The Past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows!
—Walt Whitman, ‘A Passage to India’
Whitman’s poem of 1871 might serve as an apt epigraph for this centenary volume dedicated to EM Forster’s mystifying novel A Passage to India (1924). Despite its constant presence in university syllabi and its mesmerizing appeal to readers throughout the world, the novel is still open to fresh exegesis. Harish Trivedi has compiled an outstanding volume of essays that explores the ‘dark unfathom’d retrospect’, leading us back to the labyrinthine coils of a never-forgotten book.
Trivedi’s ‘Introduction’ is a testimony to his erudition as well as innovation in structuring this volume, believing as he does that, ‘It [A Passage to India] is an extraordinary feat of representing India, unsettlingly acute in terms of both social observation and psychological insight. It excels in its scope and ambition, in its ethnic as well as ethical complexity, and (yes!) in its resolute fair-mindedness’ (p. xii). This comprehensive statement, which emanates from a scholarly journey through earlier critical readings of the novel leads us smoothly into the fifteen essays divided into three sections. One could enquire, therefore, that the historical, biographical, colonial, postcolonial, postmodern and feminist aspects have already been sufficiently covered by previous scholars, so what more is there to say? Strangely, surprisingly and magnificently, the fifteen original essays find the ‘fissures in the Indian soil’ that still yield new textures, and the Marabar Caves echo once again with a tantalizing ambiguity and incertitude.
Continue reading this review
The first section presents A Passage to India through translations in various languages, and film and stage adaptations, thereby building a memorable montage that the novel inspires. The opening essay is by a novelist, Anjum Hasan, and begins delightfully with Forsterian language that a child heard from a Forster-devotee father and didn’t know what it meant! The personal and the political merge over time and the book gains complex meaning for Anjum even as the heavily marked pages are, by then, being carried around the parental home in a plastic bag (p.
12). From that, we move swiftly to a bilingual essay by Rupert Snell ‘On Translating A Passage into Hindi’ based on an experiment with six Indian translators that yielded an astonishing variety of ‘equivalent terminology’ even with the title of the book. India as ‘Hind’ or ‘Bharat’ carries varying connotations and that’s possibly the point about the politics of language. French and Polish translations provide two essays that establish the popularity of Forster’s novel in venues not much known about, but the final essay in this section, about David Lean’s adaptation in cinema, which won 11 Academy Award nominations (p. 66), will surely arouse curiosity. Forster distrusted the transition from text to screen and during his lifetime even denied Satyajit Ray the permission to convert A Passage to India (p. 64) into a film. After Forster passed away, Madhu Singh says, ‘David Lean charmed and bullied Forster’s literary estate into giving him the rights to the film’ (p. 66). The gaps between the novel and the cinematic extravaganza are thoughtfully commented upon, including the blatant changes in the ‘punkah-wallah’ and the demystification of the Cave episode. Madhu Singh’s essay raises a foundational question about the parasitical gaze of the camera eye upon a beloved book.
The second section of the centenary volume has been titled ‘Characters and Themes’ which may sound like Class Notes, but they are not. Deeply researched and impeccably presented, we find an admirable newness in entering the mental precincts of Mrs Moore, Adela, Aziz and Godbole. Ruth Vanita, for instance, writes about ‘A Passage to India as a Vedantic Novel’ (p. 95), aligning the word ‘Vedanta’ to a mode of knowledge rather than scriptures. Selecting references to stones, water, silences and ‘muddles’, Ruth Vanita offers a thoughtful critique that ‘Passage attempts… a perspective, moving below and above the realm of personality into physical and eternal realms that are “unspeakable”’ (p. 106). Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar, in her essay, comes to the rescue of Mrs Moore, claiming that she is a victim of ageism, sexism and assumptions about motherhood roles. In a delightful mood of comparison, Dhondiyal writes, ‘the contrasts between the lightness of paternal responsibility as it sits on Aziz’s shoulders, is highlighted by them having an equal number of children. While Mrs Moore broods and fusses over her children settling down, Dr Aziz fantasises about young women in Calcutta’ (p. 134). Inevitably, a large number of essays in the centenary volume link Forster’s text to indigenous practices, cultural nuances and regional histories, and that in itself brings a wonderful freshness. Not only does the critical enquiry on A Passage to India find a local leverage in the context of international scholarship over one hundred years, it relocates the novel on the ground-swell of British-India relationships in the microcosm of the novel’s narrative. As the editor, Harish Trivedi has also erased the lines between creative criticism and creative writing, and has published Anamika’s charming piece, ‘Adela Adrift in India’ in which she imagines a post-story of Adela Quested being appointed as a governess in a princely household in India. Using a letter and diary format, it is a scathing attack on the social forces that misunderstood Adela’s ‘malaise’, her incoherence, and her vocabulary after the Marabar Cave incident. Anamika’s story heals the wounds within Adela, in a way, and transfers the blame for her suffering to the assumed superiority of the men—Indian as well as English.
