In A Passage to India(P.I.) there is a spirit of place, the continuance of which is deemed desirable . This spirit is identified with an elderly custodian/witness-in-place, Professor Godbole . Because of his age, that continuance is under question, and attention is focused on the younger generation from which a suitable successor-custodian may emerge . Legacy-by-blood, which is shown, in the varying quality of scions or young, to be an unreliable procedure, vies with the ethereal process of legacy-by-instinct . To these, in the crucible, are added alternative spirits of place--the Little England and Little Islam of Chandrapore--working on and through their temporary or permanent inhabitants, with the main stress on the more malleable younger generation . And, further, in the crucible are disruptive forces breaking the mould of social status quo which both protects and imprisons the autochthonic spirit of place of manifold India---human forces, which, by dint of intrinsic personality, knowingly or unknowingly inhibit, interrupt, promote or advance the momentum towards installation in autochthonic place of the successor-custodian . Finally, central in the crucible are human pairings in friendship or potential young love---respectively, Aziz and Fielding ; Adela and Ronny---which both formally and by subjective inclination are promissory of a lifelong bond that may secure a successor custodianship .
Across Forster's novels there is found this impulsion towards installing a successor human legatee-custodian .P.I. is, however, a special case : India's spirit of place is there all around, ever immanent, in the natural manifold--in flies, wasp, elephant, cowdung, or Godbole . It does not require human understanding--not even the convergent spirituality of a simpatico like Godbole . Godbole is custodian/witness of India's spirit of place, but this is a reading from a homocentric standpoint which shuns the manifold--Godbole, if drawn from his serene reticence, would vouch that wasp, tree and Ganges are similar custodians/witnesses-in-place . Two of India's main power blocks --represented in the Little England and Little Islam of Chandrapore--are assertive, complacently pushy 'as of right', or dominant, but by the end of P.I. that forcefulness is drawn, extracted . Thereby Forster points up the human waste, self-defeatism and futility resulting from monovisions from behind a bastion--a bastion in India--which ignores or fends off the ever-present call of spirit to Come...Come...Come...and merge with the manifold . At that conclusion to P.I. something finally emerges from the various foregoing elements which is true to India's spirit of place : the acknowledgment, by public celebration, of the reality of manifold India--rendered in the fallibly human fusion of the chronometrically formal with the spontaneous, the vibrantly informal, of poetry with filth, of place for living sweepers with no place for a dead Rajah . It emerges because it was ever immanent in Little England and Little Islam, though there authorially kept in human nuclear latency--in the person of Godbole--as a reflection of the bastion mentality, at the same time as the natural manifold, which can be deemed insignificant by monovisions, is openly and assiduously displayed by Forster as variegated, dramatically ironic comment on the purported dramas ensuing from monovision . This emergence finds place in the more amenable Hindu region of Gau, far from the Clouds of colonial and Muslim Unknowing . It is an emergence not contingent on, or proceeding from, the foregoing interactions : rather, it is structurally ordered---authorial artifice, intended, I think, to reflect the artifice(the paper towers for Mohurram ; the chronometrically born God) by which the Hindu simpatico publicly displays human ineffectuality before his God, in celebration of Indian spirit of place.
Crucially though, whether Godbole, Aziz, Mrs Moore succeed to Come...Come...Come may be relevant to their personal identity developing within the confines of P.I., whether they to varying degrees become intrinsic with the spirit of manifold India---these are, in the final analysis[or, to be more exact, in the analysis of time's continuum] irrelevant, because the spirit of India is not homocentric bur geocentric, below an over-arching sky .
Take, then, the seriousness out of homocentricity--and this is what India does, and does for Forster--and Forster can and does centre on human foibles and notions of self-importance like a wistfully smiling Olympian . To take the two central 'crises' in P.I.--Mrs Moore's and Adela's experience in the Caves, and the subsequent trial--although given extensive authorial play in order to reflect the importance the intra-textual play-actors attach, homocentrically, to them, they are reducible to an Indianised version of Pope's Rape of the Lock, here called 'The Rape of the Field-Glasses' . Mrs Moore communes with the wasp, she escapes from Little England's rendition of Cousin Kate' : she is the novitiate to India, wishing to merge with a manifold India without its human particulars . And it is these latter whom she experiences crowding in on her in the Cave . Adela, similarly a novitiate, wishes to experience the real India (28), but at a distance--defined subjectively, or by the subjective definitions of India paraded by such as Aziz, Fielding or Ronny . Distance is the key factor : suitably rendered symbolically in the field-glasses felt to be wrenched from her grasp in the Cave . Both events in the Caves render in experience the next step which Adela and Mrs Moore must take to cancel distance, thereby to experience at close quarters the manifold, there to embrace its human component . The Marabar Caves are Jainist, and the central doctrine of Jainism is 'Ahimsa, non-violence towards living beings'(A.C.Bouquet,Comparative Religion,p.156), so the physical violence these novitiates experience in the Caves is self-inflicted and is the logical consequence of their incomplete Orientalness imploding in on the irresponsible--and therefore suffering--root cause .
Now to conclude, a point on caste in P.I . In Little England there, hierarchy is officially rendered in titles, position, and keeping to one's area of competence . On the fringes of the bastion is the English untouchable, Fielding--untouchable because he treats in, horror of horrors, knowledge, and because he is disrespectful of English hierarchy, while socially communing with the--for the English--true Untouchables : the Indians . I say 'English', even though Scottish surnames abound : the 'Scottish factor' imparts the notion of clannishness, but it is clearly Little Englandism which flourishes . At the Gau festival, the Hindu mind officially recognises caste with intrinsic place for the untouchable Sweepers , whereas the clannish, caste-ridden Little England does not give worthy place to its Untouchables--human India . Islam, on the other--yet on the same--hand, is opposed to caste . Yet Little Islam similarly practises it : in hierarchy, titles, with the English untouchables on the fringe of their bastion, and the out-and-out Untouchables, the Hindus, beyond . If one must view India homocentrically, then the Hindu viewpoint is the only one that merges the reality, the social artifice of caste, with the artifice of their celebrations of the manifold God that is the spirit of India .
