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Summary
Summary
Britain's three-hundred-year relationship with the Indian subcontinent produced much fiction of interest but only one indisputable masterpiece: E. M. Forster's A Passage to India , published in 1924, at the height of the Indian independence movement. Centering on an ambiguous incident between a young Englishwoman of uncertain stability and an Indian doctor eager to know his conquerors better, Forster's book explores, with unexampled profundity, both the historical chasm between races and the eternal one between individuals struggling to ease their isolation and make sense of their humanity.
Author Notes
Edward Morgan Forster was born on January 1, 1879, in London, England. He never knew his father, who died when Forster was an infant. Forster graduated from King's College, Cambridge, with B.A. degrees in classics (1900) and history (1901), as well as an M.A. (1910). In the mid-1940s he returned to Cambridge as a professor, living quietly there until his death in 1970. Forster was named to the Order of Companions of Honor to the Queen in 1953.
Forster's writing was extensively influenced by the traveling he did in the earlier part of his life. After graduating from Cambridge, he lived in both Greece and Italy, and used the latter as the setting for the novels Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908). The Longest Journey was published in 1907. Howard's End was modeled on the house he lived in with his mother during his childhood. During World War I, he worked as a Red Cross Volunteer in Alexandria, aiding in the search for missing soldiers; he later wrote about these experiences in the nonfiction works Alexandria: A History and Guide and Pharos and Pharillon. His two journeys to India, in 1912 and 1922, resulted in A Passage to India (1924), which many consider to be Forster's best work; this title earned the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Forster wrote only six novels, all prior to 1925 (although Maurice was not published until 1971, a year after Forster's death, probably because of its homosexual theme). For much of the rest of his life, he wrote literary criticism (Aspects of the Novel) and nonfiction, including biographies (Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson), histories, political pieces, and radio broadcasts.
Howard's End, A Room with a View, and A Passage to India have all been made into successful films.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
Seventy years ago, a British government reeling from the costs of world war granted independence to India. The decision was made hastily and with a shocking lack of care for the people whose lives it affected and, in many cases, ended. The British partitioned the country at the moment they relinquished it, birthing Pakistan, and setting off population transfers and ethnic cleansing that left more than one million people dead. It was a fitting end: Far from pursuing a "civilizing mission," the British Empire had exploited India, enforcing a policy of "divide and rule" and entrenching HinduMuslim tensions. It is unsurprising that most of the brilliant histories and fictionalizations of the last years of the Indian struggle for independence were written by Indians and Pakistanis. The achievement of the novelist Paul Scott, the author of "The Raj Quartet," was to tell this story largely from the British point of view, and to do so not merely without illusions, but with astonishing acuity and grace. "In Ranpur, and in places like Ranpur, the British came to an end of themselves as they were," he wrote in the second volume. The clarity of such formulations did not prevent him from being criticized by writers, including Salman Rushdie, for focusing on the British rather than their victims. But this is to miss the point: No one better captured the psychology of imperialists - in all their delusion and naiveté and cruelty. Paul Scott was born in London in 1920 and joined the Indian Army in 1943. He wrote several uneven novels about British colonialism before embarking on the Quartet: "The Jewel in the Crown" was published in 1966, followed by "The Day of the Scorpion" (1968), "The Towers of Silence" (1971) and "A Division of the Spoils" (1974). Scott died in 1977, shortly after winning the Booker Prize for "Staying On," his novel that covers some of the same themes with some of the same characters. The central event of the story, which begins in 1942, is the rape of an Englishwoman, Daphne Manners. The blame is placed on her Indian boyfriend, Hari Kumar. But this crime, which allows Scott to explore issues of race and class and gender, is only one of many narrative strands, which together comprise an entire society of Brits in India. Part of what makes Scott's work so formidable is his particular style. Large chunks of the four volumes read like plain history, describing actual incidents. It's true that characters often express their points of view, and can sometimes serve as a mouthpiece for the author, but the politics of the book are never simplistic. Nor did Scott's anti-imperialism ever keep him from wrestling with the speed of the British departure ("the creation of Pakistan is our crowning failure," one character angrily declares) and the consequences of Gandhi's philosophical and political interventions. Scott followed E. M. Forster - whose "A Passage to India" he both greatly admired and critically examined - in his willingness to display the illusions of even his relatively open-minded characters. But of course the imperial project involved even darker shadings. A British brigadier is given the name Reid because it was almost an inversion of the spelling of Dyer, who led the real-life Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which British troops fired on a crowd of Indians, killing hundreds. Scott loathed men like Reid who could only see India as somewhere "curious and beautiful," and needing to be controlled. It is through the character of Ronald Merrick that we get the truest sense of British behavior in India, and the psychology behind it. An officer bitterly resentful of the educated Kumar, Merrick is "a man, moreover, who lacked entirely that liberal instinct which is so dear to historians that they lay it out like a guideline through the unmapped forests of prejudice and self-interest as though this line, and not the forest, is our history." Here we see Scott's skill in peering inward while simultaneously stepping back; it is this talent, more than any other, that defines these novels. Hilary Spuriing, Scott's superb biographer, wrote that he was so "baffled and appalled by the arrogant complacency of the British in India that he would in the end spend the greater part of his adult life unraveling its implications." Rushdie's complaint that the books were "ultra-parochially British" is true, but not in the sense he intended. The parochialism of many of the characters is precisely what makes them so fascinating. Merrick may tell himself that he has a "duty" to the "lesser breeds" he rules over, but deep down we know him to believe "in only two basic human emotions: contempt and envy." Understanding the forces of reaction remains crucial today: Witness the tabloid explosion in support of Brexit, chock-full of post-imperial images of Britain resuming world dominance without the supposed shackles of Europe. Misguided proposals for Making the United Kingdom Great Again should be opposed, but their mental and material roots - the regnant forces of reaction - need to be understood. Scott's remarkable work is both an illuminating window on a momentous chapter of history and a guide to our present troubles. Paul Scott captured the psychology of imperialists in all their naiveté and cruelty.