Historical and Literary Background: A Passage to India.

E.M. Forster was born into a world of culture and some affluence. He once famously observed that he belonged to “the fag-end of Victorian liberalism”. Apart from A Passage to India, all his novels were written before 1914 and celebrate an Edwardian world of unrivalled middle-class stability and prosperity that was swept away by the First World War. Of course, life for the majority was very far from stable or prosperous: industrial capitalism at home and Imperialism overseas made wealth for the few at the expense of the many. Laissez-faire economics and the unfettered freedom of the individual are classic liberal beliefs but poverty and urban squalor touched the conscience of liberal intellectuals and politicians, leading to the great reforming Liberal administration of 1906-11.

E.M. Forster’s writings demonstrate this split and crisis in liberalism, the so-called “liberal dilemma”. He sought to preserve and continue the great cultural tradition of the Victorian elite while criticising the unjust economic and social system that sustained it. This led to an irresolvable tension in his texts between satirical observations of middle-class life as it was, and Utopian yearnings for a more fulfilling future in a less industrialised world.

E.M. Forster’s homosexuality was an additional complicating factor that had to be coded into his texts as a hidden agenda. The Labouchère amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, making homosexual acts in private a crime, followed by the notorious Oscar Wilde trials in 1895, made it difficult for E.M. Forster to write and publish freely about issues that concerned him greatly. This was almost certainly that contributed to his literary silence after A Passage to India.

While at Cambridge, E.M. Forster was invited to join an exclusive debating society called “the Apostles”. Other members included the economist, Maynard Keynes, the art critic Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, future husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf, and the biographer Lytton Strachey. This club became the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group, an informal association of writers, artists, painters, critics and thinkers that was influential in the artistic and intellectual life of London in the years leading up to the First World War. E.M. Forster was never a central figure in the group, but its social and intellectual support helped him to maintain his artistic purpose and its scorn for complacent middle-class convention is apparent in his own writing. Like them, he celebrated love, friendship, art and the importance of the private life over the power of bureaucracy, Imperialism and the exercise of public power.

A Passage to India is, in many ways, a conventional novel. E.M. Forster’s roots as a writer of fiction lay in the great tradition of nineteenth-century realism. Such fictions have a commanding first or third person narrator who overviews the action, a strong plot to sustain narrative interest, and coherently presented characters who have to interact with a society that is closely observed, and whose choices have clear moral consequences. Some of E.M. Forster’s older contemporaries like John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett continued to write fiction in this realist tradition and he was influenced by it. E.M. Forster does, however, attempt to combine Edwardian realism with more exploratory techniques like symbolism in an effort to articulate more complex areas of individual experience and subjectivity. A Passage to India is the most Modernist of his novels. It is in A Passage to India that Forster most questions his own values and exposes the limitations of his “English” world view in the context of the challenging, foreign landscape and culture of the Indian sub-continent.

But the time-setting of the novel is deliberately vague. E.M. Forster’s second visit to India and the final drafting of the novel coincided with increasing activity for political independence, the Amritsar Massacre (1919), and Gandhi’s passive resistance movement and imprisonment from 1922-24.