A Passage To India

I've finished A Passage To India.  Otherwise known by its alternate title - In Which Everyone Is Disappointed By Everyone Else: A Story About Sex Where Absolutely No One Has Sex.

And I should warn you - I'm going to spoil the book thoroughly for you.

We open with Adela Quested arriving in India with Mrs. Moore, ostensibly to see if she really likes Mrs. Moore's son Ronny enough to marry him.  And are introduced to Dr. Aziz, a handsome young Muslim doctor in Chandrapore who is much too flighty and poetical to know his own mind.  Aziz was disappointed in his first marriage to a woman who he thought rather plain and ugly and who nevertheless gave him three healthy children and acted the part of a caring wife until she died bearing child #3, at which point Aziz seems to have changed his mind about her and decided she was much too wonderful for him and he will never find her match.  He dumps his children on some relatives and devotes himself to being a doctor, writing poetry, making beautiful statements about things, and occasionally thinking about visiting brothels.

Miss Quested was disappointed by life in England, and is subsequently disappointed by Ronny, who elicits no passion in her whatsoever.  She's referred to many times as prudish, prim, and a cold fish - but I never really saw this in her character.  To me she seemed ignorant, or maybe harshly naive is a better reading.  Intentionally blind.  She wants to see 'the real India'.  Meanwhile Mrs. Moore takes her shoes off when visiting a mosque and because of this gesture earns the undying affection of Dr. Aziz.  As a favor to her, he arranges a picnic to the nearby Marabar Caves for her, Miss Quested (who had a moment of passionate hand-holding in the back seat of a car with Ronny and has agreed to marry him after all), and various other people including his new best friend the British Dr. Fielding.

Here let's take a side step.  Dr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz have essentially nothing in common but somehow seem to spend a lot of time together.  I can't help but wonder if Forster had any male friendships that weren't sexual in nature, because he seems rather at a loss for how to write this one.  And a great many thinly veiled moments of oddness exist between them.  Dr. Aziz joins Dr. Fielding as he gets dressed, for example.  Fielding mentions later in the story that it was irrelevant that Aziz visited brothels because everyone does when they're younger.  There's a lot of...well, no actually there aren't a lot of layers.  There's one layer, and it's laid on nice and thick.

So, the picnic.

No one knows what exactly happens to the two women during the picnic.  At one point Mrs. Moore feels claustrophobic in a cave and talks about people touching her.  When she gets out of the cave she discovers it was just the normal crowd.  The weird fleshy thing she felt on her face was the hand of a babe in arms.  All was nothing.  Aziz and Miss Quested and a guide go on to see the next cave without her and have a deeply awkward conversation where Miss Q asks Aziz if he has more than one wife, being Muslim and all.  And wants to know 'what marriage is like'.  He's insulted, and dips into a cave for a moment to collect himself.  When he comes back out, Miss Quested has gone down the hill to see a friend newly pulled up in a car.  The two drive off together.

On arriving home from the picnic, Aziz is arrested.  Miss Quested has accused him of accosting her in a cave.

At this point the deeply racist but tightly controlled narrative spins out and this is where Forster, I think, really comes into his own.  The only British person on Aziz's side is Fielding, who insists that Adela must be mistaken.  The pre-trial tensions rise.  Adela is apparently 'taken ill' and cannot see anyone.  She's haunted by an 'echo', which also mimics what Mrs. Moore says had bothered her in the crush of bodies in the first cave.  We're back to her thinking she can't marry Ronny after all.  Aziz is in jail, but then released on bail, and then arrested again for driving a car into a ditch.  Things are spinning out of control and the story ceases to make any real logical sense.  Is the vigorously anti British lawyer a good idea or not?  Is the Nawar Bandahur losing his title?  Is Mrs. Turton going to utterly and completely lose her ever loving mind over this frothing indignity to English femininity?

Wait now...Adela is saying no one ever touched her.  It was all just horrible.  Horrible.  But they just propositioned her.  Except she can't remember what they said.  But they broke her binocular strap.  Or, or maybe they didn't.  Could it have been the guide, and not Aziz after all?  Could she have been wrong?  Is she sick?  

The trial begins - on one side, the Indians.  Ready for a fight, and to defend Aziz.  On the other side, the British.  Already victorious before a word has been said.

And Adela stands up and declares she was wrong, it was not Aziz, it was no one.  She had hallucinated the whole thing.

Now of course everyone is furious with everyone else and nothing at all has been resolved.  Aziz is filled with hate towards the British and Adela in particular, who he claims would have been lucky to have been accosted in a cave at all, seeing as she's so ugly it might have been her only opportunity for human affection.  Mrs. Moore has gone from the intelligent and loving elderly lady and turned to a demented, bitter harridan of a woman who is turned into a saintly figure by the people of Chandrapore despite having left before the trial even began and conveniently died at sea, saving us all from having to deal with her abrupt about-face and her from having to deal with her other two exhausting unmarried adult children back in England.  Ronny, who stuck by Adela through her role as 'besmirched maiden', is struck by the thought that this woman is now everyone's enemy and also a turncoat so informs her that the engagement is off...again.

Fielding misses a parade in Aziz's honour and this is the beginning of the end for the two of them.  Things spiral downward in every corner.  Suspicion kills all the relationships.  Aziz cannot understand how Fielding could have offered Miss Quested refuge at the medical college when the mobs were out for blood post-trial.  He can't understand why Fielding would continually insist on Aziz releasing Adela from her financial responsibilities to Aziz in the way of court fees and payment for destroying his good name.  Fielding can't see how Aziz could be so ungentlemanly.  Aziz can't see how Fielding wouldn't tell him he was having an affair with Adela (he wasn't).  Fielding can't believe Aziz would accuse him of such a thing.  And on and on the tiny misunderstandings mount.  

And eventually, the inevitable.  Miss Quested has returned to Britain, of course.  And Dr. Fielding has been called back to England temporarily.  And Aziz knows...he just knows that of course the Dr. will marry Miss Quested. That perhaps that was why he had been so adamant that Aziz release her financially, so that he himself would get her inheritance.  And yet at even at the end we're not given a clear 'winner' or 'loser'.  The holy bees never attack those pure at heart, but they attack Fielding and his brother in law.  Fielding must be evil, then.  But it comes out that he never married Miss Quested after all, and Aziz has been petty and ridiculous all this time.  Aziz must be in the wrong.  Misunderstandings....misunderstanding...

Fielding was no cad - he truly believed in Aziz, and he truly believed that Adela had been honestly sick and hallucinated and shouldn't be made destitute in recompense for her mistake.  Aziz was no cad - he behaved honorably, and meant no harm to anyone, and attempted to please all around him.  The evil in the story was the situation itself, where community was naturally pitted against community and there could be no winners.  Where the only 'cross cultural' friendships had to end in death (Aziz and Mrs. Moore) or eternal estrangement (Aziz and Fielding).  There could be nothing else.

Of course the irony of it all is that in wanting to see the real India, Miss Quested sparked the most defining Indian thing of the time - the indignity of colonial rule.  

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By rights the story should end there, since multi-generational engrained prejudices tend not to be wrapped up neatly at the end of stories.  In this case, though, Forster gives us all a break of sorts in the final chapter.  Aziz and Fielding reconcile.  Aziz writes to Adela, finally forgiving her.  Things are not the same, but they are mended with the stitches showing.  I appreciate this immensely as I'm rather a completist at heart, but at the same time I fully recognize that it doesn't make a 'better' story.  It does give us a bit of hope, though.  Maybe that's a good starting point.