A Passage to India

255 Pages·2016·1.15 MB·English

by  Forster E M

Copyright
A Passage to India
Copyright © 1924 by E. M. Forster Cover art and eForeword to the electronic
edition copyright © 2002 by RosettaBooks, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information address [email protected] First electronic edition
published 2002 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN 0-7953-0932-5
Contents
eForeword
Part 1: Mosque
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part 2: Caves
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part 3: Temple
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
About the Author
About this Title
eForeword
Forster’s 1924 masterpiece, A Passage to India, is a novel about preconceptions
and misconceptions and the desire to overcome the barrier that divides East and
West in colonial India. It shows the limits of liberal tolerance, good intentions,
and good will in sorting out the common problems that exist between two very
different cultures. Forster’s famous phrase, “only connect,” stresses the need for
human beings to overcome their hesitancy and prejudices and work towards
realizing affection and tolerance in their relations with others. But when he
turned to colonial India, where the English and the Indians stare at each other
across a cultural divide and a history of imbalanced power relations, mutual
suspicion, and ill will, Forster wonders whether connection is even possible.
The novel begins with people very much desiring to connect and to overcome
the stereotypes and biases that have divided the two cultures. Mrs. Moore
accompanies her future daughter-in-law Adela Quested to India where both are
to meet Mrs. Moore’s son Ronny, the City Magistrate. Adela says from the
outset that she wishes to see the “real India” and Mrs. Moore soon befriends an
Indian doctor named Aziz. Cyril Fielding, an Englishman and the principal of a
local government college, soon becomes acquainted with everyone, and it is his
uneasy friendship with Dr.Aziz that constitutes the backbone of the novel.
Although the primary characters all take pains to accept and embrace
difference, their misunderstanding, fear and ignorance make connection more
difficult than any of them expect. Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested find that
surpassing their preconceived notions and cultural norms entails confronting
frightening notions about the contingency of their beliefs and values. Getting to
know the “real” India proves to be a much more difficult and upsetting task than
they had imagined. For Aziz, the continued indignities of life under British rule
and the insults-intentional and unintentional-of his English acquaintances make
him suspect that although friendship is desired, the two cultures are not yet ready
for it.
Forster’s keen eye for social nuance and his capacious sympathy for his
characters make A Passage to India not only a balanced investigation of the rift
that divides English and Indian but also a convincing and moving work of art.
Written in 1924, two years after the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land and
Joyce’s Ulysses and one year before Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Forster’s
masterpiece was produced during one of the most remarkable periods of
achievement in English literature since Wordsworth’s day.
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Part 1:
Mosque
Chapter 1
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 bank, 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. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years
ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the
fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the
eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely
any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, 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 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. It is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a
tropical pleasaunce washed by a noble river. The toddy palms and neem trees
and mangoes and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible
and in their turn hide the bazaars. They rise from the gardens where ancient
tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered temples.
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 meagre as it is described, and have to be driven
down to acquire disillusionment. As for the civil station itself, it provokes no
emotion. It charms not; neither does it repel. It is sensibly planned, with a red-
brick club on its brow, and farther back a grocer’s and a cemetery, and the
bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles. It has nothing
hideous in it, and only the view is beautiful; it shares nothing with the city
except the overarching sky.
The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the
vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of
blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white
where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference—
orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and
so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault. The
distance between the vault and them is as nothing to the distance behind them,
and that farther distance, though beyond colour, last freed itself from blue.
The sky settles everything—not only climates and seasons but when the earth
shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little—only feeble outbursts of flowers.
But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a
benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so
strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily; size
from the prostrate earth. No mountains infringe on the curve. League after
league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. Only in the south, where a
group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse
interrupted. These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the
extraordinary caves.