A Passage to India

Jeffrey Keeten

Rating: really liked it
“Adventures do occur, but not punctually. Life rarely gives us what we want at the moment we consider appropriate.”


Illustrations from the Folio Edition by Ian Ribbons.

Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore have journeyed to India with the intention of arranging a marriage between Adela and Mrs. Moore’s son Ronny Heaslop. He is the British magistrate of the city of Chandrapore. He is imperial, much more so than when Adela knew him in England.

”India had developed sides of his character that she had never admired. His self-complacency, his censoriousness, his lack of subtlety, all grew vivid beneath a tropic sky; he seemed more indifferent than of old to what was passing in the minds of his fellows, more certain that he was right about them or that if he was wrong it didn’t matter.”

My impression is that Heaslop may have been elevated rather quickly and had no time to develop his own ideas of the way things were in India, but simply borrowed the established views of the more senior British officials in India. In this new role he was required to play he is a very different person than the young lad that Adela knew in England.

She had decided to break off the engagement and then fate intercedes with a near death experience that allows her to see Heaslop in a different light.

The engagement is back on.

“Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we're still no nearer to understanding one another.”

It is always interesting to listen to people talk about marriage. Sometimes people can be too cerebral and talk themselves out of a perfectly acceptable relationship. Others give the commitment of marriage the same amount of thought as they do to deciding what they want for lunch. Arranged marriages used to work perfectly well simply because they were an alliance usually involving money and future offspring. We decided, at some point, that romance was the elixir that we must desire the most in a relationship. Divorce rates have skyrocketed and most people are not any happier than when marriages were arranged for them by their relatives, but free will has given people the idea that happiness can be achieved if they can just find that right person. It is always better to own your unhappiness or happiness instead of having it decided for you.

Adela is not very pretty, but she does have some money. Heaslop seems rather indifferent about the whole arrangement. Yes, he wants the marriage, but more for fulfilling a necessary obligation. The sooner it is settled the sooner he can move on to other things of more importance. Adela is trying to decide whether to accept this situation or wait to see if their is a better one on the horizon.

Dr. Aziz meets Mrs. Moore by chance in a mosque and though their meeting is rocky in the beginning a friendship quickly blossoms. Adela wants to see the real India, by, well, interacting with real Indians. A meeting is arranged with Dr. Aziz and in the course of their conversations with one another Aziz extends an invitation to take them on a journey to see the Marabar Caves. This is one of those invitations that are extended as a courtesy during a party that are never expected to be fulfilled. To his horror, he discovers, a few days later through an intermediary that the women fully expect him to take them to the caves. At great expense to himself he arranges this outing.

Aziz has always been a friend of the British, in fact, one of his best friends is a British teacher named Cyril Fielding. He had arranged for Fielding and another friend to go with them on this journey to provide the much needed cultural bridge between him and the ladies.

His friends miss the train.

Disaster looms.

Aziz is accused of physically assaulting Adela in one of the caves.

Ridiculous Fielding says.

Of course he attacked her the British community insists. All these brutes desire our women.

As events unfold it becomes more and more unclear as to what really happened, but even as doubt is raised the Colonialists continue to believe that Aziz is guilty.

He must be guilty.

This is considered E. M. Forster’s masterpiece and lands on most top 100 books of all time lists. I personally did not enjoy this book as much as I have some of his other books, but because of the subject matter of this book and when it was published, I fully understand why people look on this novel as his most significant book. He was poking a finger in the eye of his own government and their insistence on continuing to try to rule the world with brutality laced with blatant racism. I can see the men, who returned triumphantly from their postings abroad, sitting around their clubs back in London angrily discussing this book.



I won’t tell you what happened to Adela or what happened to Aziz, but tragically there was a realignment of thought for both of them. Adela never wanted to see India again. Aziz never wanted to see an Englishman/woman again. In fact, for the first time he feels at peace with who he is…”I am an Indian at last.”

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Samadrita

Rating: really liked it
Make no mistake. This, to me, will always be Forster's magnum opus even though I am yet to even acquaint myself with the synopses of either Howards End or Maurice. Maybe it is the handicap of my Indian sentimentality that I cannot remedy on whim to fine-tune my capacity for objective assessment. But strip away a colonial India from this layered narrative. Peel away the British Raj too and the concomitant censure that its historical injustices invite. And you will find this to be Forster's unambiguous, lucid vision of humanity languishing in a zone of resentful sociocultural synthesis, his unhesitant condemnation not merely of racism, casteism, religion-ism and what other noxious, vindictive 'ism's we have had throughout the history of our collective existence but of the fatalistic human tendency of rejecting a simple truth in favour of self-justifying contrivances.

