Word: forster
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...clear as all this is in the novel's outline, Forster's presence makes you less sure of your instincts; as he fills in the story, things begin to seem complicated. True, the English are hypocrites who cannot believe the natives are men like themselves, but they stand for a noble, if stupid, way of life based on service. Even the English girl whose foolish hallucination is the cause of so much bitterness is decent, if dull. And the Indians themselves-generations of subjection have made them children, with all that is appealing and discouragingly immature in children. If they...
...Forster, the gifted, intelligent observer of a nation, is thus cut from the play, but Santha Rama Rau has nearly solved the problem of his absence by an unbelievably skillful job of compressing and condensing his views into the speeches of her characters. Her play has shed much of his subtley, but his outlook remains: simplified, the play still tells us the complexity of India's tragedy. (Wherever possible, she has kept Forster's original dialogue, too-an admirable practice, since he is one of the few modern writers who can make characters sound natural when they are talking brilliantly...
What is wrong with this scene is the response of the actors who play the English. Forster wrote in anger about the Anglo-Indians, but he was not so imperceptive as the play and the production are here. What the actors should be talking about when they try to persuade Fielding to side with them is a way of life; they must show that they are unable to believe that the grand work of civilizing India which they have undertaken is largely humbug. Instead of their vision, we see only a rather dowdy collection of distasteful bigots...
...Mohyeddin, a young actor from Karachi and the star of the 1960 English production of the play, brings one of Forster's most brilliant characters to life. He is surely Aziz, whose moods flow like water, who desires to please his friends even at the price of lying, who lives closer to his feelings than ever the British can, whose corroding fear that he has no dignity almost ruins him and provides Forster with his subtlest and angriest plea against the subjection of a race...
Santha Rama Rau and the play's director, Donald McWhinnie, deserve the highest praise for A Passage to India, and I wish its American production the best of luck. E. M. Forster explained the novel's popularity here during the '20's by saying that Americans liked it because it showed what a botch the British made of India. Perhaps now we shall understand Forster's book better. It talks about India, and blames the British for acting like gods; they were not big enough-and who is?-to rule another people. But it also enters a plea for tolerance...