Forster A Passage to India PDF

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E. M. Forster - A Passage to India Mainly written between 1906 and 1913). Forster visited India in 1912 and started work on his novel after his return to England the following year. Summary In Part 1, "Mosque," the novel opens with a panoramic view of the fictional city of Chandrapore, India. The narrative shifts to Dr. Aziz, who is called away from dinner with his friends by his superior at the hospital, Major Callendar. He then visits to the local mosque, where he meets Mrs. Moore, an Englishwoman who has recently arrived to visit her son, Ronny Heaslop, with his love interest, Adela Quested. After the mosque, Mrs. Moore arrives at the club just as Adela announces to the members of the club that she would like to see the real India. To humor her, Mr. Turton, the Collector of the district, offers to set up a Bridge Party. At the Bridge Party, Adela is disappointed to find that the British and Indian guests are grouped in separate areas of the lawn. There, Adela meets Mr. Fielding, the principal of the local Government College, who invites her to a tea party where she might meet more Indians, including Mrs. Moore's friend Aziz. At Fielding's tea party, Adela finally meets Aziz. The other guests include Mrs. Moore and Professor Godbole. While Fielding gives Mrs. Moore a tour of the grounds, Aziz and Adela continue their conversation. Aziz spontaneously offers to take Adela and the rest of the party for an excursion to the Marabar Caves. During this conversation, Aziz and Adela are interrupted by Ronny, who is angered to see Adela alone with an Indian. After Fielding's tea party, Adela tells Ronny that she is unwilling to marry him. Just then, the Nawab Bahadur offers to take them on a ride in his new car. They accept, but on the ride, get into a car accident. No one is hurt, and the accident is a bonding experience for Adela and Ronny, who agree to marry each other by the time they return home. Aziz skips work for a few days feigning illness. Aziz's friends, including Hamidullah, stop by to see how he's doing, followed by Fielding. After the rest of the guests leave, Aziz detains Fielding in order to show him a photograph of his dead wife as a gesture of friendship. In Part 2, "Caves," the hot season approaches. Upon hearing a false rumor that Adela is offended that Aziz has not invited them out to the caves, Aziz invites Adela and Mrs. Moore for an excursion to the caves, even though no one in the party wants to go. On the morning of the picnic, Aziz meets Adela and Mrs. Moore at the train station, but Fielding and Godbole arrive too late to make the train. Aziz, Adela, Mrs. Moore, and the rest of their party proceed to the Marabar Caves. Inside one of the caves, Mrs. Moore is unnerved by the enclosed space, which is crowded with Aziz’s retinue, and by the uncanny echo that seems to translate every sound she makes into the noise “boum.” She stays behind at the picnic site while Adela follows Aziz and the guide to other caves. Just as Adela comes to a realization that she doesn't love Ronny, she offends Aziz, who slips into another cave to escape her. Distracted, Adela also walks into a cave. Having recovered his composure, Aziz leaves the cave, and notices that Adela is missing. Aziz also notices that a car is driving by the hills below. When he returns to the picnic site, he is greeted by Fielding. Together with Mrs. Moore, they return to Chandrapore, but upon their arrival, Aziz is arrested for allegedly attacking Adela. Fielding spends the rest of the day working for Aziz's release. At the club, the British gather to discuss Adela's case. Fielding defends Aziz's innocence, in the process offending Ronny Heaslop and the rest of the club members. After Adela recovers from her injuries at the McBrydes' bungalow, she returns to Ronny's bungalow, where Mrs. Moore, still overwhelmed by her experience in the caves, speaks incoherently and unpleasantly to Adela.

