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An Unsettling Read

It seemed somewhat trite to be opening E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India on my first flight to the subcontinent. Nothing could more obviously have given away the fact that I knew virtually nothing about the place to which I was headed. I fancied that some of the other travellers – international businessmen, rich European families off to exotic islands and manual workers on their way home from the Gulf States, all of them more accustomed to the long haul to Asia than myself – were perhaps rather amused by my choice of reading. It must have looked as if, like the main female character in the novel, the terribly British Adela Quested, I thought the ‘real India’ could somehow be pinned down and examined, without realizing that there were in fact, as Forster himself puts it, ‘a hundred Indias’ (and probably more).

Nevertheless, as the Gulf of Qatar slipped from view on the second leg of the journey, I plunged eagerly into the book’s central mystery. In the (fictional) British-occupied town of Chandrapore, a
young visitor, Adela Quested, claims that she has been humiliated – either assaulted or raped, it is not clear which – during an expedition to the caves at Marabar by Dr Aziz, who works at the local hospital. She has come to India to marry Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate and son of her chaperone, Mrs Moore – an English lady of liberal Christian views. The incident causes outrage in the British community, and its members rise to support Adela. Aziz meanwhile is supported by his friend, Fielding, the British Principal of the local Government college. As a result, Fielding is shunned by his fellow-countrymen.

As the long flight plugged on through the night, Forster’s powerful descriptions of the scenery and climate of India beckoned me. I longed to feel the way the Asian heat ‘leapt forward’ hour by hour, to see the ‘angry orange’ sun that ‘had power without beauty,’ and to smell the toddy palms and neem trees and sweet ‘green-blossomed champak’. I wanted to feel beneath my feet what Forster describes as ‘something hostile in the soil’ and see the sky at night when ‘the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault’.

At one level, A Passage to India is a fine detective story, and I was eager to solve its central mystery. What really had happened to Adela Quested in the

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It seemed somewhat trite to be opening E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India on my first flight to the subcontinent. Nothing could more obviously have given away the fact that I knew virtually nothing about the place to which I was headed. I fancied that some of the other travellers – international businessmen, rich European families off to exotic islands and manual workers on their way home from the Gulf States, all of them more accustomed to the long haul to Asia than myself – were perhaps rather amused by my choice of reading. It must have looked as if, like the main female character in the novel, the terribly British Adela Quested, I thought the ‘real India’ could somehow be pinned down and examined, without realizing that there were in fact, as Forster himself puts it, ‘a hundred Indias’ (and probably more).

