"A PASSAGE TO INDIA, UNLOOS'D DREAMS"
by
Pauline Kael

The New Yorker, January 14, 1985

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The title of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India is an homage to one of the loveliest sections in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and, unlike Forster's other, more neatly constructed novels, this one has an all embracing, polymorphous quality, an openness. Forster had lived in India before and after the First World War, and in story terms the novel, published in 1924, is about the tragicomedy of British colonial rule. The liberal, agnostic author projects himself into the Indian character--into the humiliation they feel at being governed by people who have no affection for them, who don't like them. In its larger intentions, the novel is about the Indians' spirituality, their kindness, their mysticism. The novel's flowing, accepting manner is re-lated to Eastern philosophy. It embodies that philosophy, yet when Forster attempts to explain it--when he tries for mystery and depth-the writing seems thin, fuzzy, inflated. (When his exaltation goes flat, it's like flat Whitman; it's like hearing someone dither on about oneness with the universe.) I don't think the novel is great--it's near-great, or not-so-great maybe because mysticism doesn't come naturally to an ironist, and in A Passage to India it seems more willed than felt. But the novel is suggestive and dazzlingly empathic. Forster never falls into mere sympathetic understand-ing of the Indians; he's right inside the central Indian character--the young Muslim, Dr. Aziz. He embraces Aziz, all right; it's the British he pulls away from.

The movie version, adapted, directed, and edited by David Lean, is an admirable piece of work. Lean doesn't get in over his head by trying for the fall range of the hook's mysticism, but Forster got to him. In its first half, the film (it lasts two hours forty-three minutes) has a virtuoso steadiness as the story moves along and we see the process by which the British officers and their wives, who arrive in the fictitious provincial city of Chandrapore with idealistic hopes of friendship with the Indians, are gradually desensi-tized to the shame experienced by the natives, and become imperviously cruel. The movie shows us the virtual impossibility of communication between the subject people and the master-race British, and between the Muslims and the Hindus, at the same time that we observe the efforts of two Englishwomen to bridge the gulfs--to get to know the Indians socially.

Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), an elderly woman, whose son (Nigel Havers) has been in India for a year as city magistrate in Chandrapore, comes to visit him, accompanied, at his suggestion, by Quested (Judy Davis), whom he expects to marry. Mrs. Moore is displeased to see her son turning into a dull sahib, and the young, inexperience Quested, who has never been out of England before, is shocked by Ronny's new callousness and the smugness of the people he emulates. Mrs. I who has little patience with her son and his warnings about the dangers of mingling with the natives, strikes up an immediate, instinctive rapport Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), a glistening-eyed, eager doctor-poet, whom she meets by chance in a mosque. And later the two women have tea with Fielding (James Fox), the principal of the local Government College, who, to help them socialize, invites two Indian guests--Aziz and a Hindu scholar, Professor Godbole (Alec Guinness). Dr. Aziz, a bit heady with the joys of social intercourse with English women who treat him as an equal, an able to invite the group to his squalid one-room cottage, proposes an excursion--a picnic at the distant Marabar Caves.

And that's where, despite Aziz's careful, elaborate planning, everything comes to grief. Hearing the echo in a cave, Mrs. Moore is overcome by heat and fatigue, premonitions of death, and the feeling of a void where God should be. While Mrs. Moore rests, Miss Quested goes on alone with Dr. Aziz and a guide, and soon comes rushing from a cave suffering, perhaps, from what Whitman called "unloos'd dreams"-- is hysterical, and is convinced that Dr. Aziz has attempted to rape her. He is arrested, and the British, with their surface unflappability and their underlying paranoia about the Indians, react as if they were under siege. The British colony closes ranks, except for Fielding, who asserts his belief in the doctor's innocence, and the now irritable and distressed Mrs. Moore, who, without waiting to testify on the doctor's behalf, starts the journey home. For the others, the supposed attack on Miss Quested is further proof of the racial inferiority of the Indians. Besides, as the Superintendent of the Police explains at the trial, it's a matter of scientific knowledge that the darker races are attracted to the fairer, but not vice versa.

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