1At the end of the 19th century, the borders of the British Empire were already permeable, even though imperial authority craved for secure and immutable places, enclosed by manageable lines of exclusion. Indeed, the primary result of a border is to both exclude and include in the same dividing move, drawing a line to distinguish the One from the Other.

2Although space is crossed by various borders, they play different roles and have various structuring effects, not always equivalent. This paper focuses on a recent redefinition of the concept of border, as a social technology with which to analyse the identities’ construction operations, both material and symbolic, as political effects1. More or less unstable, at times rigid or blurred, borders take on various spatial forms, but all of them entail a complex ambivalent game between connection and separation, rupture and transition, therefore powerfully and lastingly impacting the space on which they are inscribed. Subsuming the normative system and the world division principle, this polymorphic notion of border will be tackled under the concept of the line2. Expressing both the limit and its subversion, the line is a particularly fertile prism through which to analyze the spatial inscriptions of colonial discourse and policy. Possessing two antithetical dimensions, the line is both fixed and shifting, restraining and defying, and this double movement calls forth the possibility of crossing, since each limit calls for its crossing. Given that the imperial power apparatus is a political one, its scope is transversal and touches upon every sphere, cultural and social, religious, domestic and private.

3As the colonial society keeps “drawing its borders and charting its cognitive, aesthetic and mental maps” (Bauman 1997, 17), this paper aims at revealing how Kipling’s Kim (1989 [1901])and Forster’s A Passage to India3 expose these colonial lines drawn by the imperial power between Anglo-Indians and Indians4, through the multiple dynamic and controversial crossings of these lines by the main protagonists.

4Kim, the young Sahib who grew as an Indian in the streets of Lahore, wanders all over India, both as a chela (disciple) of a lama in search of a sacred river, and as a spy for the British Empire, meanwhile trying to disentangle himself from these conflicted identities, and find his own self in crossing lines. Forster’s two main protagonists, the English principal Fielding and the Mohammedan Aziz, attempt to be friends, thus moving through racial and social lines of exclusion. This attempt is made even more difficult due to Aziz’s disastrous expedition to the mysterious and extraordinary Marabar caves with two English ladies, one of whom accuses him of sexual assault there. The uproar among the Anglo-Indian community which subsequently follows this alleged rape exacerbates the tensions between the two civilizations, strengthening the imperial lines of exclusion and inclusion on both sides, thus making the crossings even more hazardous for both Aziz and Fielding, trapped in the absurdity of the Anglo-Indian society.

5The complex and ambivalent game entailed by the existence of social and racial lines is, in both narratives, directly translated into space, inscribed on it, as the spatial act of crossing the line impacts the characters’ identities and disrupts their sense of place and of self5. In examining this crossing of the line as a process, this paper aims at exploring the complex mechanisms of the crossing operation and its troubling implications for the subjects realizing it, in order to finally consider the nature of the space in which this process occurs: the space of the line itself. Advancing the hypothesis that the space of the line possesses a specific depth and thickness, the analysis will focus on its representations by Kipling and Forster, both using it as a means of conveying their respective visions of India, conservative or subversive, but always marked by ambivalence.

6Through the lens of geocriticism6 and its key concepts, multifocalization7 and transgressivity8, this geocentered analysis on the spatial representations of the line-crossing process and space of the line will reveal the interdependence of fictional spaces and their referential spaces. Following Westphal’s premise that “the description of a place does not reproduce a referent; it is discourse that establishes the space” (Westphal 2011, 80), a consideration of the drawing of a line as creating the place will lead to examine colonial lines of appropriation as a vector of territorial and national identity, an identity intrinsically linked with imperial knowledge and power. The multiple transgressions of these lines tend to expose Kim as a liminal and hybrid figure, while Forster’s narrative denounces the poisonous concept of national identity in the Anglo-Indian society through the crossing of racial lines. A further analysis will then consider how the space of the line may be seen as an in-between space, an alternative space of its own or even third space9.

7Through this pluridimensional approach, space will appear as not merely a narrative setting or a descriptive mode, but rather as an organizing element of the text, crucial in displaying the critical part played by discourses in the shaping of both fictional spaces and referential ones, providing an access to what Westphal rightly calls the “essential identity” (Westphal 2011, 114) of the space of the line.

