The Marabar Caves: The Failure of Language in Framing the Universal

The extraordinary nature of the Marabar caves has been emphasized time and again in A Passage to India. They are “like nothing else in the world”, and “their reputation…does not depend on human speech” (116). More importantly, however, the caves fall outside all communal and spatial jurisdictions; they are clearly outside the colonial jurisdiction, and their history suggests that no one religious community has been able to stake their claim on them. This suggests that the caves are a space of syncretism, where the boundaries of community and ideology are easily overcome and transcended, where differences are effaced in favor of a universal identity.

Thus understood, the caves seem to be the only setting capable of engendering a meaningful and empathetic rapport between colonizers and colonized; a rapport that cannot be sustained either in the colonial Club or the local mohalla.  Given the unfolding of events in the cave, however, this rapport never materializes. One of the main reasons for this is the problems one encounters when trying to frame an all-encompassing language of universal affiliation. The scene in the cave suggests that such a mode of discourse is either not possible, or, if possible, is utterly meaningless.

Even before their journey to the caves begins, we find Adela and Mrs. Moore proclaim that they are “all Moslems now”, much to the delight of Aziz (123). This proclamation ostensibly erases all boundaries between colonizer and colonized. However, a few passages later, Aziz criticizes Akbar’s universal religion when he says “You keep your religion, I [will keep] mine” (135). The suggestion, here, seems to be that in affirming a universal religious identity one must efface all features of this identity that set it apart from others. This renders the whole project of articulating a universal identity redundant, since the whole point of such an identity is to overcome differences not to efface them. Thus, articulating the idea of a universal identity becomes impossible without effacing all that makes an individual unique.

On yet another level, the scene in the caves also exposes the utter meaninglessness of the language deployed to articulate such a universal identity. The echoes in the caves, which, here, can be taken as a kind of primordial language devoid of all cultural and ideological significations, represent a universal language of utter meaninglessness. “If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present and to come…it would amount to the same” (139). In this space of cultural and ideological syncretism, everything sounds the same, so much so that articulations of the sacred and the profane – categories otherwise readily distinguished in everyday language – end up sounding exactly the same. This suggests the failure of language in articulating a universal identity, since the meaning of one word is ultimately conveyed through its connotative and denotative differences with all other words.

Mrs. Moore’s reaction to the cave’s echoes serves to illustrate my first point. Upon hearing her words translated into a universal form, Mrs. Moore is not merely disoriented – she begins to despair, shuddering at the very idea of her connection with the universal. She wishes to sever all her individual ties, with her children, her community and God. Moreover, she realizes that in articulating her connection to the universal, all articulations of her religion and identity must necessarily be reduced to echoes of utter meaninglessness.