Do You like book A Passage To India (2005)?
It is the early 1900s (pre-WWI) in British India, and a new arrival to the country, Mrs Moore, almost accidentally befriends a young Indian doctor, Aziz. Aziz is a cheerful, optimistic Muslim man who is determined to know the English occupiers on an equal footing, and Mrs Moore's friendliness and lack of prejudice only encourage his view that this is possible.Mrs Moore's son, Ronny, is a government official, a district magistrate, and she has come in order to chaperone the young woman who might marry him, Adela Quested. The new women are instantly wrapped up in the judgemental prejudice and grudging tolerance of the anglo-Indians, those Brits who can boast of "twenty years in the country". The only Englishman who isn't uptight and arrogant is Cyril Fielding, the principal of the government school who also befriends - or is befriended by - Aziz. Adela wants to see the "real" India, without understanding what that really means, and so when Aziz suggests a trip to the famed Marabar Caves, both women accept.It is while at the Caves that something happens that destroys not just Aziz's friendship with the women but the chance of friendly Anglo-Indian relations, and strengthens the worst British assumptions about Indians.I feel incredibly ill-equipped to write this review. Written between 1913 and 1924, it would be almost impossible to say what this book is actually about. Forster says he was not aiming to write a political or sociological novel - and yet that is what I most took from it. As an observational novel, it is genius. Politically, it is astute. As a social and racial commentary, it is thought-provoking even if Forster himself thinks it's dated: nearly a century later, it is sad to say it's nowhere near as dated as he had thought. I'm not sure what Forster's aim was, because it is buried in an original introduction by Peter Burra that I didn't have the patience or energy to read, so all I can really talk about is what I took from it. As I said before, I read it as a social commentary type of novel: a story whose structure provides the framework for exploring human nature in a very real context. This would be a superb book to study and it's a shame it never came up in any of my uni courses. (On a side note, this edition would be perfect for it, with extensive introduction, appendices, glossary, etc.)I have always been fascinated by racial differences, the kind established by societies and made true simply by being asserted often enough. The British opinion and attitude as occupiers of India is well known to the point of cliché, but to see it played out in the confines of this story just makes it all the more real, vivid. The British in India are not portrayed sympathetically, but it would be hard to say, since it's well before my time, how much of it is Forster's own bias and how much of it is honest accuracy. I am inclined towards the latter.Forster's depictions of the Indians - Hindu and Muslim - isn't much prettier. He seems bent on honesty, and doesn't shy away from his observations. As a study of India or Indian nature - especially the differences, which result in so many of the misunderstandings between the British and the Indians - it is fascinating, but as Forster says, "The India described in A Passage to India no longer exists either politically or socially." Maybe there's a hint of nostalgia in the novel, then, or maybe that's my imagination, but Forster's love for the place is clear.If none of that interests you, the prose alone is worth reading the novel for. Every sentence is loaded with meaning and poetry, and I could read this twenty times and still feel like I hadn't caught it all. Between the beautiful descriptions of India and the ironic portrayals of the people - not quite tongue-in-cheek but humorous all the same - Forster shows that he was a master storyteller. I didn't mark quotes, of which the novel is bursting with, so I'll randomly pick a few bits to share:"The Indians were bewildered. The line of thought was not alien to them, but the words were too definite and bleak. Unless a sentence paid a few compliments to Justice and Morality in passing, its grammar wounded their ears and paralysed their minds. What they said and what they felt were (except in the case of affection) seldom the same. They had numerous mental conventions, and when these were flouted they found it very difficult to function." (p102)"There are some exquisite echoes in India; there is the whisper round the dome at Bijipur; there are the long, solid sentences that voyage through the air at Mandu, and return unbroken to their creator. The echo in the Marabar cave is not like these, it is entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof." (p137)" '...I say there's not such a thing as cruelty after a thing like this.''Exactly, and remember it afterwards, you men. You're weak, weak, weak. Why, they [the Indians:] ought to crawl from here to the caves on their hands and knees whenever an Englishwoman's in sight, they oughtn't to be spoken to, they ought to be spat at, they ought to be ground into the dust, we've been far too kind with our Bridge Parties and the rest.'She paused. Profiting by her wrath, the heat had invaded her. She subsided into a lemon squash, and continued between sips to murmur, 'Weak, weak.' " (p204)The question (why is it always a question?) about women is raised several times, with the juxtaposition between the Indian women in purdah (hidden away at home and not "free") and the disdainful, vocal Englishwomen who aren't afraid to look a man in the eyes. The first recognisable taste of modernity had reached India through these British women, but I wouldn't say Forster is for or against. His own modern mind comes through - if any character could be said to be the most sympathetic, and so more like Forster himself, it would be Cyril Fielding the educated athiest who comes across as homosexual until he gets married. But that's probably just my inclination.I've barely scraped the surface, as they say, of this book, and could go on and on in this same rambling way without saying anything much except the same thing over and over again - because unless I studied this book properly, I will never really understand it. That's the way my brain works with classics like A Passage to India. As a reader who read it too fast, though, I can still appreciate it's intricacies.
