What Is The Theme Of A Passage To India By E. M. Forster

admirably depict the comic, sadconfusion of a nation torn between two cultures. This provesthat Forster was familiar with the Indian culture. As soon as the A Passage got published, it accorded instant recognition, as afine novel and as perceptive and sympathetic treatment of theproblem of ‘Anglo-India.E. M. Forster had not published a work of fiction for fourteenyears when, in 1924, he produced his fifth and the most famousnovel A Passage to India

. Most of his writings belong to theEdwardian period (1901 – 1914). In the words of Forster himself,the reason why he stopped writing novels after A Passage toIndia is – “I think one of the reasons why I stopped writingnovels is that the social aspect of the world changed so much. Ihad been accustomed to write about the old-fashioned world with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace. Allthat went, and though I can think about the new world I cannotput it into fiction”. But of course A Passage to India is not thatkind of book; it is one of the most inclusive and ranging novelsever written. It is hardly about homes, family life and peace; itis hardly in its central political and spiritual themes – old-fashioned. As adventurous it is in matter, so it is in technique.Forster’s stress in the work is that

This single theme is, in the critics’various terms, ‘the chasm between the world of action and theworld of being’ (Brown, p.352): the search for the wholeness of truth; and the harmonizing of ‘the tragic antithesis of mankind’(Zabel); the antithesis ‘between real and not real, true andfalse, being and not being’ (Rose Macaulay, The writings of E.M. Forster, 1938).DIVERSITY OF THEMES IN A PASSAGE TO INDIAThe Unity of All Living ThingsThough the main characters