Unwilling to participate in the trial, Mrs. Moore, with Ronny's help, arranges to sail back to England. After Mrs. Moore leaves, Adela stays with the Turtons. On the day of the trial, the Turtons take Adela to the courthouse. In the courtroom, McBryde opens the case against the defendant. When Adela takes the stand, she suddenly realizes her mistake and withdraws her charge against Aziz. The courtroom is thrown into a tumult. Adela is carried out of the courtroom by the crowds. Fielding rescues her and drives her back to the college for safety. Meanwhile, Aziz and his party decide to attack the hospital, but Lal's buffoonery defuses their riotous impulses. Ronny visits Adela at Fielding's, where he notifies both of them of Mrs. Moore's death on the boat out to England. Fielding lets Adela stay at the college while he goes to Aziz's victory celebration, where he tries to convince Aziz not to pursue a lawsuit for damages against Adela. Later, Aziz decides not to press charges against Adela. With Ronny breaking off their engagement, Adela returns to England. A rumor that Adela and Fielding had an affair while she was staying at the college strains Aziz's relationship with Fielding, who also leaves for England before their friendship is repaired. In Part 3, "Temple," the novel fast-forwards several years to Mau during the rainy season. Godbole, the Minister of Education at Mau, directs the Gokul Ashtami festivities while Aziz, now a doctor at Mau, attends to the ailing ruler. On a walk to a local shrine, Aziz sees Fielding and a man get chased out by bees. The man turns out to be Ralph Moore, and Aziz realizes his mistake: Fielding has married Stella Moore, Mrs. Moore's daughter, not Adela. Aziz's antagonism toward Fielding and his party melts when he talks with Ralph alone in their guest quarters. Aziz takes Ralph out on the Mau tank to view the festivities, but their boat collides with Fielding and Stella's. Everyone ends up in the water. The novel ends as Fielding and Aziz go on a horse ride together, Aziz tells Fielding that once the English are out of India, the two will be able to be friends. Fielding asks why they cannot be friends now, when they both want to be, but the sky and the earth seem to say “No, not yet. . . . No, not there.” They mutually realize that circumstances prevent them from maintaining their friendship.

Characters

Dz. Aziz Aziz seems to be a mess of extremes and contradictions, an embodiment of Forster’s notion of the “muddle” of India. Aziz is impetuous and flighty, changing opinions and preoccupations quickly and without warning, from one moment to the next. His moods swing back and forth between extremes, from childlike elation one minute to utter despair the next. Aziz even seems capable of shifting careers and talents, serving as both physician and poet during the course of A Passage to India. Aziz’s somewhat youthful qualities, as evidenced by a sense of humor that leans toward practical joking, are offset by his attitude of irony toward his English superiors. Forster, though not blatantly stereotyping, encourages us to see many of Aziz’s characteristics as characteristics of Indians in general. Aziz, like many of his friends, dislikes blunt honesty and directness, preferring to communicate through confidences, feelings underlying words, and indirect speech. Aziz has a sense that much of morality is really social code. He therefore feels no moral compunction about visiting prostitutes or reading Fielding’s private mail—both because his intentions are good and because he knows he will not be caught. Instead of living by merely social codes, Aziz guides his action through a code that is nearly religious, such as we see in his extreme hospitality. Moreover, Aziz, like many of the other Indians, struggles with the problem of the English in India. On the one hand, he appreciates some of the modernizing influences that the West has brought to India; on the other, he feels that the presence of the English degrades and oppresses his people. Despite his contradictions, Aziz is a genuinely affectionate character, and his affection is often based on intuited connections, as with Mrs. Moore and Fielding. Though Forster holds up Aziz’s capacity for imaginative sympathy as a good trait, we see that this imaginativeness can also betray Aziz. The deep offense Aziz feels toward Fielding in the aftermath of his trial stems from fiction and misinterpreted intuition. Aziz does not stop to evaluate facts, but rather follows his heart to the exclusion of all other methods—an approach that is sometimes wrong. Many critics have contended that Forster portrays Aziz and many of the other Indian characters unflatteringly. Indeed, though the author is certainly sympathetic to the Indians, he does sometimes present them as incompetent, subservient, or childish. These somewhat valid critiques call into question the realism of Forster’s novel, but they do not, on the whole, corrupt his exploration of the possibility of friendly relations between Indians and Englishmen—arguably the central concern of the novel. Cyril Fielding Of all the characters in the novel, Fielding is clearly the most associated with Forster himself. Among the Englishmen in Chandrapore, Fielding is by far most the successful at developing and sustaining relationships with native Indians. Though he is an educator, he is less comfortable in teacher-student interaction than he is in one-on-one conversation with another individual. This latter style serves as Forster’s model of liberal humanism—Forster and Fielding treat the world as a group of individuals who can connect through mutual respect, courtesy, and intelligence. He educates Indians as individuals, engendering a movement of free thought that has the potential to destabilize English colonial power. Furthermore, Fielding has little patience for the racial categorization that is so central to the English grip on India. He honors his friendship with Aziz over any alliance with members of his own race—a reshuffling of allegiances that threatens the solidarity of the English. Finally, Fielding “travels light,” as he puts it: he does not believe in marriage, but favors friendship instead. As such, Fielding implicitly questions the domestic conventions upon which the Englishmen’s sense of “Englishness” is founded. Fielding refuses to sentimentalize domestic England or to venerate the role of the wife or mother—very different from the other Englishmen, who put Adela on a pedestal after the incident at the caves.

