Recommendations
Books Like A Passage to India
Colonial and Postcolonial Novels Like A Passage to India
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India is one of the great novels about the failure of human connection under colonial conditions — Dr Aziz and Adela Quested in the Marabar Caves, the British community closing ranks, the friendship between Aziz and Fielding that the political situation cannot sustain. These 8 novels share its preoccupation with cross-cultural encounter, its political honesty, and its moral seriousness.
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Howards End
by E.M. Forster
The collision of the idealistic Schlegel sisters with the commercial Wilcox family and the tragic figure of Leonard Bast — Forster's earlier masterpiece shares A Passage to India's preoccupation with the failure of connection across social distance, with 'Only connect' as its epigraph; the domestic English version of the same argument about what prevents human beings from genuinely meeting
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Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
Kimball O'Hara, the orphan son of an Irish soldier, growing up between the British and Indian worlds in 1880s India — Kipling's novel shares A Passage to India's Indian setting and its interest in the question of whether a European can genuinely cross into Indian life; Forster's novel is in part a response to Kipling's more optimistic answer to that question
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Burmese Days
by George Orwell
John Flory, a timber merchant in 1920s Burma, caught between the rottenness of the British colonial club and his inability to build a genuine life outside it — Orwell's first novel shares A Passage to India's portrayal of the colonial community as a closed, frightened, prejudiced world, and its interest in the European who can see through that world but cannot escape it
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo's Igbo village in Nigeria and the arrival of British missionaries and administrators — Achebe's novel was written in part as a response to Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the tradition of African representation it represents; it shares A Passage to India's political seriousness about colonialism while telling the story from the colonized side, which Forster could not do
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler's journey across England and his gradual reckoning with the question of whether his life of service was well spent — Ishiguro's novel shares A Passage to India's interest in the way that social forms prevent genuine human connection, its elegiac tone, and its portrait of an English character who has suppressed his own feelings so completely that he cannot retrieve them
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Heat and Dust
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Two stories of English women in India — one in the 1920s, one in the 1970s — and their relationships with India and with Indian men; Jhabvala's Booker Prize winner shares A Passage to India's Indian setting, its interest in the question of whether genuine connection between the British and Indian worlds is possible, and its double vision of a country that resists easy understanding
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
Fowler, a British journalist in 1950s Vietnam, and Alden Pyle, the naive American idealist who arrives with a plan to reshape the country — Greene's novel shares A Passage to India's portrait of the damage done by well-meaning Western intervention, its politically honest examination of what Western 'help' means in practice, and its refusal to sentimentalize the non-Western world
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A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
Lucy Honeychurch liberated in Florence — Forster's earlier and lighter novel shares A Passage to India's central concern with the English capacity for emotional self-suppression and the question of whether connection with a life more open and direct than English propriety permits is possible; the Italian version of the argument A Passage to India makes about India
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