Rewriting a passage to India: A study of burnt shadows

The present research attempts to explore and analyse how the technique of intertextuality is employed in novel Burnt Shadows to interact with E.M Forster's novel A Passage to India. Intertextuality in literature pertains to a reference to a literary text within another literary text. While basing on the idea of interdependence of texts, it underscores the interrelationship between two literary texts and showcases how two texts interact or enter into a dialogue with each other through the medium of one of the literary texts which uses the reference of another text. A text does borrow ideas, allusions, phrases, references, themes, or characters from a prior text and transforms itself by either building on it, interrogating it, challenging it, altering perspective, showing interdependence or acclaiming it. Postcolonial writers effectively employ intertextuality in their texts or discourses by borrowing references or allusions from the “canonical Western” texts and thereby challenging and questioning the hegemony and supremacy of the Western writers and discourses by modifying or by subverting it, or both. This paper shall analyse the intertextual relationship between Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and it shall be attempted to establish how Burnt Shadows is an intertextual rewriting and reinterpretation of A Passage to India, in order to offer a postcolonial reading of the colonial times, sketched by Forester in his text.