A Passage to India (1924)

I had the impression E.M. Forster was a bookish type of stylist of manners, but reading his best known and most celebrated novel more gives the impression of another British school of letters, the adventurer-writer with Kipling or T.E Lawrence. Not that I know exactly what I'm talking about. Forster's novel seems precise, almost clinical, about the relations between Muslims and Hindus in India and fully aware of the rot that underlay their occupation by Britain. The characters all seem types at first, Britons and various Indians, all of whose individual humanities gradually disclose even as vast and entrenched social and cultural networks introduce more and more complexity. It teases and probes away at several strains of cultures attempting to accommodate and understand and live with one another. Everything comes to revolve around an incident on a pleasure excursion, a young British woman accusing an Indian of assaulting her. The incident itself takes place in a dark cave; it's ambiguous and hard to know exactly what happened. Forster seems more interested in the reverberations abstracted that would be caused by such an incident or accusation in such a fragile society. He understands the strange balance of power too, with the Britons wielding so much power and yet so vastly outnumbered by the Indians, who are deeply divided themselves. This is two decades or more before Pakistan would separate itself from the maelstrom, which took place shortly after World War II, removing itself from India as a country primarily for Muslims. Forster is very good at helping us understand how much we don't know—we, as Westerners—about the overwhelming complexities of this seething mass of humanity with all its divergences of ethnicity and creed and language and God knows what else. Yet it also feels somewhat occluded too, closer to the British viewpoint than it sometimes seems to think it is. Forster is painstaking to maintain his objectivity, such as it is, but his attitude feels patronizing just a little, toward the Indians, as though his real beef and source of motivation is something in him about the grand experiments of the British Empire itself.

In case it's not at the library.