Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.
They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, cultural politics, film, South Asian studies, and related subjects.
A Passage to India is a novel by E. M. Forster.
The TU Library also owns other books about A Passage to India, as well as the 1984 film adaptation of the novel, which may be viewed at the Rewat Buddhinan Media Center on the Underground 2 level of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus, and at the Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit Campus.
A Passage to India was written in 1924 and it is about British colonization of India.
Its author, Edward Morgan Forster, was an English fiction writer and essayist. Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy.
The novel derives from a poem written in 1870 by the American author Walt Whitman, Passage to India.
The TU Library collection also includes different editions of this poem by Walt Whitman.
In his poem, Whitman was impressed by technological advances that made it easier to India from the United States of America. Whitman saw the possible trip to India as a way of improving his spiritual understanding.
Here are some excerpts from A Passage to India (1924):
Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.
- Ch.1
Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
- Ch. 3
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.
- Ch. 4
And here are some observations about E. M. Forster by authors, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
“Only connect…”, the motto of Howards End, might be the lesson of all his work. His heroes and heroines…are the precursors of the left-wing young people of today; he can be used by them as a take-off in whatever direction they would develop… Much of his art consists in the plain-ness of his writing, for he is certain of the truth of his convictions and the force of his emotions.
- Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)
“Two Cheers for Democracy”…made a considerable impression. It annoyed many, both orthodox patriots and orthodox Marxists, but they felt outmanoeuvred by it. And many others, sickened of “commitment” by the betrayals and confusions of the Spanish civil war, found it a great support and recognized a heroism in its facing of limitations.
- N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (1979)
No government, no big organization, will pay for the truth. To take a crude example: can you imagine the British Government commissioning E. M. Forster to write A Passage to India? He could only write it because he was not dependent on State aid.
- George Orwell, “As I Please” column in Tribune (13 October 1944)
He’s a mediocre man — and knows it, or suspects it, which is worse; he will come to no good, and in the meantime he’s treated rudely by waiters and is not really admired even by middle-class dowagers.
- Lytton Strachey, Letter to James Strachey, 3 February 1914, in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography (1968)
The book [A Passage to India] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?
- Virginia Woolf, ‘The Novels of E.M. Forster, Atlantic Monthly, November 1927, in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, ed. P. Gardner (1997)
- [Forster] says he would much rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave…
- Alice Forster, in an 1883 letter cited in E. M. Forster: The growth of the novelist (1879-1914) by Philip Nicholas Furbank (1977).
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)