I. Lines of Colonial Appropriation

A. The Line Creates the Place

8According to Westphal and other literary critics, the concept of divide is the identifying mark of Europe, which has created and defined its own identity through borders and dividing lines since the 15th century10 (Westphal and Moura 2018). The British Empire in India appears as a paradigmatic example of the exportation of these lines11, displaying their imposition upon landscape and architecture in rather visible lines, but also in the form of invisible lines of sociability, which in turn perniciously became containment and racial lines. The example of the Civil Lines is telling: the social lines encircling the district are not only a spatial metaphor, but produce spatial limits perceived and lived by the Indians, both in the strata of the societal space and in that of the lived space12. The visible structural lines distinguish it from the other native districts, while the invisible racial lines are strongly felt, asdescribed here when Aziz enters them: “As he entered their arid tidiness, depression suddenly seized him. The roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India. He felt caught in their meshes” (Forster 2005, 14).

9The passage from the native districts to the Anglo-Indian one is spatially symbolized in the colonial name appropriation of the streets, and their spatial straight-lined organisation13, the contrast with the rest of the city denoting their function as segregation and confinement lines. The effects they produce on Aziz, trapping him in a net, almost imprisoning him, are both physical and psychological, illustrated again when he exits the Civil Lines, exclaiming: “But to shake the dust of Anglo-India off his feet! To escape from the net and be back among manners and gestures that he knew!” (Forster 2005, 15).

10The very soil of the area seems to stick to him and contaminate him up to his social manners; indeed, the imposition of the colonial system went as far as to constrain Indian men to acquire the social rules of the colonial etiquette, in an effort to contain the threat of sedition14. In that respect, Sinha argues that the authority and the legitimacy of the Empire drew from the civil side of colonialism, as norms of European civility were transplanted in India, a fact exemplified in Ronny’s gaze, directed at the Indians: “He pointed to the dusky line beyond the court, and here and there flashed a pince-nez or shuffled a shoe, as if aware that he was despising it. European costume had lighted like a leprosy. Few had yielded entirely, but none were untouched” (Forster 2005, 36). This pathological lexical field insinuatescolonization’s fast-spreading and dangerous effects. Even more significant, perhaps, is Sinha’s demonstration of the incremental aspect of the cultural transfer: as a circulation, it constitutes a double movement, implying a process of back and forth during which the object itself is changed. To this extent, although the text recounts scenes of public humiliations and of mobility restraints—such as the theft of Aziz’s cart by two British ladies who did not even acknowledge his presence or his imprisonment—Forster also sheds light on small instances of Indian resistance, scattered throughout the narrative. These instances recall the invisibility of the social norms and lines, but more importantly the reversals operated by the Indians, as when Major Calendar dismisses the Indians’ ability to act socially, according to universal European norms: “He never realized that the educated Indians visited one another constantly, and were weaving, however painfully, a new social fabric. Caste ‘or something of the sort’ would prevent them” (Forster 2005, 49). This new social fabric, woven in the midst of and in spite of the social and racial lines established by the British, indicates the emergent threat of nationalism and resistance to the British occupation, mostly ignored by officials such as Major Calendar, blinded by a stereotypical knowledge of Indian culture.

B. Line as a Vector of Territorial and National Identity

11Thus, those active lines of colonial appropriation, created as a means of alienation and estrangement under pretense of protecting and distancing the British from the strange and disquieting Indians, drawing a line between the “Ruling Race” (Forster 2005, 61) and those who are seen as inferior, enable in fact the British to contain, domesticate and gain total control over the Other, the Indian.

12As an imperial political construct, these lines were intrinsically linked to the British Empire’s oscillations; in Forster’s 1920s India, in which nationalism protests could not be ignored anymore, the British “remain in exile” (Forster 2005, 127). This sentiment, added to that of the constant threat posed by the Indians as Others to be protected from, dramatically strengthened racial lines and the sanctification of the English official places. Ironically, the text depicts the English themselves posing as gods, as when the Collector, the figure of imperial authority in the city, watched Aziz’s arrest “from the interior of the waiting-room, and throwing open its perforated doors of zinc he was now revealed like a god in a shrine” (Forster 2005, 152).

