In 2013, I wrote a thesis to fulfill the requirement of my Bachelor’s Degree with Honours in English Literature at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It was an invigorating experience, and I’m proud of my work. I received a distinction for the thesis and first-class honours for the Undergraduate degree overall.

Before my final year, as I pondered over which text or author to devote a thesis to, Edward Morgan Forster came to mind. I had read A Passage to India for a course on Post-Colonial Literature and was quite taken by Forster’s effortlessly beautiful yet sharp writing style as well as his nuanced exploration of religious and racial themes.

Libraries with physical books were still a thing in 2013, and I recall a section in the university library devoted to Forster’s literature. I took mental note of this repository of knowledge years prior and looked forward to the time I could devote proper attention to getting through the academic literature on Forster.

Here is my thesis (supervised by Prof C.J. Wee Wan-ling). I’m posting it so I can refer to it from time to time and be inspired by my good old undergraduate days. If you happen to be interested in literature and have read any of Forster’s works, hope you enjoy it too. If nothing else, reading this could help you fall asleep in record time.

An Examination of the Religious Imagery in Edward Morgan Forster’s Fiction

A common theme running across the breadth of Edward Morgan Forster’s fiction is his concern with, and consequently his exposure and critique of, the various restrictive forms of social convention that, in his view, threaten their respective society’s moral development. For example, in Howards End, Forster invokes the Schlegel brothers—who are German poets and thinkers—in his characterisation of the fictional Schlegel sisters, so that by setting them up as the opposition to the stiflingly traditional, wealthy, and class-conscious Wilcoxes, uses them as the emancipatory juxtaposition to the strictures of early 20th Century English society. While most of Forster’s fiction follows this pattern of exposure and critique in the form of juxtaposition, and for some of them successful emancipation, this pattern becomes complicated in his fictions that are concerned with religion. Consequently, this essay will examine Forster’s use of religion in order to determine what his view of religion is (whether it is emancipator or stricture) and, as a secondary question, how it concords with the moral concerns of his non-religious fiction while differing from the conventional way he expresses them, which is primarily through juxtaposition. Some critics have argued that Forster endorses Hinduism (and therefore religion in general) because of what seems to be his favourable treatment of it in A Passage to India. Others have noted the deprecating tone with which he approaches religion, and, with support from his essays and personal letters detailing his agnostic views on religion and his liberal humanist position, have argued that he sets it up only to ridicule it. Yet some critics have taken a more nuanced position in the middle, arguing that Forster’s views on religion are ambivalent. I am in general agreement with this last group of critics and will argue that Forster has a conflicted view of religion. While he recognises the moral restrictiveness of religion and its logical and linguistic absurdity, he also recognises its creative transformative potential, that is, its ability to imaginatively emancipate society morally in the same way Art, Culture, and Hellenistic mythology have been used in his other non-religious novels as emancipatory juxtapositions. He also recognises its ability to imaginatively ground his moral realist lens and the potential for its logical and linguistic deficiency to be recast positively as an apt description of the common human desire for transcendence. Therefore, because religion is both restrictor and emancipator for Forster, his conflict is manifested as an ontologically pluralistic conflation of religion in “Mr. Andrews” and A Passage to India to create an all-embracing morality that is grounded in an imaginative ontology and is no longer restricted by the moral dogma of a single religion. This conflict also manifests in A Passage to India as an emergent religious property of longing, foreshadowed in “Mr. Andrews” and enabled by Hindu philosophy: While the transcendent and its moral solutions to society’s problems may not exist metaphysically or linguistically, within the realm of logical coherence, to long for them and hope that they are true and achievable is a worthwhile endeavour. Forster’s emergent view of religion is, therefore, one that rejects their established metaphysical bases, but accepts the proposition that there might be something “in religion that may not be true, but has not yet been sung” (Forster, A Passage to India 261), in other words, something about the power but not the truth or coherence of religion that can imaginatively furnish humanity with a morality that accords with his humanism. In this way, Forster’s religious fiction, though divergent from the pattern that characterises his non-religious fiction, concord with them in their explicit moral concerns and function.         

To argue my position, this essay will begin with a short examination of two of Forster’s typical fictions, the short story “The Other Kingdom” and his novel A Room With a View to show how he appropriates Greek mythology and Renaissance ideology as his emancipatory juxtapositions to the various constraints and conventions of early 20th century English society to inform our understanding of how Forster’s moral concerns inform his common structural pattern, and, in the following sections, his similar and different use of religion in his other works of fiction that accord with this essay’s argument. This discussion, with the help of Lynne Walhout Hinojosa’s article on “Religion and Puritan Typology in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View” will then lead into the next section, which will examine Forster’s agnosticism in his personal life through the critics Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Alistair Duckworth, his essay “What I Believe”, and his homosexual novel Maurice, which I will argue, details his rejection of the Christianity of his youth through the experiences of the novel’s main characters Maurice and Clive. This section serves to argue against the view that Forster endorses Christianity and therefore religion in general in his novels. In this section, I will also give examples of Forster’s use of religious imagery to ground his moral lens, a conflict against his agnosticism that anticipates his use conflicted use of religion in his fiction. In the section following, I will examine his short story “Mr. Andrews”, his early creative use of ontological pluralism in it, and the moral vision that I will argue it implies following this essay’s argument. Ambreen Hai’s article “Forster and the Fantastic: The Covert Politics of the Celestial Omnibus” will provide a good critical lens for understanding Forster’s use of the fantastic as a genre and how it relates to his use of religion in “Mr. Andrews”. I will then critically analyse relevant sections of his last, most religious, and greatest novel A Passage to India—including the Marabar cave scene, the song that Professor Godbole sings for his English audience, and the Krishna festival at the end—in light of his previous fiction and his ambivalent views on Hinduism in The Hill of Devi. I will argue that the Krishna festival is another expression of ontological pluralism, enabled by Hindu philosophy, and indicative of the kind of all-embracing religious vision that can produce the morality he affirms. However, because this vision is enabled only through the imagination and cannot be instantiated in reality because it is logically and linguistically absurd, religious longing is the other property that emerges to perform a similar function. In the last section, I will connect Forster’s view and use of religion to his views on the larger function of literature and the imagination against the forces that would cast it aside for the pragmatics of economic development and industrial growth connected to the practical use of language that the analytic philosophy of his later contemporaries (e.g., Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore) were preoccupied, who saw language’s propositional forms as able to logically deduce conclusions with mathematical certainty, a certainty that Forster rejects. Forster’s use of language, while designed to reveal the nonsensical nature of religious truths, also asserts that meaning (especially concerning morals and values) can be found outside the bounds of logic and logical language. This connects Forster’s religious fiction with his non-religious fiction in its common desire to be emancipated from moral restrictions, manifesting, in the case of his religious fiction, as an escape from logical language and deducible propositional truths. 

