The first chapter contextualizes Forster’s ‘rhythm’ in Aspects of the Novel within the contemporary currency of the term in evolutionary discourses on non-Western cultures, arguing that his conception of ‘rhythm’ as an aesthetics of fiction is preceded by his use of the term to interrogate the conditioning of epistemology in cross-cultural encounters. Analysing two articles on music Forster wrote in Egypt, a 1912 essay by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson about Anglo-India, as well as A Passage to India, it proposes that Forster was alert to the many problems of subjectivity, perspective, and language in delineating the racial other, and that his representations of rhythm in the novel suggest a significant, and previously unacknowledged, negotiation of the plurality of musical cultures. The chapter thus challenges the critical notion of rhythm as reflective purely of modernist fascination with form and intermediality. Complicating the long-held dichotomy of aesthetics and politics in modernist scholarship, it recovers the racial connotations of Forster’s ‘rhythm’ in Aspects, offering a new understanding of his aspiration for ‘expansion’ as a reconfiguration of the racial other.

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.