English Literature:
The Victorian and the Twentieth Century
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
91501083
92501063
92501001
92501020
93501044
93501005
鄭敦哲
張馨文
陳佩璇
魏愷玟
楊欣翰
蕭東意
Table of Contents:
A. Summary & Structure
蕭東意
p3
B. Character Analysis
楊欣翰
p5
C. Plot Analysis
張馨文
p6
D. Themes
陳佩璇
p10
鄭敦哲
p13
E. Critique
魏愷玟
2
Summary and Structure
At the beginning of the novel, we can see a brief description of the main settings like
Chandrapore, the city surrounded by the Ganges, and the Marabar caves nearby. In
fact, the introduction of these settings not only implies the irreconcilable conflicts
between the Englishmen and the Indians but foreshadows the later events. Not until
the second chapter starts are the characters introduced.
Doctor Aziz, Hamidullah, and Mr. Mahmoud Ali are arguing about whether it is
possible or not for Indians to befriend with Englishmen. Later, a servant of
Mr.Callendar, the Civil Surgeon, brings a message to Aziz because Mr. Callendar
wishes to see him. Aziz visits Mr. Callendar in vain and then he leaves to a nearby
mosque, where he meets Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore comes to visit her son, Mr. Heaslop,
the city Magistrate, and just leaves the Chandrapore club to breathe fresh air. They set
up a fine relationship that Mrs. Moore regards Dr. Aziz as a god person for warning
her about her wrong behavior in the mosque (a misunderstanding) and the danger of
walking alone at night. Aziz is also moved by Mrs. Moore who treats him like a
friend.
Mrs. Moore returns to the club, where she meets her companion from England, Adela
Quested, who may marry her son, Heaslop. After Mrs. Moore talks about her
exploration in the mosque, Adela expresses her strong interest about India and the
man Mrs. Moore mentioned. However, Mr. Heaslop warns her mother that Aziz’s
purpose is only to impress her under that friendly mask. Few days later, Mr. Turton,
the collector, holds a Bridge Party, which offers Adela ans Mrs. Moore more
opportunities to meet more Indians. Mr. Fielding, the principle of the Government
College, is impressed with Adela’s friendliness and invites her and Mrs. Moore to the
tea. He also invite Professor Godbole and Aziz, according to Adela’s request. They
have a pleasant afternoon until Mr. Heaslop comes to take Adela way. Adela feels that
Heaslop’s kind heart has changed, so she tells Heaslop that she refuses to marry him.
At that night, they have a car accident together. It is the excitement of the accident
that makes Adela changes her decision.
Few days after the tea, Aziz suggests an exploration tour to the nearby Harabar Caves.
At that day, Mr. Fielding and Professor Godbole miss the train to Marabar.
Consequently, Aziz continues the tour with two ladies, Adela and Mrs. Moore. Inside
one of the caves, Mrs.Moore, feels uncomfortable with the noise and the crowded
retinues, so that Aziz, Adela, and a tour guide go on to other caves when Mrs. Moore
3
taking rest behind. During the tour, Adela suddenly realize that she does not love
Heaslop, and she then ask an offending question to Aziz whether he has more than
one wife or not. Aziz turns in to another cave in rage and then he can not find Adela
after he turns back to her. Aziz scolds the guide by slapping on his face, and then the
guide run away. When Aziz goes back to Mrs.Moore, Mr. Fielding arrives. Aziz is so
glad to see Mr. Fielding that he doesn’t know Adela has taken a car hastly back to
Chandrapore. Later on, Aziz is accused by Adela of having raped her, and this is the
Climax of the story.
Mr. Fielding believes that Aziz is innocent so he joins the Indians’ defense of Aziz. At
the same time, the tension between Indians and Englishmen are getting increasingly
tenser that English women are not allowed to go out. Mrs. Moore is in a miserable
condition that she wants to go back to England early than the schedule. Heaslop
agrees to let his mother go back earlier, but she died on the voyage. At the Aziz’s trail,
Adela, who is ill and miserable, declares that Aziz is innocent at every one’s surprise.
Fielding takes Adela to the Government College and begins to respect her for being a
brave woman against the Englishmen. Later, Heaslop break up with Adela and cancel
the marriage. Adela then goes back to England. Aziz is angry at Fielding that he
befriends adela, who almost ruin his life. Finally, Fielding goes to England, and Aziz
moves to a place where he wishes he can never meet Englishmen again.
