A Passage to India 22

Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India, begins and ends with a question - can
the English and Indian races be friends and, at the end of the novel, the answer
appears to be no, "No, not yet". The novel, in dramatizing the repercussions
following Aziz's attempts to be decent to the English , his subsequent arrest,
trial and final anti-English sentiments, is largely constructed around this
question. Throughout the novel the barriers to inter-racial friendship in a
colonial context are explored, and personally experienced by Fielding and Aziz.
This is the first important point I would make - Forster's emphasis is firmly
placed on the realms of the personal and the individual, rather than the social
and political. And this, as we shall see, is an inherent characteristic of his own
sustained liberal humanist world-view, with the premium it places on personal
experience, individual experience, and the sanctity of the personal.

In this sense one can approach the novel in terms of a slogan first coined in the
1960s; "the personal is political, the political is personal". And this is the
vantage point from which I will explore the novel. However, it is worth noting
that A Passage is a rich, multi-layered novel, highly complex in both form and
argument, and it is indeed one of the most critically discussed novels within the
canon. This complexity derives from one of the narratives central mysteries (or
muddles): what exactly does happen in the Marabar Caves? What do the Caves
mean or suggest within the narrative? Furthermore Forster, from the self-
confessed perspective of the enlightened Western visitor, suggests that the
Caves themselves are symbolic for the "alien" "otherness" of India itself:
complex, ungovernable, bewildering, enigmatic

Various critical approaches have been applied to the novel, and a host of
allegorical interpretations attached to its central mysteries: it is about the
Encounter with sexuality, with Death, with the Hostility of Nature itself and the
emptiness at the "Heart of Things", the Encounter with the Unconscious or the
'Shadow'. Alternatively it is a narrative concerned with the limits of Christian
humanism or liberal idealism in the post-1918 world, or it is an exploration of
Imperialism, or it is a kind of existentialist exploration (underwritten by an
awareness that we need to impose meanings on the World or Nature, but must
also recognise that such meanings are inherently or finally false). How then
does one attempt to come to terms with the bewildering range of interpretation?
My answer would be to suggest that the novel is deliberately and consciously
polyphonic and symphonic in design, in common with many of Forster's works.
It deliberately raises the above issues and perspectives, weaving together
through various means - symbolism, imagery, the use of leit-motifs. It is not a
monophonic text, a thesis novel, although at times it might appear to present
itself in these terms.

Colonialism and Imperialism

It's a useful comment, from Martin Green, that "One could read all the works of
the Great Tradition, and never know that England had an empire" - the
canonical English texts deal, he comments, with "women and marriage,
personal relations, and alternatives to politics", but the financial source of the
wealth which lubricates these personal and social relationships is left generally
unspoken of. Forster's work faces that silence head on, raising issues of empire
and race in ways which had not been attempted earlier. His principal, and
contrasting antecedent as, of course, Kipling, and it is against Kipling's
representation of the 'East' as a training ground for manliness, decency and
character-building which Forster wishes to challenge. When the novel
appeared, in 1924, many Anglo-Indians were outraged: the portrayal, Forster
admitted, was exaggerated, but only slightly. Ronnie's views on his career are
parallel to the sympathies of contemporary young Anglo-Indians for whom the
'East' was, in the words of Disraeli, "a career". India was also seen, from this
Kiplingesque perspective, as a training ground, a frontier, a gymnasium within
which qualities such as manliness and character were to be assessed. We find
echoes of the influence of such views of India in George Orwell's portrayal of
his experiences in the 'East', in Burmese Days or 'Shooting an Elephant'.

Forster clearly ironises such views of the India as Career, as gymnasium or

testing ground, but it is the nature of the debunking which is important. Forster,
in common with a number of upper middle class intellectuals (such as Virginia
Woolf) was an anti-Imperialist, but his criticism of imperialism is liberal, as
opposed to Socialist or Marxist. For Forster, with his liberal emphasis on
education and individualist psychology, approaches the critique of Anglo-
Indian imperialism in terms of the predominance amongst the upper middle
classes of the "Public School Attitude": the priggishness, snobbery,
complacency, censoriousness, the lack of imagination and subtlety, the
philistinism and narrow-mindedness which the novel sees in the Anglo-Indians
is, for Forster, testimony of something deficient within the English national
character.
This emphasis on national psychology is a recurrent issue throughout Forster's
work, coupled with his ironic, and often highly satirical, portraits of the English
middle class culture from which he had emerged and, briefly, lived within. In a
1921 article, 'Notes on the English Character' Forster outlines his case more
fully: "For it is not that that the Englishmen can't feel - it is that he is afraid to
feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must
not express great joy or sorrow, or even to open his mouth too wide when he
talks - his pipe might fall out if he did. He must bottle up his emotions, or let
them out only on a very special occasion."

Forster, as someone who partly admires the virility of this type of Englishman,
remains ambivalent about the English Public School Character and the
"undeveloped heart" of the typical Englishman. Nevertheless, in A Passage, his
criticism of Anglo-Indian prejudice, snobbery and narrow-mindedness is
remorseless.

