A Passage to India
When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced 'Anglo-Indian' community. Determined to escape the parochial English enclave and explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterly portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world.
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1recommend
8mentions
5people
2015–2026years
13% recommend88% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- So for my unofficial book club with a good friend, we're in the final act of A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, after having finished A Room with a View a few weeks before. I enjoy 19th and early 20th century literature for the prose quality quite a lot, and Forster does not disappoint on that score. It's also fascinating getting an inside view on Anglo-Indian relations during British rule. It's thematically similar To Kill a Mockingbird, in that both feature prominent "White Knight" type characters.
I'm also reading some less highbrow, yet highly entertaining novels that I'm obsessed with. I'm currently on book 16 in in Lindsey Davis' Falco series[0], which are murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. I've been enjoying them non-stop ever since HN user "vintagedave" recommended[1] them around 4 months ago.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco
- The opening chapters of A Passage to India include an Indian man thinking about how irritating it is that these uncultured Brits don’t understand a polite lie as a refusal, and always want to try to solve the “problem” to get around the refusal. How unrefined!
- There's a nice bit in Forster's A Passage to India in which one of the Indian characters reflects on how ill-mannered another character is for taking a polite excuse (which also happens to be a lie) as a problem to solve and not as the firm "no" that any properly-raised person would understand it to be.
- It's not absurd, but there is a lot of hypocrisy surrounding the British Raj especially with regards to how concerned they were with the welfare of the Indian subjects. There were a lot of good British administrators who were benevolent, and fond of India. And the legal system is a boon. But there were large patches of plain greed couched in philanthropic terms. A favorite quote of mine is George Orwell quoting E. M. Forster "Again, he [Gandhi] seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice." [1]
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- For anyone to whom the name E.M.Forster does not ring a bell, he's more well known for "A Room with a View" and "A Passage to India".[1]
He also wrote another short story which I consider to be even better than The Machine Stops. It's called The Other Side of the Hedge[2], and while it's not as prescient it's one of my favorite short stories and I would highly recommend it to everyone.
- Also check out "The Machine Stops"[1] by E. M. Forster (more famous for writing "A Passage to India" and "A Room With a View").
Written in 1909, it foreshadowed the internet, VR, instantaneous global communication, chat rooms, internet addiction, and other things we take for granted now but were incredibly visionary 120 years ago.
[1] - http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
