/ARTS WEEKLY/BRITAIN: A Great Passage to India

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Beverly Andrews

LONDON, Feb 18 2003 (IPS) - E.M. Forster’s landmark novel ‘A Passage to India’ is considered to be one of the 20th century’s greatest books. Started in 1913 but not completed until after World War I in 1924, the novel is an assured dissection of the dying days of the British Raj.

As the United States prepares for war with Iraq and "neo-colonialism" is now being spoken of again in the corridors of power both in Britain and the U.S., the novel’s message on the poison spread by colonisation could not be more apt. The group Shared Experience’s production of this landmark work is therefore timely.

The play opens on an almost bare stage with the figure of Prof Godbole, the novel’s philosophic centre addressing the audience and posing the novel’s central question: "Is it possible for an Englishman and an Indian to be friends?"

He does not attempt to answer the question but simply steps to a side as the stage is magically transformed and the audience is transported back in time to an India ruled by Great Britain but one which is also experiencing yearnings for independence.

In this hothouse atmosphere two English women enter, Adela Quested, the fiancee of a young British official and Mrs Moore the man’s mother. The two women embark on a sincere "quest" to see the real India.

In their desire to escape the stifling confines of colonial society, they innocently break the unspoken rules developed over generations to govern Anglo-Indian relations. The scene is set for an explosive encounter which will change the lives of all those involved.

‘A Passage to India’ explores the clash of culture between the British, who saw themselves at the time as the harbingers of civilised values and those they ruled. A clash, which has many telling parallels with the conflicts of today.

E.M. Forster was the first serious English writer to portray Indian characters as human beings with a complexity which mirrored their English counterparts. Something that multi-cultural Britain many now take for granted was seen at the time as a revolutionary act.

Playwright Martin Sherman who adapted the novel for this production points to the book’s initial impact. "It was instrumental in opening British eyes to their own behaviour in India," he says. "The racism – worse, the patronising racism of the British – is so vile in the book, so intractable, that it is at times like the most truly painful things, comic."

Sherman points out that Forster’s critical gaze was not restricted to the shabby end of the British Raj but also focused on the divisions which existed in Indian society. The division between the educated elite and the illiterate masses and also the deadly religious rivalries which would ultimately explode in the catastrophic partition riots that followed independence.

One of this production’s great achievements is to undo the damage done to this great work by David Lean’s film adaptation, in which he drained the politics from the story and instead turned it into a domestic tragedy. In Shared Experience’s production a mixed race cast of white and British Asian actors bring to life the cruelties and petty injustices of the British Raj, its vile conceits, and the hints of its ultimate demise.

But where this production achieves its greatest triumph is in its recreation of the haunting Malabar Caves, the key moment in Forster’s novel where the collision between East and West reaching its climax. Produced on stage as an anonymous mixture of hands, the company cleverly creates a sensual, disorientating experience where it is clear that Adela has found herself in a land she could never hope to understand.

Critically acclaimed, with the Evening Standard’s notoriously acerbic critic Nicholas De Jongh calling it an "enthralling dramatisation", this production appears to have captured the public’s imagination.

The play ends with two of the book’s central characters Dr Aziz and Mr Fielding meeting several years after the story’s tragic events. Fielding extends his hand in friendship to the young Indian doctor, but Aziz does not take it. "Not yet," he says. Implying that friendship and true understanding between individuals and even cultures can exist only between equals. A message as relevant today as it was almost a century ago.