A Passage to India
by E. M. Forster
Summary
Adela Quested arrives in British India newly engaged to the city magistrate Ronny Heaslop, eager to see the real India rather than the version reserved for colonial officials, and Dr. Aziz, a young Muslim physician, arranges an expedition to the Marabar Caves to show her and his elderly friend Mrs. Moore the country he loves. Mrs. Moore, overcome by claustrophobia and the caves' strange echo, turns back after the first cave; Adela and Aziz go on alone with a guide, and after she asks him a blunt question about polygamy, Aziz steps into a cave to compose himself. He comes out to find Adela's field glasses broken on the ground and no sign of her; she has already fled to another Englishwoman's car, shaken and certain, in that moment, that he attacked her inside the cave. Aziz is arrested and tried, and the case collapses only when Adela, questioned under oath, admits that she cannot say with certainty what happened in the echoing dark. Mrs. Moore dies on the voyage home before the trial ends. Heaslop breaks the engagement, and Aziz's own friendship with the Englishman who defended him, the schoolmaster Fielding, curdles into resentment once Aziz decides Fielding sided too easily with Adela's world rather than his. Years later the two meet again in the princely state of Mau, and Forster ends the novel with both men admitting, gently and without bitterness, that an actual friendship between them cannot exist while India remains a colony.
Forster writes the caves themselves as a kind of test the novel's liberal hope for connection fails, their meaningless echo undoing every good intention brought into them. It reads slowly and carefully, patient with the social comedy of the English colonial club before the trial breaks the surface calm, and the trial itself lands harder for how unhurried the chapters leading up to it have been.
This was Forster's last novel; he published no further novel in his lifetime, a silence nearly as often discussed as the book itself.
Historical Context & Significance
A Passage to India was recognized twice, and quickly. It took the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1924, the year Edward Arnold published it in London, and the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, an award for English writing judged by a jury of French women, in 1925. The Pulitzer, the American prize against which this list otherwise measures its books, was never open to it, since Forster was British and the book was published in Britain; the 1924 Pulitzer went to Margaret Wilson's The Able McLaughlins, a book time has treated far less kindly than Forster's last.
Forster never published another novel after this one, and the Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he was repeatedly discussed in later decades, never came either. A Passage to India has instead built its reputation as it went, through repeated stage adaptations beginning in 1960, a 1965 BBC television version, and David Lean's 1984 film, which won two Academy Awards, until it settled onto lists like the Modern Library's hundred best English language novels of the century.