I was aware of David Lean’s cinematic adaptation of A Passage to India (1984) before I encountered E.M. Forster’s original novel, which celebrated its centenary in 2024. While the film was being shot on location, I had a vague sense of the ambition as well as the arrogance of those Britishers making a film in the heat and dust of India.

Heat and Dust – the title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 Booker Prize-winning novel, adapted for the screen by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1983 – seemed to be synonymous with the nation that became independent as India in 1947 and was muddling along with its millions.

Along with Richard Attenborough’s epic biopic Gandhi (1982) and The Jewel in the Crown, the Granada Television miniseries based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels (1965-75) – also broadcast in 1984 – these films gave me my first taste of how British storytellers were seeking to recreate Raj nostalgia and recuperate colonial history, while examining a central concern of Forster’s novel: the problem of the British in India.

India in the 1980s looms large for me in this reappraisal of A Passage to India. Those were heady days. The breezes of postcolonialism were beginning to reach us in our developing nation, deemed peripheral to the metropolitan corridors of Anglo-American academia, where theorists were interrogating what historian Ranajit Guha later defined as the “dominance without hegemony” of British colonisers.

India was also facing the headwinds of perestroika and glasnost. The approaching end of the Cold War would soon herald an economic liberalisation that ushered us into a new commercial-cultural firmament. Satellite television and MTV wedged out Doordarshan, the one and only national television broadcaster. Coca-Cola – banned since 1977 – would soon re-enliven our palates, seriously denting the market for local carbonated drinks like Gold Spot, Thums Up, Limca, Citra and Maaza.

We were feeling very fizzy. SPIC MACAY – the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth – ruled our social lives with its performance seasons at colleges. At Delhi University, Levi’s jeans hobnobbed with crisp cotton sarees. Pupul Jayakar’s Festival of India was inaugurated with much fanfare in Britain in 1982; it would go on to present “India through Indian eyes” in China, Japan, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Sweden and the USA. Oh yes, Indian fever was high.

It was in this internationalist milieu, during my masters program in English literature at Delhi University, that I encountered Forster’s novel in a syllabus with the colonial “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” script embedded in its suite of courses.

We had already been introduced to A House for Mr Biswas (1961) by the Trinidadian-Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul. His quaint yet acerbic tone posed considerable challenges. He invited us to imagine a Caribbean that few of us could locate on the map, let alone in our imaginations. But any pretensions that we, in the erstwhile colony, might have had a nascent postcolonial authority were lost in excited genuflections to Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) and Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985).

Into my life came A Passage to India, introduced by Dr Sanjay Kumar, a freshly-minted young lecturer, who seemed to herald radical winds of change in university teaching. We were held by his theatrical hands and ushered into the world of the Mosque, Caves and Temple of Forster’s novel.

Scrawled all over my Permanent Penguins copy of the novel are pencilled notes that attest to the rigorous education in close reading we received. Some of those notes still stand the test of time. This was the first time I encountered India as a subject of English literary studies, the first time I stumbled upon the Indian imaginary in British fiction.

A Passage to India was not the world of genteel Edwardian angst Forster had depicted in A Room with a View (1908) and Howard’s End (1910). He was writing against the backdrop of rising demands from the Indian Home Rule Movement, already gathering momentum during his first visit to India in 1912-13, and active when he subsequently served as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas in 1921-22.

The novel is based on these two visits, which Forster deemed the “great opportunity” of his life, though the letters he wrote home, mainly to his mother, were (he later admitted) “too prone to turn remote and rare matters into suburban jokes”.

His epistolary “record of a vanished civilization” was published as The Hill of Devi (1953). In the preface, he says:

In editing I have had to cut out a great deal of “How I wish you were all here!” or “Aren’t........

© The Conversation