Word: indias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that Passage to India has inadvertently done a disservice to contemporary readers by its very excellence. It has laid too heavy a shadow on the imagination, casting each new work in the model of its grave and thoughtful characterizations and demanding of each something of the haunting real-and-unreal atmosphere that has come to be identified in the minds of Westerners as India...
Hero Without Aim. But India is no longer the India of Forster's book. The hero of Son of the Moon is a young Hindu aristocrat-his family traces its descent from the moon-who has made the first solo flight from India to England. Vijay has acted and become a hero, idolized by his people, with limitless opportunities before...
...English scenic designer, satisfying his vague desire since adolescence to go to bed with a white woman; scrapbooks filled with clippings on his flight; dinners in his honor; studies in aeronautics, half-purposeful, partly an excuse for remaining in England; candid talks with Englishmen whose fairness and honesty about India's nationalism are a surprise to him after the Britons he had known in India...
Meanwhile the excitement over his achievement has ebbed away. What is there for him to do? He plans, vaguely, to fly around the world, lecturing on India. But, back home, the native princes, who might be interested in financing him if he were a tout for dancing girls, turn him down: it would be less expensive to found a chair of Indian music at an English university...
Such is the content of Son of the Moon. It is a novel of some passion and excitement, and the slow accumulation of brief scenes, following the pattern of Passage to India, is very nearly incompatible with such passion. Here & there the novel has a kind of Oriental power of hallucination: experiences blend and retreat; characters dissolve; a spell is cast by the very remoteness of the happenings so precisely described. At such moments the novel seems a blend of several books, about an India that seems partly familiar and partly a new world of still formless action...