A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Jan. 26th, 2026 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI've just been checking my reading log, which confirms that I read five of E. M. Forster's six novels for the first time over the course of 2015*; I never got round to the sixth, I think partly because I just didn't want it to be over!, and also partly because I thought I would probably find the subject matter unappealing. In that I was right, but it is a very good book, and of course I'm glad I've read it.
A Passage to India (1924) opens with three Indian men discussing, among other things, whether it's possible to be friends with an Englishman; one of the Indians, a doctor named Aziz, is to be among our main characters, as is one of the Englishmen mentioned as examples, Cyril Fielding, a schoolmaster. The book then spends three hundred pages exploring this and related questions, and explaining why the conclusion reached in its final chapters is that the answer is no. This book is in some obvious ways a great departure from Forster's usual subject matter hitherto, but it does feel very like him that the wide-ranging political themes of a book like this should be approached first and last in terms of personal friendship.
The rest of the opening section is slow-paced and follows two English ladies lately arrived in India—Adela Quested, who may or may not be going to marry the local British magistrate Ronny Heaslop, and Mrs Moore, Ronny's mother. I liked this section, partly because it gets less far into mysteriousness than the rest of the book and I think Forster lost me in the mysteriousness a bit there, and partly because it's full of the kind of precisely-observed detail he does so well. Adela's slide from well-intentioned naivety to accepting the conventions of her place is especially painful.
Then the central incident around which the plot is structured: Dr Aziz takes Adela and Mrs Moore on a trip to see the Marabar Caves, an ominous and mysterious local landmark; something happens there, after which Adela accuses Aziz of having attempted to rape her while in one of the caves—which, as has already been made clear by the omniscient narrative, he didn't do. Aziz is arrested; the local British community whip themselves up into a furore of racism and oppression over the incident, while Fielding, who is friendly with Aziz and certain he couldn't have done such a thing, joins the Indians trying to defend him; finally, at his trial, Adela realises she was mistaken and retracts the accusation, so Aziz is freed. Well, there are various ways a plot like that could have gone badly wrong, and I don't think it does in any of them. My main feeling was what unpleasant reading such a well-observed account of a horrible political mess made: that sort of situation where people are against a genuinely bad thing (sexual violence) but for completely wrong reasons (they're racist against Indians) and everyone has very strong feelings and the whole thing turns into a great excuse to act on those completely wrong reasons as much as possible while missing the question of the genuinely bad thing entirely. I felt very much for both Aziz and Adela, but I think the politics really prevented me from getting properly attached to any of the characters, including Fielding. It's very good! But not enjoyable reading.
I wasn't expecting Forster to remind me of Picnic at Hanging Rock of all things, but Hanging Rock and the Marabar Caves do seem to have a lot in common as central symbols in stories about colonialist settings. Hmmm. As for the question of what actually happened in that cave, Forster doesn't seem to think it matters; and I can see how it doesn't for the story he's telling, but I'm not sure I'm convinced.
The book is split into three parts of unequal length, and on reaching the end of part two (in which all the above happens, and then Adela and Fielding both leave India) I was slightly puzzled as to why there was another one, because it felt like the book could almost have ended there. Part three is meandering and rather mysterious. Some of it is about the continuing (lack of) relationship between Aziz and Fielding, and their last meeting when Fielding returns to India again a few years later. Some of it is about religion, and Forster's view of Indian religion is perhaps one of the more interesting parts of this book, though I don't pretend to have understood it at all. Aziz is a Muslim (and the view of Islam presented here certainly feels unusual from a modern British point of view); much of part three involves significant descriptions of Hindu celebrations and rituals and how they become relevant events to the main characters. There might have been something slashy between Aziz and Fielding (that Forster dedicated the book to his own Indian friend, Syed Ross Masood, with whom according to the notes to the edition I read he was probably in love, says something), but there isn't room for it in among all that (also not helped by Fielding making a symbolically logical but personally completely undeveloped marriage offstage in the interim). Altogether it's a funny ending.