   

• Forster’s Overarching Thematic Structural Pattern and Concerns  

Forster’s short story “The Other Kingdom” which first appeared in 1911, in the collection The Celestial Omnibus, exemplifies his thematic concerns. Like his novel Howards End, Forster juxtaposes the strictures of early 20th-century English society with the creative and liberating effect of Art, the Classics, and the imagination. The Schlegel sisters whom I noted were the emancipatory counterpart to the traditional Wilcoxes in Howards End, with their German intellectual upbringing, embody the ameliorative power of Art and imagination in a society that would devalue it favour of industrial materialism. Margaret Schlegel recalls her grand-uncle Ernst’s tirade against what was happening concurrently in Germany:  

Your poets too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom Europe has listened for two hundred years. Gone. Gone with the little courts that nurtured them. . . . Oh, yes, you have learned men, who collect more facts than do the learned men of England. . . . But which of them will rekindle the light within? (42-3) 

In “The Other Kingdom”, Forster’s concerns are somewhat narrower—English landowning practices, the conventions of marriage, and Forster’s early Romantic inclination (as opposed to the entire condition of England in Howards End)—but his thematic structure remains. He takes creative license with the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne to effect Miss Beaumont’s fantastical escape from the enclosed life of convention in her marriage with her fiancé Harcourt Worters. In the Greek myth, Daphne, a nymph, is turned into a laurel tree by her father Peneus at her request, so that she can escape the amorous advances of Apollo. In “The Other Kingdom” this myth is refashioned as Miss Beaumont’s magical escape into the Other Kingdom copse—a clump of beeches that Worters had previously purchased—from being increasingly fenced in by Worters’ industrial transformation and control of the natural landscape outside his mansion and from the social strictures of marriage.  

The short story characterises Worters as the traditional middle-class narrow-minded practical working man and Miss Beaumont as an unencumbered free spirit. Mr Inskip, the narrator, a teacher of the classics, is employed by Harcourt Worters to teach Miss Beaumont and his ward Jack Ford Latin and classical Greek language and literature. Like his mother Mrs. Worters who asks Inskip what practical use can come from a classical education (49), Worters soon comes to think that a classical education is a luxury and decides to cancel Miss Beaumont’s lessons with Inskip in favour of something more practical (58). It seems at first that Miss Beaumont is enamoured with Worters, but his increasing demands on her freedom soon cause her to lose her vitality. She complains to Inskip about his refusal to let her learn Latin and Greek, his fencing in of the Other Kingdom copse, which she feels constricts her, and his dismissal of Jack Ford whom she is fond of for laughing at him. She is described as “listless” (63), and with the completion of the bridge and asphalt path to the fenced-up Other Kingdom copse, as an automaton who wears drab coloured clothes and repeats everything Worters says. It is within this context that the final section of the short story mimicking the Apollonian myth is enacted. Miss Beaumont’s exclamation of her love for Ford, and everything he represents—an intimate knowledge of and passion toward the classics, and freedom from “‘rights’ -‘apologies’-‘society’-‘position’” (63)—her flight from Worters to the copse and her mysterious disappearance in it, as permanent as “long as there are branches to shade men from the sun” (70), exemplifies Forster’s overarching thematic concern: the restrictiveness of conventional 20th century English society and the ameliorative potential of Art and the classics to provide an imaginative escape. Forster himself expounds on this in one of his radio broadcasts in Delhi, on 18 October 1945: 

The peril that may destroy our world is hardness, heartlessness, ideological zeal untempered by humanity, and against that peril art is an eternal shield . . . if there are no artists in the post-war world, if there are only scientists and preachers – well, it is a bad lookout for the world (Hill of Devi 284).  

It is clear therefore that Forster has a strong moral outlook and he sees the role of his fiction as a means by which he can expose and critique the various issues of the society that he lived in. 

As a result, this pattern of restriction and emancipation (or at least emancipatory juxtaposition) is a common feature of the large majority of Forster’s fiction. In one of his novels A Room with a View, Forster uses Italy and the Renaissance way of thinking as his emancipatory comparison with the repressive conventionality of the English society of his time. This novel is also important because it, at least peripherally, anticipates his early views on religion in his indirect use of it, as Lynne Walhout Hinojosa contends. She argues that the novel is a “reworking and inversion of the Puritan hermeneutical practice of Biblical typology” (72). The practice of biblical typology is a way of interpreting any given text “that put[s] the reader in proper relation to God and His Providence, to illuminate the true self and to inspire the reader to shed the false self” (74). She notes that the Modernist literary trend of offering “a new vision of history, character, morality and spiritual experience” (73), which she argues A Room with a View demonstrates, lends itself naturally to being read typologically. She begins with an examination of other texts that have been intended to be read typologically, such as Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in anticipation of their similarities with Lucy Honeychurch’s (the protagonist of A Room with a View) own process of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘conversion’, and the readers’ identification with her.10 Hinojosa notes that in the middle of Crusoe’s distress, like Augustine, he opens the Bible to a random page and reads a surprisingly apt line: “Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me” (76). After a few more days of reading the Bible, also like Augustine, he converts, and as a result, has his understanding illuminated and is able to “see his life as a movement from the Old Testament type to the New Testament antitype” and “reinterpret the events of his own plot in this light” (77).  