Yes there's the much hyped 'crime' analyzed in the broader context of presupposed guilt and innocence . There's the issue of race, class and privilege factoring into the ensuing judicial process. The ripples of the eventual fallout of this mishap disrupt the frail status quo that all parties on either side of the race divide were tacitly maintaining so far and pose crucial existential questions before people of all communities.
Then there are hypocritical Englishmen who cannot choose between preserving the sanctity of the Empire's administrative machinery and upholding their own prejudices. And hypocritical Indians who righteously accuse the Englishmen of institutionalized hatred while stringently maintaining their own brand of intolerance. But greater than the sum of all these thematic veins is the connecting thread of Forster's sure-footed, measured prose which explores not only the inner lives of the central characters but tries to penetrate the heart of a nation-state in the making.

The India depicted here is a foreign country to me - a time and a place yet to be demarcated irreversibly along lines of communal identities that are presently dominating our political rhetoric. It is of little appeal to the newly arrived umpteenth Englishman but, nonetheless, presents itself as an amalgamation of unrealized possibilities. Not once did my brows knit together in frustration on the discovery of any passage or line even casting a whiff of Forster's bias against the people or the land. My senses were stretched taut all the time in an effort to detect any. Sure, Dr. Aziz is a little infantilized and his importance is sometimes reduced to that of a plot device used for manufacturing the central conflict while Adela Quested, Mrs Moore and Mr Fielding appear before a reader as upright individuals who stand for the truth. The other Indian characters seem to be defined by their general pettiness. But these imperfect characterizations can be more than forgiven in the light of what Forster does accomplish.

The song of the future must transcend creed.

There are times when the narrator's voice dissects the drama unfolding against unfamiliar Indian landscapes with a kind of fond exasperation and times when it dissolves into a withering regret for the way the engines of civilization continue to trundle along towards some catastrophic destiny without ever pausing for the purpose of self-assessment. And it is the profound clarity of Forster's worldviews and his sensitivity and forthrightness in deconstructing the enigma of the 'Orient' that elevates his writing even further.

Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell. Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and squabble so tiresomely are one, and the universe they mirror is one.

It's not the 'handicap of my Indian sentimentality' after all. Forster sought to extract the kernel of truth buried underneath layers of artifice and his craft could successfully flesh out the blank spaces between that which can be expressed with ease. Those are always worthy enough literary achievements in my eyes.

Sean Barrs

Rating: really liked it
In a rather ironic piece of narration, E.M. Forster sums up my opinion of this book perfectly:

“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.”

Indeed, this book was so terribly dull. Ordinary, bland and mundane are all words that spring to mind. Nothing happened other than a single piece of melodrama that somehow managed to dominate the book.

I understand why this book is so widely read and studied. From a critical postcolonial perspective, there are lots of juicy bits in here to dissect. There’s a lot to talk about, and I could easily write an essay on it because it raises so many important debates about race and national identity in the wake of colonialism. Seeing the true face of India becomes a difficult task because it has become so obscured with foreign influence and prejudices.

Indeed, the book is fiercely anti-imperialist and presents a compelling case for the benefits of an independent India. It also highlights the injustices the Indian native faced. Colonial rule is never good, and the coloniser always thinks his ways are better to the detriment of local culture, education and employment. He takes over and ruins everything despite how much he naively believes that he is improving the life of those he is oppressing.

Despite all this the plot has no energy. There were perhaps a few chapters, no more that forty pages or so, where the narrative managed to gain some momentum. The protagonist was imprisoned for a crime he didn’t do and the bits leading up to his trial were quite engaging. When the verdict was eventually reached the rest of the novel dribbled on. There was no story left! Yet it continued for another hundred pages. This meant that for a relatively short book, this felt like a really, really, long book.

This is a book I SHOULD have liked

I was really surprised at my reaction to this. This is a book that appeals directly to my interests; yet, it just seemed so painfully convoluted and dull. I did, however, really appreciate E.M. Forster’s prose. He is a very skilful writer and a wordsmith, his sentences and paragraphs roll into each other perfectly. (This seems like a generic point, though I only make it because the surface level of his writing is so eloquent in places.) It’s just a shame the plot did not carry the same level of mastery. It just needed to be tighter and more focused to be effective.

