In June 1924 E.M. Forster’s marvellous novel A Passage to India was published, so its 100th birthday is this year.
Did you know that the novel’s title comes from a line of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? The plot revolves around a British schoolteacher, Adela Quested, her elderly friend Mrs Moore, Indian Dr Aziz and his British friend Cyril Fielding. The central action of the story is an excursion to the Marabar Caves, where Miss Quested believes or imagines that she is attacked. Everyone in the racist India of the time, assumes the doctor is guilty, preferring to take the word of a white woman over that of a man with brown skin. The backdrop to the story is the British Raj and the Indian independence movement of the 1920s.
Contemporary reviewers expressed concern over the inter-racial friendship between Aziz and Fielding. Critics since that time have complained that Forster didn’t go far enough in attacking the racist attitudes of the British. Others have examined the novel from gender viewpoints, seeing it as a commentary on the place of women within the Empire. And others have felt that the book mystified India, making it a place no white person could ever hope to understand. No reader ever really knows what happens in the caves, and we are left intrigued and puzzled at the end. Is the book simply a tale of powerlessness and alienation, of how one race can never really hope to understand another? Forster was very keen on the idea of people ‘connecting’ (remember the repeated phrase ‘Only connect!” in Howard’s End), but through Forster’s stream-of-consciousness style, we see all the missed meanings and the eventual failure to connect. Mrs Moore becomes friendly with Dr Aziz and they discover a common bond, but such friendship, as well as that between Aziz and Fielding, is unable to flourish in the oppressive regime of colonial India.
The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in its year of publication. In 1984 the David Lean directed movie version came out, with Judy Davis, Peggy Ashcroft, James Fox, Nigel Havers, and Alec Guinness. It’s hard to believe that the film is forty years old this year! It’s a superb adaptation – now might be a good time to rewatch it?
In 1960 the manuscript, donated by Forster, was sold to raise money for the London Library and it fetched £6,500 which was at the time a record sum for a modern English manuscript.
Have you read E.M. Forster’s book? How long since you have seen the movie version? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.
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