ABSTRACT
My chapter probes the complex role of occultism in loosening boundaries between closed social networks. I will argue that in late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century colonial culture, occultism offered the means for mobility between different personae and world-views otherwise denied or at least circumscribed by the restrictive relations between colonizer and colonized. If the stratified class structure of British life offered little room for broad social interactions (as witnessed in the awkward bridge party in Forster’s A Passage to India), occult practices like séances, table rapping, and spirit communication permitted colonial relations to be imagined outside a hierarchical framework, just as occult doctrines of the cyclical evolution of life forms from asexuality and hermaphroditism to sexual differentiation challenged normative conceptions of sexuality. Forster’s novel is a useful reference point in that it focused on the alienation of a small group of Englishmen from the racial exclusivism practiced by the colonial bureaucracy. As teachers, missionaries, doctors, and other professionals, they could not but be involved with Indians at a level of intimacy forbidden by colonial logic. Such contact, necessitated by the nature of their work as service professionals, did not necessarily mean they were all anti-colonial activists, but it did put them in positions where their day-to-day transactions with colonized Indians gave them a more complex perspective on racialized encounters, resulting in far deeper questioning of the structure and style of existing bureaucratic relationships. Aziz’s sharing of the photograph of his dead wife to Fielding opens a field of interaction that would be impossible under the normal protocols of colonial relationships. ‘We can’t build up India except on what we feel’, says Aziz to Fielding, who in a quick and fleeting moment is given access to a dead woman’s presence materialized in a photograph (‘he wished that he too could be carried away on waves of emotion’).1
