The 100 best novels
written in English
No 48
A Passage to India
by EM Forster
(1924)
EM Forster's most successful work is eerily prescient on the subject of empire
Robert McCrum
Monday 18 August 2014
I
n 1957, EM Forster, looking back in old age, wrote that the late-empire world of A Passage to India "no longer exists, either politically or socially". Today, approaching 100 years after its composition, the novel is probably as "dated" as ever. Yet – because Forster's concern is the forging of a relationship between a British schoolteacher and a Muslim doctor, reflecting the larger tragedy of imperialism – A Passage to India stands as a strangely timeless achievement, one of the great novels of the 20th century.
The part of A Passage to India that most readers remember, of course, is the tortuous romantic drama of the Marabar caves. Thus: when Adela Quested, an English schoolteacher, and her companion Mrs Moore arrive in Chandrapore they enter colonial India, a place obsessed with the promotion of British values and the British way of life. The idea is that Adela will meet and marry Mrs Moore's son Ronny, an eligible but bigoted British civil servant, the city's magistrate. But Miss Quested, as her name implies, has other ideas. Rejecting the prejudice and insularity of the British community, she sets out to investigate the "real" India, assisted in her search by Dr Aziz, a young Muslim doctor who naively wants to promote an entente between the master race and its colonial subjects. Each, in turn, is encouraged by the head of a local government college.Aziz arranges for Miss Quested and Mrs Moore to visit the famous caves at Marabar. There, in a classic episode of Forsterian "muddle", something happens between Aziz and Adela that disgraces the doctor, and inflames the furious hostility of the British sahibs. In the crisis, Aziz, already disdained as "spoilt westernised", is imprisoned. Eventually, after a trial, Adela withdraws her charges and Aziz, radicalised and angry, moves to the native state of Forster's imagination. "I am an Indian at last," he says, and he stands alone in the monsoon rain. There, in the closing part of the novel, he is visited by Fielding, the British schoolteacher who had been his great confidant and friend. The Aziz-Fielding relationship tormented Forster. In a passage that caused him great creative agony, he wrestled with the complexity of an east-west understanding. "But the horses didn't want it – they swerved apart; the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion… they didn't want it. 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'" It is a bleak but prescient conclusion: the issue of east and west is no nearer a resolution today than it was 100 years ago.
A note on the text
EM Forster visited the caves of Barabar in January 1913 on his first visit to India. It was an experience he never forgot, and it was into his fictional caves of "Marabar" that he sent Mrs Moore and her young companion, Adela, in the central and all-important section of his masterpiece, Part II, Caves. On his return from India, he began to write an Indian novel, but abandoned it to write Maurice, a novel of homosexual desire that would not be published until after his death. He did not return to his "Indian" manuscript until 1921, having recently accepted a post as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. Nevertheless, the experience of writing the novel was hardly fulfilling to him. He admitted privately that he was "bored by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of fiction-form", especially "the studied ignorance of the novelist". The last section, Temple, was Forster's attempt, after a long struggle, to lift the narrative to a higher plane, as well as to resolve the unbridgeable conflict within the Raj.
A Passage to India was published on 4 June 1924 by the British imprint Edward Arnold, and then on 14 August in New York by Harcourt, Brace and Co. Forster borrowed his title from a Walt Whitman poem of the same name in Leaves of Grass. By the end of the year, there were 17,000 copies in print in Britain and more than 54,000 in the US. Forster's best-ever sales were matched by enthusiastic reviews. Only in India were critics exercised by his portrait of Anglo-Indian society. Today, he is seen as eerily prescient.
The typescript of A Passage to India, with many manuscript revisions, is now held in the library at King's College, Cambridge, Forster's home throughout his later years. As many have noted, Forster never wrote another novel, and lived until 1970, aged 91. For 46 years, his reputation grew with every book he didn't write. Maurice (written 1913-14), an explicitly homosexual novel, was published posthumously in 1971.
Three more from EM Forster
A Room With a View (1908); The Longest Journey (1907); Howards End (1910).
THE GUARDIAN
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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