The strategy of McBryde, the prosecution’s lawyer, is to present his

interpretation of the facts of the case in such a dry, emotionless, and

“scientific” manner that they appear to be the truth. His interpretation of
Aziz’s actions and character resembles Ronny’s interpretation of Aziz’s
meeting with Mrs. Moore in the mosque in Chapter III. Mrs. Moore
acknowledged that Ronny’s ungenerous interpretation, though it could be
factually correct, ignored the warmth and trustworthiness of Aziz’s
character that she herself sensed. Here, McBryde’s account similarly
presents mere interpretations of fact as fact. McBryde’s account is devoid
of any recognition or sympathetic understanding of Aziz’s honorable
character. Additionally, McBryde’s account—while presenting itself as
“truth”—ignores specific angles of the case (such as the disappeared
Marabar guide) and depends on biased character witnesses such as
Panna Lal.
In response to the pretense of logic and fact that the English put forward,
Mahmoud Ali emotionally argues that the English have conspired to
withhold Mrs. Moore as a witness. This assertion prompts the Indian crowd
in the courtroom to begin chanting Mrs. Moore’s name. To the English,
these actions are proof of the Indians’ tendency to be overemotional and
superstitious; Forster, however, presents the incantation of “Esmiss
Esmoor” as a sort of collective Indian intuition about what is missing from
the English pretense of justice. Mrs. Moore comes to symbolize an ideal,
spiritual, sympathetic, and—perhaps most important—race-blind
understanding. Though Mrs. Moore herself succumbs to apathy after her
visit to Marabar and never offers to defend Aziz at his trial, she acquires an
almost godlike significance through the rest of A Passage to India. Forster
adeptly shows Mrs. Moore’s shortcomings as human, yet also presents her
as a positive symbol of unself-conscious and spiritually perceptive
interracial understanding. Forster implies that Mrs. Moore’s brand of
extraordinary, undemonstrative compassion is what is missing from the
English-style trial.
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Adela is able to declare Aziz’s innocence during the trial because she
experiences a vision during her testimony. This vision is, in a sense, a
positive version of the vision Mrs. Moore experienced after going into the
first cave at Marabar. In that cave, Mrs. Moore has a vision of all
differences being collapsed into the sameness of the echo, “boum.” This
lack of individuation and valuation frightens Mrs. Moore and makes her
cease to care about individual relationships. Adela’s vision is similarly
impersonal. She experiences an out-of-body re-creation of her expedition
into Marabar, and in it, she actually “sees” that Aziz did not enter the cave
after her. The impersonal, detached point of view of this vision allows Adela
to put honesty before her individual feelings or relationships with others.
Forster foreshadows this revelation of Adela’s relative unimportance when
Adela first enters the courtroom and notices the poor but godlike Indian
operating the fan. His aloofness and beauty suggest a detached, spiritual
perspective from which Adela and her trauma appear less significant.
Forster presents Adela’s experience of spiritual impersonality as a positive
vision that restores the balance of justice in the trial.
All the main events in A Passage to India, strangely, are actually
nonevents. The event of Adela’s experience of an assault in the Marabar
Caves turns out to be an imagined assault. The event that should be Aziz’s
conviction is rendered a nonevent by Adela, who quietly affirms Aziz’s
innocence. Similarly, in the aftermath of the trial, the strain on English-
Indian relations builds to a climax, but these tensions wither in the
oppressive heat of the sun. The riotous Indians who gather at the Minto
Hospital leave without violence to return home for naps. This anticlimactic
tendency shows that Forster cares less about plot events than about how
those events make an impression on individual characters and on the
social atmosphere of the novel. Furthermore, the series of anticlimaxes
reminds us of the pervasive sense of emptiness, absence, exclusion, and
nothingness at the core of A Passage to India: more important than what
we see occur is what we do not see occur; more important than what
happens is what does not happen.