The thing I actually liked best was this anecdote about Forster during his Indian travels, from the endnotes:
*Complete Forster-reading stats to date:
A Room with a View: read twice, first in ~February 2015
Howards End: read four times, first in ~March 2015
The Longest Journey: read five times, first in ~March 2015
Where Angels Fear to Tread: read twice, first in ~June 2015
Maurice: read twice, first in ~October 2015
The Machine Stops: read once, ~January 2016
The Obelisk and Other Stories: read once, ~March 2016
Arctic Summer and Other Fiction: read once, June-September 2025
A Passage to India: read once, January 2026
A Passage to India (1924) opens with three Indian men discussing, among other things, whether it's possible to be friends with an Englishman; one of the Indians, a doctor named Aziz, is to be among our main characters, as is one of the Englishmen mentioned as examples, Cyril Fielding, a schoolmaster. The book then spends three hundred pages exploring this and related questions, and explaining why the conclusion reached in its final chapters is that the answer is no. This book is in some obvious ways a great departure from Forster's usual subject matter hitherto, but it does feel very like him that the wide-ranging political themes of a book like this should be approached first and last in terms of personal friendship.
The rest of the opening section is slow-paced and follows two English ladies lately arrived in India—Adela Quested, who may or may not be going to marry the local British magistrate Ronny Heaslop, and Mrs Moore, Ronny's mother. I liked this section, partly because it gets less far into mysteriousness than the rest of the book and I think Forster lost me in the mysteriousness a bit there, and partly because it's full of the kind of precisely-observed detail he does so well. Adela's slide from well-intentioned naivety to accepting the conventions of her place is especially painful.
Then the central incident around which the plot is structured: Dr Aziz takes Adela and Mrs Moore on a trip to see the Marabar Caves, an ominous and mysterious local landmark; something happens there, after which Adela accuses Aziz of having attempted to rape her while in one of the caves—which, as has already been made clear by the omniscient narrative, he didn't do. Aziz is arrested; the local British community whip themselves up into a furore of racism and oppression over the incident, while Fielding, who is friendly with Aziz and certain he couldn't have done such a thing, joins the Indians trying to defend him; finally, at his trial, Adela realises she was mistaken and retracts the accusation, so Aziz is freed. Well, there are various ways a plot like that could have gone badly wrong, and I don't think it does in any of them. My main feeling was what unpleasant reading such a well-observed account of a horrible political mess made: that sort of situation where people are against a genuinely bad thing (sexual violence) but for completely wrong reasons (they're racist against Indians) and everyone has very strong feelings and the whole thing turns into a great excuse to act on those completely wrong reasons as much as possible while missing the question of the genuinely bad thing entirely. I felt very much for both Aziz and Adela, but I think the politics really prevented me from getting properly attached to any of the characters, including Fielding. It's very good! But not enjoyable reading.
I wasn't expecting Forster to remind me of Picnic at Hanging Rock of all things, but Hanging Rock and the Marabar Caves do seem to have a lot in common as central symbols in stories about colonialist settings. Hmmm. As for the question of what actually happened in that cave, Forster doesn't seem to think it matters; and I can see how it doesn't for the story he's telling, but I'm not sure I'm convinced.
The book is split into three parts of unequal length, and on reaching the end of part two (in which all the above happens, and then Adela and Fielding both leave India) I was slightly puzzled as to why there was another one, because it felt like the book could almost have ended there. Part three is meandering and rather mysterious. Some of it is about the continuing (lack of) relationship between Aziz and Fielding, and their last meeting when Fielding returns to India again a few years later. Some of it is about religion, and Forster's view of Indian religion is perhaps one of the more interesting parts of this book, though I don't pretend to have understood it at all. Aziz is a Muslim (and the view of Islam presented here certainly feels unusual from a modern British point of view); much of part three involves significant descriptions of Hindu celebrations and rituals and how they become relevant events to the main characters. There might have been something slashy between Aziz and Fielding (that Forster dedicated the book to his own Indian friend, Syed Ross Masood, with whom according to the notes to the edition I read he was probably in love, says something), but there isn't room for it in among all that (also not helped by Fielding making a symbolically logical but personally completely undeveloped marriage offstage in the interim). Altogether it's a funny ending.
