Friday essay: A man out of time – E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India at 100 and the legacies of colonialism

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Date: 2024-12-19 19:29

Author: Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Senior Lecturer, Literary and Cultural Studies, Monash University

Original article: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-man-out-of-time-e-m-forsters-a-passage-to-india-at-100-and-the-legacies-of-colonialism-236324

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I was aware of David Lean’s cinematic adaptation of A Passage to India (1984) before I encountered E.M. Forster’s original novel, which celebrated its centenary in 2024. While the film was being shot on location, I had a vague sense of the ambition as well as the arrogance of those Britishers making a film in the heat and dust of India.

Heat and Dust – the title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 Booker Prize-winning novel, adapted for the screen by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1983 – seemed to be synonymous with the nation that became independent as India in 1947 and was muddling along with its millions.

Along with Richard Attenborough’s epic biopic Gandhi (1982) and The Jewel in the Crown, the Granada Television miniseries based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels (1965-75) – also broadcast in 1984 – these films gave me my first taste of how British storytellers were seeking to recreate Raj nostalgia and recuperate colonial history, while examining a central concern of Forster’s novel: the problem of the British in India.

India in the 1980s looms large for me in this reappraisal of A Passage to India. Those were heady days. The breezes of postcolonialism were beginning to reach us in our developing nation, deemed peripheral to the metropolitan corridors of Anglo-American academia, where theorists were interrogating what historian Ranajit Guha later defined as the “dominance without hegemony” of British colonisers.

India was also facing the headwinds of perestroika and glasnost. The approaching end of the Cold War would soon herald an economic liberalisation that ushered us into a new commercial-cultural firmament. Satellite television and MTV wedged out Doordarshan, the one and only national television broadcaster. Coca-Cola – banned since 1977 – would soon re-enliven our palates, seriously denting the market for local carbonated drinks like Gold Spot, Thums Up, Limca, Citra and Maaza.

We were feeling very fizzy. SPIC MACAY – the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth – ruled our social lives with its performance seasons at colleges. At Delhi University, Levi’s jeans hobnobbed with crisp cotton sarees. Pupul Jayakar’s Festival of India was inaugurated with much fanfare in Britain in 1982; it would go on to present “India through Indian eyes” in China, Japan, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Sweden and the USA. Oh yes, Indian fever was high.

It was in this internationalist milieu, during my masters program in English literature at Delhi University, that I encountered Forster’s novel in a syllabus with the colonial “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” script embedded in its suite of courses.

We had already been introduced to A House for Mr Biswas (1961) by the Trinidadian-Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul. His quaint yet acerbic tone posed considerable challenges. He invited us to imagine a Caribbean that few of us could locate on the map, let alone in our imaginations. But any pretensions that we, in the erstwhile colony, might have had a nascent postcolonial authority were lost in excited genuflections to Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) and Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985).

Into my life came A Passage to India, introduced by Dr Sanjay Kumar, a freshly-minted young lecturer, who seemed to herald radical winds of change in university teaching. We were held by his theatrical hands and ushered into the world of the Mosque, Caves and Temple of Forster’s novel.

Scrawled all over my Permanent Penguins copy of the novel are pencilled notes that attest to the rigorous education in close reading we received. Some of those notes still stand the test of time. This was the first time I encountered India as a subject of English literary studies, the first time I stumbled upon the Indian imaginary in British fiction.

The ‘great opportunity’

A Passage to India was not the world of genteel Edwardian angst Forster had depicted in A Room with a View (1908) and Howard’s End (1910). He was writing against the backdrop of rising demands from the Indian Home Rule Movement, already gathering momentum during his first visit to India in 1912-13, and active when he subsequently served as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas in 1921-22.

The novel is based on these two visits, which Forster deemed the “great opportunity” of his life, though the letters he wrote home, mainly to his mother, were (he later admitted) “too prone to turn remote and rare matters into suburban jokes”.

His epistolary “record of a vanished civilization” was published as The Hill of Devi (1953). In the preface, he says:

In editing I have had to cut out a great deal of “How I wish you were all here!” or “Aren’t Indians quaint!” I did not really think the Indians quaint, and my deepest wish was to be alone with them.

A Passage to India is not a far cry from this sentiment. But by the time the novel was published, Gandhi’s nonviolent civil-disobedience movement against colonial rule, informed by his philosophy of satyagraha (insistence on truth), had been underway for five years. As a study of prevailing social-sexual mores among British potentates from a decade earlier, Forster’s novel was already dated. In his own words, the “gap between India remembered and India experienced was too wide”.

Under Western eyes

So, the mise en scène.

Chandrapore: a fictional Indian town that is presented as “nothing extraordinary”, a place where the Ganges happened “not to be holy”, where an “indestructible form of life” lies flat under the “overarching sky”.

This is India “under Western eyes”, to borrow from Chandra Talpade Mohanty (not Joseph Conrad’s novel) – an India that Forster concedes, in his prefatory note to the 1957 Everyman edition, “no longer exists politically or socially”.