13The British Club of Chandrapore, in A Passage to India, depicts the typical enclosure of the Anglo-Indian club15, and illustrates the societal space in which Great Britain is reconstructed and performed, through sacrosanct rituals and conventions16. This institution may be seen as a “site of memory,” which Pierre Nora defines as a place which is simultaneously material, symbolic and functional (Nora 1984, xix). Indeed, the three aspects coexist in the British Club: vested with the imaginary symbolic aura of Britishness, embodied by the social norms and class hierarchy of the club, it also functions as an object of ritual. The intention of memory, crucial in edifying a site of memory, lies in the peculiar relationship of Anglo-Indians with their mother country. As Bruneau has argued, the relation between identity and territory, always present in diasporas and transnational spaces, is expressed through the collective memory (Bruneau 2006, 332). While a place usually preexists identity, the opposite occurs when part of a population is implanted in another country: the British identity preexists the colonized place. The collective memory thus serves as a means to represent or reproduce the space of origin, in order to maintain a connection with it, and avoid acculturation or transculturation. The edification of the British Club therefore represents the recreation of a micro-territory, a territorial foothold whose rituals and ceremonies helped the British retain their own distinct identity17. This spatial appropriation is encoded through lines of segregation, the very lines forbidding entry to any Indian, distinguishing the racially pure from the impure.

14The multifocalization of Forster’s narrative, constantly shifting from the point of view of the British to that of the Indians18, attests to this sanctification on the occasion of the Bridge Party—an ironically misnamed social gathering, supposed to bridge the gulf between East and West—which one of Aziz’s friends attends only because “Shrines are fascinating, especially when rarely opened, and it amused him to note the ritual of the English Club, and to caricature it afterwards to his friends” (Forster 2005, 41).

15The failure of this party is revealing of the importance of racial, social and spatial lines, rejecting those on the other side of the line in an absolute way, since “When the tennis began, the barrier grew impenetrable. It had been hoped to have some sets between East and West, but this was forgotten, and the courts were monopolized by the usual Club couples” (Forster 2005, 42).

16The striking contrast between Forster’s narrative and Kipling’s lies in the fact that these lines of colonial appropriation and racial lines, while deeply problematic in Forster, are absolutely not so in Kipling. As in A Passage to India, they pervade the whole narrative of Kim, structuring Kim’s relationships and life, but remain uncontested, unchallenged, beyond question. Respect is shown, from the English, to the subtle hierarchies of caste among the Indians, and even from the Indians to the English: not one Indian dares—or wishes to—protest against the British rule, even when reminiscing about the Mutiny. The reason why is because for Kipling, as Edward Said brilliantly argues in his introduction to Kim, there was no conflict19; India’s destiny was to be held by the British, and the natives rejoiced at this. On the contrary, Forster’s narrative wittingly emphasizes the many absurdities and faux-pas of the British authority in India, through the accurate overview of the colonial social and racial system, giving us the natives’ point of view to counterbalance and shatter English confidence.

17Yet what transpires, above all, is their different perception of space; while both writers are fascinated by India, Forster uses this fascination to depict India as unattainable, whereas Kipling’s fascination leads him to fantasize about India as one accessible space, all access being granted to Kim, the liminal figure, the extraordinary specimen of Colonel Creighton’s collection of Indian types. In The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen compellingly analyzes the Western perceptions on India, embodied in a discourse that contributed to a progressive elaboration of stereotypes. He distinguishes three approaches, distinct but not inconsistent with one another: the “curatorial approaches” of the first, conservatives orientalists, considered as the first manifestation of superiority of the West over the Orient; the “exoticist approaches,” part of the romantic group who saw India as mysterious, in contrast with decadent Europe, celebrating the spiritual dimension of the subcontinent. The dichotomy existing within these two first approaches served the interests of the colonial enterprise in the third one, which Sen calls the “magisterial approach” of the utilitarists. By ignoring the results found by the orientalists, the utilitarists were able to deny the existence of a specific—in the sense of elitist—Indian history and culture (Sen 2005, 141–2). Kipling’s Colonel Creighton embodies both the curatorial and the magisterial approaches, as he classifies, collects, and analyzes elements of Indian culture in a scientific fashion, while using these findings to better subjugate and domesticate Indians. Through Colonel Creighton’s observation of Kim’s growth and crossings, as both a specimen and a useful tool, Kipling attempts to reinforce the authority of the British Empire, although the opposite is eventually achieved through the subversiveness of the line-crossing process and Kim’s own liminality.