Hinojosa argues that this typology is “inverted” (77) by Forster in A Room with a View. Lucy Honeychurch is initially pulled by the forces of “the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain . . . [who] have sinned against passion and truth” (Forster, A Room with A View 201), in the form of the round (as opposed to the flat)11 English characters, among whom include her cousin Charlotte Bartlett and her lover Cecil Vyse. Hinojosa notes that, instead of the Bible, Lucy’s self-identifiable text to which she constantly refers is instead “the romance novel”, (78) which results in a divergent sort of conversion for her in her eventual confessed love for George Emerson: “one with a new sense of spiritual truth, a new morality of egalitarianism and the body, and a new historical telos” (78). As what the Italian Renaissance was to the Middle Ages, so Hinojosa argues, the Modernists were to the Victorians, the Modernists therefore finding “inspiration in historiography of the Italian Renaissance” (78) which believed “that an entire age and culture can secularize” to form (in Modernism) “a new modern ‘spirituality’ based on individualism and reason” (79). Whether or not Forster intended for his novel to be read exactly as Hinojosa argues, it is clear that Lucy’s enlightenment and conversion are devoid of any actual religious influence, as she points out. The point to be made here concerning my thesis is Forster’s concurrent acceptance and rejection of religious typological practice: he accepts the self-examining and transforming potential of the typological structure but rejects the Bible’s ascetic theology and by extension its metaphysical base. This accords with my central thesis’ argument about Forster’s more explicitly religious works. In the following section, I will examine relevant aspects of his personal life through his essay “What I Believe”, the process of Maurice and Clive’s rejection of their early Christian faith in Maurice that I argue probably accords with Forster’s rejection of his Clapham Christian upbringing, and then, his conflicting use of religious imagery to ground his moral lens, anticipating his conflicted use of religion in his fiction. 

• Forster’s ‘Spiritual’ Agnosticism 

Anne M. Wyatt-Brown’s article on Forster’s childhood titled “A Buried Life: E. M. Forster’s Struggle with Creativity” and Alistair M. Duckworth’s biographical introduction to Forster in his edited version of Howards End together offer a comprehensive understanding of Forster’s rejection of his Christian upbringing and his eventual liberal humanist position, which will help understand his use of religion in his fiction. Forster’s great-grandfather was Henry Thornton, “an influential member of the evangelical Clapham sect” (Duckworth 6). His evangelical great aunt, Marianne Thornton, along with a slew of women including his mother, surrounded him and instructed him throughout his adolescent years (9). Wyatt-Brown notes that, having no male presence in his life with the death of his father at two, and having had an overprotective guilt-ridden mother who limited his contact with friends his age and “specialized in making Morgan feel inadequate”, Forster’s consequent perpetual “yearning for a real friend may well have initiated his homoerotic fantasies” (113). Forster’s affectionate recall of probably his only childhood friend Ansell, a “non-verbal” “garden boy” (113), echoes Maurice’s relationship with his university friend Clive Durham’s gamekeeper Alec Scudder in his homosexual novel Maurice. Therefore it seems that an examination of Maurice and Clive’s process of rejecting religion, Christianity in particular, can inform the reader of Forster’s rejection of the Christianity of his childhood.  

Maurice meets Clive Durham in university, and their conversations about religion eventually lead Maurice to reject whatever little faith he had in Christianity. When Maurice tries to defend their belief in “The Redemption” and the doctrine of “the Trinity” (48), Clive replies:  

Belief’s always right . . . It’s all right and it’s also unmistakable. Every man has somewhere about him some belief for which he’d die. Only isn’t it improbable that your parents and guardians told it to you? If there is one won’t it be part of your own flesh and spirit? Show me that. Don’t go hawking out tags like ‘The Redemption’ or ‘The Trinity’ (49). 

After this Maurice “cut out all the chapels he dared” and “yielded all his opinions” (49) to Clive. What attracts Maurice to Clive’s denunciation of Christianity is the latter’s observation that Christianity rejects the flesh and spirit. Clive himself was deeply religious (67) as a boy, and consequently felt damned because of his carnal impulses. He wondered “why had he out of all Christians been punished with it” (67). Similarly, those same “terrors [of damnation] had visited Maurice” (67). Consequently, when Clive comes across Plato’s Phaedrus and its endorsement of erotic love, he “saw that the temperate pagan really did comprehend him, and, slipping past the Bible rather than opposing it, was offering a new guide for life . . . not to crush [erotic love] down . . . but to cultivate it” (68). Maurice and Clive’s attraction to Greek philosophy over Christianity because the former embraces the whole of life, including homosexual erotic love, mirrors Forster’s attraction to Hellenistic mythology, against the oppressive shaming that dominated his childhood which he naturally associated with the proscriptions of Christianity. Duckworth notes that by the time Forster entered King’s College, Cambridge, joined the Apostles, and later became a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group, he had “lost whatever Christian faith he had had” (10). At Cambridge he developed an attraction to the Greek “idea of accommodating bodily passion” (Crews 42), and consequently saw them as “a reasonable and civilised acceptance of man’s full nature, a circumventing of the modern extremes of inhuman machine-worship and morbid Salvationism” (Crews 43).  

This is further corroborated in Forster’s essay “What I Believe”, his humanist manifesto published 14 years after his last novel A Passage to India. In it, he calls belief a “militant creed” that tramples over “tolerance, good temper, and sympathy” with a “jackboot”. Echoing his thematic concerns in his fiction, he notes that his “lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul”, and that his “temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field, where even the immoral are admitted”. He emphasizes that “no form of Christianity and no alternative to Christianity will bring peace to the world or integrity to the individual”, and that Christianity’s influence “in modern society is due to the money behind it rather than to its spiritual appeal”.  He rejects the notion that Christianity’s “failure proceeds from the wickedness of men, and really proves its ultimate success” because he does not have the faith to believe that. What I believe he means is that the claim “Christianity’s badness testifies to its truth” is not falsifiable and so cannot be accepted, because then nothing bad done in the name of Christianity will ever be able to falsify its claim to truth.

In place of established religion, Forster offers his vision of a moral future. Living and writing in a tumultuous period of the early 20th century, between two world wars, amid the Great Depression and the disillusionment of the Romantic ideals of the power of nature and the heroic potential of the human species, Forster’s concerns for the future were justified. But even though he rejects Christianity, he uses its religious imagery to explicate his moral vision for society. For example, he rejects the utilitarian notion of loyalty to country or dying for a cause in favour of personal relationships, and calls his belief a faith because it “ignores all contrary evidence”. The members of this new moral vision are sensitive, their “temple . . . is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom . . . the wide-open world”, and he calls them “the elect, the chosen”, re-envisioning the Christian doctrine of predestination. “The Saviour of the future,” he says, referencing Christ’s second coming prophesied in the Bible, “will merely utilize [his] aristocracy” to reform morality and economics. Consistent with his ambivalent use of religion in general, he notes at the end that, if one is to calm the waters of economic distress and threat of war, the “spiritual force” will have to be “restated in a non-Christian form”. 

