Of Bridge Parties, the Dating/Marriage Market, and Intimate Racism: Putting The Architecture of Desire and A Passage to India into Conversation

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Solangel Maldonado, The Architecture of Desire: How the Law Shapes Interracial Intimacy and Perpetuates Inequality (New York University Press, 2024). 

Linda C. McClain

By coincidence, I read E. M. Forster’s novel, A Passage to India (1924), while reading Solangel Maldonado’s The Architecture of Desire: How the Law Shapes Interracial Intimacy and Perpetuates Inequality (2024). The coincidence proved to be a productive one. Consider that in 1924, the year Forster published A Passage to India, with its depiction of how British colonial rule in India distorted human relationships, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted its Racial Integrity Act (a “modern” version of its centuries old antimiscegenation law), struck down four decades later in Loving v. Virginia (1967). Published one hundred years apart, Forster’s and Maldonado’s books have striking resonances in addressing cultural, political, and legal barriers to interracial intimacy.  The first focuses more on barriers to friendship and the second, on barriers to dating and marriage, but both powerfully examine how social distance hinders social contact on terms of equality. 

Early in A Passage to India, Dr. Aziz (a “Moslem”  (Muslim)) and his two friends, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali, argue over “whether or no [sic] it is possible to be friends with an Englishman” (pp. 6-7; pages cited are from Harcourt, Inc./Harvest Book 75^th anniversary edition).  A false (later withdrawn) accusation of attempted sexual assault against Dr. Aziz by a young English woman, Miss Adela Quested, reinforces Anglo-Indian views about their racial superiority, the dangerous desire of the “darker” races for the lighter, and the need to hold the line against social contact. The book ends by reprising the opening question, as Aziz and his British (Anglo-Indian) friend, Cyril Fielding, disagree over whether they can be friends before the British leave India and India becomes a nation. The Architecture of Desire begins by revealing how, even with the end of legal prohibitions on interracial marriage four decades ago, cultural and structural obstacles remain.  Maldonado reviews how racial pseudo-science rationalized antimiscegenation laws and legally sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination in public and private spaces. Her book shows how some of those traces remain and shape unequal opportunities for interracial intimacy. The book ends by considering what role law and policy could have in addressing those obstacles.

In A Passage to India, Forster vividly surfaces the social distance between the Anglo-Indians (White men and their wives) engaged in Britain’s direct colonial rule of India (the British Raj, which lasted from 1858 until the establishment of India and Pakistan in 1947) and their colonial “subjects” and how vigorously the former police such distance. The Indian caste system—to which Isabel Wilkerson has compared the race-based caste system in the United States—is present in the novel (in references to Brahmins and Untouchables), but the hierarchy and social distance between the Anglo-Indians and Indians is at the core of the novel. The Anglo-Indians reside in “the little civil station” near Chandrapore. They socialize and have leisure activities in the Chandrapore Club (pp. 4, 21-22). Miss Quested, a young White British woman, has travelled to India with Mrs. Moore so Miss Quested can determine whether being married to Mrs. Moore’s son, Ronny, part of the Anglo-Indian colonial government, will suit her. Eager to see “the real India,” Miss Quested tells the Collector, Mr. Turton, that she wants to meet “those Indians whom you come across socially—as your friends;” he laughingly answers, “Well, we don’t come across them socially.” Although they are “full of all the virtues,” it is “too late” in the evening to explain to her “the reasons” for not meeting them socially (p. 26). However, he offers to arrange a “Bridge Party,” to “bridge the gulf between East and West.” To avoid admitting Indians to the Club itself, Turton invites “numerous Indian gentlemen” and ladies of their family (who are “out of purdah”) to join him in the club’s garden (p. 35).    

