The Ruling and the Ruled

Abstract

This research attempts a comparative study between E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Yasmina Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night. This comparison explores separateness between the ruling and the ruled community in both novels as a major theme. The distance that separates each group from one another in Colonial India is exposed as a dramatic chasm that prevents every attempt at coexistence between the English and the Indians. Separateness in Khadra’s imagination is an allusion to escape. In other words, Forster exposes separation to emphasize the necessity of connection between the Anglo-Indians and the Indians in Colonial India. Unlike Forster, Khadra inserts the concept of separateness to reveal the idea of escape that haunts Younes and the group of pieds-noirs because all of them try to settle a new life off the sad and ambiguous past they had once survived. In fact, the Europeans of Oran strive to distance themselves from the Arabs as if they want to suppress their existence in Algeria.