A passage to Forster’s India-scape
The last two weeks have been spent discussing books I’ve travelled with, and this is the last of the three. This week I’m talking about discovering a classic, and the surprise it has given me to find that the language and content is still accessible.
I’m talking about A Passage To India by E.M Forster, that classic book about the end of the British Raj, and that, for our modern politically correct times, consummately racist book about the “natives”. That is to say, er, us. Allow me to quote a few choice lines:
“Natives don’t respect one all the more after meeting one, you see” and “Why the kindest thing one can do to a native is let him die (...as a patient)”
While underlying the story is the tale of a few sympathetic Britishers who don't believe Indians are inferior to them, as the popular culture demands, A Passage To India is a bit like a time capsule, taking us back, like books are supposed to, to a different time and immersing us in it. While Forster is careful to leave in the Indian point of view, for example, Dr Aziz, the main character, accused of molesting an Englishwoman, is given chapters and passages devoted to his own internal workings, it doesn’t take long to figure out that he is just a foil to the true hero, a Mr Fielding, sympathetic to India and Indians, and who makes it his mission to defend Dr Aziz. It’s explained earlier in the book that the young woman molested, a Miss Quested, thinks Dr Aziz is attractive, but “she did not admire him with any personal warmth, for there was nothing of the vagrant in her blood”.
Forster is not a condescending writer, like many others of his ilk were, but when writing about a time that you are in, many unconscious judgements slip out. You can see what kind of Englishman he was, perhaps of Fielding’s sort, a sympathetic, but not overly involved man, who kept himself separate from both the British Raj and the people they ruled. For all its little digs at us as a people, however, this is a book worth reading. It’s like going through old Reader’s Digests and finding articles on how to be the perfect wife (highly amusing) and must be treated the same, a harmless relic of an age now gone.
The writing is superlative and the story gripping, I wouldn’t think I was reading such a dated book if I didn’t know the author and the time it was written. And it’s always nice to go back and see where we were and what we have come from.
The writer is an author
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