Review

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India explores the difficulty in the mutual understanding and cohabitation of the British and the Indian people in British India in the early twentieth century. The major events centers on an alleged attempted rape. Dr. Aziz, the warm-hearted young Indian, acts as guide to two English ladies, Mrs. Moore and Miss Adela Quested, to the Marabar Caves, where Adela, believing she is insulted by some guy, runs for life and later accuses Aziz of attempted rape. Although Adela realizes in court that Aziz is innocent and withdraws the accusation against the will of her own people, the damage has been done to the already antagonized local Anglo-Indian relationship and the trauma lasts with the victimized individuals.

When we are compelled to examine the cause of this farce, we step on Forster’s ambivalent mysticism. While the 1984 film adaptation directed by David Lean plays up the mental impact of Indian mysticism on Adela, and shows that what she experiences is merely a delusion aggrandized by the echo in one of the Caves, Forster the novelist leaves the truth variously speculated but never conclusively explained. Forster seems to indicate that what really happens in that Cave is not important. What is at stake is less the mysterious Indian culture than the English people’s inability to comprehend that culture, and less the physical conflict between the two peoples than the mental segregation which denies equality and resorts frequently to animosity.

Precede the charge there is among the British community a general distrust toward the Indians. Ronny suspects ill intention behind everything an Indian says, and Mr. McBryde, the British superintendent of police in Chandrapore, even goes so far as to say as a matter of fact that “All unfortunate natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30” (148; ch. 18). Forster observes the geographical-social separation in the statement which sounds almost mystical: “Somewhere about Suez there is always a social change: the arrangements of Asia weaken and those of Europe begin to be felt” (227; ch. 28). Yet nothing supports McBryde’s racial prejudice. Geographically the English have gone through the Passage, which is the Suez Canal, to reach the Indian land, but culturally the passage is never crossed. Besides this racial bias, they also share the fear from the 1857 Mutiny, also known as India’s First War of Independence, which has left indelible horror on the memory of the British, and sets them on their alarm with any slightest provocation.

Accompanying the explicit animosity there is the sense of dislocation and displacement which is less ready to be pinned down but which puts the English so much ill at ease. Mrs. Moore observes that “[t]he traces of young-man humanitarianism had sloughed off” on Ronny Heaslop, her son, who is the city magistrate of Chandrapore (42; ch. 5), while Adela, Ronny’s fiancée, finds to her disappointment that “India had developed sides of his character that she had never admired” (68; ch. 8), such as complacency and lack of sympathy. It would be easy to blame Ronny’s changed personality on the changed environment, yet Ronny’s change is also much a self-inflicted one. Modeling after his official superiors such as the District Collector, Turton, Ronny has decided that he is in India to rule, not to sympathize. Ronny, as Praseeda Gopinath points out, becomes a “type,” who subsumes himself to his imperial destiny and to the code of the Sahibs (206). To the Indians the British, with few exceptions, prefer to be treated like a whole, a community superior to and separated from the natives, rather than individuals to be associated with.

 “[N]o one can ever realize how much kindness we Indians need,” says Aziz to Fielding, the British headmaster of the college for Indians, “Kindness, more kindness, and even after that more kindness” (100; ch. 11). The “kindness” Aziz talks of may be expressed in another word: sympathy. Barbara Bush opines that the post-1918 empire was a period of consolidation rather than expansionism (78). Such consolidation, according to Gopinath, meant that “empire building went from conquest and control of savage lands to bureaucratic stabilization, the development of infrastructure, and domestication” (205). Much of the consolidation was carried out in bureaucratic ways, with individuals appearing in their official capacities, despite that fact that equal association and communication is what India really needed. For Forster the “Passage” is not only that through which Britain reaches India, but also that through which the Indians experience the touch of the English. “The roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India. [Aziz] felt caught in their meshes” (11; ch. 1). The development of the infrastructure is experienced like a hostile act of prey. Without sympathy and mutual understanding, the British India can never be consolidated.

The problem of dislocation is more complicated in the cases of Mrs. Moore and Adela, both of whom experience confusion and pain with the echo in the Marabar Caves. What is this echo? For both Mrs. Moore and Adela, this echo must be steeped with the Indian inexplicable, which they interpret with their personal experiences, thus incurring the crash. “The original sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil,” observes Fielding (244; ch. 31). It is not that the ladies lack sympathy; they are actually both eager to be kind to the people (although Adela had intended to see the “real India,” instead of the Indian people), but kindness is not enough. It seems that the very values and beliefs of the English have to be subjugated before an English could really understand India, for the real India, once judged by English criteria, must go awry. It is just as what Forster says of the Indian city: “the East had returned to the East via the suburbs of England, and had become ridiculous during the detour” (88; ch. 9).

Another factor which obstructs the British comprehension of India is the dividedness of the nation itself. India was a much fragmented nation in terms of politics, religion and the caste system. Under Forster’s pen India appears to be shapeless and indefinable. “How can the mind take hold of such a country?” (353; ch. 14) He asks. The country is where all things get blended, fields and city, ruins and civilization, nature and culture, science and religion, Moslem and Hindu, English and Indian. The country cannot be comprehended even by the Indians, because it is not a whole. “There is no such person in existence as the general Indian,” says Aziz (236; ch. 30). He has strived to be a respectable modern doctor under the English, imagined himself as one of the Mughal Emperors, flattered himself as a Moslem poet, but has never undertaken to be an Indian who loves this nation and speaks for all groups of the Indian people. As Aziz ponders on the fate of India he realizes that “[n]ot until she is a nation will her sons be treated with respect” (238; ch. 30). As long as the Indian people are divided by creeds and castes, they cannot be a whole, and as a result, their nation appears in the foreign eyes as disintegrated, unprincipled, and unrespectable. Even though scattered individuals may now and then brave the elements, the world would not approve. Thus when Aziz and Fielding seek each other’s friendship with great affection, the world, as Forster describe it, is not ready:

…the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices “No, not yet,” and the sky said “No, not there.” (367; ch. 37).