II. Line-crossing: Transgression and Subversion

A. Kim: A Hybrid Figure

18Line-crossing is indeed part of Kim’s identity; his nicknames, Little Friend of all the World, and Little Friend of the Stars, emphasize his ability to cross the social, racial, cultural, and even religious lines of both British Empire and Indian society. Not only does he keep passing constantly from being a Sahib to being an Indian, be it a Mohammedan boy, a chela, a fakir, or a beggar, but he also continually moves from one enclosed space to another. These intrusive breaches make him a perfect spy for the Great Game, being both an insider and an outsider to all kinds of cultural and ethnic groups; no line appears to be impossible to cross for him. Nevertheless, amidst all of his peregrinations across India, in search of his lama’s sacred river, one specific line keeps attracting him, producing an irresistible appeal, towards which Kim is repeatedly drawn: the Road, or the Grand Trunk Road. This ancient path, dating as far back as the first Indian Empire, is yet another line colonized by the British. Paved in 1839 under the rule of the East India Company as a way to connect the military troops from Calcutta to Kabul, it constituted the lifeline of British India (Chandrasekhar 2013, 3). As a historical symbol of India’s diversity and tolerance20, the Road exerts a profound fascination on Kipling, expressed through Kim’s joyful vitality:

The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have it […] India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it, more awake and more excited than anyone, chewing on a twig that he would presently use as a toothbrush; for he borrowed right- and left-handedly from all the customs of the country he knew and loved. (Kipling 1989, 121)

19Kim’s feeling that he can only be at one with India in this place emphasizes Kipling’s own fantasy of a non-conflictual India, in which British rule is as much needed as it is loved by the Indians. On the contrary, Forster’s vision of India as resisting and rejecting British rule transpires through his depiction of the line of mountains containing the mythical and unfathomable Marabar caves.

B. Crossing Racial lines in Anglo-Indian Society: the Poison of Nationality

20Forster describes the caves, right before the expedition, as being “like nothing else in the world, and a glimpse of them makes the breath catch. They rise abruptly, insanely, without the proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere, they bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen. To call them ‘uncanny’ suggests ghosts, and they are older than all spirit” (Forster 2005, 116).

21The emphasis on the immemorial extraordinary dimension of India’s geology announces its very inscrutability, thereby foreshadowing Aziz’s failure at attempting to cross racial lines by bringing English ladies in such a place; and indeed, “Trouble after trouble encountered him, because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tries to keep men in compartments” (Forster 2005, 119).

22The climactic incident, that of Miss Quested accusing him of sexual assault, exposes these compartments, and their poisonous sense of nationality. Fielding, by defending his Mohammedan friend:

had not rallied at the banner of race. He was still after facts, though the herd decided on emotion. Nothing enrages Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed. All over Chandrapore that day the Europeans were putting aside their normal personalities and sinking themselves in their community. Pity, wrath, heroism, filled them, but the power of putting two and two together was annihilated. (Forster 2005, 154)

23Forster firmly points out that the primal animals here are not the Indians, but the British “herd,” acting upon gregarious instincts rather than reason.

24Fielding is therefore banned from the English Club, since “The man who doesn’t toe the line is lost” (Forster 2005, 160); lost, not only in the sense that the man estranges himself from his nation, but more importantly meaning that in leaving the line, the man leaves a gap in the line. And this exposure of the vulnerability of British authority is what really constitutes the violation and betrayal of the nation, not the assault in itself, but his reaction to it, stepping out of the line; more than a misconduct, it is the worst possible act of transgression21 for the British, an outrage and a crime, an abomination.

25Furthermore, in her study Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text, Jenny Sharpe innovatively genders the subject of sexual violence22, which has been used historically by critics to legitimate the “civilizing mission.” She argues that rape “emerges in and is constructed by its enunciation” (Sharpe 1993, 6), demonstrating further the ways in which imperial crises have been managed by using the fear of sexual assault or the violation of female bodies. As such, rape allows strategies of counterinsurgency “to be recorded as the restoration of moral order”; and indeed, Forster’s narrative “foregrounds rape as a system of colonial relation” (Sharpe 1993, 8), critically representing the discourse which encodes anticolonial rebellion as the assault of British women. Fielding, by questioning not only his friend’s guilt but, more importantly, the veracity of the assault itself, challenges the discursive use of sexual violence by the British authority, and thereby undermines the imperial authority’s own argument of legitimacy: granting protection against alleged Indian rapists.