Aziz becomes the chief doctor of Rajah of Mau two years later. He heard that Fielding
has marries Adela not long after he goes back to England. Because of this, Aziz
becomes hateful about English people. One day when he visits an old temple with his
three children, he meet Fielding and his brother-in-law, Ralph Moore, and he realizes
that Fielding actually marry Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Stella Moore. Aziz becomes
friend with Ralph, and after his rowboat accidentally runs into Fielding’s their
friendship also renewed. They go for a ride together before Fielding is about to leave,
Aziz says that they would be friend when English are out of India.
Exposition: In the mosque where Aziz meets Mrs.Moore. Aziz represent the Indians,
and Mrs. Moore represents British.
Raising Action: They take a explorative tour to the Marabar Caves.
Climax: Aziz is accused by Adela that he has raped her. And it cause the tension
between Englishmen and Indians.
Falling Action: Adela declares that Aziz doesn’t rape her in the court. And Aziz is
angry at Fielding that he befriend Adela.
Conclusion: Aziz tells Fielding that they can be friend when English are out of India.
4
Characters
Dr. Aziz
Aziz is an Indian doctor in Chandrapore. He is intelligent, emotional and
impetuous, also has some extremes and contradictions in his deep mind.. As a person
in high social class in India, he has more opportunities to make friends with English
people. He tries to make friend with Adela, Mrs. Moore and Fielding, but he still feel
self-abased. That’s the reason he pretends he was sick to avoid Adela and Mrs. Moore
to see his house, even though his house is much better than other Indians, he abases
himself as an Indian. Moreover, he is just like many Indians at that time, on the one
hand, they appreciate the modernization and influences from English, but on the other
hand, they abhor English and the oppress toward their people, just like Aziz’s parts of
personalities, extreme and contradiction.
Despite his contradictions, Aziz is an affectionate person, we can see his
affection appears when he has some intuited connections with Mrs. Moore and
Fielding. At first, he was very surprised that Mrs. Moore, as an English person, can
treat him so friendly without any racial gap. But the author interferes to their
connections by the incident in the cave, after the incident, Aziz’s extremes come out
and he was totally despair of English people. His despair causes his offense toward
Fielding, and he reacts following his heart without evaluating the facts. Aziz, in this
novel, stands for the central concern of the possibility of friendship between English
and Indian.
Cyril Fielding
Fielding is the principal of the government college in Chandrapore. He devotes
to develop friendship with Indians, and he always tries to educate the Indians to be
individuals. He has more sympathy toward Indians than the other English in India.
Therefore, he becomes the major threat to the Englishmen in India, his education on
Indians results in a movement of free thought that might have great effect on
English’s colonial power. He has no obvious racial discrimination on Indians, and
that’s why he can befriend Aziz sincerely, and ignoring the alliance from his own race.
Fielding’s personality and attitude change after Aziz’s trial. He comes to be
frustrated by Indians as well as English. His English sensibilities become more
prominent that he tends to proportional and reasonable against Indian’s sensibilities.
By the end of this novel, the author seems to identify more with Aziz, and Fielding
becomes not so likable because of his increasing identification with English.
Adela Quested
5
Adela is a English lady who is young, intelligent and full of curiosity. She
travels to India with Mrs.Moore and expects to engage to Mrs. Moore’s son, Ronny.
As an individualist and free thinker, these qualities lead her to question the behavior
and standard of English toward Indians. Like Mrs. Moore, Adela is also eager to see
the “real India.” However, Mrs. Moore’s connection with India is more affectionate
and genuine, Adela seems to see India on intellectual aspect. Adela never really put
her heart to the task, and she never has any connection with India consequently.
Adela’s experience in the cave makes a huge crisis on the story and also on her
mind, her characters changes greatly in those days after she accused Aziz. She begins
to realize the echo in the cave represents something out of her rational comprehension.
Adela feels pain not only because she can’t explain her experience, but also her doubt
to herself and the damage she had done to others.
Mrs. Moore
Mrs. Moore is an elderly woman, she travels to India with Adela, and she hope
Adela to marry his son, and to see what the real India is. At the beginning of her trip,
dislike Adela’s rationality, she successfully makes friends with Indians on an intuitive
connection, and put her heart on their friendship. But her experience in the cave
makes her mind turn into apathetic, and she leaves India without bothering Aziz’s trial
and overseeing her son’s wedding. In this novel, Mrs. Moore is a representative
symbol, she represents the ideal solution to the problem between English and Indian,
that the gap can only disappear when people are connected spiritual and open-minded.
