Summary: Chapter XXIV
The hot season has begun, and everyone retreats indoors,
away from the sun. The morning of Aziz’s trial, the Turtons drive
Adela to the courthouse with a police escort. On the way, Mr. Turton
thinks to himself that he does not hate Indians, for to do so would
be to denounce his own career and the energy spent on them. He concludes
that it is Englishwomen who really make matters worse in India.
In front of the courthouse, students jeer at the car.
Rafi, hiding behind a friend, yells that the English are cowards.
Inside, the English gather in Ronny’s office and loudly trade rumors
about an Indian rebellion and Fielding’s traitorous behavior. Ronny expresses
confidence in his subordinate, Das, who is acting as judge for the
case. Major Callendar loudly denounces all Indians. He relates with
satisfaction that the Nawab Bahadur’s grandson recently suffered
severe facial injury from a car accident; all Indians should be
similarly made to suffer. Everyone ignores Adela, who sits quietly,
fearing she will have a breakdown during her examination.
When the case is called, the group files into the courtroom
to their special chairs. Adela notices the lowly Indian servant
operating the fan. He has a beautiful, godlike demeanor and appears
aloof from everything taking place in the room.
McBryde opens the case for the prosecution. He presents
as scientific fact his assertion that darker races lust after fairer
races, but not vice versa. An Indian in the audience protests that
Adela is ugly. Adela becomes flustered. Callendar requests that
Adela be moved to the platform for better air. All of the English
then move to the platform. Amritrao, the lawyer from Calcutta, protests
that having all the English up on the platform will intimidate the
witnesses. Das agrees that everyone but Adela must return to the
floor. Outside the courtroom, word of this humiliation spreads,
and the crowd jeers.
McBryde argues that Aziz lives a double life, simultaneously “respectable”
and depraved. McBryde dwells on Aziz’s attempt to crush Mrs. Moore
in the first cave. Mahmoud Ali objects to this accusation, as Mrs.
Moore will not be testifying at the trial. Mahmoud Ali bemoans the
fact that Ronny has sent Mrs. Moore away, as she knew Aziz was innocent.
Despite Das’s attempts to restore calm, Mahmoud Ali shouts that
the trial is a farce and all of them slaves. He leaves the courtroom
in protest. The Indians begin chanting “Mrs. Moore” as if it were
a charm, until the chant sounds like “Esmiss Esmoor.”
Adela goes up to the witness stand. She suddenly feels
like she is back at Marabar, and that it seems more lovely this
time. As McBryde questions her, she visualizes each step of that
day. When he asks if Aziz followed her into the cave, she requests
a minute to answer. Visualizing the caves, she cannot picture him
following her. She states quietly that she has made a mistake, that
Aziz never followed her. The courtroom erupts. Callendar tries to
halt the trial on medical grounds, but Adela confirms that she withdraws
all the charges. The enraged Mrs. Turton screams insults at Adela.
Das officially releases Aziz.
Summary: Chapter XXV
Adela is pushed along in the tide of Indians toward the
exit. Fielding asks her where she is going. She responds listlessly,
so he reluctantly takes her to his carriage for her safety. Fielding’s
students are gathered around the carriage. They convince Fielding
and Adela to get inside and they then pull the two through town.
Indians drape flowers around Adela, though some are critical of
the two English sticking together.
The roads in Chandrapore are blocked with crowds, and
the Eng-lish are cut off on the way back to the civil station. Adela
and Fielding are pulled back to the college. The phone lines are
cut, and the servants gone. Fielding encourages Adela to rest and
lies down himself.
Meanwhile, Aziz, in his victory procession, cries out
for Fielding, who has abandoned him. Mahmoud Ali orders the procession
to the hospital to rescue the Nawab Bahadur’s grandson, as word
has circulated that Mahmoud Ali overheard Callendar bragging about
torturing the young man. The Nawab Bahadur urges restraint, but
the crowd proceeds to the hospital.
Disaster is averted only by Panna Lal, who mistakenly
believes the crowd has come to the hospital to punish him for offering
to testify for the English. Lal acts the buffoon to honor the vengeful
men, and he retrieves the Nawab Bahadur’s grandson for them. The Nawab
Bahadur averts further disaster by making a long-winded speech in
which he renounces his loyalist title. He invites Aziz and friends
to his house for a celebration that night. The baking heat of the
hot season bears down on the city, and nearly everyone retreats indoors
to sleep.
Analysis: Chapters XXIV–XXV
By the time of the trial, it becomes clear that the English
value the sense of conflict that Adela’s alleged assault has triggered
much more than the welfare of Adela herself. The English solely
focus on the vengeance to be had through Aziz’s trial, ignoring
the true trauma that Adela still suffers—the trauma of the echo.
The less sympathetic English essentially ignore Adela, even on the
morning of the trial, and instead engage in gossip about Fielding
and inflated stories about Indian dissent and rebellion. Even the
sympathetic, chivalrous Mr. Turton, who is attentive to Adela, thinks
to himself that the general presence of Englishwomen in India is
the cause of all English-Indian tension.
