A passage to India

About the book

Mrs Moore and Adela Quested arrive in India wanting experiences beyond the closed routines of the British official community. Their encounters with Dr Aziz and the school principal Fielding seem to offer openings towards friendship, but hospitality and goodwill operate within an unequal political order. An excursion to the Marabar Caves brings uncertainty into a relationship already vulnerable to collective suspicion. Forster gives landscape, sound, social ritual, and religious difference important roles in the difficulty of making experience intelligible. The novel follows how an individual's account can be seized by a community eager to have its prejudices confirmed. Its central question concerns whether personal sympathy can establish a lasting connection when institutions and historical circumstances continually return people to opposed positions, even when they would prefer to meet differently.

• Colonial power
• Friendship
• Uncertainty and prejudice

Why read it

For a novel that examines the political conditions of personal trust without reducing its encounters to a simple failure of goodwill.

English text