Note on the text: A Passage to IndiaE.M.
Forster began his last completed novel, A Passage to India, after
his first visit to India in 1912-13. However, he ran into difficulties
with the novel and abandoned it around the present Chapter 14 some time
in 1914. The problem seems to have been his difficulty on deciding on
the nature of the fateful events in the Marabar Caves. In one early
draft, it is Fielding who experiences the mysterious echo; in another,
Aziz and Adela are in the cave together. In one fascinating fragment of
manuscript Adela is actually attacked by an unnamed assailant and beats
him off with Ronny’s binoculars. The noverl remained unfinished for ten years. In 1921-22, E.M. Forster visited India for a second time and worked as a secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior for several months,. His experiences there provided material for the final section of the novel and refreshed his general sense of the complexities of Indian life at a time of gathering social unrest on the sub-continent. Encouraged by Leonard Woolf, the husband of E.M. Forster’s fellow Bloomsbury novelist Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster seems to have completed the novel early in 1924. It was first published by Edward Arnold later that year.
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