Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context.
Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. A tough figure to pin down politically, Forster celebrates the individual and personal relations: things that British rule of law seeks to suppress. Forster writes against the Benthamite utilitarianism adopted by most colonial administrators in India. But Forster appropriates Brahman Hindu for aesthetic and political purposes and in so doing advocates a jurisprudence that does not reduce all experience to mathematical calculation. Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu are not verisimilar, and Brahman Hindu does not recommend a particular jurisprudence.
Forster uses Turton to show that Brahman Hindu jurisprudence is fair and more effective than British bureaucratic administration. Turton is the local district collector whose job is to pander to both British and Indian interests positioned as such, Turton is a site for critique and comparison. Building on John Hasnas’s critiques of rule of law and Murray Rothbard’s critiques of Benthamite utilitarianism, this essay argues that Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu in the novel endorse polycentric legal systems.
Forster’s A Passage to India presents Brahman Hindu jurisprudence as an alternative to British rule of law, a utilitarian jurisprudence that hinges on mercantilism, central planning, and imperialism.
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