—Shannon (Giraffe Days)
Nutshell: racism temporarily defeated by means of more or less permanent sexism. Novel promises to be an exercise in inverting baudrillardian dissimulation: “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 guests” (3). That this is a colonialist’s perspective of colonized space in British India should not be irrelevant, and we might accordingly regard colonized India as a (dis?)simulacrum, a copy that has replaced the original, but instead of propounded presence, the copy constitutes a propounded absence. Viewed from “the little civil station,” the setting “appears to be a totally different place” (4). A bit heavy-handed at times, such as in declaring that the roads “named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India” (13). It is nonetheless a matter of imposing progressive market relations, wherein the railway can be said to be “pushing its burning throat over the plain, and the twentieth century took over the sixteenth” (178). It is therefore very much the description found in Late Victorian Holocausts.Discourse is littered with uglies such as: “he agreed that all Englishwomen are haughty and venal” (9); “That is why India is in such a plight, because we put off things” (11); “‘I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them.’ ‘Then you are an Oriental’” (21); “He felt disloyal to his caste” (33); “You’re superior to everyone in India except one or two of the Ranis, and they’re on equality” (42); and so on. This stuff is entirely the point, of course--the confrontation of irreconcilables, which is not to suggest that the truth is in the middle between them. Far from it: for all the annoying pre-modern ideology on the native side, one can hardly sympathize with the colonialist.Probably a good idea to approach this with a firm grounding in the history of the British Raj, which I lack. But we might rest assured that the relation is thoroughly dialectical: “You can make India in England apparently, just as you can make England in India” (78). Indeed, “the East had returned to the East via the suburbs of London, and had become ridiculous during the detour” (110)--not merely first as tragedy, second as farce, but also the colonialist’s hyperreal copy, more real than the original, for “this city is full of misstatements” (117), which fictions should be regarded as originary. The setting arises after the Sepoy Mutiny, after Davis’ late Victorian holocausts, after World War I--a parade of horribles that should not be underestimated, as the English had already hit “the unspeakable limit of cynicism, untouched since 1857“ (207). The events of the novel are therefore comparatively small, but prescient, considering later historical developments.Lovely chapter X (123-24), regarding how “it matters so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides.” It’s likely retrograde, pastoralist, anti-modern--but it reads well.Major confrontation of the novel, supra, is the trial of a native who is accused of sexually assaulting a colonialist. The reaction is nothing if not predictable: “Nothing enraged Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed” (183). We are solemnly informed that “all unfortunate natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30” (184). The casual racism of the colonialist characters is highlighted by the narrative, held out for our judgment as errors, rather than ontologies of the setting itself. They are accordingly subject to disputation and defeat, and, though the narrative defeats them at a trial which places the prosecutrix literally on a pedestal in court (243), that defeat is engineered through the recantation of the alleged victim: “‘You withdraw the charge? Answer me,’ shrieked the representative of Justice. Something she did not understand took hold of the girl and pulled her through. Though the vision was over, and she had returned to the insipidity of the world, she remembered what she had learnt. Atonement and confession--they could wait. It was in hard prosaic tones that she said, ‘I withdraw everything’” (256). This hits as hard as Max Schell’s terrible, terribly effective cross-examination of Judy Garland in Judgment at Nuremberg, which is mercifully for all interrupted by Lancaster's peremptory ejaculation, but it likewise reads now as the standard MRA bullshit that there’s greater risk of harm in false rape accusations than in rape itself. The racist stuff is generally presented as partisan contention, the ideology of characters, whereas the false rape accusation, which the racist contenders recapture with the proposition that she “had renounced her own people” (257), is an ontological fact of the setting. We may therefore regard it as affixed into setting permanency, sexism inscribed into the world, though at least racism endures a temporary defeat, even though racist characters persist.Contention between defendant and his chief British friend dominates the falling action thereafter, concluding with perhaps the most affective ending that I’ve read (aside from the last lines of Paradise Lost naturally!): (view spoiler)[“’Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it--they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there’” (362). (hide spoiler)]
—sologdin
I'm not wildly enthusiastic about this book. It gives you an interesting view of India as a British colony, and some of the descriptions are lovely, but overall I found it quite dry and hard to read in anything but little chunks. The story itself isn't wildly inventive, of course: it reminded me a lot, at least around the middle, of To Kill A Mockingbird: a native is wrongly accused of assaulting a woman, the woman's part is taken by all, etc. It's not a new story -- of course not, since it could easily have happened (and for all I know, probably did). The characters didn't feel real to me, really, and Miss Quested's little outbursts after the "attack" made me raise an eyebrow.
—Nikki