Little bridging takes place at the Bridge Party. The barrier proves “impenetrable,” as the Englishmen’s good intentions give way to attending to their “women folk.” Plans for tennis sets “between East and West” fail and the “usual club couples” monopolize the courts instead  (p. 47). When Mrs. Moore asks her son who the Indian ladies are, he instructs her that she is “superior” to “everyone in India,” except for a few of the “Ranis” (Hindu queens, or wives of a Raja), who are “on an equality” with her (p. 42).  When Mrs. Moore criticizes Ronnie and his peers for not behaving “pleasantly to Indians,” he angrily answer that “India isn’t a drawing room;” the British are not in India to be “pleasant,” but to “do justice,” “keep the peace,” and “hold this wretched country by force” (p. 52).

Loathing what she sees of colonial rule and Club life, Mrs. Moore becomes a symbol of a kind of ecumenical human sympathy and desire for connection. Early on, she leaves the Club to visit a mosque on her own. She meets Aziz there and, after his shock at encountering a British woman in a mosque, they find they have things in common (a widow and widower, each with three children). They both critique the Anglo-Indians. Her sympathy and life philosophy lead him to call her “an Oriental” (p. 21). When she wishes she were a member of the Club, to invite him in, she learns from him that Indians are not allowed into the Club (p. 21). 

Another critique of  social distance comes through the character of Mr. Cyril Fielding, the Principal of the college at Chandrapore, The narrator suggests that because Mr. Fielding came to India in his forties, he had “no racial feeling” and voiced ideas fatal to “caste” and the “herd mentality” (p. 65). (Fielding, however, proves to hold some Orientalist views about differences between English and Indian people, e.g., the latter’s greater emotionality.) Fielding’s experience suggests the role of Englishwomen in maintaining distance from Indians; he has learned that one couldn’t “keep in” with Englishwomen and Indians. While most Englishmen preferred their “kinswomen,” he “had found it convenient and pleasant to associate with Indians and he must pay the price” (p. 66). Recognizing that Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested are (so far) different, he invites them to tea at his home, where they have more genuine social contact with the other guests, Dr. Aziz and Professor Godbole, a Brahmin who works at the College.

 Aziz and Cyril form a rapid intimacy at this first meeting (67-68). Later, Cyril is the first Englishmen to whom Aziz shows a picture of his deceased wife.  Aziz’s relationships to Mrs. Moore and to Fielding are at the core of the novel. The Aziz-Fielding relationship may reflect elements of Forster’s own friendship with Syed Ross Masood, a Muslim educator who Forster earlier tutored in England and later visited in India. Conversations with Masood (for whom Forster also had (evidently) unreturned romantic feelings) encouraged him to write an Indian novel. Forster dedicated A Passage to India to Masood and “to the seventeen years of our friendship.”

Fielding further “keeps in” with Indians and distances himself from the Anglo-Indian women—and men—when he resolutely asserts Aziz’s innocence after Aziz is charged with attempting to sexually assault Miss Quested during the expedition Aziz organizes to show her and Mrs. Moore the Marabar caves. Miss Quested believes that she perceived a “shadow” near her, and hit the person with her field glasses;” he pulled her round with the strap and, when it broke, she escaped. She was “never actually touched” (p. 214). (The novel makes it clear that Aziz did not enter the cave.) Fielding repeatedly insists that the charge rests on a “mistake” and that Miss Quested is under “some hideous delusion” (pp. 181, 186). Mr. Turton counters that the only “mistake” has been that newcomers have discarded the wisdom (borne of his decades of experience) that nothing but “disaster” results when English people and Indians attempt to be intimate socially” (p. 182)

The alleged assault becomes a rallying cry for the Anglo-Indian rulers and their wives. For Mrs. Turton, it shows that “we’ve been far too kind with our Bridge Parties and the rest,” and the men have been far too “weak” in their rule (p. 240). She advocates far more hierarchy and cruelty (“they ought to crawl from here to the caves on their hands and knees whenever an Englishwoman’s in sight, . . . they ought to be ground into the dust”) (p. 240).

