahman priest. Except for Professor Godbole, all agree to Aziz's suggestion that they visit the Marabar Caves.

Overwhelmed by the heat and the smells of the crowd also visiting the caves, Mrs. Moore tries to get out, but she is swept back, grows faint, hits her head, and is, above all, terrified by a dull echo, a "boum" that resonates in her consciousness. When the group emerges from the cave, Adela is missing. Aziz had accompanied her until, at one point, he loses his balance and lets go of her hand. Adela then wandered off to another cave. Aziz cheerfully reassures all that Adela has surely joined her friends down the road, and he is appalled the next morning when he is arrested on charges of having assaulted Adela in the caves.

The arrest creates a severe strain between the English and Indian communities. Fielding defends Aziz, in defiance of the "club set," and writes to Adela arguing his friend's innocence. Adela begins to doubt the validity of her own charges, finally realizing that she had scratched the wall, producing an echo that frightened her, and had struck out at Aziz and fled untouched. Before an outraged court she withdraws all her charges. Aziz faints. Free from the law but not from his rage, Aziz seeks revenge, demanding damages or public apology from Adela. Fielding tries to deter him, but unfounded rumors of an affair between Fielding and Adela stir Aziz’s fury once more, and Fielding, in disgust, breaks their friendship and leaves India. Adela returns to England--alone but having grown through suffering.

The brief final section of A Passage to India, Temple, counterpoints the reality of the cave with a transcendent time of rebirth, the rainy season. Professor Godbole, Aziz, and Fielding are reunited as Godbole presides at a Hindu birth ceremony; Fielding marries Mrs. Moore's daughter; and Fielding and Aziz almost become reconciled, but will not truly become friends again, Aziz says, until "we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea."

Forster's efforts to explore in the novel the political, philosophical, theological, and human implications of colonialism command respect. Beyond any of these, however, are the superb characterizations that dramatize his unforgettable but perhaps unattainable mantra--"only connect."

An assault also triggers the events in the Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's (1920-78) tetralogy about India between 1942-45: The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971), and A Division of the Spoils (1975). This time, however, the rape is real, its impact a terrible force throughout the tetralogy. The victim is Daphne Manners, a young Englishwoman profoundly aware of the strains separating the English, the natives, and the Anglo-Indians. The rape occurs at night on the mosaic floor of an isolated garden pavilion where Daphne and her Anglo-Indian lover, Hari Kumar, are sharing the passion of their first sexual encounter. Suddenly, a group of men is upon them, tearing Kumar away, binding his mouth and limbs, and then raping Daphne. Within a few days, several youths are arrested for the crime--Kumar among them.

Hari Kumar is a handsome, dark-skinned Anglo-Indian, well educated in England, incapable of speaking Urdu or Hindi, the basic Indian dialects in his canton, and hopelessly misplaced in the turmoil of caste and class--too English for the Indians, too Indian for the English. His particular nemesis is the superintendent of police, Ronald Merrick, a red-armed, blue-eyed, malevolent force omnipresent in the tetralogy and Scott's symbolic representation of the cruelest manifestations of colonialism. An English grammar-school boy of lower middle class origins, he has--an ironic touch Scott cannot resist--absolute mastery of the dialects Kumar cannot speak, but also an English accent far less precise than Kumar's. He has long known about and resented the open affection shared by Daphne and Kumar (indeed, Merrick has proposed to her and been rejected).

Before the first novel had ended, Daphne dies in childbirth without ever implicating Kumar. A child of color survives to be raised by Daphne's aunt, Lady Manners, in blatant defiance of the outraged British community. Kumar refuses to testify at a preliminary hearing, is jailed, and, only two years later (in The Day of the Scorpion) does he learn of Daphne's death. Kumar wins his release, then disappears from the tetralogy. He is mentioned only once more at the close of the final volume when, in 1947, Guy Perron, a former classmate in England, calls on him, only to be told by a native boy that Kumar was out visiting a pupil. Perron leaves his card, but no message, convinced that Kumar was at last among people who wished him well. Scott's narrative ranges far beyond Daphne and Kumar, but Merrick remains a diabolical and destructive force throughout. He rises in status, leaving the police force to become an army captain, then a lieutenant-colonel.

In 1947, as England faces its inevitable loss of India and the Raj Quartet draws to a close (in A Division of the Spoils), Merrick does at last fall, his obituary indicating him as a staunch defender of the jewel in the British crown. The facts of his death are never released, but Guy Perron learns from native sources that Merrick was found on his bedroom floor "hacked about with his own ornamental axe and strangled with his own sash." There were cabalistic signs on the floor and "Bibighar" (the name of the garden where Daphne had been raped) scrawled in lipstick across a dressing-table mirror. The cause? One possibility is that Merrick, assigned the task of keeping peace between Hindu and Muslim on the eve of Indian independence, may have been felled by either side. It matters little which, for what is happening beyond the Merrick bedroom is the grisly train massacre of Muslims by Hindus. Guy Perron and Sarah Layton work side by side to help the victims. The jewel, much tarnished, will at last be loosed from the crown.

Whatever its flaws, the Raj Quartet, 25 years after its completion, remains a formidable achievement, deserving to be read as well as to be seen in the 14 episodes of its more famed Masterpiece Theater television version, The Jewel in the Crown (1983). The Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie (1947- ), who objected to what he regarded as stereotypical characterizations of English and Indians in the novel, thought the television adaptation "a marked improvement on the original."

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