It’s fascinating how grand moral crusades so often spring from intensely private passions. Scratch the surface of a noble cause and you often find something far less universal: personal loyalties, private desires, unspoken grudges, all dressed up as principle. A Passage to India is a textbook case - what was sold as anti-colonial critique is, at heart, one man’s romantic transposition wearing a very serious, long face.
The paper-thin plot revolves around the alleged “rape” of English maid Adela by local Indian Muslim Dr. Aziz in the 1920s, as the British Empire wheezes toward its end. Adela arrives in Chandrapore with Mrs. Moore, her fiancé’s mother, wavering on whether to marry and horrified by the colonials’ attitude toward the locals - with the lone exception of the saintly Mr. Fielding, a veritable masterpiece of a man. 😉
Adela, our supposed heroine, glides through the plot with the emotional range of a marble statue. Purpose? None. Motivation? Perhaps marriage - though even she seems unconvinced. Mrs. Moore, meanwhile, is a fever dream: she stares, gasps, and drifts as if high on morphine or midway through a mystical initiation, especially in the infamous cave sequence.
Dr. Aziz is the pièce de résistance of cringe. He ricochets between caricature and solemn diplomat, leering at breasts one moment, dithering at train stations the next, and cultivating a baffling fixation on Mrs. Moore. Watching him is like staring at a broken compass: no sense of direction, just frantic spinning.
And Alec Guinness… oh sweet mercy. His performance as a “wise Indian guru” is stupefying, embarrassing, and so misguided it borders on surreal. The film’s anti-colonial “message” lands with all the delicacy of a marble block dropped from a great height.
Even the soundtrack joins in the catastrophe, announcing itself like a brass band on steroids: bombastic “exotic” flourishes that desperately scream “India!” but instead signal “tourist brochure with delusions of grandeur.”
But beneath all this pomp and posturing lurks, as anticipated, something far more personal. Forster’s real-life affair with a Muslim man in Egypt is quietly transplanted into India through the Aziz–Fielding subplot. Nothing wrong with the affair itself - his heart, his business - but what’s rather pathetic is how he projects it by casting himself as Fielding: the noblest, purest, wisest Englishman in the land. Around this idealised self-portrait, he constructs a banal, meandering story about a plain, confused girl who mistakes her own nerves for a crime. What’s presented as a cultural bridge is really a private infatuation draped in colonial wallpaper - and, cynically, perhaps also Forster’s way of poking at the British society that disapproved of his desires.
The result? Fielding emerges as an implausibly noble saviour figure, Aziz as the exotic object of yearning, and the women - especially poor Adela - drift around the edges. Women are all hystericals anyway, young because of hormone, old because of envy.
What remains is a parade of bad performances wrapped around a silly story about a girl who thinks she’s been assaulted, but hasn’t. Overlong, overstuffed, and bloated with self-importance, this “classic” is a lumbering elephant of a film: trumpeting loudly, signifying little, and somehow still adored for "its message".
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