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. |