Bearing the White Man's Burden: Misrecognition and Cultural Difference in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

Adela's Quest for Visual Authenticity and the Marabar Caves

With the plot of A Passage to India, centering around an imagined attempted rape of an Englishwoman, Adela Quested, by an Indian man, Aziz, Forster offers a narrative of how the construction of racial difference sustains (and ultimately disrupts) colonial power in British India. The debacle involving Adela and Aziz begins when she decides to accompany him to view the Marabar Caves outside of Chandrapore, which she believes will allow her to fulfill the wish "to see the real India" (24).

Adela's search for an authentic India is problematized, however, at the same moment that her desire comes to focus on the Caves. In Adela and Aziz's initial conversation about the Marabar Caves, we learn that Aziz has never visited the Caves although he has spent his life in Chandrapore. Aziz, it seems, has no firsthand knowledge of the Caves-only a vague awareness of their reputation, much like that of Adela. The sense that the Caves are an exotic destination for English tourists rather than the expression of an Indian essence or an integral aspect of Indian life is re-emphasized in the scene in which Adela first expresses the wish to visit the Caves. In this passage, the narrator observes that while the Marabar Hills are anything but picturesque as one approaches them, they "look romantic in certain lights and at suitable distances," as when "seen of an evening from the upper verandah of the [Anglo-Indian] club," and it is this very view that inspires Adela to recall her conversation with Aziz and his promise to show her the Caves (126). The recognition that Marabar is primarily of concern to the English tourist in search of romantic vistas qualifies the viewpoints not only of the characters, but even that of the third-person omniscient narrator, who introduces the Caves as the only "extraordinary" feature of Chandrapore in the first sentence of the novel (7).