Hill Meets Plain: E. M. Forster's Narrative Tremors

Abstract This essay makes a case for why Forster set A Passage to India in the lowlands of the Himalayan Mountains by reading the novel alongside colonial descriptions of Indian geological phenomena. Tracking the novel's particular interest in mountain formation, continental fusions and the aetiology of earthquakes, it suggests that Forster's geological register is an expression of his anxieties about what form an independent India would take. While the novel's geological descriptions reveal what Adelene Buckland calls ‘colonial habits of thought’, they also mark a departure from Forster's previous writing on Indian landscapes in his letters and essays. Forster was concerned in this period with what he calls a ‘spirit of Non-Cooperation’ that has entered India, and the geological brings an invisible scale to the socio-political tremors of the present that suggests a landscape in flux. Its disturbances affect the security of English enclosures, psychic and social, while through geological metaphors—caterpillars and waves—Forster conveys the rearrangement of its central characters’ allegiances, and how they are tossed about, propelled out of, or hardened by the novel's shifting landscape. Drawing Forster's geological writing into dialogue with Archibald Geikie's description of thrust-faults in the mid-1880s, Richard Oldham's seismology investigations in the late 1890s, and Émile Argand's writing on continental fusion in the early 1920s, the essay turns to the sonic resonance of the Marabar Caves. In the Caves, Forster expresses the antagonism of encroachment and upheaval, and what proximity to Europe means for the nation in formation.