Throughout the essay, it is clear that Forster has a very strong moral realist lens, but it also seems that he recourses to religious imagery and hopes to ground his morality in an imaginative metaphysical base that a pure naturalism in the form of realism would not be able to furnish. This is probably because naturalism and its literary extension realism reject the notion that moral values that are instantiated in the real world (in a platonic form, spiritual reality, or divine command) and are objectively binding to people regardless of whether they accept it or not, but are instead merely the cooperative values that emerge from evolutionary processes that ensure our species’ overall survivability. This imaginative base manifests itself as Romanticism, Classics, Art, and Hellenistic mythology in most of his novels, but in a few, he does use religion as an alternative to ground his moral lens. Consequently, unlike his less explicitly religious novels that characteristically juxtapose social convention with emancipation in the form of Art, or something related, and because religion is for Forster both morally constricting and emancipating for the reasons stated in the previous two sections, he conflates them within the confines of literature, as an art form, to provide a moral vision that is both indebted to and disparaging toward itself. In so doing, he acknowledges the power of religion but not its truth. This is best contained in his short story “Mr Andrews”, but is most interestingly expressed in A Passage to India. 

• “Mr Andrews” and Forster’s Ontological Pluralism  

Several critics have noted that his short stories are encoded through fantasy with homosexual desire (that the novel’s commitment to realism could not) because he lived in a nation that at the time “criminalized male homosexuality” (Hai 220). Ambreen Hai’s article examines the six short stories in Forster’s original Celestial Omnibus collection and goes one step further, to argue that the “genre of the fantastic” allowed Forster to “encode a covert politics” that not only allowed him to address “homosexual desire”, but also “interlocking forms of societal oppression such as of race, class, and gender” (218). Hai argues that through the mode of the fantastic, “Forster could stage the otherwise unspeakable, presenting readers with possibilities that took them out of the realm of the conventional without having to name what those possibilities might be” (222), and that “the fantastic was not simply a means of expressing personal unfulfilled longing but rather an effort to consider whether writing could be a form of political action” (225), in other words, to have moral significance. Hai’s article only examines the six short stories in the Celestial Omnibus, not some of his later short stories, among which include the more explicitly religious ones like “Mr. Andrews”. However, I would like to logically extend his argument to Forster’s use of religion in “Mr Andrews” as well. The short story form and the genre of fantasy gave Forster a medium with which to experiment with religion that allowed him to “decline a definitive explanation, leaving the reader suspended in uncertainty” (223), to both draw from and reject it in the same way the fantasy genre could “hesitat[e] [perpetually] between the dominant world of heteronormativity and the unspeakable underworld of proscribed desire” (223) and to use it to present his moral vision as his form of political action.

“Mr Andrews” details the experience of a “decent middle-class” (141) Christian English man who passes away and ascends to the “Gate of Heaven” (141). Along the way, he meets a Muslim fundamentalist from Turkey who spent his life in Macedonia “plundering the villages of the infidel” (142). He pities the Turk, and at the Gate cries “cannot he enter?”(142). He realises that the Turk utters the same plea for him at the same time. A voice tells them that they both can enter and asks them what they wish to wear and do. Andrews’ Christian sensibility tells him the most appropriate thing to ask for is a white robe and a harp. Conversely, the Turk asks for the best clothes he stole and the virgins promised him by killing infidels (See Qu’ran 4:74 and Qu’ran 56:36). They both get what they desire. When Andrews ventures into heaven itself, he realises that every religion is true—every God that is worshipped exists, for those who believe in purgatory, there is one, and for those who believe they are not dead (like the Christian Scientists), there is a place to demonstrate it (144). Forster presents to the reader an ontologically pluralistic vision of religion. He draws from pantheism, various monotheisms, and pagan religious doctrines to create a new religious vision that eventually leads Andrews and the Turk into oneness with the “world soul” (145). 

Forster’s religious vision is a logical contradiction. It is logically incoherent to affirm the truths of all religions because they have contradictory claims. The fact that Andrews and the Turk are rewarded for their opposing beliefs and actions testifies to this. Fantasy enclosed in the short story form therefore allowed Forster to present this thought experiment in such a way as to reveal its incoherence. He notes that both Andrews and the Turk were not happy in heaven because they expected so much more: “We desire infinity and we cannot imagine it. How can we expect it to be granted?” (144) As a result, they both choose to leave heaven and unite with the world soul, which is presumably pantheism’s contribution to this metaphysical fantasy. Here Forster also disparages the possibility that religious people apprehend the consequences of their salvific theories since they have no real conception of what eternity is and whether they would find it pleasurable or unbearably boring. At the same time, Forster draws from religion, especially a pantheistic epistemology, to ground the hope of the transcendent, in the characters’ subsuming into the world soul. Even though he is not committed to the reality of any religious belief, he is indebted to its imagery in his presentation of his emancipatory hope for his characters, a hope that is all-embracing and also an affirmation of his vision for morality, since the Turk and Andrews are friendly to each other, they hold each other’s hand, and their uniting with the world soul gives it “all the love and wisdom they had generated” (145). This implies that all that matters in the end is not how well they adhered to the dogma of their respective religions, but whether they could embrace each other as members of the same race regardless of the past. They could, and in so doing, were able to unite with the world soul and find true salvation. Like Hai’s analysis of Forster’s use of fantasy, “Mr. Andrews” fantastical expression of his moral vision is one that both embraces and rejects religious expression and truth, precipitated by Forster’s conflict between his rejection of religion and his desire to ground his moral realist lens and emancipatory hope in an ontological reality (if only in the realm of fiction).   

The feature of restriction and emancipation, or emancipatory hope that runs through the breadth of Forster’s fiction is in “Mr. Andrews”, complicated. Not only are his common juxtapositions of Hellenistic mythology and Art substituted with religion, but religion itself is also the perpetrator of moral blindness in the characters and logical absurdity in its fantastical expression. Its subsequent conflation therefore represents the conflict I have argued is present in his religious fiction. This conflict is also expressed in A Passage to India, the most religious of all his fiction, and the novel that is the culmination of his fictional intellect, being the last one he ever wrote.

