At the beginning of the 20th century race related issues represented a key element of the controversial debate on the legitimacy of imperial expansion in Britain. Moreover, with the popularity and scientific authority of the new theories on evolution, namely the ‘survival of the fittest’ thesis, assumptions about race seemed more determining than ever.
It is my intention in this paper, thus, to understand, on the one hand, how race thinking reached an unprecedented relevance at the beginning of the 20th century and, on the other, to focus on how it influenced the relationship between members of different races in an imperial context.
Having in mind that A Passage to India (1912-1922) has been considered ‘a classic work of fiction on the theme of race relations’ Goonetilleke (1988: 80), I will attempt to focus on how these relations are described and how far they illustrate the ‘imperial frame of mind’ in which the novel was written, by analyzing some key excerpts and ideas. However, I do not intend to engage in a literary approach to the novel but rather to look at it insofar as it provides the reader with a clear account of the importance of race and the difficulty of racial relations in an imperial context.