“Except for the Marabar caves - and they are 20 miles off - the city of
Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
This is an unusual opening.
Novels usually tell us that the scene they are about to describe will be
interesting, not “nothing extraordinary”. The term “presents” is a hint that
there will be a difference between the outward appearance of the city, and what
is to be found behind the façade. Obviously, the reference to the caves is a
hint that these are to play a key part in the novel’s events, and come back to
mind when the trip to the caves in being planned, and underway. Overall the
tone here, deliberate I suspect, is of a sneering Victorian tour guide,
summarising the merits or otherwise of this backwater for the benefit of our
incoming tourists, Mrs Moore and Miss Quested.
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.
Here the description
strikes an even more unusual note. Firstly, what is the difference between
edged and washed, a distinction the narrator takes care to point out. The
simple answer is dirt – the river runs past the city, regardless of verb
choice, but does not flood, and therefore the city remains filthy. This
description is reinforced by the verb choice “trails” – the city lacks energy,
spreading itself pointlessly along the banks of the river. It – the city – must
be relatively small if it only runs ( a more traditional verb choice) for two
miles, but it is “scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits”. Hold
up there – the narrator tells us that he cannot tell the difference between the
city and the rubbish it produces. It is a rubbish tip. In any other context
this would be dismissed as ridiculous hyperbole – no city in the world, however
polluted, is indistinguishable from a rubbish tip. This is more than hyperbole
– it is abuse.
There are no bathing steps on the river front as the Ganges happens not
to be holy here;
Another sentence that is easy to
pass by, but once more, hold up. The ganges is the holy river of Hinduism, and
that holiness doesn’t switch on and off as the river passes through the
landscape. Forster must surely have known that. So what is he doing saying
this? Is the reader being invited to question the narrator’s veracity (this
early in the novel)? Is Forster assuming lazily that his readers will allow
this to pass, being ignorant of other faiths? This is part of the “nothing to
see here” lacklustre description of the city, but I find this approach puzzling
– if Forster wanted to imagine a non-descript city in the middle of India, why
set it on the banks of one of the greatest rivers in the world? And then
proceed to ignore this setting for 300 or more pages?
indeed there is no river front,
What? For an innocuous piece of
description this is the third time in two sentence that I have to ask that
question. No river front? Ignoring the fact that a few lines earlier we have
been told that the city trails along the river bank (I appreciate that there is
a subtle difference between a river bank and front), why would a city be built
on the bank of (to repeat myself) one of the greatest rivers in the world, and
then effectively turn its back on it? Surely one of the reasons the river is
worshipped as a God is because of its life-giving properties. The citizens of
Chandrapore would need access to the river for water, for washing, for
cremations, for leisure – the idea that they would ignore this incredible
resource beggars belief. By now this narrator is losing credibility. This is
not a realistic portrait that is being painted, which alerts the reader to the
fact that there is more to Chandrapore than we are being led to expect.
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.
Here we have filth again. The
narrator/Forster’s sense of disgust with this city is palpable. One has to ask,
in what sense are the temples “ineffective”. Presumably architectural, although
there may be a small comment on the spiritual ineffectiveness of these foreign
religions.
Chandrapore was never large or beautiful but 200 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 18th century, nor
was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the
bazaars.
Confirmation, if it were needed,
that this is a tour guide, or an effective parody of one. The emphasis on the absence of tourist goods in the
bazaar and the imperial history of the town put the reader in the role of
armchair traveller, learning about the city by proxy, but guided by a very unreliable
mentor.
The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving.
What wood? The wood of the
carvings which scarcely can be found? Or something else – this is ambiguous,
but leads to the next thought – the people of Chandrapore are “inhabitants of
mud”. Literally of course this means ‘people living in mud – that is, the
mud-like wood” – but the very clear reference is to ‘people of mud’ – that is
mud-people. This is an old racist taunt which JK Rowling references in her use
of the term “mud-blood” as a deeply offensive term, as indeed it is.
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.
We return to the Ganges. I take
the phrase “come down” to mean flood or burst its banks. Excrescence is a
powerful word, expressing a sense of disgust, and the speaker here seems to anticipate a flood almost
wishfully, looking to see a cleansing of the filth that appals him so much,
back into the soil – note back into, not just into, again referencing the idea that
the people of India have arisen from the soil, are people of mud.
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.
As throughout this paragraph,
there is ambiguity here. The tour guide voice has been abandoned for something
much more expansive. It is not clear whether “houses do fall” (as opposed to
‘houses fall’) refers to what happens when the Ganges comes down, or as
something that periodically happens in any event. People are drowned and left
rotting is also ambiguous – if people drown their bodies would normally be
washed drown stream, or eaten by crocodiles. This phrase could mean either
‘people are drowned, and then their bodies are left to rot’ or ‘some people
drown, and others die in the streets where their bodies are left to rot’. The
ambiguity doesn’t rest there – people are drowned actively, rather than drown
passively – is this something done to them, or something that happens. Leaving
bodies to rot is unlikely to be something that actually happened in India other
than in a major disaster, but the narrator gives the impression it is a common
occurrence. Here as throughout ‘A Passage to India’, the narrative voice shifts subtly, and can never be trusted. In an apparently innocuous scene-setting paragraph, numerous under-currents lead the reader to understand that India may seem harmless, but if you scratch the surface you will find it threatening, distressing, and dangerous. Miss Quested is about to find that out.
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