Plot Analysis
1. Chapter One
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 back, 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…. The very wodd seems made
of muc, 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
6
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….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 new-comers cannot believe it to be as meager as it
is described, and have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment.
Although brief, chapter one outlines the physical features of Chandrapore as
well as the principal themes of the novel. There is a complete contrast between
Indian and British. The systematically planned construction reflects the English
sense of organization and skillfulness. Chandrapore, a miniature of India, an
ancient land of diverse and divided people, is a country ruled by the British
Government searching in the dark for her destiny. The regional geography
foreshadowed the divisions of cocial life an cultural conflicts and brings out the
principal themes of division and union, fission and fusion, the self and the
non-self. It is a political novel which focuses conflicts on the race relations,
between Indians and English, and among themselves.
2. Chapter 3
Another pillar moved, a third, and then an Englishwoman stepped out into the
moonlight. Suddenly he was furiously angry and shouted:’Madam!Madam!’
‘Madam, this is a mosque, you have no right here at all; you should taken off your
shoes; this is a holy place for Moslems.’
‘I have taken them off.’
‘You understand me, you know what others fell. Oh, if others resembled you!’
Rather surprised, she replied:’I don’t thin I understand people very well. I only know
whether I like or dislike them.’
‘The you are an Oriental.’
But she did nottake the disappointment as seriously as Miss Quested, for the reason
that she was forty years older, and had learnt that life never gives us what we want at
the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
The encounter in the mosque opens out the possibilities of friendship and
7
affection between the two races. The mosque symbolizes the values of Islam, the
equality of all men and universal brotherhood, represented by Aziz. His later
utterances to Mrs. Moore are an index of his deep affection and admiration for
her and a total reversal of his earlier snarl.
3. Chapter 5
The Bridge Party was not a success—at least it was not what Mrs Moore and Miss
Quested were accustomed to consider a successful party. They arrived early, since it
was given in their honour, but most of the Indian guests had arrived even earlier, and
stood massed at the farther side of the tennis lawns, doing nothing.
A little group of Indian ladies had been gathering in a third quarter of the grounds,
near a rustic summer-house in which the more timid of them had already taken refuge.
‘I consider they ought to come over to me.’
‘I refuse to shake hands with any of the men,…’
‘You’re superior to them, anyway. Don’t forget that. You’re superior to everyone in
India except one or two of the Ranis, and they’re on an equality.’…She had learnt the
lingo, but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of the politer forms and of
the verbs only the imperative mood.
Indeed all the ladies were uncertain, cowering, recovering, making tiny gestures of
atonement or despair at all that was said….
【The Collector】made pleasant remarks and a few jokes,…, was consequently
perfunctory. When thery had not cheated, it was bhang, women, or worse,…and at the
proper moment, he retired to the English side of the lawn.
The party is an attempt to make East meet West and explore areas of friendship.
It is actually a comic contrast to the spirit meeting in the Mosque of Aziz and
Mrs. Moore. The party seems like one of Turton’s jokes-superficial in substance
and futile in effect. The English ladies, especially Mrs. Turton, behave stiffly, and
the Englishmen’s efforts are somehow frustrated by their wives. We can also see
their discrimination against the Indians in associating them with negatives thing,
such as drugs or lechery. The Indians too are too self-conscious to share freely in
the pleasure of the conversation. Therefore, this event becomes an ironic symbol
of man’s indifference to man, set against the wider horizon of a universe which is
open to some and closed to others at the same time. It does not really get beyond
an exchange of surface graces and superficial civilities.
4. 【The】echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on
life….’Everything exists, nothing has vlue.’
Mrs. Moore was a religious woman who aimed at becoming one with the
8
universe. She suffered a spiritual and physical breakdown at the cave when it
spoke to her of a universe without value. Morals and good and evil were
destroyed and Nothingness prevailed.
5. Chapter 15
‘What about love?’….She and Ronny-no, they did not love each other.
She followed at her leisure,…and not seeing him, she also went into a
cave,…wondering with the other half about marriage.
On entering the cave, she considers her personal problems, the danger of
marriage without love and of pure animal instincts dominating life’s major
choices. Adela seems to be torn between the forces of reason and passion, and the
feeling of assault might have been an inner conflict within her won being. In the
cave she meets herself as something other, the shadow, which creates the echo
sound in her brain. Knowing her real self and realizing her true problems
shocked her. Marriage without love is tantamount to rape, and probably explains
why she thought she was raped. Her running away later can be interpreted as
running away from the sudden stark reality, of as a suggestion of her rejection to
the false values that has always dominated her.