Like Heart of Darkness it occupies an uncertain place in the cannon of English literature; it’s not quite radical enough (and prejudice free) to be fully anti-colonial yet is still demonstrates the need for change. It’s a book I could study, but never one I could enjoy. Although I didn’t like this, I will still be trying another one of E.M. Forster's novels in the future.

William2

Rating: really liked it
A Passage to India seems a bolder statement on Colonialism and racism than ever. The Indians are thoughtful and droll, speaking about the trouble making friends with Englishmen, who become less personable the longer they are in India. The British seem to a man all about keeping the Indian down, of holding the colony by force. The writing is beautiful. I just finished E.L. Doctorow's The March, which errs on the purplish side at times. There's no such overwriting here. Even when one reads more slowly the prose constantly surprises. And this is my second or third reading, too.

Few books I have found can sustain such interest over the years. Lolita, Madame Bovary, Germinal, they are rare. This time through I find myself astonished by Forster's skill at under-describing his characters. This technique adds to the fleeting, lighter than air aspect of the writing. He'd much rather talk about a gesture, say, or the layout of a house. But the characters are left very flat, if not without description altogether. We must go by their voices. Under-description of this sort was highly recommended by Elmore Leonard, too, in his day. He was another master of it.

Part Two opens with the story of the developing geology the India. Venturing into the Marabar Caves, whose substance is hundreds of millions of years old, is to enter the primordial. It is to be shown something ancient, far outside the mental and emotional scope of homo sapiens, who are no older than 200,000 years. Forster's fascination is with the numinous. Adela and Mrs Moore have since their arrival talked of nothing more than seeing the "real India." In her quest for this passage to India, Adela enters the caves with little knowledge of their history, and there finds herself face to face with the numinous. But in its most primitive essence, which of course includes the erotic, and just like that her heretofore admirable open mindedness is overwhelmed by the true otherness of India. Overwhelmed by fear, she makes an egregious category mistake—a reductio ad absurdum—that upends the lives of all the main characters. An unwarranted charge of attempted rape is lodged against Dr Aziz.

Aziz's arrest reminded of the U.S.'s current epidemic of frightened white cops shooting unarmed black men. These events are equitable only to the extent that both are examples of raw racism run amok. Aziz, however, will get a trial and be acquitted. Our shooting victims will never get that, even posthumously, as we have seen.

The novel is a big nail in the coffin of the Old India Hands. My God, how Forster must have been hated for writing it. How dare he besmirch their generations of "service" in keeping the Indian down. It's a very brave book. Forster indicts his nation in 1924, twenty-three years before Partition. All the insipid reasons for being in India are trotted out and shown to be lies. Britain was not in India to pass down a legacy of democratic administration, that was an unexpected and lucky outcome. It doesn't matter what Niall Ferguson says about the benevolence of the so-called Raj in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order. This was commercial exploitation at its basest. That the British left slightly fewer corpses in their wake than King Leopold of Belgium did in the Congo is not an argument in their favor.

One final note on this Folio Society edition. It's a beautiful book on acid-free paper with sewn signatures, wonderful to handle. Even turning the pages is a joy. But the illustrations by Glynn Boyd Harte are wretched and annoying. The book is best unadorned.

