Developing the Heart: E.M. Forster and India

Although Edward Morgan Forster lived to the age of ninety-one, he had within the first half of his life both established and abandoned a position as one of the great novelists of the English language. After A Passage to India was published in 1924, he wrote no more novels. Yet, the reviews, articles, broadcasts, and short stories that he continued to publish until the 1960s are proof that this was not because his muse deserted him. Instead, it is clear that something prevented Forster from writing another novel, and, at least since the publication of P.N. Furbank’s official biography of the writer in 1977,1 it has been generally accepted that this was because he could no longer reconcile writing stories about heterosexual characters with his own homosexual orientation. It is also now generally accepted that Forster’s sexual awakening came about due to the love, sex, and friendship that he found in Indians and their country. It is Forster’s Indian relationships that are the subject of this book.

India fulfilled Forster and gained him a maturity he had not hitherto found in England. In 1906, when India brought to England (and then to Forster) the young Syed Ross Masood, Forster had his first real experience of falling in love. Masood was the first man to whom he ever declared himself, and when Masood went home to India, Forster followed him there in 1912. It was in India, at the age of thirty-three, that Forster came face to face with the realities of sex. The libido then awakened in him, until then almost dormant, could never subsequently be put to rest. Later, during his second visit to India in 1922, he experienced what was probably the only promiscuous, gratuitous sex of his life. What Forster found in India drove him to seek explanations for, and solutions to, what he saw as the problem of his homosexuality.

Through love and sex, as is often the case for homosexual men, Forster also found friendship. By the time he reached India, he already held strong views about the value of friendship, but these were expanded and moulded by what he came to see as the Indian way of friendship, as well as by the relationships he formed with a very large number of Indian men. Forster’s Indian friendships gave flesh to his liberal beliefs and informed his view that loyalty to a friend transcended any loyalty to crown, state, or nation. The Indian friends he made were transgressive in all ways: they were, at least until 1947, when independence levelled the field, subjects of the Empire, the ruling class of which Forster was a member; they were of races and colours discriminated against and despised by many of his countrymen; and they were of faiths, Islam and Hinduism, considered barbarous by his Christian co-religionists. His Indian friends were his beliefs made concrete, and they were vastly important to him.