Readers of English literature, especially fiction, may be aware this year marks the centenary of E.M. Forster’s celebrated novel A Passage to India. Last month we featured a reminiscence review of this enduring and nuanced classic which provides multiple interpretations of India’s love-hate relationship with the British Raj that continues to this day.

It’s noteworthy that during their almost two centuries rule over India the Red Devils’ massive pillage, plunder and transfer of resources, reduced India (and China) from their status of the world’s wealthiest countries to the poorest. Meanwhile in 1835 in pursuance of this project, Lord Macaulay, a grandee of the Raj, overhauled India’s education system to nurture an anglicised class  of English-speaking Indians “who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” This proved a fateful decision as it enabled this class to unite India, then a region of 525 princedoms with an equal number of languages and dialects into a nation led by native leaders who quickly became proficient in English, aka Inglish, and led a successful freedom movement hoisting the Brits on their own petard. The enduring charm of Passage to India is that it is centred around a maturing relationship between the rulers of British India and Macaulay’s Indians against the backdrop of a snowballing freedom movement.

A century later upon re-reading this impartial and under-started novel and re-viewing American director David Lean’s lavish cinema version, it becomes quite clear that the British rule over India was almost entirely an upper class project. With centuries of experience of belittling and suppressing the working class back home,  the Oxbridge elite who also dominated the media, kept the British middle and working classes in the dark about their cruelty, and exploitation of India. Even to this day school history texts in the UK are reticent about the atrocities of the British Raj. The abiding appeal of Passage to India is that it recounts rising disillusionment with the Raj back home and in India.