• Forster’s Double Vision in A Passage to India 

A Passage to India is Forster’s last and most complex novel. According to Pankaj Mishra, he was “trying to weave into it . . . homoerotic friendships . . . deficiencies of the English . . . the mysteries of Hinduism . . . [and the] human predicament in a universe which is not, so far, comprehensible to our minds” (18-9). Forster’s contemporary and acquaintance Virginia Woolf noted that “he is like a light sleeper who is always being woken by something in the room. The poet is twitched away by the satirist; the comedian is tapped in the shoulder by the moralist” (74). Malcolm Bradbury, Forster critic and editor of the Casebook Series of critical essays on A Passage to India, in his introduction to the anthology observes “the sheer complexity of his moral and cultural critique. His attitudes are liberal, humanist, reformist, romantic; and yet they are constantly being questioned from the standpoint of a quizzical moral realism by the author himself” (15). It is no wonder that the novel has engendered a sizable controversial critical legacy that has attempted in multiple ways to formulate critical frameworks that can incorporate all these features to fit a specific teleology that they argue Forster intended. However, it is important to note that Forster himself might not have had a teleology in which all the specific features of his novel may be subsumed. In an interview at King’s College, Cambridge on 20 June 1953, he tells the interviewer that “people will not realize how little conscious one is of these things [technical cleverness]; how one flounders about. They want us to be much better informed than we are. If critics could only have a course on writer’s not thinking things out” (Casebook 30). In another article, its author Robert Selig published a letter he received from Forster regarding his master’s thesis on A Passage to India which he had sent to Forster for his response in 1957. In his thesis, he connected the ‘Boum’ of the Marabar caves to “the Hindu mystic syllable OM” (472), the caves themselves to Plato’s cave in his Republic, Adela’s assault as “a frustrated attempt to enact a rite of fertility” per George Frazer’s anthropological study of religion and mythology in The Golden Bough, and Miss Quested’s name as a reference to “the Grail quester” (472). Forster’s reply was discouraging, because he objected to just about everything Selig argued were symbolic features of the novel: he had never known about the Hindu syllable ‘OM,’ had never considered Plato’s cave in relation to his own, and had only “glanced at Frazer” (473). Consequently, in this part of the essay I will not attempt to undertake a full analysis of the novel and then note religion’s place in it but will simply analyse the novel’s religious features and note the similarities between it and his other fiction following my thesis about Forster’s view of religion in general. However, in so doing, the complex muddle that characterises his novel as a whole may then be subsumed under this argument that Forster himself was conflicted about the moral role of the novel, religion, and humankind’s value in an amoral and meaningless world, a conflict that by its nature (expressing itself as a muddle) cannot be dissected and understood with Selig’s specificity. 

The conflict between Forster’s agnosticism and the moral realism that he desires to ground in an imaginative ontology is expressed in A Passage to India as the “double vision” (195) Mrs. Moore experiences after her trip to the Marabar caves: “All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background [eternity; humankind’s moral significance]” (196). The moral nihilistic naturalism of the caves shakes Mrs Moore out of the assumption. The novel therefore presents a Forster who has become disillusioned with Romanticism (Bradbury 16) and the ameliorative power of art that no longer has the backdrop of spirituality to support it in a “world that is not made for man” (Bradbury 16). As an alternative to Art, Classics, and Hellenistic mythology then, Forster recourses to practiced religion itself to attempt to ground his moral vision. And, as I have noted in his other religious fiction, the result is that Forster both embraces and rejects religion, in the same way Mrs. Moore’s double vision permits her to “neither ignore nor respect infinity” (196). She cannot ignore it for to do so will be to fall into nihilism and despair; she cannot respect it either because it is too absurd to be true. In the following paragraphs, I will present evidence for Forster’s double vision in his rejection and denigration of religion, followed by his embracement of its emancipatory potential.  

None of the three religions present in the novel are given wholly favourable treatment by Forster. Forster describes the attempt by Christian missionaries Mr. Graysford and Mr Sorley to evangelise to their “Hindu friends” (34). They are asked if there are rooms in the Father’s house as well for monkeys, jackals, all other mammals, wasps, oranges, cactuses, crystals, mud and bacteria (34). The missionaries diverge at monkeys; the younger Sorley accepts that there might be a place for monkeys, but Graysford rejects the possibility. However even the progressive-looking Sorley is unable to go past wasps; he “became uneasy . . . and was apt to change the conversation” (34) when wasps and everything after that was brought up. He concludes the conversation by maintaining that “we must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing” (34). Forster notes that Christianity is about exclusion: the saved have to be identified against the lost, and if all were saved, then being saved would be meaningless. This exclusivity is also mixed with hypocrisy in the British Raj’s administration of India and so is complicit with Forster’s critique of the English’s use of Christianity to justify their economic exploitation in the name of ‘the civilising mission’. This is apparent in the scene in which the English draw strength from their “National Anthem” in its “demands on Jehovah” (23). At the relational level of the narrative, the English Turtons, Burtons, and Callendars are nominal Christians who perpetuate divisiveness in their ignorant and dismissive attitude toward the Indians. 

Mrs Moore, the only genuine Christian around quickly loses her faith when she is confronted with the nihilistic horror of the Marabar caves, and is for the rest of the novel, before she passes away on a ship back to England, unable to remove this double vision that “undermine[s] her hold on life” (139). She tells her son that “God . . . is . . . love” (46) and appeals to the notion that “Christianity [is] a necessary condition for the peaceful commerce among nations” (Spurr 33). However, her encounter with the caves and the echo tells her that “everything exists, [but] nothing has value”. Her religious conviction crumbles: “But suddenly, at the edge of her mind . . . Christianity, and . . . all its divine words from ‘Let there be Light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘Boum’” (139). As her belief in a divine morality collapses, she loses her desire to communicate with God, and also loses all affection for her children and even Aziz. Later Forster describes her as having lost her “Christian tenderness” (187). She refuses to testify in Aziz’s favour even though she believes that he is innocent. When pressed for a reason, she mutters: “Was he in the cave, and were you in the cave . . . and am I good and is he bad and are we saved? . . . and ending everything the echo” (193). The caves strike at the metaphysical ground undergirding her moral epistemology and this pushes her to a state of moral ambivalence and cynicism.  