Fielding’s character changes in the aftermath of Aziz’s trial. He becomes jaded about the Indians as well as the English. His English sensibilities, such as his need for proportion and reason, become more prominent and begin to grate against Aziz’s Indian sensibilities. By the end of A Passage to India, Forster seems to identify with Fielding less. Whereas Aziz remains a likable, if flawed, character until the end of the novel, Fielding becomes less likable in his increasing identification and sameness with the English. Adela Quested Adela arrives in India with Mrs. Moore, and, fittingly, her character develops in parallel to Mrs. Moore’s. Adela, like the elder Englishwoman, is an individualist and an educated free thinker. These tendencies lead her, just as they lead Mrs. Moore, to question the standard behaviors of the English toward the Indians. Adela’s tendency to question standard practices with frankness makes her resistant to being labeled—and therefore resistant to marrying Ronny and being labeled a typical colonial English wife. Both Mrs. Moore and Adela hope to see the “real India” rather than an arranged tourist version. However, whereas Mrs. Moore’s desire is bolstered by a genuine interest in and affection for Indians, Adela appears to want to see the “real India” simply on intellectual grounds. She puts her mind to the task, but not her heart—and therefore never connects with Indians. Adela’s experience at the Marabar Caves causes her to undergo a crisis of rationalism against spiritualism. While Adela’s character changes greatly in the several days after her alleged assault, her testimony at the trial represents a return of the old Adela, with the sole difference that she is plagued by doubt in a way she was not originally. Adela begins to sense that her assault, and the echo that haunts her afterward, are representative of something outside the scope of her normal rational comprehension. She is pained by her inability to articulate her experience. She finds she has no purpose in—nor love for—India, and suddenly fears that she is unable to love anyone. Adela is filled with the realization of the damage she has done to Aziz and others, yet she feels paralyzed, unable to remedy the wrongs she has done. Nonetheless, Adela selflessly endures her difficult fate after the trial—a course of action that wins her a friend in Fielding, who sees her as a brave woman rather than a traitor to her race. Mrs Moore As a character, Mrs. Moore serves a double function in A Passage to India, operating on two different planes. She is initially a literal character, but as the novel progresses, she becomes more a symbolic presence. On the literal level, Mrs. Moore is a good-hearted, religious, elderly woman with mystical leanings. The initial days of her visit to India are successful, as she connects with India and Indians on an intuitive level. Whereas Adela is overly cerebral, Mrs. Moore relies successfully on her heart to make connections during her visit. Furthermore, on the literal level, Mrs. Moore’s character has human limitations: her experience at Marabar renders her apathetic and even somewhat mean, to the degree that she simply leaves India without bothering to testify to Aziz’s innocence or to oversee Ronny and Adela’s wedding. After her departure, however, Mrs. Moore exists largely on a symbolic level. Though she herself has human flaws, she comes to symbolize an ideally spiritual and race-blind openness that Forster sees as a solution to the problems in India. Mrs. Moore’s name becomes closely associated with Hinduism, especially the Hindu tenet of the oneness and unity of all living things. This symbolic side to Mrs. Moore might even make her the heroine of the novel, the only English person able to closely connect with the Hindu vision of unity. Nonetheless, Mrs. Moore’s literal actions—her sudden abandonment of India—make her less than heroic.