Such outrage rage on behalf of White womanhood, as well as appeals to racial pseudo-science, parallel The Architecture of Desire’s recounting of the rationales for racial segregation. For example, Mr. McBryde, District Superintendent of Police, has a “complete philosophy of life,” including a “theory about climatic zones,” under which: “All unfortunate natives are criminals at heart,” merely because they live in southern latitudes (p. 184). Although Aziz has been an exemplary doctor, McBryde reduces him to the general type: the Indian. At the Club, the scene is racist and ugly. As Fielding notes, “they had started of speaking of ‘women and children’—that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times” (p. 203).  A beautiful but “brainless” young mother (normally looked down upon by other English women) becomes the symbol, even more than Adela, of “all that is worth fighting and dying for” (p. 200). The mother uses the n – word in voicing her fears about being attacked in her bungalow while her husband is away.

The Anglo-Indians blame Fielding’s friendships with Indians when Dr. Aziz’s arrest contributes to a “new spirit” of political uprising by Indians (p. 238). When Fielding is publicly criticized for visiting Aziz at the prison and told he must choose one side or the other, Fielding resigns from the Club and announces his intention to resign from the service and leave India if Aziza is found guilty (p. 210)

Mrs. Moore (who dies at sea before the trial) is the other English person who believes that Aziz is innocent. Hearing Mrs. Moore’s conviction of that innocence is a catalyst for Adela worrying that she has made a mistake—a mistake she admits at the trial. The novel never answers the question of what actually happened to Adela in the cave. Perhaps, as Fielding theorized, she suffered a hallucination, due to the heat, the disturbing echo in the cave, or to realizing, while in the caves, that she did not love Ronny.  Her recognition that she was mistaken and withdrawing her charge disrupts the prosecution’s script of a young, innocent White woman who escaped an assault by a “vicious,” degenerate Indian. It defies the prosecutor Mr. McBryde’s lecture on “Oriental Pathology,” with its general, scientific “truth” that “the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but not vice versa” (p. 243). Someone in the courtroom comments: “Even when the lady is so uglier than the gentleman?” (p. 243).  (Adela herself has admired Aziz’s “Oriental” beauty, while regretting that neither she nor Ronny had “physical charm” (p. 169).)     

After the trial, the friendship between Aziz and Fielding suffers when Fielding takes responsibility for housing Miss Quested—now an outcast among the Anglo-Indians—until she can book passage to England. Aziz perceives this as Fielding, who persuaded Aziz not to seek compensation against her (beyond costs), taking sides against him. Further, after the fright of the arrest and trial, Aziz wishes to “escape from the English.” By book’s end, he has left British India and found employment as a chief medicine man to the Rajah in official in Central India. His poetry turns to the liberation of India through ending Indian women’s purdah. Mistakenly believing that Fielding has married Miss Quested when he returned to visit England, Aziz destroys his letters unopened, viewing their friendship as “the end of a foolish experiment” (p. 328).

Aziz and Fielding eventually reconcile when they meet again in India and Aziz learns that Fielding married Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Stella, not Adela. When Aziz meets Mrs. Moore’s son, Ralph, he is reminded of how “she had stolen to the depths of his heart.” Ralph’s insights, like his mother’s, lead Aziz to call him “an Oriental” (p. 349). Although Aziz and Fielding are reconciled, the book ends with Aziz and Fielding recognizing the political barriers to their friendship. As Fielding views it, his marriage has thrown up barriers to their friendship (even though Stella is more like her mother than wives like Mrs. Turton). He “had thrown in his lot with Anglo-India by marrying a countrywoman, and he was acquiring some of its limitations, and already felt surprise at his own past heroism” (toward Aziz) (p. 358). For Aziz, the barrier is British colonial rule: Cyril is “dear” to him, but they cannot be friends until English rule ends, whether through the efforts of Aziz, or of his sons, and India becomes a nation (p. 361).

As Shin Yin Kiang reports, in Failures that Connect; or Colonial Friendships in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Forster initially conceived of A Passage to India as “a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has had to go.” He explained to Masood that, “My sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable.”  Yet, even as the novel shows the formidable barriers to such sympathy under British colonial rule and its supporting ideologies, the novel also “creates moments and spaces in which to imagine alternative ways of being oneself and belonging to others that undercut the colonial taxonomies of gender, race, and class” (p. 125).