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter I Except for the Marabar Caves--and they are twenty miles off--the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life. Inland, the prospect alters. There is an oval Maidan, and a long sallow hospital. Houses belonging to Eurasians stand on the high ground by the railway station. Beyond the railway--which runs parallel to the river--the land sinks, then rises again rather steeply. On the second rise is laid out the little civil station, and viewed hence Chandrapore appears to be a totally different place. It is a city of gardens. It is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a tropical pleasaunce washed by a noble river. The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible and in their turn hide the bazaars. They rise from the gardens where ancient tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered temples. Seeking, light and air, and endowed with more strength than man or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to greet one another with branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a city for the birds. Especially after the rains do they screen what passes below, but at all times, even when scorched or leafless, they glorify the city to the English people who inhabit the rise, so that newcomers cannot believe it to be as meagre as it is described, and have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment. As for the civil station itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms not, neither does it repel. It is sensibly planned, with a red-brick club on its brow, and farther back a grocer's and a cemetery, and the bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles. It has nothing hideous in it, and only the view is beautiful; it shares nothing with the city except the overarching sky. The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference--orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault. The distance between the vault and them is as nothing to the distance behind them, and that farther distance, though beyond color, last freed itself from blue. The sky settles everything--not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little--only feeble outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily, size from the prostrate earth. No mountains infringe on the curve. League after league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted. These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves. Chapter II Abandoning his bicycle, which fell before a servant could catch it, the young man sprang up on to the veranda. He was all animation. "Hamidullah, Hamidullah! am I late?" he cried. "Do not apologize," said his host. "You are always late." "Kindly answer my question. Am I late? Has Mahmoud Ali eaten all the food? If so I go elsewhere. Mr. Mahmoud Ali, how are you?" "Thank you, Dr. Aziz, I am dying." "Dying before your dinner? Oh, poor Mahmoud Ali!" "Hamidullah here is actually dead. He passed away just as you rode up on your bike." "Yes, that is so," said the other. "Imagine us both as addressing you from another and a happier world." "Does there happen to be such a thing as a hookah in that happier world of yours?" "Aziz, don't chatter. We are having a very sad talk." The hookah had been packed too tight, as was usual in his friend's house, and bubbled sulkily. He coaxed it. Yielding at last, the tobacco jetted up into his lungs and nostrils, driving out the smoke of burning cow dung that had filled them as he rode through the bazaar. It was delicious. He lay in a trance, sensuous but healthy, through which the talk of the two others did not seem particularly sad--they were discussing as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman. Mahmoud Ali argued that it was not, Hamidullah disagreed, but with so many reservations that there was no friction between them. Delicious indeed to lie on the broad veranda with the moon rising in front and the servants preparing dinner behind, and no trouble happening. "Well, look at my own experience this morning." "I only contend that it is possible in England," replied Hamidullah, who had been to that country long ago, before the big rush, and had received a cordial welcome at Cambridge. "It is impossible here. Aziz! The red-nosed boy has again insulted me in Court. I do not blame him. He was told that he ought to insult me. Until lately he was quite a nice boy, but the others have got hold of him." "Yes, they have no chance here, that is my point. They come out intending to be gentlemen, and are told it will not do. Look at Lesley, look at Blakiston, now it is your red-nosed boy, and Fielding will go next. Why, I remember when Turton came out first. It was in another part of the Province. You fellows will not believe me, but I have driven with Turton in his carriage--Turton! Oh yes, we were once quite intimate. He has shown me his stamp collection." "He would expect you to steal it now. Turton! But red-nosed boy will be far worse than Turton!" "I do not think so. They all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike. Do you not agree with me?" "I do not," replied Mahmoud Ali, entering into the bitter fun, and feeling both pain and amusement at each word that was uttered. "For my own part I find such profound differences among our rulers. Red-nose mumbles, Turton talks distinctly, Mrs. Turton takes bribes, Mrs. Red-nose does not and cannot, because so far there is no Mrs. Red-nose." "Bribes?" "Did you not know that when they were lent to Central India over a Canal Scheme, some Rajah or other gave her a sewing machine in solid gold so that the water should run through his state." "And does it?" "No, that is where Mrs. Turton is so skillful. When we poor blacks take bribes, we perform what we are bribed to perform, and the law discovers us in consequence. The English take and do nothing. I admire them." "We all admire them. Aziz, please pass me the hookah." "Oh, not yet--hookah is so jolly now." "You are a very selfish boy." He raised his voice suddenly, and shouted for dinner. Servants shouted back that it was ready. They meant that they wished it was ready, and were so understood, for nobody moved. Then Hamidullah continued, but with changed manner and evident emotion. "But take my case--the case of young Hugh Bannister. Here is the son of my dear, my dead friends, the Reverend and Mrs. Bannister, whose goodness to me in England I shall never forget or describe. They were father and mother to me, I talked to them as I do now. In the vacations their Rectory became my home. They entrusted all their children to me--I often carried little Hugh about--I took him up to the Funeral of Queen Victoria, and held him in my arms above the crowd." "Queen Victoria was different," murmured Mahmoud Ali. Excerpted from A Passage to India by E. M. Forster All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