6. Chapter 17
He spoke at last. ‘The worst thing in my whole career has happened,’ he said. ‘Miss
Quested has been insulted in one of the Marabar caves.’….
’Oh no, no, but not Aziz…not Aziz…’….
“Miss Quested herself definitely accuses him of-‘
‘There was an echo that appears to have frightened her….’
They had started speaking of ‘women and children’….Each felt that all he loved best
in the world was at stake……women and children were leaving for the Hill Station in
a few days, and the suggestion was made that they should be packed off at once in a
special train.
Here we can see two types of discriminations. One is against the Indians, in
thinking that they are a danger to the women in town because according the
English, lechery and drugs are all that they are fond of, or something even worse.
The second is against the English women. Englishmen believe women are
dependent, that they can’t do anything without them; therefore, they should
protect them because they are so helpless on their own. Here we clearly see the
superiority of the Englishmen over both the Indians, and their wives.
7. Chapter 24
9
Her vision was of several caves. She saw herself in one, and she was also outside it,
watching its entrance, for Aziz to pass in. She failed to locate him. It was the doubt
that had often visited her, but solid and attractive, like the hills, ‘I am not-‘ Speech
was more difficult than vision. ‘I am not quite sure.’…
‘I’m afraid I have made a mistake….Dr Aziz never followed me into the cave.’
Something that she did not understand took hold of the girl and pulled her through.
Though the vision was over, and she had returned to the insipidity of the world, she
remembered what she had learnt. Atonement and confession-they could wait. It was in
hard prosaic tones that she said, ‘I withdraw everything.’
The echo was concerned with her state of mind, which continues to harass her
until she withdrew the charge. This can be seen as a sudden epiphany, under the
impact of Mrs. Moore, she realized the truth of her mind which she couldn’t
perceive before.
8. ‘No, not yet,’and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’
The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can
best do so by the help of good will plus culture and intelligence.
‘Any man can travel light until he has a wife or children.’
Mr. Fielding is essentially a cultured humanist who believed in the efficacy of
education and culture. As a liberal educationist, he is closer to the Indians. He
was unresponsive to the idea of marriage, because his fundamental belief lay in
individualism. However, his credo is derived from Western liberalism, and it is
also where he finally returns. In the end, he also got married, and can no longer
‘travel light.’ The ending provide no answer for whether he and Aziz can still be
friends, all we know is that it is unlikely for their friendship to stay the same, it
has deteriorated. .
Theme
Colonialism & Imperialism
Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over territory beyond its
borders by the establishment of colonies in which indigenous populations are directly
ruled. On the other hand, imperialism is a policy of extending control over foreign
countries either through direct territorial conquest or through indirect control on the
politics or economy of these entities. As these two ideas deeply rooted in British at
that time contributes British Raj (Hindu for “reign”), Forster arouses the issue of
Britain's political control of India on a more personal level by posing the question
“whether or not it is possible to be friends with an Englishman.” He uses this
question as a framework to explore the issue through the friendship between Aziz and
10
British people.
At the beginning of the novel, within the debate between three Indians in
chapter two, Mosque, Aziz scorns the English for their unequal treatment to Indians.
Yet in the following part his first encounter with Mrs. Moore in the mosque opens
him to the possibility of friendship with English people; then through the first half of
the novel, Aziz and Fielding present a positive model of cross-cultured friendship by
liberal individuals with frankness, intelligence, and good will. However, in the latter
of the novel, after Aziz arranges trip to Marabar Cave, Adela’s accusation that Aziz
attempted to rape her and her subsequent disavowal of this accusation at the trial lead
to the ending of the close friendship between Aziz and Fielding. As the landscape
itself seems to imply at the end of the novel, such a friendship may be possible
eventually, but “not yet.” By presenting a practical demonstration of the difficulties
in establishing such a friendship, Forster regards the possibility of English-Indian
friendship in a rather pessimistic aspect, yet it is qualified by the possibility of
friendship on English soil, or rather after the liberation of India.
Forster criticizes British rule of India not only through ordeal of establish
cross–culture friendship, but also through different typical attitudes the English hold
toward the Indians whom they control. Englishwomen are most satirized in the
novel for their overwhelmingly discriminative, self-righteous, and viciously
condescending to the native. On the contrary, Englishmen though unable to relate to
Indians on an individual level, express their contempt rather in a direct way. For all
Forster’s criticism of the British manner of governing India; however, he does not
appear to question the right of the British Empire to rule India. In A Passage to
India, although the British fail to understand Indian religion and culture, they are not
shown as tyrants. Ronny Heaslop, for example, the City Magistrate, is completely
sincere when he says that the British “are out here to do justice and keep the peace”
(chapter 5), which shows that in their own way, the English try to rule in a just way.