The bare bones of the plot: Adela Quested, a plain schoolmistress, and Mrs Moore, her chaperone, arrive in Chandrapore to cement a possible marriage with Mrs Moore’s son Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate. The two women are befriended by Cyril Fielding, principal of the local government-run college churning out English-speaking Indians, as per Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Education (1835).

Macaulay’s memorandum argued for a British Education Act that would shape “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. Students would be forced to jettison studies customarily conducted in Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, all the better to perform the role of “interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern”.

Miss Quested and Mrs Moore are desirous to meet “Indians”, much to the horror of the resident English, who are loath to allow “natives” within striking distance. “Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die,” remarks one of the many memsahibs, whom Forster unfailingly paints in the most offensive colours.

Ronny, a public-school boy to his core, hardened by his job “to hold this wretched country by force”, tries to rein in the two women by letting them know in no uncertain terms that “India isn’t a drawing room”.

Despite pettifogging objections, Ronny’s mother and his “much too individual” prospective wife are soon acquainted with a Hindu professor, Narayan Godbole, and a Muslim physician, Dr Aziz. As a “Mohammedan”, Dr Aziz is not allowed entry into the Chandrapore Club, even though a “few flabby Hindus” have been admitted.

This signalling of a colonial divide and rule policy cannot go unnoticed. The British were attempting to supplant the grand abiding influence of 500 years of the Muslim Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.

Scenes of British bigotry unfold “while the true India slid by unnoticed”. Giving us the temperature of the times, Aziz and his friends, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali, discuss whether “it is possible to be friends with an Englishman”. In particular, they interrogate the nature of the “ladies” of Empire, examining them for ingrained imperial prejudices.

Forster quickly brings us to the crisis that becomes the fulcrum of the narrative. A chord is struck between Aziz and Mrs Moore in an unexpected early meeting where both drop their guard. Aziz then offers to take Mrs Moore and Miss Quested on a trip to the famed Marabar Caves, based on the real Barabar Caves, the oldest surviving rock-cut caves in India, located in the state now known as Bihar.

“The caves are readily described,” writes Forster:

A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills. […] Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation – for they have one – does not depend upon human speech.

A metaphor for the deep dark dive into the womb and the untramelled psyche, for the supposed unknowability of India and its putative arcane spirituality, for the inability of speech to match up to the liberal-humanist credo by which Forster lived: all of this and more might be justifiably attached to the Marabar Caves.

At the caves, the well worn colonial trope of “an English girl fresh from England” attacked and sexually violated by a devious Oriental man is introduced.

Aziz is arrested on unspecified charges, Adela is returned into the bosom of a pernicious social apartheid, and the empire casts its racialised net over all its actors. “Miss Quested was only a victim, but young Heaslop was a martyr,” writes Forster; “he was the recipient of all the evil intended against them by the country they had tried to serve; he was bearing the sahib’s cross.”

Forster offers a poor, rather inadequate, if dramatic and well-meaning, resolution to his Shakespearean master-slave dialectic, which mandates that Caliban can only ever ravish Miranda, his coloniser Prospero’s daughter. There is a public trial. An Indian judge is appointed to preside over the case. Two nationalisms rear their heads. Adela admits to making a mistake at the critical juncture of her testimony. Aziz is acquitted.

At the conclusion of the court case, there are “shouts of derision and rage […] people screamed and cursed, kissed one another, wept passionately.” Aziz faints into the arms of Hamidullah. “Victory on this side, defeat on that – complete for one moment was the antithesis,” writes Forster. “Then life returned to its complexities.”

Then the courtroom empties until

no one remained on the scene of the fantasy but the beautiful naked god. Unaware that anything unusual had occurred, he continued to pull the chord of his punkah, to gaze at the empty dais and the overturned special chairs, and rhythmically to agitate the clouds of the descending dust.

So who is this “god”?

A swagger of influencers

Forster was part of the intellectual aristocracy of the Bloomsbury Group, which included artists and writers like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Wealthy, privileged bohemians out to smash pieties of polite society and Victorian sexual mores, this swagger of “influencers” (in contemporary parlance) shaped the era’s emerging feminism and modernism.

Forster was openly gay within his private circle, though not publicly. Maurice, his novel about love between two men, was written in 1913 but withheld from publication until after his death in 1970.

Yet A Passage to India, this oddest of odd works, presages the homosexuality Forster could not express in print during his lifetime. A scene during the trial, narrated through Adela’s eyes, gives voice to Forster’s heart. Adela notices a man, “the humblest of all who were present”, who has “no bearing officially on the trial: the man who pulled the punkah”:

… he seemed to control the proceedings. He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god – not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her […]

he stood out as divine, yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish-heaps […]

he seemed apart from human destinies, a male Fate, a winnower of souls.

Race and gender, caste and class, sex and desire coalesce in this passage, which goes on to provide the most penetrating critique yet of the empire to which Foster fully belonged, and repudiated. In the face of the punkah-walla’s “aloofness,” Adela questions her “particular brand of opinions, and the suburban Jehovah who sanctified them – by what right did they claim so much importance in the world, and assume the title of civilization?”