Henry Avila

Rating: really liked it
Adela Quested a plain looking young , affable and naive English school teacher travels to distant India in the early 1920's accompanied by the elderly , kind Mrs. Moore (maybe her future mother-in-law) a widow twice and see the real country, more important to decide if she will marry Mrs. Moore's son the magistrate, of the unimportant city of Chandrapore disillusioned Ronny Heaslop ( he dislikes Indians now)...Conditions are very uneasy in India the natives hate the British rulers and seek independence and in turn the conquerors, despise what they perceive as an inferior local race, besides the Hindu and Muslim populations are always ready to riot against their enemies, foreign and domestic the tense, volatile situation needs the strong hand of the British army to keep peace but for how long ? Mrs. Moore like her female companion Adela, wants to see and feel India, experience its atmosphere no matter how alien, breathe in the romantic flavors, customs and particularly the strange exotic, mysterious and nevertheless engaging people of this dangerous but fascinating nation. Warned not to go alone the old lady does, visits a mosque and hears a voice in the dark telling her to take off her shoes, she had by Dr. Aziz a young Indian Muslim physician, ignorant foreigners in the past had shown disrespect, unexpectedly they later become great friends the two so completely different... Cyril Fielding the head of the modest local college is the only British man to show any sympathy for the poor native people, he hates how they are treated, the Indians especially the English women who do not hide their contempt . Yet can friendships develop and last between the Indian and the British in the colonial era, such as the emotional Dr. Aziz and the calm Mr.Fielding ? There is not much to see in the unattractive dirty city, no spectacular monuments or building, nothing the Ganges River flows leisurely by not causing any impact mostly ignored by the population, it isn't sacred here occasionally a dead body is spotted, not devoured by the crocodiles as it floats down to the ocean...In the local British Club no Indian members of course, they gossip drink play cards and the highlight, tennis when the notorious weather permits, scorching heat waves that crush the spirit and monsoon rains pouring ceaselessly down, causing widespread devastating flooding. Still twenty miles away in the Marabar Hills are countless caves to explore, nobody knows what makes them exciting though the areas only attraction, a tour is organized and led by Dr.Aziz composed also of Mrs.Moore, Miss Quested, Mr.Fielding and prominent Indians both Hindu and Muslims yet plans are not facts they do not go accordingly, a disaster ensues which will effect many people, lives are changed...A very interesting exploration of India during an unique period in its history, even today is still relevant to her destination as a rising superpower both economically and militarily...Yes things change...

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
THIS IS AN ANTICOLONIAL NOVEL BUT

Forster deals blows right and left in this novel and modern readers will grimace when they read the intricately exposed racism of the British in India (the lofty British ladies learning just enough Urdu to be able to give instructions to the servants); but alas, some of the generalisations about Indians will jar as the narrator throws out stuff like

Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.

Or

What they [the Indians] said and what they felt were (except in the case of affection) seldom the same. They had numerous mental conventions and when these were flouted they found it very difficult to function.

or

Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend.

That doesn’t sound very nice to me, I had thought that Mr Forster was a nice man. Well, he was a nice man. This book was published in 1924 and is brilliantly anti-colonialist but even progressive minds could not help generalising about The Oriental.

THE MYSTIC EAST

Part of the opposition displayed between western colonialists and Indian subjects is expressed as the English demanding facts and figures and making religion a department of the Colonial Office (“God who saves the King will surely support the police”) versus continual suffocating Indian religious fervency, both Islamic and Hindu. This cliché had caterpillar legs, it was very strong 40 years later when the Beatles set up a tax avoidance scheme called Apple and then immediately left for Rishikesh to meditate on ineffability with the Maharishi. But the insistence on the hardnosed versus the floaty mystical-twistical can be irritating and possibly strike the reader as crypto-racist. Forster himself seems to participate in this Mystic East schtick. Here is the narrator waxing not so much lyrical as borderline incomprehensible :

All over the city and over much of India the same retreat on the part of humanity was beginning, into cellars, up hills, under trees. April, herald of horrors, is at hand. The sun was returning to his kingdom with power but without beauty – that was the sinister feature. If only there had been beauty! His cruelty would have been tolerable then. Through excess of light, he failed to triumph, he also; in his yellowy-white overflow not only matter, but brightness itself lay drowned. He was not the unattainable friend, either of men or birds or other suns, he was not the eternal promise, the never-withdrawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness; he was merely a creature, like the rest, and so debarred from glory.

TUMESCENCE/DETUMESCENCE

The action of the plot turns into a big courtroom drama. This is the second classic in a row that I read with a John Grisham tendency, the other one was The Brothers Karamazov. The case collapses in dramatic fashion and after that comes a lot of ruefulness and bumbling and personal bitterness but not too much happens. There is maybe seventy pages of deflation. I could imagine that some reader might be a trifle impatient with that.


ON THE OTHER HAND

You have to love zingers like

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air.

And a crafty observation like

There is always trouble when two people do not think of sex at the same moment

Ha ha, EM, so true.

Piyangie

Rating: really liked it
A Passage to India is set in the time the British ruled India. Forster wrote this book after visiting India and having first hand seen the real relationship of the ruling British and the ruled natives. Since he had personal experience, it was easy for him to paint a true and accurate picture of how the British administrators governed the natives. First and foremost, Forster saw it was to be oppressive; he was not happy with the way the natives were treated. He observed a difference in the British who ruled India on behalf of the British Crown and couldn't comprehend how the liberal minded youth who were full of goodwill toward the native brethren became hard conservatives once in India in official capacity. He also observed that when the Indians live in British soil the personal relations between the two races were on friendly grounds; but in Indian soil, the relationship between the two races were strained with distrust and hostility. All his observations and his personal views over them led him in producing one of the best written fictions on East and West.

