Edward Morgan Forster was born into
a comfortable London family in 1879. His
father, an architect, died when Forster was very young, leaving
the boy to be raised by his mother and great‑aunt. Forster proved
to be a bright student, and he went on to attend Cambridge University, graduating
in 1901. He spent much of the next decade
traveling and living abroad, dividing his time between working as
a journalist and writing short stories and novels.
Many of Forster’s observations and experiences from this
time figure in his fiction, most notably A Room with a View (1908), which
chronicles the experiences of a group of English people vacationing
in Italy. Two years after A Room with a View, the
novel Howards End (1910),
in which Forster criticized the class divisions and prejudices of
Edwardian England, solidified his reputation as a social critic
and a master of incisively observational fiction.
Long before Forster first visited India, he had already
gained a vivid picture of its people and places from a young Indian
Muslim named Syed Ross Masood, whom Forster began tutoring in England
starting in 1906. Forster and Masood became
very close, and Masood introduced Forster to several of his Indian
friends. Echoes of the friendship between the two can be seen in
the characters of Fielding and Aziz in A Passage to India. By
the time Forster first visited India, in 1912,
the Englishman was well prepared for his travels throughout the
country.
At the time of Forster’s visit, the British government
had been officially ruling India since 1858,
after the failed Sepoy Rebellion in 1857,
in which Indians attempted to regain rule from the British East
India Company. The East India Company, a privately owned trading
concern, had been gaining financial and political power in India
since the seventeenth century. By the time of Forster’s visit, Britain’s
control over India was complete: English governors headed each province
and were responsible to Parliament. Though England had promised
the Indian people a role in government in exchange for their aid
during World War I, India did not win independence until three decades
later, in 1949.
Forster spent time with both Englishmen and Indians during
his visit, and he quickly found he preferred the company of the
latter. He was troubled by the racial oppression and deep cultural
misunderstandings that divided the Indian people and the British
colonists, or, as they are called in A Passage to India, Anglo-Indians.
The prevailing attitude among the British in India was that the
colonists were assuming the “white man’s burden”—novelist Rudyard Kipling’s
phrase—of governing the country, because the Indians could not handle
the responsibility themselves. Forster, a homosexual living in a
society and era largely unsympathetic to his lifestyle, had long
experienced prejudice and misunderstanding firsthand. It is no surprise,
then, that Forster felt sympathetic toward the Indian side of the
colonial argument. Indeed, Forster became a lifelong advocate for
tolerance and understanding among people of different social classes,
races, and backgrounds.
Forster began writing A Passage to India in 1913,
just after his first visit to India. The novel was not revised and
completed, however, until well after his second stay in India, in 1921,
when he served as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior.
Published in 1924, A Passage to India examines
the racial misunderstandings and cultural hypocrisies that characterized
the complex interactions between Indians and the English toward
the end of the British occupation of India.
Forster’s style is marked by his sympathy for his characters,
his ability to see more than one side of an argument or story, and
his fondness for simple, symbolic tales that neatly encapsulate large‑scale
problems and conditions. These tendencies are all evident in A
Passage to India, which was immediately acclaimed as Forster’s
masterpiece upon its publication. It is a traditional social and
political novel, unconcerned with the technical innovation of some
of Forster’s modernist contemporaries such as Gertrude Stein or
T.S. Eliot. A Passage to India is concerned, however,
with representing the chaos of modern human experience through patterns
of imagery and form. In this regard, Forster’s novel is similar
to modernist works of the same time period, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)
and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
A Passage to India was the last in a
string of Forster’s novels in which his craft improved markedly
with each new work. After the novel’s publication, however, Forster
never again attained the level of craft or the depth of observation
that characterized his early work. In his later life, he contented
himself primarily with writing critical essays and lectures, most
notably Aspects of the Novel (1927).
In 1946, Forster accepted a fellowship at
Cambridge, where he remained until his death in 1970.
