E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India: Ends of Empire.
Lecture by Peter Jones, King’s College, Cambridge, 5 June 2021
Blog post by Lisa Hutchins
A Passage to India (1924) draws extensively on Edward Morgan Forster's experiences of living in India during two extended trips made around a decade apart. It gives a fictionalised account of his time there – but this account, as we learned from this lecture, is a long way from being the full story. Can we ever know that full story?
Peter Jones, Fellow-Librarian at Kings College, followed up his earlier lecture on Leonard Woolf with a discussion of how archive material relating to A Passage to India sheds light on Forster's personal and political understanding of India. This material also reveals significant gaps in the published narrative; some parts of the story provoked profound discomfort in British society at that time. They are Forster's homosexual relationships with members of the Indian servant class, and increasing momentum in that country towards political independence.
Peter told us A Passage to India is unique among Forster's novels for its relationship to his non-fiction writing. The Forster Papers, held at King’s College Cambridge, contain factual accounts of the visits, including semi-public and confidential letters, journals and diaries. There are also a series of manuscripts. Text A is the published version of the novel which includes different periods of work. One follows Forster's stay in India in 1912-13, is distinguishable by being written in green ink, and covers roughly the first seven chapters. Work then seems to have stalled until Forster was able to return between 1922 and 1924. By then, the political situation was much more febrile and pro-independence than before the war. Text B contains various undated early drafts and alternate versions while a third group of materials, labelled C, includes miscellaneous materials. Peter told us that comparison of these fiction and non-fiction writings revealed the fascinating differences relating to Forster's sexual life and views about independence which he revealed to trusted correspondents, while reserving a much more cautious version for his more widely-shared writings.
The impetus for Forster to travel was a friendship he had formed in suburban Surrey. (His travel plans were also helped along by the proceeds from A Room with a View, which enjoyed commercial success after publication in 1908.) Forster befriended Syed Ross Masood, a lawyer and educator who went on to become the Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University. When Forster met him, he was 17 and studying for Oxford entrance. Peter told us how Masood returned to India after studying for the bar and introduced Forster to his circle there. The two men travelled in Europe together before the Indian visit and Peter said it was always understood between them that Forster would write a book:
My own debt to [Syed Ross Masood] is incalculable. He woke me up out of my suburban and academic life, showed me new horizons and a new civilisation, and helped me towards the understanding of a continent. Until I met him India was a vague jumble of rajahs, sahibs, babus and elephants, and I was not interested in such a jumble; who could be? He made everything real and exciting as soon as he began to talk, and seventeen years later when I wrote A Passage to India, I dedicated to him out of gratitude as well as out of love, for it would never have been written without him.
E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951.
Other important influences on Forster were the Maharajah of Dewas, who employed him as a private secretary from 1921 (with this period in his life described as a release from the stifling hierarchy of English life) and Sir Malcolm Lyall Darling. A friend of Forster's from his King’s College days, and a senior member of the Indian Civil Service, Darling's discomfort with Anglo-Indian society and refusal to accept the idea of racial inferiority of Indians led him away from a conventional career path and towards work on improving conditions for Indian peasant farmers. Forster wrote:
I had English friends in the civil service and I could pass from one camp to another with results that were interesting but painful. The English had been trained in a fine tradition of paternal government. Times were changing and they found it difficult to change. Some of them accepted the new situation with a good grace, most of them with a bad one, and the manners of their womenfolk could be ghastly. Looking back on that first visit of mine to India I realise that mixed up with the pleasure and fun was much pain. The sense of racial tension, of incompatibility, never left me. It was not a tourist's outing, and the impression it left was deep.
E. M. Forster, Three Countries, talk in Milan and Rome 1959
Passages of reflection, anecdote and recollection from journals and letters are reworked in A Passage to India and The Hill of Devi, Forster's other work on India, a memoir of his time with the Maharajah of Dewas. Friends and acquaintances, especially the three men mentioned above, also contributed to characters in the works, although they are adapted to the needs of the story rather than offering accurate portraits. The lecture concluded with the difficult events of the Jallianwala Bagh (or Amritsar) Massacre of 1919 and the destabilising effects of stalled independence talks from 1918 onwards. Indian troops had made a huge contribution to the British war effort, and pressure for independence was gaining strength. Both helped to create a much more volatile political situation experienced by Forster on his second visit than on his first, and Peter explained how the writer had some difficulty reconciling the two versions in the novel.
Peter also showed us that, while we may never know the complete story of Forster's time in India, dedicated literary scholarship in the archive has offered a deep and satisfying insight into the circumstances of this novel's creation.
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The Literature Cambridge Women Writers Season launches on Saturday June 19 with a lecture from Trudi Tate on Bid Me To Live by 'HD'. Full programme and booking details here.
