A Passage to India

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by E. M. Forster


First Published: 1924
332 Pages
 

Forster's 1924 masterpiece, A Passage to India, is a novel about preconceptions and misconceptions and the desire to overcome the barrier that divides East and West in colonial India. It shows the limits of liberal tolerance, good intentions, and good will in sorting out the common problems that exist between two very different cultures. Forster's famous phrase, "only connect," stresses the need for human beings to overcome their hesitancy and prejudices and work towards realizing affection and tolerance in their relations with others. But when he turned to colonial India, where the English and the Indians stare at each other across a cultural divide and a history of imbalanced power relations, mutual suspicion, and ill will, Forster wonders whether connection is even possible.

The novel begins with people very much desiring to connect and to overcome the stereotypes and biases that have divided the two cultures. Mrs. Moore accompanies her future daughter-in-law Adela Quested to India where both are to meet Mrs. Moore's son Ronny, the City Magistrate. Adela says from the outset that she wishes to see the "real India" and Mrs. Moore soon befriends an Indian doctor named Aziz. Cyril Fielding, an Englishman and the principal of a local government college, soon becomes acquainted with everyone, and it is his uneasy friendship with Dr.Aziz that constitutes the backbone of the novel.

Although the primary characters all take pains to accept and embrace difference, their misunderstanding, fear and ignorance make connection more difficult than any of them expect. Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested find that surpassing their preconceived notions and cultural norms entails confronting frightening notions about the contingency of their beliefs and values. Getting to know the "real" India proves to be a much more difficult and upsetting task than they had imagined. For Aziz, the continued indignities of life under British rule and the insults-intentional and unintentional-of his English acquaintances make him suspect that although friendship is desired, the two cultures are not yet ready for it.

Forster's keen eye for social nuance and his capacious sympathy for his characters make A Passage to India not only a balanced investigation of the rift that divides English and Indian but also a convincing and moving work of art. Written in 1924, two years after the publication of Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses and one year before Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Forster's masterpiece was produced during one of the most remarkable periods of achievement in English literature since Wordsworth's day.

E. M. Forster

Born on New Year's Day in 1879 in London, Edmund Morgan Forster was raised by his mother and great aunt. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1901 and spent the next ten years living abroad in India, Italy and elsewhere. His experiences abroad would provide Forster with material for his novels, particularly A Room with a View and A Passage to India.

In 1905 Forster published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and then followed it with The Longest Journey in 1907 and A Room with a View in 1908. He achieved his first breakthrough success with the publication of Howard's End in 1910, which many people still regard as his greatest work. During this time, Forster was associated with a group of writers, artists and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. Including such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Benjamin Britten, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury Group was a source of intellectual and cultural stimulation for the young novelist.

In 1924, Forster published A Passage to India, widely regarded as one of the most important English novels of the twentieth century. In the opinion of many critics, A Passage to India signals Forster's growing disillusionment with the solutions offered by traditional liberalism. This disillusionment, perhaps not surprisingly, coincides with the author's waning interest in the novel; in fact, A Passage to India was the last novel Forster finished.

Instead, he turned his attention to teaching and criticism, beginning with the Clark Lectures he delivered at Cambridge 1927. Those lectures would form the basis of his widely-admired book of essays, Aspects of the Novel, published the following year. In 1946, he accepted a fellowship at Cambridge University, where he remained until his death in 1970.
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