Whilst Forster emphasises the personal experience of Imperialism two points

should be noted: (i) he recognises that Imperialism in India is a system
(political, economic and social) and that India is a colonial subject, and (ii) that
Forster's account of India is culturally and historically specific. Although the
novel was first conceived in 1912, it is set in an India shortly after the Amritsah
Massacre, a notable and brutal episode in the history of English rule over India,
when there were debates about how Anglo-Indian rule could be liberalised
through new attitudes of courtesy and decency. Forster spent two years in India,
in 1912 and again in 1921/2, and did so as a paid secretary at a Hindu court. He
was closely involved in Indian affairs, supported the Ghandi Non-Co-operation
movement of the early 1920s, and continued to remain interested in Indian
affairs as a broadcaster and commentator in the inter-War period. For these
reasons Forster's portrait of Anglo-Indian rule is a well-observed portrait, from
the pen of someone who was thoroughly familiar with the realities of the Raj.

Personal Realities

Why the interest in India? For Forster the interest was highly personal. Forster
was a homosexual and it was his love affair with an Indian, Syed Ross
Massood, a long and turbulent affair, which opened his eyes to India. The novel
is dedicated to Massood and is, partly at least, an attempt to come to terms with
that relationship through its exploration of Anglo-Indian friendship. Massood
died in 1923, when Forster was working on the novel, and inevitably his
thoughts and feelings regarding the relationship worked themselves into the
novel's characterisation, its imagery, and its treatment of personal relationships.
It certainly explains a great deal about the characterisation of Aziz and the
narrative's attempt to see events from Aziz's point of view. In part also Forster's
treatment of inter-racial friendship draws upon his other affairs, most notably
with Mohammed, whom Forster had first met in Alexandria in 1917.
Throughout his novels Forster explores ways in which the barriers - of race, of
class, of age and gender - can be broken down or even transcended.
In Howards End, for example, the novel's insistence on the need
to connect("only connect") permeates the exploration of the various
friendships, and Forster's other Edwardian narratives continue this in their
presentation of Anglo-Italian relationships, or in the friendships which cross the
barriers of class. As a liberal novelist Forster is determined to explore these
friendships from all perspectives, from a variety of points of view.

A Polyphonic Novel

This takes us back to the issue of A Passage as a "polyphonic" novel, as a

novel with multiple points of view or perspectives, and also as a novel split
across a number of levels - political/social observation, spiritual/philosophical
speculation, and straightforward drama. One's reading of the novel is, therefore,
determined by the point of view from which the action is seen. If, for example,
we identify Fielding with Forster, as many readers do (and partly correctly), the
novel is about friendship and the difficulty of leading a life by liberal principles
Fielding, in terms of this reading, is the hero. From Aziz's point of view,
however, the novel takes on a different quality: Aziz moves from the nave
good-natured innocent who is eager to please to a more rigidly Indian
nationalist perspective. However, the novel also presents us with two more
points of view, that of Adela Quested and Mrs Moore. In the case of Adela the
novel allegorises her growth in personal honesty and personal truth - she moves
from a shallow desire to "see India" towards a more truthful sense of self, of
sexual and psychological honesty, than she had previously possessed. But it is
the point of view of Mrs Moore, who also confronts something in the Marabar
Caves, an emptiness and hollowness which undermines her form of Christian
idealism, which makes the novel particularly enigmatic. What is in the caves, if
anything, challenges all Mrs Moore's idealistic belief in the intrinsic
friendliness of Nature and of the Universe - she realises, possibly, that Nature
is, at best, indifferent, and possibly hostile. From this perspective many critics
have seen Forster using Mrs Moore's point of view as a means of exploring
fundamental issues about Good and Evil, about Truth and Reality. Certainly the
novel permits this reading, a reading of the "shadow side" of Christian
humanism and of the basic tenets of Western civilisation, and a prophetic
anticipation of the spirit which would lead to Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Yet over-arching all of these perspectives is the design of the novel itself, with
its tripartite structure modelling the 3 Indian seasons. It is also a novel
structured by the quest for India itself. The novel portrays a ever-shifting and
panoramic view of an 'India' which cannot grasped. References to
mystery/muddle that is India are frequent throughout the novel, but by the end
all we can say for sure is that we have various visions, but India remains.

Forster's Art

What then can be said of the novel's style, language, structure etc., assessed in
purely aesthetic terms? And what does Forster bring to the Novel form that it
did not have before? The answer is, I would suggest, that the novel is
essentially modernist, in its use of polyphony, its patterning, its refusal to offer
final interpretations. The perspectives offered through the novel are multiple,
characterisation shifts between the socially stereotypical and the elusive and
enigmatic. Forster appears, at first sight, to be an old-fashioned novelist, in the
mode of an earlier novelist such as Jane Austen, especially in his use of ironic
and omniscient narration. But look again. What we see is a consistent blurring
of narrational and character-based points of view, the indeterminate attribution
of perceptions, comments and observation. And all of this is part of a larger
whole in which subjectivity and personal perspectives predominate and are
celebrated. Forster was, at the time of writing Passage, consciously under the
influence of the French novelist Proust and, as a writer he was certainly not
unaware of the wider development of European modernism within the novel
form. The modernist novel, with its tendency towards the subjective, the
indeterminate, representing the flux and process of experience, was seeking to
find new ways of expressing reality, and Forster's novel is one further example
of this general tendency in twentieth century writing. However, we cannot
forget also that Forster's style also clings to the more traditional role of the
novelist, to represent and comment upon the social and empirical world. The
balance of modernist and traditional elements makes for an intriguing reading
experience, and characterises an individual writing talent who has been so
influential on later writers such as Paul Scott, Angus Wilson, John Fowles,
Doris Lessing, and so many more.