Review: A Passage To India by E. M. Forster

Chandrapore, a fictional city on the banks of the Ganges, is “nothing extraordinary”, E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel set in India under the British Raj insists in its opening pages. We meet Dr Aziz, a Muslim doctor, and his compatriots complaining about the British: being friends with them “is impossible here”, they note drily. As Dr Aziz walks back to the hospital he stops by a mosque, where he meets Mrs Moore, recently arrived from England as a chaperone for a young woman, Adela Quested, who may marry her son, the city’s inexperienced young magistrate. Adela wants to see “the real India”, and is drawn to the Marabar Caves in the hills that shimmer on the horizon. It’s in the second part of this novel, entitled Caves, in which a party of Aziz, Mrs Moore and Adela set off to explore the mystical caverns, that things go wrong.

A Passage To India tells many stories — a racial miscarriage of justice like To Kill A Mockingbird, a young woman’s journey of self-discovery like Forster’s earlier novel A Room With A View — but it finds its emotional and political centre around the friendship between Dr Aziz and Mr Fielding, Fielding, the local school’s principal, is a man who “used ideas by that potent method — interchange”. He impresses and confuses his Indian friends with his clear thinking and sympathies for their anti-British ideas, and maddens and confuses the Anglo-Indian community who spend most of their time gossiping at the local Club. Although peripheral at the beginning, he steps into the spotlight in the novel’s troubling close. It’s a melodramatic, comedic, mannered novel. It’s also gorgeous, a stunning evocation of land and people. There are many wondrous little pictures. Describing sunrise, Forster invites us to consider how “perched on the roof of a shed, the station-master’s hens began to dream of kites instead of owls”; or during the building heat before the monsoon the “films of heat” that cause “a patch of field [to] jump as if it was being fried, and then lie quiet”.

Where the novel really thrills is its illumination of the apparatuses of British imperialism. Forster has great fun ridiculing the Raj’s bureaucracy, such as the young magistrate’s attempts to sound more like a British official:

he had been using phrases and arguments that he had picked up from older officials, and he did not feel quite sure of himself. When he said ‘Of course there are exceptions,’ he was quoting Mr Turton, while ‘increasing the izzat’ was Major Callendar’s own. The phrases worked and were in current use at the club.

It’s great fun watching the Anglo community lose their minds when their power is threatened (Mr Fielding is resented for “keeping his head” at a moment of crisis). Later though Forster furiously exposes the violence latent in the mannered Anglo-Indian community. A plot involving a young white woman accusing an Indian man of assault reminded me of Amina Srinivasan’s complicating of the Me Too movement in The Right To Sex: while women don’t make up sexual assault, men of colour are disproportionately convicted, and white men disproportionately walk free, yet another process that embeds and widens racial inequity.

While emphatically told from a white perspective (with some of the Indian characters leaning towards caricature and a distinct exotic flavour to many of the novel’s descriptive passages), encoded in A Passage To India’s bones is a clear-sighted critique of British colonisation. Towards the end Fielding realises that “this pose of ‘seeing India’ which had seduced him to Miss Quested at Chandrapore was only a form of ruling India”. On entering the Marabar Caves both Mrs Moore and Adela are struck by an echo that rings in their minds long afterwards. That echo might stand in for several things — a typical preoccupation of Forster’s with the great Unsaid; an interest in the infinite and the universal — but here he is more more pointed. “The echo is always evil,” he writes, revealing how imperialism corrupts every interaction between people when it is the system that those people exist in.

Gay rating: 1/5 for Aziz and Fielding’s bromance.