Spatial Renovations and Forgetting As Memorialization in Forster’s Global Imaginarium

When I first read A Passage to India (1924) as a grade-school student, a deceptively simple question plagued me: where exactly are Chandrapore and the Marabar Caves in subcontinental India? There is a straightforward biographical answer to this question, but the novel resists parallels of real with fictional place. In this chapter, I argue that the nonlocation of Chandrapore and its caves is significant for Forster’s developing sense of national politics and culture in the years before and after the First World War. Before the war, the author shows a commitment to spatial renovations as literary symbols for his dissenting, anti-imperialist politics but, over the 1920s, he takes up the counterintuitive position that to be imprecise, or to forget someone or somewhere is the most honest way to remember them. The imprecise location of Chandrapore: somewhere “on the road between Upper India… and the sea,” is a description so broad that it is essentially meaningless about subcontinental geography. Literary historians note that disguising place names was conventional in Anglophone fiction, albeit old fashioned for the 1920s, and point to the Barabar Caves close to Patna in Bihar, India, which Forster visited in 1912–13 during his first trip to India to see his friend Syed Ross Masood. But I continue to wonder what novelistic purpose spatial obscurity serves in the novel. Forster is typically extremely precise about fictional streets and neighborhoods—at least part of the drama in Howards End (1910) hinges on the specific location of Hilton, a village imagined to be a suburb of London accessible by commuter train. In Alexandria during the First World War, Forster wrote a travelogue that provided clear walking maps of the historical Egyptian city in Alexandria: A History and a Guide (written 1917–1919, pub. 1922). In contrast, through a series of litotes in the novel’s opening pages we learn that Chandrapore is “nothing extraordinary,” it has “no bathing steps,” the Ganges “happens not to be holy there,” there is “no river front,” and it was “never large or beautiful.” Confusingly in chapter 12, the caves are described in conjunction with “the southern part of the peninsula” and “Dravidia,” linking them to South Indian languages and cultures that are distinct from the Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu subcultures referred to in the novel. The Hindu princedom of Mau, where the final section of the novel is set, “some hundreds of miles westward of the Marabar Hills,” turns out to be in Uttar Pradesh (northern India) despite sounding very much like Dewas, where Forster lived and worked for an Indian prince in Madhya Pradesh (central). Within the narrative, Chandrapore and its caves seem to dissipate rather than accrue solidity as a representative British Indian town. As the novel concludes, they lose what symbolic heft the opening negatives allow them—when Mrs. Moore looks back at the Indian shore from her departing ship, the coconut palms on the coast wave farewell to her, saying: “‘So… you took the Marabar caves as final?’ they laughed. ‘What have we in common with them…? Good-bye!’”