Chapter 2 - The Queering of Musical Instruments

Summary

The second chapter focuses specifically on A Passage to India, examining the ways in which Forster’s representations of Western musical instruments in the novel destabilize and subvert – that is, queer – colonial norms. It continues the previous chapter’s interrogation of the conventional dissociation of modernist aesthetics from politics by bypassing Forster’s preference for a formalist, ‘abstract’ reading of the novel and going against his consistent dilution of the novel’s political resonance with contemporary nationalist movements in India. Documenting Forster’s awareness of the dissemination of Western musical instruments as an embodiment of the empire’s material invasion of the colony, the chapter explores his rarely discussed attention to the material existence of music as part of his criticism of colonialism. Drawing upon postcolonial theories, material culture studies, and queer musicology, the chapter suggests that Forster’s descriptions of Ronny Heaslop’s viola, the Maharajah’s harmonium, and a piano in a European Guest House delineate the individual subjection to and negotiation of external forces in a colonial environment.