A Passage to India

What did happen to Miss Quested in the Marabar Caves? This tantalizing question provides the intense drama at the centre of Forster's last and greatest novel, of racial tension in colonial India. After a mysterious incident during their visit to the Marabar Caves, the charming Dr Aziz is accused of assaulting Adela Quested, a naïve young Englishwoman. As he is brought to trial the fragile structure of Anglo-Indian relations collapses and the racism inherent in colonialism is exposed — a theme which still has powerful, dangerous realities today. Yet the novel is also, in Forster's words, 'about something wider than politics ... about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and the Indian sky'.