A note on the textĮM Forster visited the caves of Barabar in January 1913 on his first visit to India. 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'' It is a bleak but prescient conclusion: the issue of east and west is no nearer a resolution today than it was 100 years ago. 'But the horses didn't want it – they swerved apart the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion… they didn't want it. In a passage that caused him great creative agony, he wrestled with the complexity of an east-west understanding. The Aziz-Fielding relationship tormented Forster. There, in the closing part of the novel, he is visited by Fielding, the British schoolteacher who had been his great confidant and friend. 'I am an Indian at last,' he says, and he stands alone in the monsoon rain. Eventually, after a trial, Adela withdraws her charges and Aziz, radicalised and angry, moves to the native state of Forster's imagination. In the crisis, Aziz, already disdained as 'spoilt westernised', is imprisoned. There, in a classic episode of Forsterian 'muddle', something happens between Aziz and Adela that disgraces the doctor, and inflames the furious hostility of the British sahibs. Each, in turn, is encouraged by the head of a local government college.Īziz arranges for Miss Quested and Mrs Moore to visit the famous caves at Marabar. Rejecting the prejudice and insularity of the British community, she sets out to investigate the 'real' India, assisted in her search by Dr Aziz, a young Muslim doctor who naively wants to promote an entente between the master race and its colonial subjects.

But Miss Quested, as her name implies, has other ideas.

The idea is that Adela will meet and marry Mrs Moore's son Ronny, an eligible but bigoted British civil servant, the city's magistrate.

Thus: when Adela Quested, an English schoolteacher, and her companion Mrs Moore arrive in Chandrapore they enter colonial India, a place obsessed with the promotion of British values and the British way of life. The part of A Passage to India that most readers remember, of course, is the tortuous romantic drama of the Marabar caves. Yet – because Forster's concern is the forging of a relationship between a British schoolteacher and a Muslim doctor, reflecting the larger tragedy of imperialism – A Passage to India stands as a strangely timeless achievement, one of the great novels of the 20th century. Today, approaching 100 years after its composition, the novel is probably as 'dated' as ever. I n 1957, EM Forster, looking back in old age, wrote that the late-empire world of A Passage to India 'no longer exists, either politically or socially'.

Em forster a passage to india