III. The In-between Space of Line-crossing: Thickness of the Alternative Space

A. In the Thick of It

26Yet, the line-crossing process involves more than subsequent consequences. Lines appear to be more than merely a simple, thin delineation; they seem to possess a thickness, a depth, in which one engages with complex identity and spatial issues. Indeed, although both novels explore the theme of friendship in a hostile environment, in which climate plays a major role, in which nationality is a poison, the recurring questions “Who am I? Who is the Other?” reverberate, deeply imbedded in India’s own spatiality. Its transversal lines, colonial but also geographical, such as the Grand Trunk Road or the Marabar caves, reveal the authors’ specific perceptions of identity mechanisms in India. Kim’s transgressive crossings lead him into the line, in the thick of it; and this specific space is for him one of metamorphosis. Embracing multiple identities, and not in a superficial way since he has the ability to “enter another’s soul,” he thereby transgresses the absolute rule of British authority: never to go native. The leitmotiv of “Once a sahib, always a sahib,” attempting to reassure readers and the author himself of the perennial supremacy of Englishness, is nevertheless defeated in the space of the line-crossing, as Kim never forgets his vernacular Urdu, but easily lets go of the English language once back on the road with his lama: “Each long, perfect day rose behind Kim for a barrier to cut him off from his race and his mother-tongue. He slipped back to thinking and dreaming in the vernacular” (Kipling 1989, 261).

27The thickness of the line powerfully asserts Kim’s hybridity, and even his dialogical nature, his ability as a liminal figure to be in the margin, in the midst of the line, and, in it, to move from one identity to another, one culture to another, and thereby from one place to another. Embodying Kipling’s fascination for passages and crossings, especially those leading from one world to another,23 Kim subversively operates permanent processes of deterritorialization, going beyond all schemes based on the center and periphery model, and of reterritorialization24, thereby actualizing new virtualities through this displacement:

And my share and my joy—he smiled to the darkness—I owe to the lama here. Also to Mahbub Ali- also to Creighton Sahib, but chiefly to the Holy One. He is right—a great and a wonderful world—and I am Kim—Kim—Kim—alone—one person—in the middle of it all. (Kipling 1989, 194)

28While seemingly praising the Great Game for allowing him to cross all types of lines, Kim’s overflowing feeling of gratitude towards the lama demonstrates the powerful virtues of the space of the line. In crossing racial and social lines, Kim is able to access the space of the line itself, in which not only did he encounter the lama, but also found his own sense of belonging and identity, asserted here buoyantly and euphorically. Only accessible through the crossing of a line, this in-between25—which is also literally in-between two distinct entities separated by the line—, this space of the line resembles a third space, harboring a hidden potential, at the equilibrium point between Self and Other. By its creative and transformational potential, it expresses a form of resistanceto the established domains of imperial authority, thought to be autonomous and immutable by Kipling. Indeed, while imperial lines of containment spatially inscribe the relationship between Self and Other in terms of subjugation and domestication, this space of the line seems to allow a true encounter between Self and Other, embodied by the friendship between Kim and the Holy One; an encounter which subversively transgresses the imperial ordering of subjects, and goes against the rigidity and fixity of its power structures. Exemplifying the irreducible heterogeneity and transgressivity of space, it testifies to the possibility of a world in which Kim can be, in Westphal’s sense of the term:

Being is elsewhere. It is in deterritorialization, in that which contests the necessarily singular space of identity imagined in the territory and the nation; it is also in the discourse that, instead of freezing everything in the doxa, embraces the paradox, the momentary exceeding of the One and the Other. (Westphal 2011, 144)

29While this plausible world appears in Kim, due to the absence of confrontational dividing lines, Kipling’s fantasy of an absence of conflict unveils its ambivalent and paradoxical effect: the absence in itself challenges the concept of British authority as inflexible and unyielding. However, even though consistently challenged in Forster’s narrative, the imperial lines seem to succeed in preventing Aziz and Fielding to access this plausible world: their failed attempts, in part due to miscommunication26, only grant them temporary feelings of friendship.

B. The Impact of Fictional Spaces Upon Referential Spaces

30The line-crossing motion is simultaneously transposed into the vastness and luxurious openness of Kipling’s imaginary India27, which in turn mirrors the rather loose structure of the novel, whereas Forster’s narrative lines depict India as actually resisting the enclosing threat of the British Empire.

