"A Passage to India"

Paper Summary:

"A Passage to India"by E.M. Forster and the movie based on it, written and directed by David Lean, share themes and plot elements, but are vastly different. This paper explains that the sixty years between the two show a different emphasis on the colonial experience of the British in India and the relationships of the peoples from both societies. Forster was concerned with the political realities of the colonial Raj in India, and Lean was more interested in the personal relationships of the characters only.

From the Paper:

"Lean's version did make fun of the stuffy, arrogant English colonialists, but he softened Forster's political and psychological criticism, thereby throwing away almost all of the novel's philosophical complexity (Crowdus). Indeed, Lean's movie version was primarily spectacle. Shot on location, it was more concerned with pomp and the trappings of the immorality of colonialism and imperial pretensions than it did with the underlying political and human dilemmas (Young). He changed the focus from a political story to one of personalities."

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