The thing I actually liked best was this anecdote about Forster during his Indian travels, from the endnotes:
...he was in the habit of going out before breakfast, birdbook in hand; according to Syed Ali Akbar (Illustrated Weekly of India, 18 October 1970), "his joy knew no bounds when he succeeded in identifying a bird."
*Complete Forster-reading stats to date:
A Room with a View: read twice, first in ~February 2015
Howards End: read four times, first in ~March 2015
The Longest Journey: read five times, first in ~March 2015
Where Angels Fear to Tread: read twice, first in ~June 2015
Maurice: read twice, first in ~October 2015
The Machine Stops: read once, ~January 2016
The Obelisk and Other Stories: read once, ~March 2016
Arctic Summer and Other Fiction: read once, June-September 2025
A Passage to India: read once, January 2026
no subject
Date: Jan. 26th, 2026 09:25 pm (UTC)Part of the point seems to be that it's unknowable and part of the result is that A Passage to India would make so much more sense to me as a supernatural novel.
no subject
Date: Jan. 28th, 2026 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 28th, 2026 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 28th, 2026 07:50 pm (UTC)It would make the most sense. The caves are already written like one of those places where reality goes strange—Adela and Aziz are presented as having mutually exclusive subjective experiences during the few moments they are separated in the cave system, as though they had been exploring a haunted house. Hers is suggested as a hallucination, but it doesn't need to be anything so psychologically realistic, especially not with that mystically negative ending where the earth, the rocks, the horses, the birds, the sky all affirm that now is not yet the time for friendship between Aziz and Fielding, the Indian and the Englishman. If all that happened in the caves was the earth itself shrugging aside another connection, the metaphysics of the novel would seem to permit it. I just can't tell if Forster intended that reading. It seems so very far beneath the awareness of the narrative if so.
no subject
Date: Jan. 28th, 2026 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 28th, 2026 06:30 pm (UTC)But like you, in the end I was glad I had read it and found it very well done. I do think it helps that Adela doesn't so much accuse Aziz of attempting rape as find herself too confused to contradict everyone else when they all assume that's what happened. Once they finally leave her alone to think (ironically, actually on the stand in court) she realizes that isn't what happened, although she doesn't quite figure out what did.
I think Forster intentionally leaves it a mystery, but as I said to
I hadn't thought of the Hanging Rock/Marabar Caves comparison, but yes, that makes perfect sense! (And reminds me I've been meaning to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock.) Both mysterious features, and both seem to symbolize a kind of rejection from the landscape itself toward the colonizers, which IIRC is echoed at the very end of A Passage to India, when Fielding asks Aziz why they can't be friends - "But 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 whole landscape and earth and sky saying "“No, not yet,” and...“No, not there.”"
no subject
Date: Jan. 28th, 2026 07:53 pm (UTC)If anything occurred in the Marabar Caves that can be explained, I want it to have been something like that. But I've never been able to tell if I over-sharpened my pattern recognition on weird and speculative fiction and if the reader is not intended to assume the two events are linked.
no subject
Date: Jan. 29th, 2026 06:39 pm (UTC)Yes, definitely! It was part of the awfulness of the situation, that she has so little control over what happens once the machinery of Outrage gets going, but again it was very well done.
I really like the idea that the supernatural personified-geography of the Marabar Caves is related to that final passage about the earth rejecting Aziz and Fielding's connection. The latter is a beautiful bit of writing and seems so sadly comprehensible in its simplicity, whereas the caves are an awful mystery, but I can definitely see a shared kind of meaning there.