Read the following opening lines of A Passage to India (1924), written by Edward Morgan Forster (1879— 1970), and analyze its implication and significance in an essay of not less than 250 words
Except for the Marabar Caves and they are twenty miles off the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial and the sea and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration neither continued in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.
(1) This part is taken from the Chapter one. Foster divides A Passage to India into three parts: “Mosque,” “Cave,” and “Temple.” Each Part opens with a prefatory chapter that describes meaningful or symbolic parts of the landscape. This chapter describes the city of Chandrapore and the surrounding areas. It begins and ends by mentioning the extraordinary Marabar Caves, yet the narrative reveals no detailed information about the caves. Instead, Foster portrays the caves as a symbol, the meaning of which is a deep mystery. The caves and their indefinable presence hover around the narrative from the start.
(2) The description of the Indian city of Chandrapore and the English colonial buildings nearby suggests the wary and condescending attitude the British hold toward the Indians, an attitude the subsequent chapters examine in detail.
(3) A Passage to India is Foster’s most ambitious and persuasive novel. It was published in 1924 following a period in which he had acted as secretary and companion to the Maharaja of Dewas Senior. The novel offers a distinctly less generous and complacents picture of the Raj and its British servants than had Kipling. The British from an elite, cut off by their ill-founded sense of racial, social, and cultural superiority from the multiple significance of the native civilizations of India, while maintaining the class-distinctions and petty.