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As long as someone abused the English, all went well, but nothing constructive had been achieved, and if the English were to leave India, the committee would vanish also.
Aziz sits on a local committee of Muslims and Hindus that discusses the current colonial political state, but he remarks that the only reason the committee even exists is to criticize the English – if the British colonial rule were to come to an end, so would the committee, and the fragile unity between the Muslims and the Hindus would dissolve. This passage points out that the muddle of India goes beyond the effects of English colonialism. Even if the country were not colonized, it would still be divided by conflict between native Muslims and native Hindus, and its people and customs would still not be united under one identity.
“So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as final?” they laughed. “What have we in common with them, or with Asirgarh?”
As Mrs. Moore travels to Bombay, still depressed by her recent crisis of faith, she realizes that she has not seen the real India, and that it would be practically impossible to do so. The country is too large, and it has too many cities and different factions of people to be defined by only one place or experience. She may have had an earthshaking existential realization in the Marabar caves, but a visit to Asirgarh or elsewhere in India might have brought completely new philosophies to her mind.
[India] knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She had never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.
In A Passage to India, India becomes a symbol of the division of people across the world. The religious and political tensions in India are a microcosm of the whole world’s inability to understand people who are different from them. India seems to call to the English people in the novel, who come to the country sincerely believing that they will make a positive difference and that they will genuinely love and befriend the locals. But instead of unity they often find confusion and disappointment, and love always seems to elude them – a troubling conundrum that is certainly not unique to only British-Indian relationships.