Islam is not given much treatment by Forster, but when it is treated through his characterisation of Aziz, it is described as a de-mythologised faith. It is clear that Aziz is not convinced by Islam’s metaphysical claims, but rather its evocation of cultural and nationalistic emotions in him: “Here was Islam, his own country, more than a Faith . . . an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable” (16). He rejects the notion that it incorporates the supernatural, which is shown in his scepticism of the Mohammedan Saint whose decapitated body carried out the wishes of his mother. He tells his children not to believe in the myth, hoping that they will not “grow up superstitious” (282). He also tells the Nawab Bahadur’s grandson Nureddin “not to believe in evil spirits” (90) so that India may advance. Faith is by definition a belief that cannot be proved by empirical evidence, hope in something ‘ultra-mundane’ (See for example Qu’ran 2:4). Aziz’s rejection of the supernatural aspects of Islam is a rejection of Islam itself, and it reflects Forster’s view that even some adherents to their faiths find their beliefs just too absurd to accept and so pick and choose whatever they feel justified to affirm in their religion for the sake of cultural continuity.  

Hinduism at first blush does not fare very well either. Forster details a religious riot between the Muslims and Hindus during the religious festival Mohurram celebrating the first month of the Islamic calendar. Their paper tower procession struck a “peepul tree” (87) a tree that is sacred to the Hindus. “A Mohammedan climbed up the peepul tree and cut the branch off, the Hindus protested, there was a religious riot” (87).21 The Collector “suspected that they had artificially bent the tree nearer the ground” (87) so that they could have a reason to fight with the Muslims. Forster also describes a comic scene when Aziz is planning for the trip to the Marabar:  

The Professor [Godbole] was not a very strict Hindu—he would take tea, fruit, soda water and sweets, whoever cooked them, and vegetables and rice if cooked by a Brahman; but not meat, not cakes lest they contained eggs, and he would not allow anyone else to eat beef . . . Other people might eat mutton, they might eat ham. But over ham Aziz’s religion raised its voice (119). 

Hinduism’s many arbitrary rules about food eating prevent the excursion from being easily planned, and so is complicit with the divisiveness that Forster rails against. In the Hill of Devi, he records his letters written to home about the Gokul Ashtami Festival in India which he noted were “fatuous and in bad taste” (64). “There was no dignity, no taste, no form, and though I am dressed as a Hindu I shall never become one” (64). He details his experience with another festival, this one for the elephant god Ganpati, and was sorry that “it all meant nothing to [him]” (68).  

His characterisation of Professor Godbole also reveals the unintelligible aspect of Hinduism, and its inability to differentiate right from wrong. Godbole refuses to help Aziz because it conflicts with his religious beliefs that conflate good and evil. After Adela’s imagined assault at the Marabar caves, Fielding asks Godbole for his opinion about whether or not Aziz is capable of assault. Instead of answering the question, or even acknowledging that it was asked, Godbole instead asks Fielding for his advice about the name of the school that he wishes to found in his birthplace. When Fielding expresses exasperation at Godbole’s indifference, he justifies his nonchalance by saying that according to his philosophy, “nothing can be performed in isolation. All perform a good action . . . and when an evil action is performed all perform it” (166). He then illustrates his point by claiming that everyone is responsible for assaulting Adela, including herself. At the end of his long and confusing philosophical explication, he concludes by asking Fielding “But did you have time to visit any of the interesting Marabar antiquities?” (167) leaving him “silent, trying to meditate and rest his brain” (167).  

It is clear therefore that Forster’s view on religion accords with his personal beliefs expressed in his essay “What I Believe”, since they are contributors to moral narrowness and divisiveness in the novel. However, Forster’s moral lens extends to the non-religious and atheistic characters in the novel as well, revealing the deficiency of the naturalistic moral mindset. Adela is described by Fielding as a “prig”, (109) with a “schoolmistressy” (230) manner, and with too much of an opinionated theoretical understanding of life. After the assault in the caves, she cannot get rid of the echo in her head. Unlike Mrs Moore however, she never understands its nihilistic message, in other words, the true implications of her atheism. When she affirms her atheism with Fielding, Forster describes their affirmation as  

words follow[ing] up by a curious backwash as though they had seen their own gestures from an immense height—dwarfs talking, shaking hands and assuring each other that they stood on the same footing of insight . . . Not for them was the infinite goal behind the stars, and they never sought it . . . the shadow of the shadow of a dream fell over their clear-cut interests, and objects never seen again seemed messages from another world (249).  

Fielding himself, when confronted with the Marabar Hills far off, wonders whether his whole life of careful moderation was worth it: “He felt he ought to have been working at something else the whole time,—he didn’t know at what, never would know, never could know, and that was why he felt sad” (179). The atheistic characters are continually haunted by a conception of life that has passed them by, that they would never be able to grasp. The nihilistic naturalism of the caves affects both the atheistic characters by challenging their assumptions about their beliefs, and revealing to them, at least at the subconscious level, the meaninglessness of life in a contingent world that will nevertheless outlast them. Gertrude M. White remarks that this is “the collapse of the liberal-bourgeois-agnostic mind face to face with the ultimate mystery at the heart of the universe” (150). In place of a reductive naturalism in a novel whose realistic form can no longer rely on the fantastic to find emancipatory hope to ground his moral vision, Forster recourses to religion, Hinduism in particular. 

While Hinduism was never a realistic faith option for Forster, he was attracted to some of its forms. In the Hill of Devi, Forster publishes a letter he wrote to his friend Mrs Aylward about his conversation with the Maharajah of Dewas on Hindu philosophy. The Maharajah explains to Forster that everything is a part of God, and men “have developed more than birds because they have come nearer to realizing this” (13). Our existence is explained by the fact that God has become “unconscious that we were parts of him” (13). He says that this best explains the reality of evil and suffering in the world if we are not God’s conscious creation: “we were either put here intentionally or unintentionally . . . and it raises fewer difficulties if we suppose it was unintentionally” (13). Hindu philosophy, with its interesting explanation for the presence of evil and suffering in the world, would have been an attractive concept to Forster who was always aware of its presence in his circumstances and the circumstances of the world he lived in.