The final section has a generic title, ‘Issues and Comparisons’, but the essays are a stimulating reworking of several well-known themes. Gaura Narayan centre-stages the Uprising of 1857 to develop an intricate essay on race relations (p. 152). Her equations may be questioned but nonetheless open into a valuable discourse on the interconnectedness between story and history, as in her summation, ‘In choosing heterosexual desire in its most violent aspect of gender-based vulnerability in general and rape in particular, the novel reprises the central paradigm in Mutiny narratives which present a racialized rhetoric of Indian masculine rapacity and English feminine vulnerability’ (p. 154). In the next essay, Ipshita Chanda, while acknowledging previous critical studies about the viability of ‘friendship’ across racial barriers and the implicit animosity that marked the colonial encounter, offers an unexpected and insightful comparison of Forster’s ‘cave’ and Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘cave’ episode depicted in Chaturanga (p. 177). In Tagore’s novel, the sequence is narrated as a diary entry and not a direct experience; however, the cave is just as ambiguous, disorienting, and ominous as in Forster’s presentation. In Tagore, ‘My blood froze. That primitive beast. Then something clutched at my feet…it seemed something like a snake’ (p. 178). The surreal threat and ‘otherness’ are images in common, and Chanda elaborates much more.
What such readings offer are distinctly new approaches to A Passage to India even after the constant critical scrutiny the novel has attracted during its century of existence. The credit undoubtedly goes to the editor of the 100 Years volume for selecting or commissioning a diversity of perspectives and holding true to a high benchmark.
It is befitting to conclude this review with Harish Trivedi’s own essay, ‘The Earth Said No, the Sky Said No: Poetry and Politics in A Passage to India’ (p. 218). Forster had repeatedly said that his novel was intended to be poetical, not political, and had given the example of the three sections connoting the Indian seasons of cold, hot and rainy weather. Even the indeterminacy of the incidents in the Marabar Cave bear witness to his poetic efforts, he maintained. Harish Trivedi contests all of this while being respectful of Forster’s intentions. He carefully marks the actuality of the novelist being embedded in the political events of his time, and being connected with people who carried the Imperial bias. Trivedi’s close reading of the Marabar Cave episode will dispel many assumptions about the so-called mysticism in the ‘aum’ like echo. Instead, Trivedi’s meticulous documentation and interweaving of Forster’s biography, poetics and the manuscript drafts of Passage leads to a startling conclusion:‘It may be reasonable then to surmise that it was Forster himself who was distracted at the caves and afflicted by sexual fantasies which he projected on to Adela, even when this was not consistent with her character as developed by him right up to this point in the novel’ (p. 226). With that surmise in view, everyone should read this essay. It’s also the right stop-sign for my review in accordance with the point I made about the refreshing, admirable scholarship in the book 100 Years of A Passage to India: International Assessments.
Malashri Lal, writer and academic, with twenty-two books, retired as Professor, English Department, University of Delhi, Delhi. Publications include Tagore and the Feminine, and The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English. Co-edited with Namita Gokhale is the ‘Goddess Trilogy’ and alsoBetrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt which received the Kalinga Fiction Award. Lal’s book of poems, Mandalas of Time has recently been translated into Hindi as Mandal Dhwani.