Okay today we're talking about EM Forster's A Passage to India. It is a classic of modernist era British literature, but I think it's something like a secondary or tertiary classic. I only say that because in undergraduate and then graduate school reading specifically in that period was never assigned as a text. I think there may be a couple reasons for this. The first is that it was released in 1924 and even though it was released two years after Ulysses it has a feeling it's a little bit more Edwardian or late Victorian. I can't really pinpoint exactly why I say that, but I think it lacks a bit of an interiority of the characters. It's more pulled back high levels you don't get them their inner life as much. I think the other reason it might not be a full canon material is that it takes place in India. There seems to be some sort of reluctance to include these texts that are part of the diaspora, the empire writ large if it's not overly critical of the Empire. I don't know if this is some post-colonial canonization lack.
The thing is it's a surprisingly delightful book. It's hard to
read but it's hard to read in the way that it is like Richard Wright's Native
Son is hard to read -- it's hard to read that there's great Injustice in
those Clash of civilizations. India is tricky to understand anyway because
right now it is one of the largest Muslim countries if you just take an
absolute count of all the people in the nation that are Muslim. I think it has
the second highest after Indonesia. But India itself is so big that they're
only 18 or 20% of the total population now. And prior to British colonization
there was a huge Clash because the minority Muslim Mughals had been in charge
for a while. And then you have a very rigid caste system in the Hindu side of
the Indian subcontinent that I'm not even well-versed enough to speak
about.
So, you have this entire mélange of the height of the British Raj,
you have Muslim Indian and Hindu Indians all together and the basic plot is one
of a big misunderstanding. You're reading and you get this dramatic irony that
hovers over the key plot event in the second half is kind of this unraveling.
Spoiler alert: there is an assault or an attempted rape it's not clear that an
English woman accuses an Indian of partaking. But the thing is we see the scene
from the accused’s perspective, and we know that the fact of the matter is that
she's making it up. And the entire middle of the book you're reading is this
character who I really like just is getting railroaded. I don't want to get too
deep into it but thankfully it's not too much Injustice just enough to know
that hey colonialism is bad.
The only thing that I really could talk against this book is that
there is an entire third section that seems a little superfluous after the
events and I'm sure there's criticism on it if you wanted to pull apart about
why it matters and why it's necessary to the text but as a reader my first real
Forester it just didn't really seem like it was necessary overall. I really
enjoyed it and I would recommend reading A Passage to India if you were a fan
of fiction about colonialism.
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