100 Years of A Passage to India: How India Showed E. M. Forster Another Way of Looking at Life

Nigel Collett, “Developing the Heart: E. M. Forster and India”, 2022:

“…Politically, the novel is a criticism of the British Raj, whose functionaries and their wives are uniformly portrayed as failing to understand, and mostly not wanting to understand, those they govern. The flawed relationships between rulers and ruled create the impossibility of friendship between the two and place insurmountable difficulties in the path of any man or woman brave enough to defy convention by reaching out the hand of friendship. It is clear from his earlier denial that Forster had intended a serious purpose in writing the novel — he had wanted it to build a bridge between the nations. That he no longer thought such a bridge possible was one of the factors that deadened his impulse to complete the book.

The novel is also about the confusions of a young life awakening to awareness of sex and love, and failing badly to cope. Through the character of Miss Adela Quested, who finds more in “the real India” than she had ever imagined, Forster examines the mystery of the passage from innocence to awareness. Permeating the book are Forster’s hymns to friendship and to India, the country he loved…”

Jacqueline Banerjee, ‘Abundant vitality: How India showed E. M. Forster another way of looking at life’, TLS, August 5 2022:

“…Collett’s thorough research enables him to find many correspondences between Forster’s experience of the subcontinent and A Passage to India, showing, for example, how his state of mind when visiting the Barabar Caves, near Gaya in Bihar, is reflected in the Marabar Caves episode in the novel. But what makes this book so rewarding is the bigger picture – of how a rather timid, repressed youth was, as he put it, shaken out of his “narrow and academic suburban outlook” and introduced to “another way of looking at life”, becoming, in the process, a man at ease among every rank and caste. In return, as Collett shows in new detail, he did much to convey India’s abundant vitality to an uncomprehending West. His broadcasts and contacts in later life helped him to repay the debt of which he was so keenly aware. Enabling leading Indian novelists such as Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali to find their audience abroad was another part of Forster’s achievement…”

E. M. Forster, “A Passage to India”, 1924:

“…MOST of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,” or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere. “As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror”—it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent…”

 cover artist: David Gentleman (1930-)