My knowledge of English literature is remarkable for a gaping hole where classic novels should be, most of which I know of only by virtue of frequent references to them in subsequent works. In school we were exposed to a smattering of Homer (in Latin class), Chaucer, Shakespeare, a few dead white male poets, Shaw, T.S. Elliot, and Victor Hugo. At home we memorized scriptures, read Thornton W. Burgess nature stories, Twain, Zane Gray, and C.S. Lewis, but Darwin and enlightenment philosophers were verboten and I can not recall studying anything written by a woman, nor anything in translation from a foreign language. Ironically, after getting an Ontario Scholarship based largely on my high school English marks, I failed English 20 as a freshman at Western, concentrating on sciences. During my working career, I managed to devour many of the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and some Graeme Green and James Agee, in addition to the medical literature I needed to maintain my competence. Post-retirement, I tried to expand my reading choices but got trapped by curiosity into reading mostly philosophy, neuroscience, history, and biographies. As a result I am still very uneducated in English classics – no Plato, Greek mythology, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Stevenson, Woolf, Doyle, Proust, Swift, or Faulkner. I can never fill in this gap now, but occasionally I try, as with what follows. And partly because I have two part-Indian grandchildren, I chose to start with….

A Passage To India. E.M. Forster. 1924, 306 pages (not including editor notes, Appendices and a long introduction).

There are several slightly different editions to this classic. The one I read is, I think, the Everyman Edition, edited by Oliver Stallybrass published in 1957. The title is apparently taken from a Walt Whitman poem that I have not read. Set in the early twenties in a fictional town in central India during the Raj, the domineering bigoted smugness of the British rulers and the deep undercurrents of rebellion in the oppressed, generally poor natives divided by caste, culture and religion are lucidly dramatized. The conflicting cultural outlooks are exposed most notably by the differing interpretations of an apparent sexual assault by a native on an English woman in a dark cave outside the divided town.

The cast of characters is diverse and it is easy to get lost in the complex plot, the foreign-sounding names, and the symbolism of the different religious rites, but I really enjoyed this story. In order to fully appreciate the complexity, it probably should be read twice and studied, not just read. Or as a last resort, I could watch the Hollywood adaptation, probably a shortcut to banality.

If this classic had been studied in our Grade 12 English Lit class, I could guess at Don Birtwhistle’s homework assignment questions:

1) Did Forster achieve a balance in showing respect and understanding for both the British and the native Indian cultures? Justify your answer.

2) Discuss the possible explanations for the incident in the cave. Which is the most likely? Provide reasons for your choice in 200 words or less.

3) Compare and contrast the moral outlook of Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding.

I could now ace this assignment by finding answers on the internet, but it would have been tough in 1962.

The India that is on display no longer exists and the demise of the Raj is presciently predicted toward the end of the story. And there is certainly no residual of this India in my grandchildren. But it is a timeless great history lesson and a good read.