A Passage to India stands apart from Forster's other books both because of its setting and its overt politics. The novel stands as a further evolution in the depiction of colonialism from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Rudyard Kipling's Kim; it has greater awareness of the abuses of Imperialism than either of those books, but still describes India and Indian culture in an essentializing, Orientalist mode that would be rejected by later post-colonialist Indian writers such as Salman Rushdie and Amit Chaudhuri.
A Passage to India was adapted to the stage in 1960 and to film in 1984, during a period of nostalgic revivalism for the Imperialist past and sympathetic depictions of the...
