E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India": Digital Edition
This is a free digital edition of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. To begin reading, scroll down or go directly to Chapter 1.
A Passage to India, first published in 1924, is one of the most influential novels ever written about life in India under British colonialism. It explores both British and Indian perspectives on British rule, and marks how the damage done by racism can thwart a meaningful cross-cultural encounter even between well-meaning people. Upon its publication the novel was an immediate success, winning prizes for Forster including the James Tait Memorial Prize for fiction (in 1924). It remains widely taught in classrooms and discussed by literary critics.A 1984 film adaptation by David Lean was also a critical success, and earned two Academy Awards.
The novel's title comes from the "Passage to India" section of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (which can be accessed at the Walt Whitman Archive here). Whitman's poem concerns a spiritual journey and ambitious themes related to technology and progress; for Whitman, the British presence in India represents a technologically-driven marvel of modernity. In contrast to the vastness of Whitman, Forster's novel is much more concerned with demystifying grand mythologies about the relationship of "East" and "West." The novel gives a highly realistic account of both the British and Indian perspectives on the British presence in India, hinting that the two communities could in fact be compatible but for the power imbalance. If Rudyard Kipling once wrote, cynically, that "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," in Forster's conception of India East and West can and do meet, though they will likely continue to struggle to find true friendship or intimacy under British colonial rule.
Indian readers have been ambivalent A Passage to India –- while Forster's critique of Empire is appreciated, in Godbole, the Nawab Bahadur, and Aziz, his characterization verges on caricature. That said, Forster took the problem of race and racism in India under the British colonial government quite seriously. Unlike Joseph Conrad, for whom Africa and Asia are often just a background for stories involving European characters, Forster focuses directly on the problem of relations between Indians and the British in India. The central crisis in the first half of the novel concerns an accusation of sexual assault on the part of an Indian man against a British woman. The deep biases that are revealed with respect to assumptions about guilt and innocence expose the flaws in the justice system under British rule.
Edward Morgan Forster lived most of his life in England, but traveled extensively during the 1910s and 20s, mainly in Egypt and India. He is probably best known today for the one novel he wrote about India, A Passage to India, though at the time this novel was considered somewhat of a departure from his earlier, widely successful novels based in England itself, including A Room With a View, Howards End, and Where Angels Fear to Tread.
As a participant in the Cambridge-originated Bloomsbury movement, Forster was close to many of the movers and shakers in the British modernist literary scene, though his novels have been considered somewhat traditional in comparison to those of Woolf or Joyce. It might also be important to note that Forster was gay – though he was never ‘out’ during his lifetime. Some scholars have in recent years, looked for homosexual themes in Forster’s works, including A Passage to India. These are debatable, but even if we decide not to focus on that aspect of his biography, it does seem clear that Forster’s strong emotional attachment to Egyptian and Indian men he knew probably made a difference in how well he portrayed those societies in his fiction.
Forster's A Passage to India is based on Forster’s two trips to India, one of which occurred in 1912, and the second of which occurred in 1921-1922. The second trip was longer, but the first included extensive travels that gave Forster the main settings and contexts in which he set A Passage to India. Even before he visited India, he had a number of Indian friends, including one, Syed Ross Masood, to whom the novel is dedicated. Through his conversations with Indians -- mostly men -- Forster gained a good sense of what young Indians were thinking about in the early 1920s, and how they felt about the British at the time. Their critique of the injustices of British colonialism was reaching a new level of articulation, in part because of the recent memory of the Khilafat movement and the rise of the Gandhian non-cooperation movement in the late 1910s. The fictional town in the novel, Chandrapore, is based on a British-built suburb of Patna called Bankipur; the Marabar Caves in the text closely resemble the Barabar Caves north of Gaya (about four hours from Patna by car).
Under U.S. copyright law, A Passage to India is in the public domain as of January 1 2020. This edition was produced and edited by Amardeep Singh at Lehigh University (amsp@lehigh.edu).