The cultural and religious difference between the two races was, according to Forster, the main impediment for closer relations. The different cultures have different manners and different ways of lives. They cannot be compared with one another to determine which is more superior. They are just different. If one culture tries and acts superior, then hostility is the inevitable result. This was the major mistake the British administrators did. From their point of view the natives were "uncivilized"; and they wanted to make them "civilized". By trying to make them "civilized", the British were imposing their culture and their way of life on the natives. They were of the view that what Indians needed were justice, discipline and peace. There they made the mistake, for the natives greatly resented this. What they really wanted was the British to understand, accept and respect their culture, their religion and their way of life. To be treated as a nonentity in your own country is a painful experience. Every race has their pride and wounded pride can lead to calamities. Failure to understand this was the key to hostility between the ruling and the ruled.

On the other hand, Forster doesn't defend the natives either. He exposes their weakness, their flaws and their hypocrisies which made me ponder that after all we should view all these actions from pure human perspective. Irrespective of the difference in race, ethnicity, culture and religion, we are all human and as humans we do have inherent flaws; and if we want to live harmoniously and with peaceful human relations, we have to check our flaws and be kind and tolerant towards others.

The story through which Forster says it all is good but not great. The first part of this three part story was so slow that my first impression was that I would not be able to push it through. I love Forster's writing. It is absolutely beautiful. And that is what held the thread for me without breaking. But I admit that it was very trying. In part two, the story picks up the pace and although I still struggled through some of the chapters, the reading experience became much more pleasing.

Forster had chosen a good set of characters to set out the story. Although I didn't like many of the characters (except Mr. Fielding who I personally thought resemble the author) they essentially contributed well to his story. I feel that it never crosses Forster's mind that the reader should like his characters. I think he is more concerned that we understand them rather than like them.

Before I end the review I would like to share a conversation in the story that really struck me hard. During this conversation, Dr. Aziz tells Mr. Fielding that once they become free of British rule that they can be fully friends. That was the most thought provoking sentence of the entire book. Although he cannot hear me, I just wanted to shout out and tell him "Well done, Forster!"

Julie G

Rating: really liked it
It's a Saturday evening, and you and your significant other have just arrived at an outdoor barbecue, hosted by your sweetheart's employer.

As you step out on to the patio, you do a quick visual sweep of the social atmosphere. At first glance, it looks as though the party is dominated by your partner's coworkers, which is unfortunate, as they are all metallurgists. That's right. They're all metallurgists, and you're. . . well, you're you.

You've got your fingers crossed that someone's significant other will turn out to be a pole dancer or a comedian, but as you approach the first pockets of people, you realize that, as usual, you're dreaming.

You dash off to find alcohol to sustain you, only to discover that the host is a recovering alcoholic and the only beverage that will be served on this night is a cucumber-infused water. What in the hell?

Soldiering on, you bravely break into one or two of these small social packs, trying to crack a joke, entertaining yourself by balancing the sliced cucumbers on your eyes, pretending they are pennies and you are blessedly dead.

No such luck. You're alive, but you're invisible, and you are stone-cold-sober and this may be the most boring evening of your life. Your partner has abandoned you to some work-related issue, and you are completely hopeless until you stumble upon a group of three people, standing off to the side. You hear something about a “Dr. Aziz” and some accusations that are damning, that apparently have been made by a female coworker. Two of the people reveal in the conversation that they are HR employees, and they are investigating the claim. You are suddenly a fly on the. . . paper plate? You can't hover closely enough. You are riveted. You hate to admit it, but you've always loved a good scandal. . . as long as it doesn't involve you.

You listen for as long as possible, until the small group breaks apart and walks away. Your partner startles you, returning to you, pulling you out of the trance of the story, and indicates to you that it's time to leave. Time to leave? But it just FINALLY got interesting.

Jan-Maat

Rating: really liked it
In a novel with the line “a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent” it is no surprise that the centre of this cloud of writing is the idea of the difficulty, or the possible impossibility of communication and direct connection between people.