In the chapters that deal with Aziz’s trial, we begin
to see clearly the differences between Ronny’s character and the
character of the majority of the English. Though Ronny does not
focus on Adela’s personal pain more than any of the others, he does
become somewhat more gracious in the aftermath of her ordeal. Adela’s
assault makes Ronny into a sort of martyr figure for the English,
as his fiancée has been wronged; this status seems to release him
from the English community’s vengeance-seeking. During the trial,
Ronny almost exclusively focuses on his subordinate, Mr. Das, who
is trying the case. Ronny feels condescendingly confident in Das
and looks forward to Das’s successful performance as a good reflection on
Ronny himself. Here, like Turton, Ronny is a character who feels confident
in the British Empire and in the process of justice that the Empire
brings to India. Though Ronny does not share the cross-culturally
sympathetic character of his mother, Mrs. Moore, neither does he
seek disproportionate revenge against the Indians, as many of the
other English do.
The strategy of McBryde, the prosecution’s lawyer, is
to present his interpretation of the facts of the case in such a
dry, emotionless, and “scientific” manner that they appear to be
the truth. His interpretation of Aziz’s actions and character resembles
Ronny’s interpretation of Aziz’s meeting with Mrs. Moore in the
mosque in Chapter III. Mrs. Moore acknowledged that Ronny’s ungenerous interpretation,
though it could be factually correct, ignored the warmth and trustworthiness
of Aziz’s character that she herself sensed. Here, McBryde’s account
similarly presents mere interpretations of fact
as fact. McBryde’s account is devoid of any recognition or sympathetic
understanding of Aziz’s honorable character. Additionally, McBryde’s
account—while presenting itself as “truth”—ignores specific angles
of the case (such as the disappeared Marabar guide) and depends
on biased character witnesses such as Panna Lal.
In response to the pretense of logic and fact that the
English put forward, Mahmoud Ali emotionally argues that the English
have conspired to withhold Mrs. Moore as a witness. This assertion prompts
the Indian crowd in the courtroom to begin chanting Mrs. Moore’s
name. To the English, these actions are proof of the Indians’ tendency
to be overemotional and superstitious; Forster, however, presents
the incantation of “Esmiss Esmoor” as a sort of collective Indian
intuition about what is missing from the English pretense of justice.
Mrs. Moore comes to symbolize an ideal, spiritual, sympathetic,
and—perhaps most important—race-blind understanding. Though Mrs.
Moore herself succumbs to apathy after her visit to Marabar and
never offers to defend Aziz at his trial, she acquires an almost
godlike significance through the rest of A Passage to India. Forster
adeptly shows Mrs. Moore’s shortcomings as human, yet also presents
her as a positive symbol of unself-conscious and spiritually perceptive
interracial understanding. Forster implies that Mrs. Moore’s brand
of extraordinary, undemonstrative compassion is what is missing
from the English-style trial.
Adela is able to declare Aziz’s innocence during the trial
because she experiences a vision during her testimony. This vision
is, in a sense, a positive version of the vision Mrs. Moore experienced
after going into the first cave at Marabar. In that cave, Mrs. Moore
has a vision of all differences being collapsed into the sameness
of the echo, “boum.” This lack of individuation and valuation frightens Mrs.
Moore and makes her cease to care about individual relationships.
Adela’s vision is similarly impersonal. She experiences an out-of-body
re-creation of her expedition into Marabar, and in it, she actually
“sees” that Aziz did not enter the cave after her. The impersonal,
detached point of view of this vision allows Adela to put honesty
before her individual feelings or relationships with others. Forster
foreshadows this revelation of Adela’s relative unimportance when
Adela first enters the courtroom and notices the poor but godlike
Indian operating the fan. His aloofness and beauty suggest a detached,
spiritual perspective from which Adela and her trauma appear less
significant. Forster presents Adela’s experience of spiritual impersonality
as a positive vision that restores the balance of justice in the
trial.
All the main events in A Passage to India, strangely,
are actually nonevents. The event of Adela’s experience of an assault
in the Marabar Caves turns out to be an imagined assault. The event
that should be Aziz’s conviction is rendered a nonevent by Adela,
who quietly affirms Aziz’s innocence. Similarly, in the aftermath
of the trial, the strain on English-Indian relations builds to a
climax, but these tensions wither in the oppressive heat of the
sun. The riotous Indians who gather at the Minto Hospital leave
without violence to return home for naps. This anticlimactic tendency
shows that Forster cares less about plot events than about how those
events make an impression on individual characters and on the social
atmosphere of the novel. Furthermore, the series of anticlimaxes
reminds us of the pervasive sense of emptiness, absence, exclusion,
and nothingness at the core of A Passage to India:
more important than what we see occur is what we do not see occur;
more important than what happens is what does not happen.
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