Wednesday, June 21, 2006
India - A Journey to the Past
" A novel where India examines E.M. Forster"
That is the title of the review of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. The Guardian, one of my favorite newspapers on the web, republished its review of "A Passage to India". The review had appeared 82 years ago---on June 20, 1924. "The story is, essentially, that of the close contact of east and west in the persons of Dr Aziz, a Muslim, assistant medical officers of the Chandrapore hospital, and Mr Fielding, principal of the college. In them it is as close as blood itself allows. So far as affection is concerned they are friends, so that the interplay of east and west is along the very finest channels of human intercourse - suggesting the comparison of the blood and air vessels in the lungs; but the friendship is always at the mercy of the feelings which rise from the deeps of racial personality. "
I have read the book more than once (it was a must read for book lovers growing up in India) and I have seen the 1984 movie directed by David Lean. It is Forster's "Howards End" that I rate at the top of his works. But Forster's story of a small town in India during the early part of 20th century remains a classic.
- Mr Forster leans, if anywhere, towards his own race in his acute sense of their difficulties, but not more than by the weight of blood; and, again, fairness is not the word for his sensitive presentation. It is something much less conscious; not so much a virtue as a fatality of his genius. Whether he presents Englishman or Muslim or Hindu or Eurasian he is no longer examining life, but being examined by it in the deeps of his personality as an artist.
