A charming but mercurial Indian surgeon, Dr. Aziz, strikes up a relationship with an elderly English lady, Mrs. Moore, in a mosque. Mrs. Moore has traveled to Chandrapore to visit her son, Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate, in the company of Ronny’s intended, Adela Quested. The misalliance between East and West is deftly drawn by Forster as he overlays one comedy of manners (whose center is the English Club) upon another (revolving around Aziz and his Indian friends). The destructive rather than comic consequences of those differences suffuse the novel’s central event, an expedition to the local marvel, the Marabar Caves, organized by Dr. Aziz for the benefit of Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested. The outing ends in calamity, with Miss Quested racing from the scene to accuse Aziz of assaulting her in one of the caverns. The bewildering tenuousness of all personal relationships is Forster’s great subject; the urgency of the need expressed in the epigraph to Howards End—“Only connect”—runs through the varied scenes of A Passage to India like the current of a slow but unstoppable river.
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