Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

E.M. Forster was a novelist in line from Jane Austen and George Eliot. Before World War I he wrote four novels pulverizing the assumptions of the genteel upper classes, their snobbery, their imperialism, the insensitivity and coarseness of the so-called public school code of manners. Then after the war he visited India and discovered that the tidy scheme of morality he had set against the narrow values of the English professional classes was inadequate. It could not take in the multitudinous life of the East. His moral vision no longer made any sense. Until then he believed that passion and money were the two things that moved people to act as they did. Now he saw that religion was as important. He still thought personal relations the most real things on the surface of the Earth, but rationality and affliction are not enough: loneliness--getting away from friends--is needed to deepen intimacy.

Today the stage is held by a generation of dazzling Indian novelists--Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy--who have pushed “A Passage To India” into the wings. But it remains not merely a remarkable critique of imperialism but startling in its honesty. Forster declared that however enlightened, even affectionate, Englishmen might be, Indians would never accept them as equals until they got out of India. If he does not spare has own countrymen, neither does he sentimentalize Indians. India taught Forster that rationality is not the only key to life’s mystery.