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It is this failure of the heart — Forster calls it elsewhere ‘the undeveloped heart’ — which lies at the root, which makes human relations impossible, which stands in the way of the Beloved Republic. The whole drama of A Passage to India is played before an oppressive, inescapable background of brutal sunlight, gathering in strength as the hot season descends. The sun is both a character and a symbol, the symbol of power without beauty and intellect without love, a master from whose dominion there is no escape. In this atmosphere human relationships, even within the closed group of the ruling race, wither and are formalised, while real friendship between Indians and English becomes almost impossible. ‘Even the friendship between Fielding and Aziz, valuable and important as it is, is kept alive only by constant effort and fails in the end of full flowering.

The complete honesty with which it analyses the psychology of a colonial society, the waste, the frustration and the bitterness which inequality produces upon both sides, is one of the book’s most valuable qualities. For it is not the English alone who are stunted by this false relationship. If, as Acton said, power corrupts, so equally does powerlessness, and the Indian characters are not idealised to afford a cheap and easy contrast with their rulers. On the contrary, they are frequently bitter, suspicious, unstable and lacking in moral force. Their powerlessness has engendered the very qualities which may seem to justify the arrogance and lack of sympathy with which they are treated. Yet they are alive, their mess is a vital mess, while the English community, more efficient perhaps, is condemned by its lack of roots to a sterile rectitude.

This is the aspect upon which Forster dwells most. A Passage to India is not in the ordinary sense a political book, though the questions with which it deals are of course of great political importance. This is perhaps partly because it was written in 1924, when the Indian national movement was still in its early stages, and because the material for it was collected by Forster during his still earlier visits to India in 1910 and 1922, visits which he later described in The Hill of Devi. But even more, perhaps, because Forster does, rightly or wrongly, tend to see the problem rather as a personal than a political one. And when, at the end of the book, the political issue is raised sharply, it is raised in a personal form and we pass out of the tyranny of the sun into the shade of the Beloved Republic.