While Forster’s presentation of Hindu muddle in the novel reflects the “abolish[ment] [of] the intellectual sanity that makes life endurable to the Western mind,” (Crews Casebook 183), its embracement of contradiction enables him to present his ontologically pluralistic vision of religion as in “Mr Andrews” but in the novelistic form which is committed to a greater semblance of realism. Forster’s vocation as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas and his personal letters also reveal his knowledge of Hinduism. Therefore, a brief examination of Hinduism will be helpful to our understanding his use of it. “Hinduism has been likened to a vast sponge, which absorbs all that enters it without ceasing to be itself” (Spear 57). It began with the Aryans who brought their “religious practices in the form of the Sanskrit language” (Burnett 28) to India in about the 14th century B.C. These Vedas were then supplemented with the Upanishads that came later and asserted that “the ultimate reality known as Brahman is identical with the self” (Burnett 61). Yann Martel, in his novel Life of Pi, explains this Hindu principle like this: “that which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing” (48-9). From the A.D. 400, the religious ballads called the “Puranic literature” (Burnett 91) were incorporated into Hinduism, and these introduced the most popular of Hindu deities “Vishnu, Siva and Brahma . . . [to] the pantheon of classical and post-classical Hinduism” (Burnett 91). From among the many manifestations of Vishnu, Krishna “is undoubtedly the most important” (Burnett 98). This is particularly so in Forster’s case because he chooses the Gokul Ashtami Festival, which celebrates the birth of Krishna, as the setting for his moral vision. The Bhagavad-Gita, which continues the tradition of the Upanishads, records the fact that Krishna “permits and, in fact, takes delight in the many ways and illusions of mankind, and approves of every faith and creed” (Burnett 106-7). With the inclusion of deities to the philosophy of the Upanishads, “the Bhagavad-Gita, therefore, has to provide a solution” to reconcile “the notion of a personal deity . . . [and] monism which assumes that all things are part of the same ultimate reality” (Burnett 108). Simon Weightman has noted that, unlike most other religions, Hinduism never set up a “semantic field” to give itself a clear “external definition” (8): “the ancient Hindus had no cause to set up such a semantic field. . . . [not to do so] is simply to state that all these [contradictory] elements are compatible with the term Hinduism” (8).

As I have noted in the paragraphs prior, Forster expresses the inherent contradictory nature of Hinduism as a muddle that cannot differentiate right from wrong. However, he also expresses the more positive aspects of the Hindu muddle with the celebration of the birth of Krishna in the Gokul Ashtami festival and the Krishna song that Godbole sings. These characteristics are its all-embracing moral nature and its forms that are beyond language, the latter recast positively. Like in “Mr. Andrews”, Forster conflates the religions presented in the novel that have caused divisiveness throughout. The festival, which is celebrated on the eighth day of the sixth month of the Hindu calendar, is creatively reimagined in the novel. Forster compares Gokul, the birthplace of Krishna, with Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, the second person of the Trinity and son of God in Christianity, and a revered prophet who will come again and judge the world in Islam (See 1 Jn 4:2; Qu’ran 43:57-67). He then compares “King Kansa” (273), a tyrant who kills innocent children to prevent a prophecy of his death by the hand of “Devaki’s eighth son” (Burnett 99) Krishna from occurring in the future, with King Herod, who in the biblical narrative also ordered the killing of many male infants because of a prophecy that the king of the Jews will be born in Bethlehem at that time (See Matt. 2). At the festival’s climax, “infinite love [takes] upon itself the form of SHRI KRISHNA, and [saves] the world” (273). This echoes the biblical concept that God is love and he has incarnated to save the world” (See 1 Jn. 4:8 and Jn 3:16). It is however, supplemented with the Hindu principle that this salvation is no longer anthropocentric but all-embracing: “All sorrow was annihilated, not only for Indians, but for foreigners, birds, caves, railways, and the stars” (273). 

In the festival, Godbole remembers his acquaintance with Mrs Moore and expresses God’s love for her by saying “come, come, come, come” (276), acknowledging that it is the best he can do. Language’s inability to express divine love is repeated sometime later in a worshipper’s praise of God at the procession of the same festival in which she “[praised] God without attributes” (299). Thus, notes Forster, “did she apprehend Him” (299). At the beginning of the festival, Forster describes God as one who “is, was not, is not, was” (269), an existence that transcends and transgresses linguistic and tensed boundaries. These ‘grammar transcending’ (Brock 260) apprehensions of God allowed for its absurdity to be cast in a new positive light, one that, precisely because it is a muddle, is closer to humankind’s lived experience and moral nature than its opposite. This will be treated more completely in the following section.   

At the climax of a novel that is searching for something “universal” (135) to bring unity to a divided country, and allegorically to the whole world,23 this conflated religious festival is Forster’s creative answer. It simultaneously embraces and rejects religious belief in its use of its forms and in its logically absurd and linguistically unapprehend-able conflation, which I have argued reflects Forster’s conflict between wanting to ground his moral lens in an imaginative religion and at the same time choosing to reject its logical forms and corresponding dogmatic truth. An emergent property of Forster’s conflicted expression of religion that accords with this essay’s argument is the property of religious longing which has already been foreshadowed in “Mr Andrews”. When Andrews and the Turk decide to leave heaven, it is because they both “were conscious of no great happiness” (144). Instead, they both find that they were happiest when they were praying for each other outside the gate that the other might enter. Andrews also notes that while his “expectations were fulfilled” (144) in heaven, his hopes were not. Similarly, in A Passage to India, the Hindu notion of religious longing is expressed in the form of the song by the gopis (milk-maidens) dedicated to calling Krishna to come, who never comes. Godbole sings the song for his English audience and Aziz, who are unable to appreciate it because there was no melody intelligible to their sensibilities, although the Hindu servants were enraptured by it (72). Godbole explains the meaning of the song, and when Mrs Moore asks him whether Krishna comes “in some other song” (72), he replies “oh no, he refuses to come . . . . I say to Him, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come” (73). This implies that the act of longing itself, while never fully consummated in its fulfilment, is the kind of religious expression that accords with Forster’s agnostic religious epistemology: God or the transcendent may not exist, which is evident from Forster’s absurd treatment of it, but longing after it and assuming its metaphysical base is nevertheless a beautiful endeavour which can furnish you with a morality and an ethos that seeks to benefit the world. This corroborates with a section of his essay “What I Believe”, in which he notes that “the people [he] respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit”. 

