Clash of Two Cultures Basis for Tragic Tale

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	• A Passage to India (MAXNotes Literature Guides) (MAXnotes) Ann Wood Research & Education Association, 1996 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 100 reviews view larger image
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Clash of Two Cultures Basis for Tragic Tale

Britishers Mrs. Moore and her prospective daughter-in-law, Adela Quested, make the arduous journey to India to visit Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny Heslop. He is a magistrate in Chandrapore, India, during the British occupation of that country. The two ladies make the acquaintance of Dr. Aziz, a local doctor who offers them a chance to see the "real India" by visiting the Marabar caves. Hoping to please the British ladies, he plans a wonderfully complicated and expensive journey. However, an unfortunate misunderstanding erupts into a tragic affair that point up the cultural differences and seething anger between the two cultures.

Was Miss Quested attacked by Dr. Aziz in the caves? This question becomes the central issue which propels the plot and lays bare the hostility and polarizing feelings of superiority and inferiority prevalent at the time. The reader is swept into the life of Dr. Aziz as more misunderstandings cause a permanent rift with his dearest friend and gives him a genuine hatred of the English. While the pompous Heslop contends his countrymen are in India to do justice and keep the peace, the appalling behavior on both sides explodes at a trial and lingers long after.

Forster is adept at not taking sides, at showing both the British as well as the Indian side of the issues. In his fair and balanced telling, the reader can alternately sympathize with Dr. Aziz or Miss Quested. Neither wins when the truth is revealed and both are forever scarred by the incident in the Marabar caves.

In 1984, David Lean brought this drama to the big screen and, in my opinion, actually improved on the source material by making the characters more sympathetic and capturing visually the beauty of India. Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested atop an elephant riding to the Marabar caves is a breath-taking scene and one any viewer will long remember.

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There is beauty here.

First of all, I should say that as I grow older I'm learning that everything I read more than five years should probably not be included in the list of books I've read. I first read A Passage to India in 1994. I know this because in my quasi obsession, through most of the nineties, to catch up on reading the important books years I had never read, I wrote the dates at which I started and finished each book on the inside cover. When I picked A Passage to India up again this summer, I was stunned to find that, except for a few hazy vaguenesses, I had forgotten the book completely. I certainly had no memory of its beauty. At the heart of A Passage to India are the issues of race, friendship, decency, and the clash of cultures in British India at the turn of the 20th century. Forster's story is polyphonic, which is to say it is told from a number of voices. His prose is beautiful enough to stop you, and the novel's larger questions are ones that continue to resonate with the world's denizens even at the turn of this century.

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East and West Can Never Meet

Almost a century after the book's publication the most crucial problems it discussed are as current as they were during Forster's life. The impossibility of communicating across the divide of culture, religion, and race, seems to be even more alive then when he saw it. The value of the novel lies not so much in representing it but in the fact that Forster offers a way out - personal contact. There is little chance people will suddenly like Muslims, Pakistanis, gays, lesbians, Moroccans, Turkish, Kurds etc etc - there is a chance (a very slim chance, Forster would be quick to add) that an American and a Muslim, a Turk and a Kurd, an Israeli and a Palestinian can be friends. The world may not want it, the people that surround them may not want it but the results depend on us alone. If we do not try we only have ourselves to blame.

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