Nevertheless, as the Gulf of Qatar slipped from view on the second leg of the journey, I plunged eagerly into the book’s central mystery. In the (fictional) British-occupied town of Chandrapore, a young visitor, Adela Quested, claims that she has been humiliated – either assaulted or raped, it is not clear which – during an expedition to the caves at Marabar by Dr Aziz, who works at the local hospital. She has come to India to marry Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate and son of her chaperone, Mrs Moore – an English lady of liberal Christian views. The incident causes outrage in the British community, and its members rise to support Adela. Aziz meanwhile is supported by his friend, Fielding, the British Principal of the local Government college. As a result, Fielding is shunned by his fellow-countrymen. As the long flight plugged on through the night, Forster’s powerful descriptions of the scenery and climate of India beckoned me. I longed to feel the way the Asian heat ‘leapt forward’ hour by hour, to see the ‘angry orange’ sun that ‘had power without beauty,’ and to smell the toddy palms and neem trees and sweet ‘green-blossomed champak’. I wanted to feel beneath my feet what Forster describes as ‘something hostile in the soil’ and see the sky at night when ‘the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault’. At one level, A Passage to India is a fine detective story, and I was eager to solve its central mystery. What really had happened to Adela Quested in the caves? Did the morose Dr Aziz indeed assault her, or was she attacked by someone else (perhaps the guide who accompanies the party)? Alternatively, could she have been attacked not by a man at all, but by a bat or some other animal? Or was she simply confused by the heat? Worse still, was she lying? ‘What happened to Adela Quested in the Marabar caves doesn’t matter. It is only part of the strange unsettled quality of life in India which often oppressed first time visitors and brought out unexpected sides to their personality,’ declared an editor’s footnote in the edition I was reading. I found this disconcerting. How could it not matter what had happened to Adela? The remark seemed to challenge the way I was reading the novel. I had only half finished it when the plane landed in Delhi, and I closed it with a distinct feeling of disquiet. The post-Independence, twenty-first-century India that I arrived in was obviously very different from the country Forster had visited nearly a hundred years before. He first travelled there in 1912–13 and began A Passage to India soon after his return to England, though he was at that point unable to finish it (he only completed it after a second visit in 1921). Yet I recognized India’s highly unsettling atmosphere at once. On the road from Delhi airport to the city centre an utterly chaotic scene passed before me: cars and trucks veered across lanes at whim while cows wandered untended amidst the dual carriageway traffic. I found myself laughing at the sheer impossible gaiety of the place, then tearful as tiny children thrust their hands through the windows of the moving car, begging for money. The sheer barrage of noise reminded me of an early passage in Forster’s novel where Dr Aziz stands inside a mosque and listens to the ‘complex appeal of the night’:
In the stillness, he heard many small sounds. On the right, over in the Club, the English community contributed an amateur orchestra. Elsewhere some Hindus were drumming – he knew they were Hindus because the rhythm was uncongenial to him – and others were bewailing a corpse – he knew whose having certified it in the afternoon. There were owls . . . the Punjab mail . . . and flowers smelt deliciously in the station-master’s garden. But the mosque – that alone signified . . .
Along the roadsides in modern Delhi, a mixture of people – women clothed from head to foot in the black hijab, boys holding hands, Hindu drivers with garlands of flowers dangling inside their rickshaws, Sikhs in enormous turbans and sadhus in traditional white lungis – intermingled peaceably enough. And behind them stretched an endless scramble of temples, mosques and cricket grounds. Here and there, the remnants of Empire, administrative bungalows and Western-looking monuments, could be glimpsed behind wooden trestles loaded with coconuts. I was strangely and simultaneously entertained, appalled and aggravated by it all and wondered whether I was already encountering the ‘unexpected sides to my personality’ that Forster’s editor had predicted. Where and how, I wondered, had the British fitted into this chaotic scene? What was their legacy? And what their culpability? In the novel, faced by the confusion of life in India, the elderly Mrs Moore experiences an immense loss of faith on the day of Adela’s embarrassment in the Marabar Hills. Realizing that any sound made in the caves, whether swearing or ‘lofty poetry’, or the voice of ‘poor little talkative Christianity’, would result in the same echo – ‘ou boum’ – she begins to feel overwhelmed and terrified. Whilst not quite experiencing Mrs Moore’s sense of existential despair, I could understand how Forster’s own passage to India must have brought to the fore a whole host of questions, not just about the continent itself, but about the way all societies conduct, structure and explain their lives. What most struck Forster about India was its ‘lack of form’. He considered it a landscape without horizons and outlines, a startling contrast to the ‘Mediterranean harmony’ that he had written about in his earlier Italian novel, A Room with a View (1908). It was this ‘formlessness’ that Forster wanted to describe, and the insights to which that gave rise. All this, I realized, was of far more interest to him than the vexed question of Adela’s honour. It was only on my journey out of India three weeks later that I found the peace and quiet necessary to resume my reading. By then, I had realized exactly what that early enigmatic footnote had been getting at. Perhaps I had indeed been bowled over by ‘the strange unsettled quality of life in India’. I was, anyway, no longer interested in what had happened to Adela Quested. Now, there seemed to be far more interesting matters at stake, a multiplicity of dimensions that I had at first either missed or at least rated as of secondary importance. The incident in the Marabar caves is, in fact, simply the hook around which Forster weaves a host of narratives about life’s larger concerns: race and culture, men and women, religion and sexuality. And it was these that now leaped off the page. Forster is, of course, principally concerned with the sheer arrogance and lack of cultural understanding of the British administrators in India. (Aziz – a respected doctor – is not allowed into the Chandrapore Club even as a guest.) But Forster reserves his strongest condemnation for the memsahibs whom he sees as particularly unpleasant to the Indians. Indian women are totally absent from the novel and it is significant that Aziz’s wife is dead. There is a rich tissue of religious discussion in the novel as well. As Forster puts it, ‘the fissures in the Indian soil are infinite’. The British are Christians, Aziz is a Muslim, but Hinduism (‘riven into sects and clans, which radiate and join, and change their names according to the aspect from which they are approached’) also plays its part through Fielding’s enigmatic colleague at the Government college, Professor Godbole, and through the ‘annual antic’ (a huge, colourful and reconciliatory festival) towards the close of the novel. Sexuality too is explored – if subliminally – in one of the book’s strongest relationships, the cross-cultural friendship of Aziz and Fielding. Nobody will convince me that Forster was not writing about latent homosexual desire when he describes how Aziz lends Fielding a collar stud as he dresses one evening. Forster in fact dedicated A Passage to India to Syed Ross Mahood, a young man to whom he had become tutor and with whom he had probably fallen in love. A Passage to India is an unsettling read. If you begin it by feeling sympathetic to the British, you will soon be shaken out of your complacency. Have compassion for Adela Quested and you will be shown quite clearly that she does not deserve your interest. But the Muslim Aziz is not a wholly sympathetic character either. Towards the end of the novel he unfairly misjudges Fielding, and by the time he dramatically blurts out on the last page, ‘We shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea . . .’, he had certainly lost some of my sympathy. If you are looking for answers you will be disappointed; Forster is not trying to solve a set of philosophical problems, merely to draw attention to them. Like Fielding, he believes that ‘the world is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence’. But as the last lines of the book indicate, they are not ready to do so yet. As I sipped my tea in the early hours of the morning on the flight back to England, I reflected that the experience of reading A Passage to India is rather like the experience of being in India for the first time. You are forced to confront your preconceptions and reassess your allegiances, and everything, but everything, is much more complex than it at first appears. I am not, of course, suggesting that you have to visit India to read the book as Forster intended it. That indeed is its beauty. For what Forster has done is to create, in the texture and shape of the novel, the same unsettling effect that a real visit to the country has on you, to ignite a desire to understand other ways of being and experiencing and to help you imagine a workable tolerance. In our post-9/11 world it is something we sorely need.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © Ruth Symes 2007


About the contributor

Ruth Symes is a freelance writer and historian. After an academic career in Cambridge and York, she now lives in Manchester with her Indian husband.

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