Written a century later, The Architecture of Desire shows how racial taxonomies that once undergirded legally sanctioned racial subordination limit those “moments and spaces” for forming intimate bonds free of that racist past. The book begins with an anecdote from 2009 that makes disturbingly clear that the end of the legal prohibition on interracial marriage four decades earlier did not mean the end of all barriers. As Maldonado recounts, Beth Humphrey (White/Caucasian) and Terence McKay (Black/African American) encountered a Justice of the Peace who refused to marry them because he did not think the marriage would last and society would reject their children (p. 1). Forty years after Loving, that public official resurrected the “sociological” arguments that the Commonwealth of Virginia attempted to offer as a “modern” justification for its antimiscegenation law. As I discussed in Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law, Virginia attempted to counter the Lovings’ argument that antimiscegenation laws were rooted in racial prejudice and a relic of slavery by contending that the 1924 law reflected “modern,” sociological concerns over how marital “differences” when people marry interracially make marital “adjustment’ different and lead to divorce and harm children (p. 131).

Maldonado also shows how structural racism of the past leaves its traces even as the rate of interracial marriage and public approval of it increases: in 2009, “a poll found that 46 percent of registered Republicans in Mississippi believed that interracial marriage should be illegal” (p. 1) Religious disapproval also continues: a business owner in 2019 refused to host a wedding for an interracial couple because “mixed-race” marriages were contrary to her Christian beliefs (p. 1). (The owner  subsequently apologized and commented that, after sitting down with her pastor, she had learned she was mistaken.)

  Barriers to interracial intimacy reach far beyond intransigent public officials or business owners appealing (however mistakenly) to what the Bible says. As Maldonado elaborates, there are many “structural barriers to interracial intimacy”—including segregated neighborhoods and schools—that are the legacy of past “legally sanctioned” practices such as segregation, redlining, racial steering, and racially restrictive covenants (p. 9). The legacies of these earlier practices  help to maintain social distance and limit opportunities for social contact, i.e., limit spaces in which “individuals of different races” may “interact as equals” (p. 9). Beginning in the early 1920s, social scientists used people’s attitudes about marrying across ethnic, racial, and religious lines —part of “social distance scales”—to measure prejudice and elucidate racial hierarchies. As Maldonado observes, “social scientists have long believed that intermarriage is an indication of social distance between groups—specifically, that lower rates of intermarriage indicate social distance” (p. 3). If that is true,  “African Americans might be more isolated than other groups,” leading her to investigate the various reasons (p. 3).   

The intergroup contact hypothesis, a fixture in the scientific study of prejudice, posits that intergroup contact on terms of equality between members of different groups can reduce prejudice. Hundreds of studies have supported this hypothesis. Thus, if there are structural and attitudinal barriers to such social contact, it makes sense that this will affect opportunities for interracial intimacy.  For centuries, state antimiscegenation laws posed a direct legal barrier, sending a message that such laws were needed to “‘prevent . . . the Caucasian race from being contaminated by races whose members are by nature physically and mentally inferior to Caucasians” (p. 53).  Federal immigration and naturalization laws also contributed to “the construction of the racial categories and racial hierarchy that shaped interracial intimacy” (p. 48). Maldonado shows the arbitrariness and inconsistency of the racial categories. As one example,   ethnologists classified Asian Indians as Caucasian, but the U.S. Supreme Court denied Bhagat Singh Thind, a “high-caste Hindu,” naturalization because he had “Indian blood,” and was not White (p. 50). While state laws varied as to which in which interracial marriages were permitted or prohibited, all antimiscegenation laws prohibited marriages between White and Black (African American) persons (p. 40).

