A Passage to India: The Dominant Voice

Abstract

A Passage to India moves toward catastrophe and symbolic revelation with the visit of two English ladies and their Indian host to the famous Marabar Caves. As Mrs Moore, Adela Quested, Aziz, and their entourage of servants enter the first cave, Forster describes their passage:

The small black hole gaped where their varied forms and colours had momentarily functioned. They were sucked in like water down a drain. Bland and bald rose the precipices; bland and glutinous the sky that connected the precipices; solid and white, a Brahmany kite flapped between the rocks with a clumsiness that seemed intentional. Before man, with his itch for the seemly, had been born, the planet must have looked thus. The kite flapped away … Before birds, perhaps … And then the hole belched, and humanity returned.¹