Instead understanding has to be intuitive and incommunicable, Mrs Moore knows nothing has happened but can’t convince her son, how she knows or how Professor Godbole knows about her and the wasp is unclear and if we don’t like telepathy as an answer then we are best off not asking the question, just as we are best off not asking what, if anything, happened in the Marabar caves. Miss Quested experienced something, but even E.M. Forster screwed up the draft versions that attempted to give her point of view as that something occurred. A clear statement would run counter to the intuitive direction of this novel. Nothing can make sense in the unreality of our group think, some alternative means of perception, something more (view spoiler)[ or Moore, then again the name could be meant to suggest Moor as though, admittedly through marriage, she has a non-British outlook to start with (hide spoiler)] is required to understand.

Miss Quested speaks of wanting to experience the real India, but because she lives, as almost all the characters do, in the world of illusion, her quest will be concluded but the object missed. A failed seeker after the Holy Grail. (view spoiler)[ I wondered if Fieldings name was also meaningful or playful given the references to taking sides (hide spoiler)]

In the beginning “they were discussing as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman” (p33) (view spoiler)[ the answer is no. There is the entente cordiale, there is the “special” relationship and there is the oldest ally. No friends. (hide spoiler)] As evidence of the potential of intimacy: “he has shown me his stamp collection” (p34). I wasn’t expecting Forster to have a sense of humour (view spoiler)[ I'm still smiling and cringing with social embarrassment over Mrs Turton's "words of welcome in Urdu. She had learned the lingo, but only to speak to servants, so she knew none of the politer forms, and of the verbs only the imperative mood" (p62) (hide spoiler)], nor quite the brutality implicit in Dr Aziz showing the picture of wife to Fielding only for the chest of drawers to be later forced open and that photograph presented in court as evidence of his immoral and degenerate character.

The characters exist very firmly in their environments. The English, at the slightest suggestion that something is not right flip back to 1857, the dominance signalled in 1757 so provisional that everybody has to be continually on watch (view spoiler)[ ah, there’s no great correspondence between the two events, but the temptation of aligning two ‘57s was too great for me (hide spoiler)]. There are no innocent conversations. No exchange of views. Every gesture has its own sub-text of resistance and opposition, if one chooses to live on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But this is also unreal or at least only an aspect of reality. Change the air and of a sudden there are “problems so totally different from those of Chandrapore. For here the cleavage was between Brahman and non-Brahman; Moslems and English were quite out of the running, and sometimes not mentioned for days” (p289). The novel doesn’t claim to completeness only to offer up a few shards to work upon the imagination (view spoiler)[one could for instance look at how women stand between the men and prevent contact, seeing this in the context of Forster’s unwillingly platonic relationship with Syed Ross Masood and eventual physical relationship with Mohammed el Adl in Egypt, which gives a different texture to “God si Love” (p283) one of the Empire as providing the means for people to have the opportunities, sexual or otherwise, to do what they could not do at home. In the novel we see the English having an unBritish equality of privilege paid for by the denigration of everybody else. This is such an extreme, and generally unfamiliar, degree of privilege that it is unsurprising to see with what insane tightness it is clasped and with what mad eyes the hint of a violation is regarded. (view spoiler)[ this reminds of my paternal grandparents who were in their own small way grand people in the far-east, return to London meant going down from the Herrenvolk back into the working class, no more servants or a bungalow with a veranda for them!(view spoiler)[ I’m not sure if paternal Grandmother never really recovered or if she was already of unsound mind before going out, no doubt it was six of one and half a dozen of the other, along the lines of those desiring power being the worse qualified to wield it empire was not for most an endeavour to encourage generosity of thought and broadness of understanding (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)].

Apparently the last two Viceroys of India read this novel. Pushed in conversation Dr Aziz at first looks to the Afghans, for the Mughal Empire to strike back and replace the British, only then to imagine an Indian community as a viable future (view spoiler)[ as in, good grief, impossible to contemplate, everybody: ”’India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one! Hurrah!’” (p315) so we see Dr Aziz shift from a pan-Muslim and frequently Mughal past to a very different future. Such feats fiction can accomplish. (hide spoiler)]. Nodding to Benedict Anderson then there is no divide between the realm of the imagination and the realm of tangible reality. The one flows into the other. The boats collide and overturn. Despite the different directions and tools the experience is one.

Matthew

Rating: really liked it
I read A Passage To India for my Completist Book Club on Goodreads. This is a book that I may have never even heard of if it was not for that group. For those who are curious, it is a club that chooses books from must read lists to read each month. Because of this club, I have been able to find some interesting, some challenging, and, sadly, even some boring books that I cannot figure out why they are must reads. But, whatever the case, I am always glad to be a part of the group because it has really expanded my reading horizons.

