A Passage to India

Title: A Passage to India
Author: E.M. Forster

This is one of those books that has been sitting on my shelf for years. Ignored. Unattended. Forgotten. Then came a day when I had nothing to read, and absently scanned my shelf until my eyes rested on it's dusty spine. I picked it up. I read it. I enjoyed it. Maybe you should read it too. Or not. Read this synopsis and decide for yourself. Like the book, my review starts out a little boring but gets interesting fast. Good luck.

A Passage to India provides a detailed look into British India in the early 1900s, focusing on a city called Chandrapore.

The story centres around Aziz, a Muslim Indian doctor and his friends, Fielding, the British school principal, Ronny, a British court official, his fiancé Adele and his mother Miss Moore.

Miss Moore and Adele are visiting India, and Ronny, as an investigation into whether or not Ronny and Adele are suited for marriage.

Ronny has been in India just long enough to have little regard for nationals or their culture. Indian characters in the book explain that new arrivals are often genuinely kind and sensitive, but that it wears off quickly. With Ronny, it has clearly worn off.

For Miss Moore and Adele the thrill hasn’t worn off. In fact, they express a desire to experience ‘the real India.’

This leads to a lame ‘bridge party,’ at the British club. For one day, Indians are allowed in and a party is staged to ‘bridge’ the gap between east and west. The result is embarrassing and insulting for the Indians invited. However, it sparks a friendship between Fielding and the two women, as well as Aziz and several other Indians.

From there the little group meets again at a small party Fielding holds. In a rash moment Aziz offers to take the women to the Marabar Caves, and they accept his invitation, though it was only meant as a gesture. He has never been there himself, and planning the event will be expensive and awkward.

Eventually, the outing to the caves is pulled off, barely. For a time, Aziz is on top of the world, having organized this successful event for the British women—although the reader understands that no one is actually having a good time—but it all comes crashing down around him when a misunderstanding occurs in one of the caves and Adele believes she has been molested.

This leads to the climax of the story. Aziz is hauled in to jail, Adele has a breakdown, Miss Moore gets fed up with everyone, Fielding turns against the Brits and stands with Aziz, believing in his innocence, the community becomes polarized and the Muslim Indians threaten to revolt.

The event provides an opportunity to see inside both camps during a time of catastrophe. The Indians become angry, violent and unforgiving, loyal to their friends and hateful to their enemies. The British become scared, hard and cold, insulated and defensive towards anything and anyone foreign.

Somehow, Forster knows these two groups intimately. His prose captures the Arab-influenced Muslim Indian perfectly—as perfectly as I can imagine, having lived among Arab Muslims. And his description of the interaction between the two groups, and especially the Indian thought process he describes, is incredible.

The book is regularly interrupted by passages, sometimes pages long, describing India and its people. Elegant prose that paints a compelling picture of an ancient land and culture and people, invaded by a foreign power that fails to understand that beauty.

“The sky settles everything—not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little—only feeble outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon . The sky can do this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily, size from the prostrate earth. No Mountains infringe on the curve, League after league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted. These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves.”

This book left me with a desire to see India. It also left me with a strong distaste for British influence in that country and the legacy it has left. That feeling might just overwhelm the desire to see the country.