A PASSAGE TO INDIA | BOOK REVIEW

 

A Passage To India | E.M. Foster | Book Review

E. M. FORSTER

English novelist Edward Morgan Forster OM CH, who lived from 1 January 1879 to 7 June 1970, is best known for his books A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924).

In addition, he produced a large number of essays, lectures, broadcasts, short stories, and plays for pageants. Moreover, he co-wrote the opera Billy Budd (1951). He is now regarded as one of the most prominent English novels of the Edwardian era.

After graduating from Tonbridge School, he went on to King's College in Cambridge to study history and classics, where he encountered other aspiring authors including Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. After that, he took a tour of Europe before Where Angels Fear to Tread, his debut book, was published in 1905.

REVIEW:

A Passage to India (1924) is a novel by E. M. Forster set against the background of the British Raj and the Indian Independence Movement in the 1920s. It earned the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Award for fiction and was listed by the Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest works of English literature. Time magazine featured the novel in its “TIME 100 Greatest English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005”.

Dr. Aziz, his British friend Cyril Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Adela Quested serve as the story's main protagonists. Adela accuses Aziz of attempting to abuse her during a tour of the Marabar Caves, which are fashioned after the Barabar Caves of Bihar. The circumstances surrounding and fallout from Aziz's trial bring out all the racial tensions and biases between native Indians and the British colonial rulers of India. In A Passage to India, Forster draws on his personal experience of the country.

In 1913, shortly after his first trip to India, Foster began writing A Passage to India. However, the book wasn't fully updated and finished until 1921, following his second trip to India, while he was working as the Senior Maharaja of Dewas State's Secretary. A Passage to India, a 1924 book that explores the complicated connections between Indians and the English at the conclusion of the British occupation of India, highlights the racial misunderstandings and cultural duplicity that characterised these contacts.

FINAL VERDICT

This book defiantly would be a brilliant choice for those who are keenly interested in Indian history and culture.

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