The Architecture of Desire also identifies structural barriers to interracial intimacy, such as the legacy of legally sanctioned discrimination that prescribed or perpetuated spatial segregation (and social distance). This legacy, Maldonado argues, shapes present-day dating and marriage preference. It is part of the “architecture” that shapes peoples’ desires.  Another part of that “architecture” is what Maldonado calls (in Chapter 1) “a gendered racial hierarchy in the intimate market” (p. 13), or “sexual racism” (p. 66).  Building on Sonu Bedi’s book, Private Racism, and work by legal scholars Elizabeth Emens and Russell Robinson (among others),  Maldonado details how patterns of dating, cohabitation, and marriage reveal such a hierarchy: even though there is significantly more interracial dating and marriage than in 1967, racial preferences favor some partners and disfavor others (Black women and Asian American men). She details this with respect to online dating platforms. While people might resist the idea that “sexual racism” plays any part in their choices about intimate partners, Maldonado draws (in Chapters 1 and 3)  on studies showing how implicit bias,  colorism, racial stigma, as well as racial and gender stereotypes factor into those seemingly “free” choices.  
            These racial preferences, Maldonado argues, have harmful effects. In addition to the stigmatic harm of being rejected because one’s racial group is deemed to be less romantically desirable (p. 119), less preferred partners have fewer opportunities in the marriage market. Since marriage continues to be a “wealth-enhancing institution” and is linked to “myriad benefits to children,” unequal opportunities for marriage contribute to inequality (p. 117). Other blog posts in this online symposium discuss this aspect of Maldonado’s argument in more detail, so I  mention it briefly here.

What to do? The final chapter of The Architecture of Desire offers several concrete proposals for how the law, having played such a large role in preventing and deterring interracial intimacy, might remove some of the barriers to such intimacy. These aim at reducing forms of social distance and increasing social contact on terms of equality. They are informed by studies detailing the “propinquity effect”: “the tendency of individuals to form close relationships with people they repeatedly encounter,” such that “the more often one comes into contact with another person, the more likely it is that one will form a friendship or romantic relationship with that person” (p. 144). As Maldonado reminds readers, a major objection to school integration was White persons’ fears that such “propinquity” would lead to interracial friendship and marriage. And yet today, de facto school segregation due to residential segregation and methods of school assignment limit the opportunities for such “propinquity”

Some proposed reforms in Chapter 6 include eliminating single family zoning, the Mrs. Murphy exception in fair housing law, and changing the K-12 school assignment system. Other proposals aimed at the literal architecture of our public and civic spaces to increase the possibilities of interracial social contact, such as investing in public transportation and fostering diversity on college campuses. Returning to online dating (the virtual space in which a majority of people search for intimate partners), Maldonado draws analogies to public accommodations laws to argue that dating platforms should not be permitted to facilitate discriminatory conduct by their users by eliminating filters that now permit users to screen out persons of particular races and ethnicities. All of these reforms, again, may increase “propinquity” and thus “reduce barriers to interracial interactions and intimate relationships” (p. 144). 

Maldonado also recognizes the limits of the law. Thus, she does not propose to use the “heavy hand” of the law directly “to encourage interracial intimacy” (p. 144-45). For example, she would not advocate that the law prohibit persons on dating sites from “expressing or acting upon their racial preferences” (p. 132). Maldonado argues for the importance of education. I agree. Even though what to teach in K-12 about U.S. history and civics remains a fraught topic,  I agree with her that teaching (whether in K-12, college, or graduate school) about “the history of slavery, conquest, and segregation or the immigration and citizenship law that excluded individuals on the basis of race” may lead to thinking differently about “our intimate preferences” (p. 146) It may lead to questioning preferences that seem “natural” and recognizing the role of the law and other “external influences” (p. 147).  Reading fiction that addresses these issues can also help to teach these lessons. There is a rich and growing literature in the U.S. to aid in this education. Forster’s exploration, in A Passage to India, on the problems and possibilities of friendship amidst the social distance of colonial rule, is a noteworthy example from another time and place.

Linda McClain is Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. You can reach her by e-mail at lmcclain@bu.edu.