Book review: A Passage to India

Naturally, any book written in 1924 is bound to offend a twenty-first century sensibility, steeped as we are in a consciousness of racial stereotyping. Just occasionally, it must be admitted, Dr Aziz is portrayed as childish and petulant, and phrases such as “Like all Indians…” grate on our ears, but all in all, Forster succeeds magnificently in exposing the fatal arrogance of the Anglo-Indians, the falsity of their more-British-than-Britain lifestyle, the misunderstandings that hamper cross-cultural relations and the way that politics poisons human friendship. A system in which one class and race of people is set above all others as their colonial masters and sees all others as their social, political and racial inferiors can only corrupt and corrode personal contacts. Only when people meet on an equal footing can they ever be friends. And in the end, Forster’s message was a subversive one at the time: he subverts the perceived heirarchy of imperial exchange, he suggests that the Anglo-Indians had as much, if not more, to learn from the colonised people as to offer them.
This was not the first time I’ve read this, nor will it be the last. Forster writes so sensitively, with such acuity of vision and denseness of expression that it profits from reading and re-reading: the  mark of a true classic.