A Passage to India by EM Forster

When I went to one of the literature lectures at the NSWAG recently, the lecturer said this was her favourite EM Forster novel. Perhaps because I’m on holidays and not feeling very serious, I’ve found it hard to read. The poetic passages and the long descriptions of Indian religious ceremonies and the fraught emotional journeys of the characters were hard going. The themes of course were fascinating and showed prescience: Indian independence, freedom from the British, the pomposity and public school mentality of those British ruling India, the racism and tension that ran through both Indian and British societies. I can see how this book must have caused a furore when it was published in the 1920s. The story is abut four characters, Dr Aziz a Muslim doctor, Miss Quested, a British woman who has come out to marry one of the civil servants, Mr Fielding, an enlightened British educator and Mrs Moore, the mother of the civil servant. She’s the strangest of the characters, showing a sort of spiritual awareness and separation from the attitudes of the ruling class there. Anyhow when they go off for a picnic Miss Quested accuses Aziz of improper behaviour and that results in a court case that unleashes all the animosity between all the groups and puts a huge strain on the friendship between Fielding and Aziz. The question at the beginning, and at the end, is whether there can ever be a proper friendship between an Englishman and an Indian.