Book Review 048 / A Passage to India by E M Forster

A Passage to India 

E M Forster 

1924

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Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 48 / A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)

Octubre 1, 2015 

The narrative point of view in A Passage to India is elusive. At points, particularly when describing (supposedly) neutral scenes such as landscape, Forster uses a traditional, omniscient narrative voice. The landscape (or similar) is not however simply described – the description includes subtle (and sometimes not so subtle – see below) judgments and observations. We are being shown India through the eyes of a distinct person or character, albeit one that doesn’t appear in the novel. Would it be safe to assume this point of view is as close to Forster’s as makes no difference?

I’m not sure, because when portraying conversations and interactions between characters, the narrative voice changes. The narrator tells the reader what the characters are thinking and feeling – sometimes even identifying feelings that the character is only dimly aware they are experiencing, such as when the romantic feelings of Ronny and Adela are re-kindled in their ride home and subsequently accident. But again this is not the whole story – the narrator may see all, but reveals the story’s events only as and when they are observed or participated in by the characters. There is no breaking of the fourth wall, no jumping forward in time, and scenes from the past are strictly confined to memories, such as Dr Aziz’s memories of his wife. We observed the complex interactions between the characters with an informed understanding of their nuances, but the narrator is a guide rather than a translator – we are helped to understand what the characters are thinking and feeling, but don’t simply step inside their heads.

The narrator’s partial omniscience takes a further knock during and after the “incident” in the caves. The scene is initially shown from Dr Aziz’s point of view, and then recounted to Fielding. Fielding notes that this initial recount is already beginning to get slightly confused. The puzzling departure by Adela is unexplained – the point of view is limited. This scene is immediately preceded, and foreshadowed, by a scene narrated from Mrs Moore (Adela’s prospective mother in law, and de facto guardian). When the narrative finally portrays the scene from Adela’s perspective, her recollection is clouded and incomplete. In fact the narrative is completely confused through this part of the novel – it is never explained what the charge/allegation against Dr Aziz’s is. The one thing Adela is consistent about is “the man had never actually touched her” (208), but the English community reacts as if she has been ravaged, and indeed the doctor tells them that her life is at risk.

Why does this matter? I think it is always important to ask questions about the point of view. Who is telling me this? Are they telling me the whole truth? Is there something that is being kept from me? Are my thoughts and feelings being manipulated, and if so how.

I am sure Forster intended this story as a positive commentary on the Raj, and specifically the late colonial period when India was ruled, ineffectively, by the British. Forster portrays the effect that colonial power has on well meaning British people who come to India with the best of intentions – to be compassionate, to help the local population, to foster (near-pun intended) good relations between Hindu and Muslim, and so on. These intentions are eroded by the force of circumstances, until they become hard-faced colonial administrators, making decisions based upon what is best for Great Britain, not India, and living largely segregated lives apart from the local population. As the Collector says: “I have had 25 years in this country … and during those 25 years I have never known anything but disaster result when English people and |Indians attempt to be intimate socially.” (161). Newcomers quickly come to understand (or are taught) that mixing with the locals is harmful to both parties. His target is the Raj (and by extension, the Empire) not the people who kept it running.

You could see this all as liberal far-sightedness, Forster predicting the end of the Empire and the resulting inevitable partition between the majority Hindus and the minority Muslims, and commenting on the corrosive effect of Empire on the people administering it. Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” makes similar points. But I am not sure this is the whole story. “A Passage to India” doesn’t simply portray the effects of colonialism. There is a portrait of India and Indians themselves which at points is unsympathetic. Indians are shown to be pompous, unreliable, volatile, and dishonest, not just as individual character traits but consistently. When the narrator claims “Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time, in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend. It is his demon, as the Westerner’s is hypocrisy” (272) it is unclear whether this is the narrator voicing a judgment of one of the characters, or Forster’s personal judgment. This racism is more subtle than that of many of Forster’s characters, but forms a backdrop to the novel. I wanted to illustrate this by looking in more detail at the book’s opening paragraphs, which unusually I am going to repeat here in full to avoid you having to go and look it up.  

“Except for the Marabar caves – and they are 20 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 200 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 18th 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.

THE READING BUG

Supplementary: A Passage to India – E.M.Forster (2)

“Except for the Marabar caves – and they are 20 miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.

This is an unusual opening. Novels usually tell us that the scene they are about to describe will be interesting, not “nothing extraordinary”. The term “presents” is a hint that there will be a difference between the outward appearance of the city, and what is to be found behind the façade. Obviously, the reference to the caves is a hint that these are to play a key part in the novel’s events, and come back to mind when the trip to the caves in being planned, and underway. Overall the tone here, deliberate I suspect, is of a sneering Victorian tour guide, summarising the merits or otherwise of this backwater for the benefit of our incoming tourists, Mrs Moore and Miss Quested.

