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E. M. Forster's 1924 masterpiece, A Passage to India, is a novel that tackles the thorny notions of preconceptions and misconceptions through characters' desire to overcome the barrier that divides East and West in colonial India. Here we see the limits of liberal tolerance, good intentions, and good will as we try to sort through the common problems that exist between two very different cultures. But Forster's India is a country where the English and Indians stare at each other across a cultural divide and a history of imbalanced power relations, mutual suspicion, and ill will. A fresh reader must wonder whether connection is possible at all.A Passage to India begins simply enough: with people genuinely desiring to connect and to overcome the stereotypes and biases that have divided the two cultures. Mrs. Moore accompanies her future daughter-in-law, Adela Quested, to India where both are to meet Mrs. Moore's son Ronny, the City Magistrate. From the outset, Adela makes it clear that she wishes to see the "real India" and Mrs. Moore soon befriends and Indian doctor named Aziz. Cyril Fielding, an Englishman and the principal of a local government college, soon becomes acquainted with everyone and it is his tenuous friendship with the Indian Dr. Aziz that really constitutes the backbone of this novel.While it is true that the primary characters take great pains to accept and embrace difference, their misunderstanding, fear and ignorance made that connection far more difficult than they expected. Getting to know the "real" India proves to be a daunting and challenging task. The bulk of this perhaps falls to Dr. Aziz, who soon learns that the indignities of life under British rule and the insults—unintentional and intentional—of his English acquaintances make him suspect that although genuine friendship may be desired, the two cultures are not yet ready.ABOUT THE AUTHORE. M. Forster published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905, which was quickly followed in 1907 by The Longest Journey and then in 1908 with A Room with a View. However, Forster's major breakthrough came in 1910 with the book Howard's End, which is often still regarded as his greatest work. Forster was associated with the Bloomsbury Group: a collective of intellectuals and peers, among them Virginia Woolf, Benjamin Britten, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The 1924 publication of A Passage to India firmly cemented Forster in the literary firmament as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century with this being one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. It was, however, the last novel Forster ever completed.Forster seems to have harbored a growing disillusionment with traditional liberalism and instead turned his attention to teaching and criticism, beginning with the Clark Lectures he delivered at Cambridge in 1927, which were gathered into a much-admired collection of essays published as Aspects of the Novel. In 1946, Forster accepted a fellowship at Cambridge where he remained until his death in 1970.SERIES DESCRIPTIONSFrom classic book to classic film, RosettaBooks has gathered some of most memorable books into film available. The selection is broad ranging and far reaching, with books from classic genre to cult classic to science fiction and horror and a blend of the two creating whole new genres like Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man. Classic works from Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, meet with E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Whether the work is centered in the here and now, in the past, or in some distant and almost unimaginable future, each...
Excerpts: From the book
Chapter 1
EXCEPT for the Marabar Caves -- and they are twenty
miles off -- the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of
miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it
deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as
the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front,
and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The
streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses
exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters
all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but
two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then
imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The
zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever
democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the
bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving.
So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the
Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into
the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the
general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there,
like some low but indestructible form of life.
Inland, the prospect alters. There is an oval Maidan, and a long sallow
hospital. Houses belonging to Eurasians stand on the high ground by the
railway station. Beyond the railway -- which runs parallel to the river
-- the land sinks, then rises again rather steeply. On the second rise
is laid out the little civil station, and viewed hence Chandrapore
appears to be a totally different place. It is a city of gardens. It is
no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a tropical
pleasaunce washed by a noble river. The toddy palms and neem trees and
mangoes and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible
and in their turn hide the bazaars. They rise from the gardens where
ancient tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and
unconsidered temples. Seeking light and air, and endowed with more
strength than man or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to
greet one another with branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a
city for the birds. Especially after the rains do they screen what
passes below, but at all times, even when scorched or leafless, they
glorify the city to the English people who inhabit the rise, so that
new-comers cannot believe it to be as meagre as it is described, and
have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment. As for the civil
station itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms not; neither does it
repel. It is sensibly planned, with a red-brick club on its brow, and
farther back a grocer's and a cemetery, and the bungalows are disposed
along roads that intersect at right angles. It has nothing hideous in
it, and only the view is beautiful; it shares nothing with the city
except the overarching sky.
The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the
vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally
a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will
pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after
sunset it has a new circumference -- orange, melting upwards into
tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so it is by night.
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A Passage to India by E. M. Foster is set in Chandrapore, India in 1920 India when British rules India. Foster was a liberal in outlook. Foster describes the tensions between the British officers and the Indian population. There are three main characters in the book : an Indian doctor named Aziz, a British university administrator named Cyril Fielding, and a Adela Quested, a young British schoolmistress who visits Chandrapore with her prospective mother in law Mrs. Moore to visit her son Ronny Heslop who is a magistrate in Chandapore. Foster believes that British and Indian can live together with harnoby and this he shows by the friendship of Aziz and Fielding. Foster has introduced “Bridge Party”, a social gathering to bridge the gap between both the cultures. Aziz invites them all for an expedition to see the real India by visiting renowned and mysterious, Marabar Caves. While visiting the last cave, Adela is sexually harassed ans she believes it is Aziz. Fielding is very furious and they file a complaint against Aziz. Aziz is arrested and is sent to jail to await trial on the criminal charges. The remaining novel deals with the trial and the fallout from the alleged crime of an Indian man assaulting a British woman. The last portion of the novel that deal with court proceedings against Aziz are very interesting and breathe holding. In A Passage to India Forster explored various themes like friendship between the Indian and the British, the incompatibility of different cultures, the hollowness of religion and the discriminations made by human himself. This book is the outcome of his own experience when he stayed in India. Foster emphasized the importance of love and understanding at the personal level in this novel. Overall, the novel dealt with the misunderstandings between the British and the Indians in the British Raj in 1910-20. This book needs a careful read without skipping a single line. This is a great historical novel with exceptional writing by Foster.
The book A Passage to India by E M Forster
(author) is published or distributed by RosettaBooks [0795309325-BEPDF, 9780795309328-BEPDF].
This particular edition was published on or around 2002-5-16 date.
A Passage to India is available for use in eBook binding.
This book by E M Forster
is written in English language.
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