In Hinduism, therefore, Forster finds a philosophy that closely accords with his moral vision that can also be instantiated imaginatively in a novelistic fictional reality that demands a greater semblance of realism than its short story counterpart. Apart from presenting Forster’s conflict between his moral realist lens and his rejection of religion, the features of religious longing and Hindu-enabled religious conflation, like his use of fantasy, are common in their implicit rejection of clear propositional logical forms which I have made a brief observation of in his description of God’s attributes. I will now examine the limits of language in conjunction with my thesis in the following section and argue that his rejection of the logical use of language points to the importance of Art and literature—and the imagination in the form of religious imagery as its subset—in incorporating our full creative nature and moral experience. This then connects Forster’s religious fictions with his non-religious fictions through the larger moral function of literature that all his fiction is concerned. 

• Forster and the Limits of Language 

 A few critics have noted that Forster lived in a time when what is now termed analytic philosophy was being developed by philosophers who were experimenting with the “logical and linguistic analysis of philosophical concepts” (Emmett 199). These individuals who were contemporaries of Forster and to whom he must have been acquainted since he was in Cambridge at the time and was also a member of the Bloomsbury group include G. E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, and Bertrand Russell. These critics have therefore endeavoured to compare what was going on in the philosophy of language at the time with Forster’s A Passage to India. Gary Brock’s “Language, Truth and Logic in E. M. Forster’s Passage to India” and V. J. Emmett Jr.’s “Verbal Truth and Truth of Mood in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India” concur in their observation that Forster’s novel reveals the inadequacy of language when used solely as a broker of logically deducible truths in the philosophical tradition.24 Emmett gives examples from the various misunderstandings caused by a confusion between “verbal truth” and “truth of mood” (201) between the characters, which he argues parallel “the analytical philosophers’ distinction between the cognitive and non-cognitive functions of language” (201). Brock gives the example of Adela’s rationalism. She tells Mrs Moore that “if one isn’t absolutely honest, what is the use of existing” (256). This claim is proven by Forster to be a deficient way of living and understanding life when Adela tells the Anglo-Indian community that “Aziz attacked her” (256), and they “accept her statement as true verbally” (257) and she accepts it because she is unaware that “what she may really be expressing are subconscious fears” (257), probably related to the forced nature of her ensuing marriage to Ronny. This reading is very probable since she asks Aziz about marriage right before the assault occurs and was thinking about it all day before she entered the cave. What she said is therefore merely true to her mood.  

Both critics have also extended their argument to Forster’s use of religion. Emmett makes the connection between Forster’s disdain for Christianity’s propositional truths and his acknowledgment of the inherent limits of language. He recalls Mrs Moore’s encounter with the Marabar caves, and after quoting at length the passage in which Christianity’s propositional truths such as “let there be light” and “it is finished” are nullified by ‘boum’ (139), he argues that “her [ensuing] rejection of Christianity is put in terms of the meaninglessness of its language. She sounds like a Wittgensteinian rejecting theological propositions as meaningless because [they are] unverifiable” (206). Similarly, Brock saw in A Passage to India Forster’s use of “Indian philosophies [which] insist that the sphere of logical thought is far exceeded by that of the mind’s experience of verifiable reality and that to express and communicate knowledge in moments of ‘grammar-transcending’ insight, metaphors, similes, and allegories must be employed” (260). He quotes George Thompson, who notes that the mystery of “Oneness . . . cannot be instituted in the world of reason and social order. In that sense it is forever unattainable” (263). The property of religious longing that emerges from Forster’s moral vision in A Passage to India and enabled by Hindu philosophy, is therefore also expressed not only directly, in the Krishna song but also in the limits of language itself—a moral vision that will always be unattainable except in the realm of fiction and the imagination. This is therefore not to say that Forster’s sympathies can simply lie with Fielding’s “agnostic humanis[m]” (208) as Emmett asserts, since Forster obviously rejects established religion, but that the act of language transcending longing for a moral vision to unite humanity itself is a worthwhile endeavour, and one that can find a suitable home in fiction and the imagination even if realism dictates that the characters in the novel cannot find consolation in it and are unable to connect, like Fielding and Aziz at the novel’s conclusion.  

Whether Forster embellishes his religious visions with fantasy or Hindu philosophy, language and its non-logical use are employed to express his moral vision that cannot find ground in its “cognitive” (201) function. Here Forster’s religious fictions are very much like his non-religious fictions in their moral concerns even though his presentation of his moral vision—which cannot be expressed clearly and realistically—is his acknowledgement that such a solution cannot be instantiated in reality. Almost a century later, this acknowledgement still holds. Nevertheless, Forster’s use of the religious imagery of longing reminds readers that the act of assuming eternity to be true, even if it cannot be logically affirmed, is an important aspect of moral formation. 

The breadth of Forster’s fiction is concerned with morality. While his religious fictions diverge from his common pattern of juxtaposition and attempted emancipation, I have endeavoured to argue in this essay that they are just as concerned with morality as most of his fiction in general. Because Forster was conflicted about religion—its moral repressiveness and logical absurdity on the one hand, its emancipatory potential, moral grounding, and ‘grammar transcending’ insights (Brock 260) on the other—he conflates them to form an all-embracing moral vision, with an emergent property of longing that provides him with the imaginative moral grounding that he desires. In doing so, Forster affirms the power but not the truth of religion. These allow his religious fictions to be consistent with the moral concerns that attend all his fiction in general. They also allow his religious fiction to be remarkably relevant to our contemporary situation in two ways. The first is his religious epistemology that corroborates with contemporary postmodern liberal religious thought that de-mythologises its supernatural aspects, rejects its logical forms and metaphysical bases, but embraces its transformative potential and ameliorative function. The second is Forster’s explicit rejection of the practical cognitive use of language in our contemporary society in the employ of profit and his embracement of language’s ameliorative potential as a vital aspect of humankind’s full expressive capacity and moral nature. Forster never writes another novel after A Passage to India. It is very probable therefore that he never could find a better way to recast or solve the conflict that he believed attended all of humanity. Almost a hundred years from then, his conflicted voice is now, as ever before, exceedingly relevant in its diagnosis of society and the power of Art, literature, (with religion as a meta-text), and the imagination as vital emancipatory juxtapositions that incorporate all of the lived experience that a narrow economic pragmatism would deny. 

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Thanks for reading! Hope it cured your insomnia 🙂