The Only One of Its Kind

A PASSAGE TO INDIA -- E. M. Forsfer --Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

By 1913 Novelist Edward Morgan Forster had written three books, brilliant, brittle as spun glass and about as nourishing as popcorn. Then he went to India with a Cambridge don, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, his friend and spiritual mentor.

In their months in India there were two high moments for the young, hero-worshipping Forster. They dined at the mess of the Royal West Kents at the Khyber Pass. The young officers in their bright uniforms got pleasantly drunk, asked each other: "I say, will he put you in a book?"

The second was at the high, lovely, remote, forbidden city of Chandrapore in Central India, where "the spires of the Jain temples pierced up through the grey and white mists. . . ." There the tiny, fantastic, incompetent Maharajah put on religious festivals for them ("Tell me, Mr. Dickinson, where is God?"), talked English literature ("See, Mr. Dickinson, that balcony -- did Hamlet climb up there to visit Juliet?") and gave Mr. Dickinson his palace. Says Forster: "He forgot that he had given it to me only two days before."

Moment of Inspiration. That trip would have been as short-lived as the Maharajah's memory had it not been for the use Forster made of it. He studied India and the Indians, rulers and ruled. Out of these, and by the gift of some moment of inspiration that lifted his sar donic talent to genius, Forster wrote A Passage to India. Its history has been a 3 remarkable as the book itself, or its author.

A Passage to India was first published in 1924. Beautiful, ironic, crystal-clear, intense -- "one of the saddest, keenest, most beautifully written ironic novels of the time" -- at once "a political document of the first importance," "a masterpiece of subtle characterization" with "a story that moved like a house on fire," A Passage to India evoked tremendous critical enthusiasm. In 20 years it sold almost 100,000 copies in the U.S., yet it never became an integral part of ordinary U.S. cultural life or political thought.

Last week the novel's fortunate publishers reprinted it. It had gained a new timeliness as the problem of India had gained a new urgency.

Since A Passage to India first appeared, a small library of Indian fiction had been published. Much of it was brisk and readable. None of it attained the delicate, tough clarity of Forster's novel. Nor did any other English novelist, writing of India, possess Forster's unique talent --that of keeping his characters, their good & bad intentions, their hopes, fears and antagonisms, in a state of suspension so that their dilemma is timeless yet forever timely. No one who wanted to understand that great problem could afford to miss the reprint of Forster's novel.

Madame, This Is A Mosque. The theme of A Passage to India is the relations of the English in India and the Indians. Its pathos and irony result from the failure of good will of people on both sides (typified by Mrs. Moore and Dr. Aziz) to do much more than complicate the problem.

Mrs. Moore came into the city of Chandrapore on the Ganges with a motherly goodness of heart that won the sensitive Moslems in an instant. Her son was the City Magistrate, and she was escorting to him Miss Quested, the athletic, progressive, well-meaning modern girl he intended to marry. One night red-faced, white-haired, twice widowed Mrs. Moore wandered outside and into a mosque to escape the heat.

There in the darkness a Moslem was worshipping. He was Dr. Aziz, educated in England, touchy as a porcupine and delightful and unexpected as a child, proud (the descendant of bodyguards of the Mogul Emperors), a good polo player, a widower with three children, filled with the turbulent, conflicting emotions of a subject people whose ancestors tamed elephants. Dr. Aziz had just been royally snubbed by the English--twice. As he sat in the mosque, repeating poetry that brought tears to his eyes and thinking that some day he, too, would build a mosque, he discovered Mrs. Moore: "Madame, this is a mosque, you have no right here at all; you should have taken off your shoes; this is a holy place for Moslems."

"I have taken them off."

"You have?"

"I left them at the entrance."

"Then I ask your pardon."

So began the friendship of Mrs. Moore and Dr. Aziz. It is all the story of A Passage to India. For their friendship led to complications so involved that before it ended (with Mrs. Moore's death) the city was in revolt. At each stage of their innocent progress toward intimacy the massive forces of misunderstanding and suspicion coiled around them and their friends. The common-sensical politeness and kindliness of Mrs. Moore was the greatest mystery in India. It baffled people like Dr. Aziz. They thought she was joining them when she was merely being kind. They thought she meant some profound message when she was merely interested in them.

But Mrs. Moore never knew the wild, reckless, intoxicated efforts her friendship put them to. Dr. Aziz happily spent all his money, the resources of a lifetime, and risked his neck repeatedly, merely to take his English friends on a picnic. One of the most vividly imagined people in English fiction, normal and matter-of-fact as anybody's grandmother, Mrs. Moore set a large and strategic portion of the Empire on edge merely by being herself in an unbelievably different world.

The Indian Heart. Her only rival as an imaginative creation is Dr. Aziz. With his emotionalism, his ready tears, his hunger for affection and his sudden patronizing of the people who respond to it, his humor and his brilliant discourses on the Mogul Emperors, his absentmindedness (after he had arranged his mighty expedition to the famed Marabar Caves he asked: "By the way, what is in these caves, brother? Why are we going to see them?"), Dr. Aziz tells U.S. readers more about the secret places of the Indian heart than any living Indian.

After 20 years, the celebrated scenes of A Passage to India--the eerie sunstroke episode in the caves, when Miss Quested imagines that Dr. Aziz has insulted her, the melodramatic trial, when she lets, the Empire down by refusing to bear false witness against him--seem less impressive; the brilliant characterizations, the religious and political insights, the atmosphere, more impressive. Much that once seemed stage setting now seems as live as a hand grenade. Sample: the jocular references to Japanese spies.

But it is the portrait of Aziz that has gained depth. When he plays polo with an English soldier, each thinks, as they separate: "If only they were all like that.'' And at the end of the book, as he is riding horseback with the one English friend who has stood by him, he delivers his heartbreaking prophecy and curse:

"India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! . . . Clear out, you fellows, double-quick, I say. We may hate one another but we hate you most. ... If it's fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then" --he rode against him furiously--"and then," he concluded, half-kissing him, "you and I shall be friends."

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