Forster’s Portrayal of India in his Novel A Passage to India through muddles, mystery, and disparate characters

In the Anglo-Indian fiction A Passage to India, E.M. Forster, in his effort to understand India, created an imaginary India with his keen observation of its history and facts. Using India’s colonial period as his novel’s backdrop, Forster conjures India’s “real” essence: a careful and exotic combination of muddles, mystery, and disparate characters.

Muddles

As soon as the novel begins, Forster constructs the imaginary Indian city named Chandrapore that bears the impression of a disordered and disorganized India. This small, filthy, monotonous, and unpleasant city next to the Ganges River offers “nothing extraordinary” except the Maravar Caves twenty miles away (Forster, 3).

Nevertheless, the odd landscape is not the only haphazard in Chandrapore. In this unlikable city, its occupants also seem to be made of “mud” (Forster, 3). Even one of the novel’s crucial characters, Mr. Feilding, when he stops by Venice while returning to England, cannot help but comment on how India is a formless civilization that failed to escape the “muddle” (Forster, 304). Both the natives and the Anglo-Indians who inhabit Chandrapore are tangled and trapped inside their caste-racial-cultural tension and distinction.

Moreover, the Marabar caves incident and how it affects Adela Quested is another manifestation of a muddle. The ambiguity surrounding that mysterious incident is intentionally constructed by the author to suggest India is an odd enigma. In a letter to his friend William Olmer, Forster wrote that through Miss Quested’s experience in the cave, he tried to portray it as an “unexplainable muddle” (Symondson, 2016).

Mystery

A Passage to India personifies India as a mystical figure, where some powerful Indian mysterious force seems to be controlling the environment and atmosphere to keep India intentionally disoriented and divided.

For instance, when “the bad weather” or summer arrives in the fictitious outlandish world of Chandrapore, people are forced to retreat inside due to the extreme “heat,” Forster writes, “…the street was deserted as if a catastrophe had cleaned off humanity during the inconclusive talk” (Forster, 119). Not only that, in the Marabar Caves incident, it is noticed how the obscure atmosphere in those inanimate caves manipulates Adela to hallucinate that Dr. Aziz had attacked her.

These instances of events suggest some mystic force is plotting against the Indians and the English and concocting incidents to prevent any sort of friendship between an Indian and an English and, of course, becoming successful at its mission.

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.” (Forster, 350)

Disparate Characters

The Indian Characters in the novel play an instrumental role in representing the intricacies of India.

Dr Aziz, on the one hand, is a modern Muslim Indian who is very protective of his Muslim Community and motherland. Through Aziz’s eyes, Forster also sees India as deeply flawed with prejudice, especially against their own Indian communities. Moreover, Aziz, at the beginning, shows an intriguing interest towards Western ideologies; in fact, he pursues to become friends with the English. However, the charm soon wears off, and he realises the British’s negative effect on India.

On the other hand, Godbole, a Hindu Brahmin, is the epitome of a very conservative, conventionally religious, and mysterious India. Whereas Dr Aziz reflects the Indians’ attitude towards colonialism, Godbole’s behaviour is an instance of a peaceful India where unity lies from the highest Brahmin to the most miniature wasps. James McConkey says Godbole’s position is “one of detachment from human reality and from the physical world, a detachment obtained by as complete a denial of individual consciousness as is possible, that denial and remove bringing with them a sense of love and an awareness of unity” (2020).

Another Indian character appearing in the courtroom is the punkhawallah, who also plays a vital role in India’s portrayal. Forster uses the punkhawallah as a symbol to reflect the meaninglessness of the communal and class conflict in Anglo-India. According to G.K. Das, “Physically naked, he (the punkhawallah) is presented in the novel as a man in his natural form, as the human individual, who is equal with all other individuals and higher than communities” (1977).

Conclusion

Through A Passage to India, Forster offers India’s unique illustration containing muddle, mystery, and socio-political strife. Though Forster does not present India in any attractive setting, the mysterious force that runs its course throughout the novel strangely makes India more appalling. Moreover. he is drawn towards the allusive spiritual mystery of India, which has the power to be the catalyst to nullify these unfathomable forces. In other words, Forster envisions a united India, free from all racial and social boundaries.

Sources

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/curious-case-of-professor-godbole-a-passage-to-india-reexamined/6E5661495566F76C5F75E64DF1966337
• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-17994-7_1
• https://www.katesymondson.com/articles/2016/7/15/the-mystery-and-muddle-of-a-passage-to-india