A Passage To India (E. M. Forster, 1924)

To begin in an indirect way, I watched the first series of Indian Summers on PBS last fall. It was clear that Channel Four (and PBS) were hot to push it as a Downton Abbey successor and it felt pretty exciting to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, even if it wasn't quite as good. Well, I can toss all that out since I just read it was canceled after the airing of the second series in the UK, so who knows if I'll see any more of it. Even if it ended up being a truncated epic, it made me realize just how little I knew about British India.

Therefore, the timing of A Passage to India wasn't bad. While I still lack a basic textbook knowledge of the period, at least I came in with a general sense of the look and feel of the times, which are nearly the same as the TV show counterpart. Of course, the plots are not at all the time, plus the writers of the TV show had the gift of hindsight. I had to keep this in mind when reading that Forster, who, in 1924, did not have a crystal ball or ESP.

Forster has a pretty keen sense of the fractures among the Indian people, between Hindu and Muslim, and well as the tension between English and Indian. He is not shamelessly for one side or the other, and I was changing my mind throughout the book as to who the "good guys" were in the book. I suppose Mrs. Moore could be seen as the most sympathetic, but her character was also quite passive as well as absent from about the halfway point onward. Dr. Aziz was the most convoluted character, a generally good man, but with a lot of dark thoughts and horribly framed for a crime he clearly didn't commit. Mr. Fielding is nice enough, but comes off as rather hapless. Then of course there are the definitely-bad English (Turton, Callendar) and definitely-bad Indians (Lal). Needless to say it's a complicated book.

Admittedly the first half was pretty dull, focused mainly on character development. However, that early focus paid off in the second half, following the Crime in the Caves, and thrusting the reader into an Anglo-Indian version of To Kill a Mockingbird. While there aren't any great big car chase sequences, there's enough tension to keep things moving along at a surprising clip during the novel's second half.

As you can see by the beat up old-timey cover above, I read a very old hardcover library version of the book. Since it is still required reading in many schools, probably at the more advanced levels of high school, you shouldn't have any problem finding a copy at the public library. However, if a banged-up threadbare book would embarrass your nightstand, a sparkly new paperback copy is easy enough to find, either at Amazon or a regular bricks-and-mortar bookstore.