In the case of A Passage To India, I can see why it is a classic. It is a tale of British Imperial rule in India and how people on both sides - British and Indian - handle all the tensions and issues this causes. Also, the main Indian character is not Hindu but Muslim and there is a lot about being Muslim in a country where that is not the main religion. It is all very relatable to modern day issues.

I have been going back and forth between 3 and 4 stars. Some of the parts were very riveting, but others left me wanting. I think it was about 50/50. But, I am going to go with 4 stars because the message and the historical significance of this story solidify it as a classic.

Funny thing, I was planning to go 3 stars when I started writing this review, but I talked myself into 4 stars!

Warwick

Rating: really liked it
‘The past! the infinite greatness of the past!’ thrilled Walt Whitman in ‘A Passage to India’. A quarter of a century later, Forster borrowed Whitman's title, but with a very different mood in mind. In place of the American's wild-eyed certainties, Forster gives us echoes and confusion; instead of epic quests of the soul, there is only an eternal impasse of personal and cultural misunderstanding.

Animals and birds are half-seen, unidentified; the landscape is a featureless blur; motives are illogical and rest on miscommunication. All human language, in the final analysis, amounts to nothing more than the dull ou-boum thrown back from the Malabar caves during the fateful expedition at the heart of the novel. ‘If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – “ou-boum”.’

Will Self once recommend as an exercise reducing a novel to a single word (he suggested in the case of The Naked Lunch, for instance, that it would be ‘insect’). For A Passage to India, that keyword would be ‘muddle’ – a term that recurs, gradually shedding its cosiness and accreting a sense of existential indistinctness, a kind of cosmic flou that renders good intentions, indeed all human endeavour, futile. ‘I like mysteries,’ says Mrs Moore, the novel's moral core, ‘but I rather dislike muddles.’ Elsewhere, Forster talks with something like dread of a ‘spiritual muddledom’ for which ‘no high-sounding words can be found’.

The plot of this book is, at times, heart-poundingly dramatic, but Forster is careful to make sure that even this is founded on doubt and indecision. In fact, what one thinks of as ‘the plot’ of A Passage to India is a storyline that arises, reaches its climax, and is resolved entirely within the second of the book's three acts. What then, you might ask, is the point of parts one and three? Well, among other things they prevent the plot from seeming too tidy – there is always something before the beginning, something after the end, to frustrate neat conclusions. ‘Adventures do occur,’ he says, ‘but not punctually.’ Life isn't tidy – it's a muddle.

British India is a perfect setting for this kind of exploration: not only does it play host to numerous individual confusions, it is itself, as it were, the political embodiment of such a confusion. One of the wonderful things about this book is that the obvious hypocrisy and conflict between the English and the Indians is not left to stand alone, as a heavy-handed message, but is echoed by similar divisions between Muslim and Hindu, man and woman, young and old, devotee and atheist. Still, it is the gulf of understanding between the British rulers and their Indian subjects that provides the most interesting material for Forster's bitter social comedy. Most of the Brits are deliciously dislikable, couching their racism in patriotic slogans, droning through the national anthem every evening at the Club, and – like one of the wives – learning only enough of the language to speak to the servants (‘so she knew none of the politer forms, and of the verbs only the imperative mood’).

The heroes of this book are those that try to reach across this divide, or to challenge the assumptions of their own side.

‘Your sentiments are those of a god,’ she said quietly, but it was his manner rather than his sentiments that annoyed her.

Trying to recover his temper, he said, ‘India likes gods.’

‘And Englishmen like posing as gods.’

These attempts don't work, and the reason they don't work is that cultural or racial divides are – the book suggests – only a special case of that ‘spiritual muddledom’ that is a universal constant. Still, the worldview isn't as bleak as it might seem. That famous ‘not yet’ in the book's closing lines is a lot more hopeful than a ‘no’, and if we're prevented from coming together by our tangled and violent past, that also raises the possibility that a better future can be laid down by the present we choose to enact now, every day, with each other. ‘For what is the present, after all,’ as Walt Whitman asked, ‘but a growth out of the past?’

Fionnuala

Rating: really liked it
So easy going - and then wham!
Quentin Tarantino could learn a lot from E M Forster. He'd learn that there's no need to pile on the menace in the early stages. The shock, when it comes is much more effective if the reader/viewer has been led into thinking all is ordinary and relatively safe. Forster is a master story teller, and a true philosopher as well.

