Without meaning to issue a clarion call for independence, E. M. Forster perfectly captured the rising tensions of the British Raj. One hundred years later, Matthew Dennison revisits the masterpiece A Passage to India
WHEN writing it I thought it a failure,’ wrote E. M. Forster to fellow author Christopher Isherwood in 1937. His subject was the novel that, in his lifetime and since, has been acclaimed as his masterpiece: A Passage to India.
As Forster himself suspected, the novel— on which he worked intermittently for 11 years and which was published a century ago, on June 4, 1924—proved his last. ‘My patience with ordinary people has given out,’ he told Siegfried Sassoon. According to a diary entry he made in 1911, ‘weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa’ had beleaguered his fictional efforts for some time.
In A Passage to India, Forster’s focus shifted from ‘the love of men for women & vice versa’. Instead, he revisited the social and emotional ‘muddles’ typical of his earlier novels, including A Room with a View and Howards End, but on a dramatically larger scale. Again, relationships are key to this last novel, but they take on a symbolic dimension in a story that ultimately— and unhappily—asserted the vastness of the gulf separating colonist and colonised in Imperial India. The failure of the friendship between a British schoolteacher and a Muslim doctor represents misunderstandings more far-reaching and more destructive than those Forster had previously examined. Although he later argued that his ‘main purpose was not political, was not even sociological’, the reader is forced to accept the narrator’s view that, so long as the British remain in India, Dr Aziz’s ‘impulse to escape from the English was sound’.
By the time he completed the novel, the writer had visited India twice: a six-month stay beginning in October 1912, followed in 1922 by a year spent as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, Tukoji Rao III, whom he characterised as politically ‘conservatissimus’. The country dazzled and confused him in equal measure—he described the princely state of Dewas Senior as ‘the oddest corner of the world outside of Alice in Wonderland’. Inevitably, he encountered the Anglo-Indian community, too. The effect of India on the British living there struck him forcefully. The statement of one Englishwoman that ‘I came out with no feelings against Indians, and now I can’t bear them’ would find its echo in attitudes in A Passage to India, in which exposure to the narrow-mindedness of the British community in India and what the novelist calls its ‘herd instinct’ corrupts the gentlest characters.
In Forster’s story, a young Englishwoman, Adela Quested, goes to India to marry a British official, Ro