Ronny Heaslop Ronny’s character does not change much over the course of the novel; instead, Forster’s emphasis is on the change that happened before the novel begins, when Ronny first arrived in India. Both Mrs. Moore and Adela note the difference between the Ronny they knew in England and the Ronny of British India. Forster uses Ronny’s character and the changes he has undergone as a sort of case study, an exploration of the restrictions that the English colonials’ herd mentality imposes on individual personalities. All of Ronny’s previously individual tastes are effectively dumbed down to meet group standards. He devalues his intelligence and learning from England in favor of the “wisdom” gained by years of experience in India. The open-minded attitude with which he has been brought up has been replaced by a suspicion of Indians. In short, Ronny’s tastes, opinions, and even his manner of speaking are no longer his own, but those of older, ostensibly wiser British Indian officials. This kind of group thinking is what ultimately causes Ronny to clash with both Adela and his mother, Mrs. Moore. Nonetheless, Ronny is not the worst of the English in India, and Forster is somewhat sympathetic in his portrayal of him. Ronny’s ambition to rise in the ranks of British India has not completely destroyed his natural goodness, but merely perverted it. Ronny cares about his job and the Indians with whom he works, if only to the extent that they, in turn, reflect upon him. Forster presents Ronny’s failing as the fault of the colonial system, not his own. PROFESSOR GODBOLE You might say that Professor Godbole, an instructor at Fielding's local college, is the loopy guru of the school. He seems clueless and utterly oblivious to others' suffering, with a streak of silliness that is evident when he boogies down at the Gokul Ashtami festival in Part 3. Godbole's behavior seems at odds with his high caste – he's a Hindu Brahmin, and as such is at the top of the Hindu social ladder. But as Godbole's name (meaning "sweet-mouthed") suggests, Godbole's behavior is really just an expression of his peaceful world-view, which emphasizes the unity of all things, from the highest Brahmin to the teeniest of wasps. Thus Godbole's antics are just another way of affirming the unity of life: both high spirituality and the lowest forms of humor are part of the cosmic order, and both have to be celebrated. This big-picture way of looking at the world makes Godbole rather indifferent to individual suffering because he perceives individual suffering as just a blip in the cosmic flow, which is small consolation to the other characters. MR. TURTON As the Collector, Mr. Turton is the head of the British civil administration in Chandrapore. He's an experienced administrator who has swallowed the British imperial project hook, line, and sinker. It's not just about controlling the land, the people, the wealth for Turton: it's also about using the British Empire to "civilize" the Indians, by force if necessary. At his best, Mr. Turton moderates the flagrant racism of his subordinates because of his belief that the British are the more advanced people, and must thus act accordingly. The Bridge Party is, after all, his idea, and if he's not exactly friendly, at least he's polite. At his worst, well, even at his worst, Turton uses his power to ensure that his subordinates don't persecute the Indians and that everything is done by the book. He's not exactly the poster child for racial tolerance, but he's a good example of how the British civic ethic can prevent an individual from seeing his own worst prejudices. MRS. TURTON Mrs. Turton, in contrast with her husband the Collector, is viciously racist. It's hard to find another character more racist than Mrs. Turton in the novel – even the subaltern that shows up at the club

in the meeting before Adela's trial at least acknowledges the possibility of friendship with Indians. Mrs. Turton is constantly berating her husband and his subordinates for not cracking down on the Indians more ferociously. She exemplifies the unfortunate irony that while Englishwomen are regarded as the weaker, fairer, helpless sex in India, they can be fiercely racist because they don't have the education or the professional experience to keep them from entertaining their cruelest fantasies. MR. MCBRYDE Mr. McBryde, the police superintendent, is introduced to us as "the most reflective and best educated of the Chandrapore officials" (2.28.1). No wonder, then, that he gets along so well with Fielding. Like Turton, McBryde is an official committed to public service in the British Empire. His attitude toward Indian criminals is neither overtly racist nor tolerant; he views them more as scientific specimens that support his view of what he calls "Oriental Pathology." Here, McBryde is unfortunately a product of his time. Apparently, you need a cool, drizzly London fog to be properly civilized because McBryde blames Indian criminality on the climate. The fact that he himself was born in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan, doesn't seem to change his mind. McBryde's scientific pretensions are neatly ironized when we later discover that he's been sleeping around on his wife. MISS DEREK Miss Derek, a friend and frequent guest of the McBrydes, works for one of the Hindu princes in a nearby princely state. She's the party girl of the set – single and always game for a good time. Her habit of absconding with her employer's car comes in handy when she rescues Adela after her "rape" at the Marabar Hills. We later find out that the girl's been having an affair with Mr. McBryde. THE SUBALTERN The subaltern, a British soldier, only makes two appearances in the novel. The subaltern gives us the military perspective on colonial India. In his first appearance, he plays polo with Aziz. Here, he represents the military fraternity, and can appreciate Aziz as a fellow sportsman, even if Aziz happens to be from a different cultu...