Nevertheless, the perspective which British hold that they are civilized and superior to
the native Indians thus having the obligation to bring the light to India actually
contains discriminative viewpoint to judge whether who is superior or not, while the
fact is no one have the right to decide the hierarchy.
Forster takes the relation between British and Indians in the colonization as a
background for the most complex of all his explorations of the possibilities and
limitations of human relationships. He suggests that British rule in India could be
successful and respectful only if English and Indians treat each other as Fielding and
Aziz treat each other—as rational pure individuals without each others’ background
interference. However, it is proved that the outcome is destined for failure within
the inevitable prejudice between colonizers and being colonized, whereas Forster
11
himself also follows into this western-centric point of view:
Froster tells the Indian friend to who he dedicates it: “When I began
the book I thought of it as a little bridge between East and West, but this
conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so
comfortable.” When in the last chapter the question is asked again, “Why
can’t we be friends now?” the answer is “No, not yet,” an answer seen by
a prophecy of the improved relations between India and Great Britain.
(Norton p.2132)
Nature
Forster makes distinction between the ideas of “muddle” and “mystery” in A
Passage to India: “Muddle” has connotations of dangerous and disorienting disorder,
whereas “mystery” suggests a mystical, orderly planned by a spiritual force that is
greater than man. Fielding admits that India is a “muddle” while Mrs. Moore and
Godbole view India as a mystery. The muddle of India in the novel appears to work
from the very uncivilized landscape and formless architecture of the countryside, to
the natural life of plants and animals without identification. This muddled quality of
the environment is a mirror of viewpoint to India in which is mixed into a muddle of
different religious, ethnic, linguistic, and regional groups.
Though Forster is sympathetic to India and Indians in the novel, his
overwhelming depiction of India as a muddle matches the manner in which many
Western writers of his day treated the East in their works, which can be shown in the
description of the river Ganges in the first chapter. As the noted critic Edward Said
has pointed out, these authors’ “orientalizing” the East makes western ruling and
colonization over other entities self-evident, and by extension, portrays the West’s
domination of the East as reasonable or even necessary.
Reference:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/passage/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Passage_To_India
Forster, E.M. Overview and selection from "A Passage to India." The Norton
Anthology of English Literature (Vol. 2), 7th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000:
2131-2141
12
Critiques
Papers on Language & Literature, Wntr 1999 v35 i1 p56(1)
An Aristotelian Reading of the Feminine Voice-as-Revolution in E. M. Forster's A Passage
To India. WALLS, ELIZABETH MACLEOD.
Abstract: In his novel "A Passage to India', E.M. Forster uses the female character to
criticize the patriarchy of British imperialism and its gender and ethnic roles. By refuting
the assumptions of British officials and declaring the defendant innocent, Adela Quested
disrupts the complacency of patriarchal authority and removes herself and the non-British
defendant from their expected roles.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 Southern Illinois University
"But the crisis was still to come."
--E. M. Forster, A Passage To India
A Passage To India is a novel about moments, those both historical and topical, within
which the immediate context of an utterance develops meaning and power. As an historical
novel, Passage is mired in and defined by competing voices concerning the British Empire
at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1924, when Passage was published, the imperial
situation in India was at best "irreconcilable" and at worst ignitable.(1) E. M. Forster
positioned himself as a kind of humanist barometer between points East and West,
predicting and at times cautioning against British ignorance and pretentiousness as the
imperial machine faced mounting threats of insurrection among the colonies. Forster
viewed Britain's audacious political stance as emblematic of its ongoing blindness toward
this tension. In various essays written around the time of publication of A Passage To India,
Forster frequently characterized Britain's attitude toward its struggling colonies as pedantic
and dangerous; in Salute To The Orient.! Forster suggested, for example, that Britain's
imperial motto was akin to "Johnny'd rather have us than anyone else" when in fact
"Johnny'd like to see the death of the lot," according to Forster (Abinger Harvest 269).(2)
[…]
Forster achieves his profound critique of imperial rhetoric subtly through a tender
exploration of cross-cultural friendship, and overtly through an imperial legal crisis
precipitated by the intangible experiences of the newly-arrived Briton, Adela Quested. It is
13
this civic crisis,(3) fueled by Adela Quested's gender and nationality, that is the catalyst for
anti-imperial consciousness between the novel's male protagonists, Cyril Fielding and Dr.