31The complete structure of A Passage to India is built around space, and its three parts, Mosque, Caves and Temple, lay out Forster’s own rational perception of space. Fielding’s comparison of the Mediterranean spatial organization with India reveals the extent of his aesthetic judgement:

The buildings of Venice, like the mountains of Crete and the fields of Egypt, stood in the right place, whereas in poor India everything was placed wrong. He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty? Form stammered here and there in a mosque, became rigid through nervousness even, but oh, these Italian churches! (Forster 2005, 265)

32The lack of form and of right placement implies a lack of defining and orderly lines, which, for Forster, constitutes the absolute achievement of mankind, harmony:

[…] but something more precious than mosaics and marble was offered to him now; the harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting. Writing picture-postcards to his Indian friends, he felt that all of them would miss the joy he experienced now, the joys of form, and that this constituted a serious barrier. (Forster 2005, 265)

33Thus, Indians would see sumptuousness, but not shape; and this, rather than imperial lines, seems to represent the absolute unbridgeable gap between East and West: the difference of spatial perception. Forster opposes two stereotyped systems of thoughts, the European28 rational, orderly and mainly intellectual spatial perception, with the emotional, feeling Oriental perception, in which senses prevail. Due to the absence of recognizable lines, India’s spatiality appears incomprehensible, and India itself called “a muddle,” since “nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge into something else” (Forster 2005, 78).

34The Marabar caves symbolize this non-accessibility of India to Europeans, who lack appropriate terms to cope with its mysterious nature. The terrifying echo they produce, which stays with Miss Quested for a long time, confusing her mind, reveals the ways in which space actually impacts our perception of the real world, and how our perception of space shapes our discourses upon the world. This indescribable echo, devoid of any distinction, resembles the country itself, devoid of any distinctive lines. When Fielding asserts that “[the] Mediterranean is the human norm” and that leaving it leads to “the strangest experience of all” (Forster 2005, 266), he implies that what differs from the norm is monstrous, extraordinary and strange, following exoticists’ and orientalists’ 19^th century depictions of India. It would seem to appear that Forster, while denouncing imperial lines of segregation, implicitly conveys their meaning of superiority in his spatial perception of India, translating them into the imperial discourse of European exceptionalism.

35However, Forster plays on these orientalized and derealizing stereotypes, since although his vision of the Marabar caves falls beneath the scope of orientalism, describing them with the—then usual—oxymoron of uncanny and wonderful, terrifying yet extraordinary, he uses the very inscrutability and mysteriousness of India to explicitly exhort the British to leave this country: “How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile” (Forster 2005, 127), implying that India was never meant to be British, and never will be. The personification of the sky, the earth and the cave, persistent throughout the whole narrative, powerfully places his claim in the very last lines of the novel, when Aziz and Fielding are riding together, but their horses suddenly swerve apart, and the whole of India expresses itself: “they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet’, and the sky said, ‘No, not there’” (Forster 2005, 306).

Conclusion

36The critical role of discourse in shaping one’s perception is then transposed into literature, which in turn produces another discourse, thereby reinforcing the effects produced on places and spaces. The nature of geocriticism is revealed through this dialogical relationship, going from spatial perception to the literary text, only to return once more to space, but with an enriched vantage point.

37The fictional effects entailed by literary narratives show themselves through the representations of lines, from their active participation in the construction and reproduction of discourses upon space, to their actual geographical reality in space. The multifocal analysis of colonial lines of appropriation and exclusion reveals their lasting impact and effects on the Indian, the Other. Forster uses these lines to ironically denounce the enclosing net of the British Empire in India and subvert them to reinforce an anticolonial discourse. Kipling, on the contrary, by avoiding any dividing line in his recreation of India as his own imaginary country, seems to be part of both the exoticist and magisterial approaches described by Amartya Sen (Sen 2005, 141–2), revealing the tension between the formulation of an ideal and the description of reality (Todorov 1989, 355). The imperial vision transpires from his depiction of India, as seen by Colonel Creighton: a collection of types and stereotypes, a museum available for British scrutiny and use, reducing the observed elements to objects; imperialism never aimed to produce equals, only to domesticate its subjects. However, although Kim has been trained, produced and used as a tool by the British empire, the agency and subversion he experiences in the line-crossing process enable him to escape—albeit partially—imperial domestication.

38The enticing fantasmatic appeal of India compels the authors to attempt to capture its mysteriousness, to decipher the unutterable; yet the “real India” that Miss Quested longed to see does not appear in either book: the anglicized India subsumes it all, European norms and clear hierarchy prevailing over a complexity which cannot be named. The “hundred images” of India in Forster’s narrative testify to this predicament; the kaleidoscopic vision and shimmering images of India give way to a constructed “real India,” another product of Western discourse.

39Yet the space of the line keeps emerging due to its transgressive nature, a space in which connections can be made, identities fused, potentials actualized, shedding light on gleaming endless possibilities. As such, the space of the line embodies a third space or in-between space, displaying pure potentials, and harbouring a possible; a space in which the encounter between Self and Other might, finally, be possible.