E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India at 100
“MY TIME SINCE I LANDED a week ago has been so marvellous that it will read like a dream”, E. M. Forster wrote on October 30, 1912, shortly after arriving in India for the first time. “It has been one of ceaseless excitement and surprise, and I have fallen straight into Indian (i.e. Native) life, which is a piece of luck that comes to very few Englishmen.” It was a piece of luck Forster badly needed. Two years earlier, to widespread acclaim, he had published Howards End, his fourth novel in five years, and he was now regarded as one of England’s leading novelists. He was, however, finding it difficult to settle to a new book, so the prospect of going to India came at a most opportune time. “I didn’t go there to govern it or to make money or to improve people”, he later wrote, listing what had traditionally attracted his fellow countrymen to the subcontinent. “I went there to see a friend.” That friend was Syed Ross Masood, an ebullient young Indian Muslim whom Forster had first met in 1906, when he was asked to coach him in Latin for entrance to Oxford. Despite a ten-year age gap, a close friendship had rapidly developed between the two men.
Their relationship became more complicated after Forster fell in love with Masood, who was demonstrative in his affections, but firmly heterosexual. The two men nevertheless reached some kind of accommodation and Masood repeatedly urged Forster to visit him when he returned to India. In December 1910 he wrote: “You know my great wish is to get you to write a book on India, for I feel convinced from what I know of you that it will be a great book”. It would be another two years before Forster made the trip, and another fourteen before that “great book”, A Passage to India, would be published.
Masood did more than merely put the idea of a novel about India into Forster’s head. “He woke me up out of my suburban and academic life, showed me new horizons and a new civilisation and helped me towards the understanding of a continent”, the author recalled. “Until I met him India was a vague jumble of rajahs, sahibs, babus, and elephants, and I was not interested in such a jumble.” Travelling to India would change not just Forster’s view of the country, but his life. It helped him out of a literary impasse by providing him with material for what is generally regarded as his greatest novel, and the country and its people became a subject to which he would repeatedly return. He wrote innumerable articles on Indian topics, became a regular broadcaster to the country on the BBC’s Eastern Service and made many Indian friends, particularly among writers, several of whom – Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, Raja Rao – he helped to get published. His reputation in India, though it has apparently rather fad
