Landscape And Geography In “A Passage To India”

11 Pages 2751 Words

The two books chosen for the following essay have been written at an interval of fifty years by two British authors: E.M Forster and R.P. Jhabvala.
The first one is E .M Forster’s major work: “A Passage to India”. Its main focus is the study of two worlds divorced. The second “Heat and Dust” has made its author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala win the Booker –Prize. In her novel, we get a picture of India by two English women separated by fifty years.
Both of the novels present an enigmatic India. This is of a primary importance for the following study as we will try to understand what kind of role the geography and landscape of India play in the novels. First, we will examine the symbolism of the landscape used by the writers of “A Passage to India” and “Heat and Dust”. This will then lead us to the second part which tries to show how the Indian setting influences the characters of the novels and especially the Westerners.

From the beginning of each book, the reader guesses that the Indian atmosphere is going to play a major role in the novels. The title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is literal in that sense: “Heat and Dust” makes it clear that the hot weather conditions are the causes of the following action. Readers expect that the heat and the dust of India are going to upset a few lives. Forster is also aware that the reader must understand the importance of the Indian atmosphere from the very first few lines. That is why he chooses to devote all the first chapter of his novel at describing the town of Chandrapore. First, he starts by presenting the part of the town inhabited by the natives as a dreary landscape:
“So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, welling here, shrinking there, like some low but in...