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.

Here the description strikes an even more unusual note. Firstly, what is the difference between edged and washed, a distinction the narrator takes care to point out. The simple answer is dirt – the river runs past the city, regardless of verb choice, but does not flood, and therefore the city remains filthy. This description is reinforced by the verb choice “trails” – the city lacks energy, spreading itself pointlessly along the banks of the river. It – the city – must be relatively small if it only runs ( a more traditional verb choice) for two miles, but it is “scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits”. Hold up – the narrator tells us that he cannot tell the difference between the city and the rubbish it produces. It is a rubbish tip. In any other context this would be dismissed as ridiculous hyperbole – no city in the world, however polluted, is indistinguishable from a rubbish tip. This is more than hyperbole – it is abuse.

There are no bathing steps on the river front as the Ganges happens not to be holy here;

Another sentence that is easy to pass by, but once more, hold up. The Ganges is the holy river of Hinduism, and that holiness doesn’t switch on and off as the river passes through the landscape. Forster must surely have known that. So what is he doing saying this? Is the reader being invited to question the narrator’s veracity (this early in the novel)? Is Forster assuming lazily that his readers will allow this to pass, being ignorant of other faiths? This is part of the “nothing to see here” lacklustre description of the city, but I find this approach puzzling – if Forster wanted to imagine a non-descript city in the middle of India, why set it on the banks of one of the greatest rivers in the world? And then proceed to ignore this setting for 300 or more pages?

indeed there is no river front,

What? For an innocuous piece of description this is the third time in two sentence that I have to ask that question. No river front? Ignoring the fact that a few lines earlier we have been told that the city trails along the river bank (I appreciate that there is a subtle difference between a river bank and front), why would a city be built on the bank of (to repeat myself) one of the greatest rivers in the world, and then effectively turn its back on it? Surely one of the reasons the river is worshipped as a God is because of its life-giving properties. The citizens of Chandrapore would need access to the river for water, for washing, for cremations, for leisure – the idea that they would ignore this incredible resource beggars belief. By now this narrator is losing credibility. This is not a realistic portrait that is being painted, which alerts the reader to the fact that there is more to Chandrapore than we are being led to expect.

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.

Here we have filth again. The narrator/Forster’s sense of disgust with this city is palpable. One has to ask, in what sense are the temples “ineffective”. Presumably architectural, although there may be a small comment on the spiritual ineffectiveness of these foreign religions.

Chandrapore was never large or beautiful but 200 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 18th century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars.

Confirmation, if it were needed, that this is a tour guide, or an effective parody of one. The emphasis on the absence of tourist goods in the bazaar and the imperial history of the town put the reader in the role of armchair traveller, learning about the city by proxy, but guided by a very unreliable mentor.

The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving.

What wood? The wood of the carvings which scarcely can be found? Or something else – this is ambiguous, but leads to the next thought – the people of Chandrapore are “inhabitants of mud”. Literally of course this means ‘people living in mud – that is, the mud-like wood” – but the very clear reference is to ‘people of mud’ – that is mud-people. This is an old racist taunt which JK Rowling references in her use of the term “mud-blood” as a deeply offensive term, as indeed it is.

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.

We return to the Ganges. I take the phrase “come down” to mean flood or burst its banks. Excrescence is a powerful word, expressing a sense of disgust, and the speaker here seems to anticipate a flood almost wishfully, looking to see a cleansing of the filth that appals him so much, back into the soil – note back into, not just into, again referencing the idea that the people of India have arisen from the soil, are people of mud.

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.

As throughout this paragraph, there is ambiguity here. The tour guide voice has been abandoned for something much more expansive. It is not clear whether “houses do fall” (as opposed to ‘houses fall’) refers to what happens when the Ganges comes down, or as something that periodically happens in any event. People are drowned and left rotting is also ambiguous – if people drown their bodies would normally be washed drown stream, or eaten by crocodiles. This phrase could mean either ‘people are drowned, and then their bodies are left to rot’ or ‘some people drown, and others die in the streets where their bodies are left to rot’. The ambiguity doesn’t rest there – people are drowned actively, rather than drown passively – is this something done to them, or something that happens. Leaving bodies to rot is unlikely to be something that actually happened in India other than in a major disaster, but the narrator gives the impression it is a common occurrence.

Here as throughout ‘A Passage to India’, the narrative voice shifts subtly, and can never be trusted. In an apparently innocuous scene-setting paragraph, numerous under-currents lead the reader to understand that India may seem harmless, but if you scratch the surface you will find it threatening, distressing, and dangerous. Miss Quested is about to find that out.

THE READING BUG