edward morgan forster a passage to india

Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer were also present at the Congress, and many of the speeches there were said to be seminal to their subsequent foundation of the Progressive Writers’ Association.

In 1935 he attended the Paris Congress of International Writers for the Defence of Culture, where his talk, titled ‘Liberty in England’, highlighted the partiality of this notion and the failure to apply it to India. It was arguably with the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 that he can be said to have achieved fame, becoming a commentator and broadcaster, as well as a reviewer and essayist, a spokesperson and figurehead for individual freedoms, liberalism and tolerance, and a critic of the inequalities of race and empire. By this time, he enjoyed a considerable literary reputation, reviewing for several magazines and associating with members of the Bloomsbury Group and other renowned writers of the day. Back in London, he continued work on A Passage to India. In 1921, Forster returned to India for a short period to take up the position of Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas.

From 1915 to 1919, during the First World War, he was based in Alexandria where he served as a Red Cross searcher and continued to write stories and essays. This trip bore the seeds of his novel A Passage to India which he began to write on his return to Weybridge. It was also through Masood that he met several other young Indians studying in Britain in the early twentieth century – many of whom went on to assume important professional including governmental positions in India.īetween October 1912 and April 1913, Forster travelled through India, staying initially with Masood and his family in Aligarh before visiting Delhi, Lahore, the Kyber Pass, Simla, Allahabad, Benares and Bankipore, among other places. Forster fell in love with Masood while his feelings were unreciprocated, the two developed a close friendship, and Forster claimed it was through Masood that he developed a lifelong and passionate interest in India, particularly Muslim India. In 1906 he began to tutor the young Syed Ross Masood in Latin in preparation for the latter’s Oxford degree. After a period of travelling in Europe, in 1904 he settled with his mother in Weybridge where all of his six novels, including Howards End (1910), were completed.

Despite his father’s premature death, he was raised in relative affluence, attending Tonbridge School and later King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and history and began to write fiction. Edward Morgan Forster was brought up by his mother, Alice Clara (Lily) Whichelo, after his architect father died in 1880.

Edward morgan forster a passage to india