A Passage to India

So this mix of a group got on extremely well.

Other members were E.M. Forster, the novelist who was known for his works like A Passage to India and Howard's End.

He was actually very closely associated with the group and, of course, shared their liberal and humanistic values.

But he was very much on the fringes.

And what is 21-year-old Chris doing?

We meet young Chris with a K at a point in his life where he is reading A Passage to India by E.M. Forster.

And he's struggling to get through the page.

His mind is a big jumble.

You know, your favourite author...

What's his name? He wrote A Passage to India.

Yeah.

E.M. Forster?

To quote just a couple of the first reviews from 1954, so the poet Stevie Smith said, "It was a beautiful and desperate book, something quite out of the ordinary." And then the novelist E.M.

Forster, who I love, so that he wrote Howard's End, A Passage to India, for instance.

He named it his book of the year and said it was beautifully written, tragic, and provocative.

Yeah, I mean, amazing reviews, and those were incredible accolades for a, basically a debut novel by a writer that nobody had ever heard of.

And it is, you know, everything that Forster cared about, I think, as a novelist is present there in some way.

But like, I mean, just anyone who reads Forster, I mean, Howard's End, A Passage to India, Room with a Viewer, those are kind of the big three, I would say.

It's

like Tolstoy who thought Anna Karenina was a failure.

Yeah, especially like for a Western audience where like you've said so much of Pakistan and other countries outside of the West get sensationalized or exoticized.

Like I'm thinking of, like there's a version of in the Company of Strangers that could have been written more from like that Western colonial perspective, like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, where it's like, oh, you know, the white woman claims that the brown person harassed and assaulted her and like makes up these allegations.

And it's just like furthers this otherness of like differences.

But like you're saying, you know, what you show us is, oh, like the West isn't the only one that has modern cosmopolitan cities or access to culture, to art, to, you know, different civilizations.