Katia N

Rating: really liked it
I started to listen to this novel, but then I loved it so much that I’ve bought the actual book. It is a superb realistic novel: the characters, social conflict, the plot, the setting and also something intangible which is hard to express in words. But that, intangible is what really matters.

Through my reading experience, I could not shrug off the feeling how little the dramatic development depended on the action of any individual character. How there was a certain inevitability and logic where everything was going. And each action by a character would be predetermined by some intangible factors be it her/his background or the situation they’ve found themselves in. It is like people happened to be in certain circumstances; and though in theory they would have an option to choose how to act, they would end up doing what the like of them have done before again and again. It wasn’t a hint of the historicism in Hegel’s sense or the Eastern karma. It was more like people “drifting” through their lives in spite of all the drama happening to them.

It was like those little English people (and the locals as well) were placed into a vastness of space and time. And even when they try to learn this place they would fall the victims of their own preconceptions. It was like a fight of collective evil with the collective good. But both of the sides of the battle were illusive and impossible to grasp.

Later, I understood from reading the intro, it was intentional. Forster “tried to indicate the human predicament in a universe which is not so far comprehensible to our minds.“ But it was so well done that it never felt far-fetched or fake.

It was the last novel Forster has written. He became “wearisome” of the “studied ignorance of the novelist”. He lived almost 50 years after that without writing any new novels. I have a split feelings about this. On the one hand, I wish he would write many more books of fiction. He was a rare talent based upon this novel. On the other hand, I appreciate he had not. I think he has squeezed everything he could out of the combination of the form and his talent; and he knew when to stop. This is a rare gift as well to know when to stop.

And this novel is alive. Reading it, I was full of emotions, both basic and complicated. At some point I was brimming with rage, at the other - I felt overwhelming compassion for one character. And as the people in the novel, I felt something behind the scenes “not so far comprehensible to our minds”.

The novel is the result of Foster’s time lived and travel in India. I thought his desire to understand and explain the clash of different systems of belief was a very nuanced one for the Westerner. So many things changed since almost 100 years this novel was written. But so many things stayed totally the same. This feeling when a group of people, a nation or a person feels inherently and not justifiably superior to the other did not diminish or disappear at all.

I loved the book. But I have a few “problems” with the novel. The main one is that I felt Forster played safe in the resolution of the main conflict in the book. Was it a realistic resolution? Yes, it was. And, It underscored underlying fairness and decency of some individuals within the grossly unfair colonial set up. But was it the most likely scenario that this conflict would resolved in such a way? I doubt. And it would be even more revealing if the novel would lead us that way. But alas, Foster it seems has stuck to the inherent sense of English “fairness” in some of his characters. Another minor peeve - he got rid of my favourite character before long.

Still, it is this rare beast of a wonderful, complicated novel that is also a pleasure to read.

W

Rating: really liked it
When I first encountered this book,it felt like a chore. It was required reading for class,and had to be crammed.

Years later,I saw David Lean's magnificent film adaptation.It was a superb effort,which quickly became one of my favourite films.I can watch it again and again.

When this book was written,the end of British rule in the sub-continent was still decades away. Unusually for an Englishman of that era,Forster depicts the growing resentment against the British Raj in India. George Orwell's Burmese Days also explores a similar theme.

Forster shows sympathy for the Indian character,Aziz,as he is accused of assault by an Englishwoman in a cave. The character of Fielding,is also sympathetic to Aziz's plight.

And then,of course,there is the mistrust bordering on hatred,between the rulers and the ruled. It all comes to a head,in the wake of the assault allegations against Aziz.

It was a very unusual book for its time,very bold in its themes. The ideas are great,but the book is a bit too lengthy.It is slow going at times and Forster's writing style isn't too attractive for me.

But the movie had my rapt attention,from start to finish.A sumptuous,grand and lavish production,a masterpiece.My favourite character from the film,Adela Quested,as played by Judy Davis.

In this case,the movie gets five stars.

Jean-Luke

Rating: really liked it
So there's this book, and every summary you read says it's about what happens one afternoon in one of these caves. So you pick up the book and begin to read. There's the caves, and there's the event, and as you turn the final page you realize you have never been so happily deceived, for this book has been one of the most memorable tales of a friendship you have read. Is it wrong that in future you may consider reading only Part III? It begins with a collar stud, and somewhere in the middle there is something about some caves, and a trial, but in many respects it is a story about two friends. I would read it again just for the beautiful Part III.