Adela’s confrontation with an overwhelming sense of infinitude in the Caves section of the novel leaves her with a persistent echo, which disappears at this moment.

Having given us his perspicacious insight into interracial relationships as a key site of colonial anxieties, Forster provides a strange reconciliation, via the “ragged edges of religion”, in the last section of the novel, titled Temple. Occupying a mere 30 pages in an almost 300-page novel, Temple relies heavily on the Hindu religious practices Forster had observed during his second sojourn in Dewas.

In The Hill of Devi, Forster devotes a section to what he deems “the most important of [his] letters home”. These described the Gokulashtami Festival, which celebrates the birth of Lord Krishna. The festival appears in A Passage to India, where it is described as a “wild and sincere” occasion, during which “all men loved each other, and avoided by instinct whatever could cause inconvenience or pain”.

There is a moment during the festivities when the music is silenced,

for this was ritually the moment of the Despised and the Rejected; the God could not issue from His temple until the unclean sweepers played their tune, they were the spot of filth without which the spirit cannot cohere.

Like Adela Quested’s observation of the punkah wallah at the trial, Forster’s sedulous sense of the despised appears within the divine. It provides an intimate insight into how he thought of bodies within the hierarchical and ideological morass of imperialism.

A passage through India?

A Passage to India has been subjected to charges of mediocrity as a work of modernism. It has been critiqued – most astringently by Edward Said – for perpetuating orientalist tropes. Benita Parry has criticised it for mystifying the idea of India. Postcolonial feminists have pilloried it for fetishising racialised bodies.

The most charitable theorists understand the novel as a treatise on how colonisation damages the coloniser’s mind, as well as that of the colonised, and as an impassioned plea for intercultural, interracial friendships.

In its 100th year, A Passage to India may also be interrogated for holding on to Forster’s liberal-humanist credo “only connect”. The question lingers, with even more urgency now, if such a hope of connection obfuscates the extractive economic and political conditions on which colonisation rests.

What if the colonised and the coloniser cannot understand each other in any way?

The title of Forster’s novel is derived from Walt Whitman’s 1869 poem A Passage to India, where the American poet sees the opening of the Suez Canal “as both a reason for celebration and an opportunity to connect with the spiritual traditions of faraway lands”.

Forster’s evocation of Suez is truer and darker. Mrs Moore dies on her passage home “across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea” via the Suez, leaving the novel to claim that “no poetry adorns it, because disillusionment cannot be beautiful”.

“Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it,” writes Forster; “they desire that joy shall be graceful, and sorrow august, and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.”

Thus his belief in the “undeveloped heart […] the heart untrained and untutored”, as he wrote of in his 1936 essay Notes on the English Character, fails to achieve any ethical connection through personal salvation.

The heartbeat of Howard’s End, the ultimate manifesto of liberal humanism, was “only connect”. A Passage to India puts paid to any such possibility. Two years after the trial, after Cyril Fielding has married Mrs Moore’s daughter Stella, he visits Aziz in Mau. He asks him: “Why can’t we be friends now? […] It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” The answer comes from the very earth:

“No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”

Attempting the impossible

In his 1909 manifesto, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Gandhi wrote:

I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbours, but in my conceit I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded.

Forster may be seen to be such a man. He was striving to achieve an idealistic, pure connection of friendship, untrammelled by the contingencies of race, religion and language. But his individual sense of egalitarianism and fraternity was negated by an India that was being swept by the winds of nationalism. Forster himself signals that, within the realm of the political, the personal may not survive: “socially they had no meeting-place.”

Forster traced an ancestral connection to the late-18th century abolitionist Clapham Sect. He was shaped by a reformist Edwardian milieu and was soaked in the charmed bohemianism of the Bloomsbury Group. And he was deeply attached to a mythic liberal humanism – which was confounded by what he encountered in revolutionary India.

With A Passage to India, his reputation in the fraught stratosphere of early 20th century English literature is both sealed and soiled.

In pedagogical, philosophical and political terms, Forster’s ambition was to show us competing beliefs and contradictory positions. His novel expresses a desire to reach out to the other, sit with biases and discomforts, humilities and hostilities – but not lose sight of civilisational injustices that make dialogue seem not only impossible, but unimaginable.

Forty years from when I first read A Passage to India, a desire for connection without attending to the contingencies of history and geography seems jejune. At this historical moment, when the world is entirely flammable, I cannot but be aware of the continuing fires of colonialism and the desire to break free of the horrendous Enlightenment binary that created it. If it is difficult to reconcile opposed ideas and positions today, to struggle between human identity and alterity, A Passage to India reminds me of how we got here.

Today, Gandhi and Forster seem to be at the irreconcilable ends of the legacy of empire: one arguing for satyagraha, non-violence and civil disobedience; the other pleading for liberal humanism and psychic integration. What their visions and works demand of us is an acute consideration of what Forster calls the “unsatisfactory and undramatic tangles” of human interaction – flawed and ineffectual, broken and unbridgeable.

A Passage to India is a reminder that we have not yet forded the gap.