Aziz.
[…]
The reliability of Adela's memory is questioned by Fielding and, accordingly, by the reader.
Yet despite Adela's apparent infirmity, the British act on the assumption that their account
of the events is true. I want to focus here on the significance of the fact that in the end
Adela does not comply with this contrived official story. She chooses instead to denounce
the charges levied against Aziz, thereby reducing the primacy and stature of the British
legal system and giving impetus to a wave of riots following the announcement of the
verdict. During this moment of cultural crisis in the novel, Forster uncovers the fallacy of
imperial Britain's univocality by converting British legal speech into a techne of
anti-imperial rhetoric through Adela's disruptive testimony.(5)
[…]
In giving her own version of the events at the Marabar (or the strange story of
transgressive truths and inexplicable events), Adela actually invents a techne for her own
experience that, in Aristotle's terms, is itself artfully concerned with "how to bring into
existence a thing which may either exist or not, and which lies in the maker and not in the
thing made" (Nicomachean Ethics 6.4.4). Adela also employs invention and memory as
epistemological tools for rewriting the sociopolitical and sociolinguistic identities
prescribed for her by the English community.(15) And it must be stressed that Adela's
femininity, her status as a subordinate and companion in the world of Anglo-India, is
ironically that aspect of Adela's ethos which underscores the powerful effect of her voice in
a public arena. McBryde never imagines that Adela, who is a witness for the British
prosecution, will invent her own proof in the witness box or draw upon a "fund of
knowledge" (Bitzer 68) that only she as the injured woman can know and articulate. Yet it
seems that Adela is the sole person in the novel who can reformulate her memory into
proof for Dr. Aziz and, ultimately, into a discourse which proves publicly that the
subjugated feminine voice is made more powerful by the dominant culture's insistence that
it is a mysterious, unknowable, and unimportant factor within the civic hierarchy.
Through Adela, Forster renegotiates what Bitzer views as "private knowledge made
general," giving voice to political ideas that, "lacking a public, have no status, no
authorization, indeed no existence" (84). This public germination of knowledge continues
as Adela maintains her relationship to other Anglo-Indians despite her expatriation to
14
England after the trial. From her unseen position in Europe, Adela manipulates the
reconciliation years later between Fielding and Aziz in India, and so becomes the
motivation for the underlying pathos of the novel: that friendship between India and
Britain will somehow exist, but ultimately "not yet" and "not there" (325). In one sense,
then, Adela is Forster's unacknowledged representative of modernity in the novel; her
private insights, brought to public fruition at trial, disengage from and dislodge Victorian
social constraints concerning gender, race and class in imperial India by operating from a
subordinate position inside the dominant legal structure engendered by the Raj. Within his
sabotage of Victorian morality, Forster, himself "the spiritual heir of Blake" (Beer 15),
constructs Adela's fate in A Passage To India with earnest purpose: the implications of the
feminine voice transmitted through Adela reveal that, like Blake, Forster's social
sympathies were as immense as his modern vision of women and his insight into the
historical, momentary relationships of imperial India was revolutionary. […]
From A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction
By Bhupal Singh
(Published in London, U.K.: Curzon Press, 1934, 1974. 2000. )
A more balanced view…
Mr. forster’s A Passage to India is an oasis in the desert of Anglo-Indian fiction. It is a
refreshing book, refreshing in its candour, sincerity, fairness, and art, and is worth
more than the whole of the trash that passes by the name of Anglo-Indian fiction, a
few writers excepted. It is a clever picture of Englishmen in India, a subtle portraiture
of the Indian, especially the Moslem mind, and a fascinating study of the problems
arising out of the contact of India with the West. It aims at no solution, and offers no
explanation; it merely records with sincerity and insight the impressions of an English
man of letters of his passage through post-War India, an Englishman who is a master
of his craft, and who combines an original books it is intensely provoking. It dies not
flatter the Englishman and it does not aim at pleasing the Indian; it is likely to irritate
both. It is not an imaginary picture, though it is imaginatively conceived. Most
Anglo-Indian writers, as we have seen, write of India and of Indians with contempt; a
very few (mostly historians) go to the other extreme. Mr. Forster’s object is merely to
discover how people behave in relation to one another under the conditions obtaining
in India at present. That he does not win applause either from India or Anglo-India is
tribute to his impartiality.
15