Sherry Chandler » E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
About a third of the way through A Passage to India (Harcourt Brace, 1922), I lay the book aside. I didn’t pick it up again for several months.
I had come to the point where the action was leading two naïve characters, the English woman Adela Quested and the Indian Muslim Dr. Aziz, toward the inevitable charge of rape that is at the novel’s center. Somehow, I couldn’t make myself go to that dark place.
This week, tired of seeing the title on my Good Reads “Currently Reading” list, I decided to force myself into that echoing cave. Once the Rubicon was crossed, I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the story that, after all, held some surprising turns. An excellent novel.
I know practically nothing about the history of the English Raj, except that it is somehow characterized by Gunga Din and the phrase “white man’s burden.” And I don’t really have anything that I think is definitive to say about the novel. Just some observations.
A Passage to India reminded me of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer novels in that evil was found not in the conquering European culture or in the conquered indigenous culture but on the frontier where the two cultures clashed. It was that frontier war of conquest that brought evil and degradation to both sides.
Likewise in A Passage to India, the Raj brings degradation to both sides. This evil echoes in the ears of Adela Quested like the blurring frightening echoes in the Marabar Caves where an assault did or did not occur. Being alone together panicked both Miss Quested and Dr. Aziz and what actually happened to Miss Quested is never completely explained.
The facts of the case are not important. What is important is what everybody believes happened, and nobody on either side is much interested in challenges to their bigotry. Everybody has an agenda. When Miss Quested tries to say that maybe she has made a mistake, no one will listen and so the event echoes and echoes and she cannot recover her emotional equanimity.
The echo is there too for Cyril Fielding, the English educator who crosses the color line to defend his friend Aziz.
“Everything echoes now; there’s no stopping the echo. The original sound may be harmless but the echo is always evil.”
Forster transcribes this echo as boum, a sort of cross between boom and om, a corruption.
Although there is courtship and marriage in A Passage to India and it is built around the triangle of Aziz, Fielding, and Quested, the major relationship is between Cyril Fielding and Dr. Aziz. Neither marriage nor women fare well. Indian women are hidden behind purdah and do not appear. European women are the worst of the Raj, cowering in their walled gardens, acting as gatekeepers to make sure there was no mixing with the natives. The men, though sentimental about the “women and children,” don’t really like them much.
“After all, it’s our women who make everything more difficult out here,” was [the Collector's] inmost thought, as he caught sight of some obscenities upon a long blank wall and beneath his chivalry to Miss Quested resentment lurked, waiting its day—perhaps there is a grain of resentment in all chivalry.
A Passage to India begins with “Mosque” and ends with “Temple,” but neither the Christian educator Fielding nor the Muslim physician Aziz are men of faith. Both are from YHWH-worshipping cultures (and Aziz aspires to be a poet) and both find the Hindus a complete mystery:
The fissures in the Indian soil are infinite: Hinduism, so solid from a distance, is riven into sects and clans, which radiate and join, and change their names according to the aspect from which they are approached. Study it for years with the best teachers, and when you raise your head, nothing they have told you quite fits.
The Hindu holy man Godbole gives Fielding only cryptic answers to ethical questions. At least the answers seem cryptic to the Englishman. He’s looking for the facts. Did Aziz do it? We all did it, says Godbole.
Because nothing can be performed in isolation. All perform a good action, when one is performed, and when an evil action is performed, all perform it.
The “good” Englishwoman, the elderly Mrs. Moore, likewise turns cryptic and noncommittal. Mrs. Moore has accompanied Miss Quested to India because she is affianced to Mrs. Moore’s son, a minor official in the Raj. After the incident of the Caves, she becomes ill and ill-tempered. While asserting Aziz’s innocence, Mrs. Moore refuses to stand up for him and beats a hasty retreat from India. Her son finds her opinions inconvenient and encourages her to leave. She dies en route and is buried at sea.
Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested had wanted to see the “real” India and are ruined by the experience. Aziz is embittered and retreats from all contact with the English, and Fielding returns to his European roots.
Interestingly enough, when Aziz calls for Englishmen to be run out of India, he calls upon his Afghan ancestors. The politics of this, I think, resonate to this very day and touch our lives in ways we may never have dreamed possible in 1922.
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