A Passage To India: Scene/Character/Theme Summaries Flashcards
How many scenes are there?
15
What happens in scene 1? (Landing in Bombay, cast and class in the British Empire)
. Credit with orchestral music and warm-tone erotic Indian painting
. The journey “out” to India - Adela purchases steamer tickets and is envied for the “new horizons” and “first time in India”.
. Marabar caves are seen in a picture, along with the well-known icons of Indian landscape, the Tah Mahal and the Himalayas. Outside in London, it is raining and dark, nothing to see by dark umbrellas.
. Landing in Bombay - camera angles (both low and high) emphasise the signifiers of empire. Lean depicts a clear contrast between the Indians and the British.
. Caste and class in the British empire - Mrs Turton welcomes Mrs Moore and Miss Quested “to the fold”. Ronny and Adela are suitably matched in terms of the English class system.
. Some high-caste Indians are sufficiently acceptable to the British to be in the welcoming party, by the message for new arrivals is “we don’t come across them socially - East is east (and west is west)”.
. Mrs Moore and Miss Quested clearly don’t like the Turtons. As Adela ponders the disturbing idea that Ronny “has become a proper sahib”, the train thumps across a bridge over a moonlit stretch of water, throbbing as if prefiguring her psycho-sexual journey in the Indian landscape.
What signifies the empire?
K
Examples of juxtaposing seen in the movie.
There are impressively large stone arches and hotels, soldiers and military bands immaculately dressed and marching with ordered precision. These are contrasted with the “muddle” of India (huge crowds of noisy, disordered, colourful lower-caste Indians out under an extremely hot sun).
Who is Mrs Turton?
Wife of Chief Collector who welcome Mrs Moore and Miss Quested “to the fold”
What happens in scene 2? (Miss Quested and Mrs Moore take a train to Chandrapore)
. Miss Quested and Mrs Moore take a train to Chandrapore - tension between Indians and Britons is shown when “the great man” has his carriage knock Dr Aziz and friend off their bicycles into the dust.
. Quested wants to see “the real India”, she tours the court (where Heaslop is Magistrate), church (Mrs Moore looks at gravestones -looks at her future), hospital, war memorial and club, but her sigh over cucumber sandwiches tells us that she feels confined by that colonial lifestyle.
. Mrs Moore appears to enjoy the noise, colour and smells on their drive from railway station to her son’s bungalow Fairholme, but she is more pragmatic and accepting of their situation than her putative daughter-in-law: “life rarely gives us what we want at the moment we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but no punctually.”
. Quested, as she sits on her bed at day’s end, has a slight smile signifying the hopes Heaslop will open her bedroom door - but he merely calls out “Good dear”. This scene suggests she has only a subliminal awareness of her own sexual desires.
What happens in scene 3? (Mosque, “bridge party”)
. Mosque - Dr Axis has a humble dwellings is Cambridge-educated and dressed in British style. His two Muslim lawyer friends, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali, represent different Indian views of the British (Mahmoud Ali bring the more politically strident of the two).
. Dr Aziz, a man of good characters beats the insults of Major Callendar and two selfish English women with resigned acceptance. His meeting with Mrs Moore is a heavily significant moment preceded by camera suits of the moon, stars, leaves rustling and sounds of crickets, dogs eerie music, all of which creates a dream-like mood.
. Water and moon, darkness and light clothing, signify a sort of religious-mystical moment: “God is here”. Aziz compliments her sentiment and adds protective warning that there are “bad characters, lepers, snakes” about and “leopards may come from the Marabar hills”.
. “What a terrible, what a wonderful river” observes Mrs Moore of the Ganges, where “crocodiles float by from Benares.” She tells Quested later “I had a small adventure and saw the moon.”
. “Bridge party” - at the garden party put on by the Turtons, a sense of polite formality and mutual antipathy between British and Indian (“they hate it as much as we do”) is conveyed by dialogue, setting and costume as well as ironic touches like the band playing playing “Tea for Two”.
. Heaslop states “we’re out here to do justice and keep the peace”, Mrs Moore thinks the party is “an unnatural affair” and adds “this is about power and personal superiority - God has put us on this war to love and help our fellow man.”
. The old Hindu professor, Godbole, comes with another set of religious concepts: reincarnation and destiny. Quested meets Richard Fielding.
What happens in scene 4? (Tea together)
. A Muslim (Aziz), Hindu (Godbole) and Christian (Adela) take tea together at Fielding’s house - Aziz arrives early at Fielding’s Bungalow and is invited to “make yourself at home”, which kegs us know that Fielding is completely different in attitude from the other long-term British residents.
. Aziz admires him and the signifiers of his Englishness, his books, cricket bat, war pictures and humming of a Gilbert and Sullivan tune.
. Aziz tells Fielding of his own ancestors, coming “over the mountains from Persia and Afghanistan”; Mrs Moore says she likes “mysteries” by not “muddles”, Godbole says India is a muddle, while Fielding watches what the old vegetarian will eat.
. Aziz said he though Mrs Moore was a “ghost” and Godbole suggests that she is an “old soul”, that is, a re-incarnation. The caves are discussed and Aziz, panicked about inviting the ladies to his house, proposes the expedition.
. Heaslop arrives, furious at racial and religious intermixing and at the sight of his fiancé’s bare white legs in the water. Unlike him, the viewer is positioned to see the pool as healing waters site of genuinely relaxed mixed gathering.
What happens in scene 5 (part 1)? (Polo ground, temple)
. Polo ground - Heaslop drives Quested and his mother away from the refreshing mystical calm of Fielding’s pool, and takes them to an aggressive game of polo. A player falls of his horse as Quested says “I’ve finally decided we’re not going to be married.”
. Strong, portentous winds blow into the rooms of Indians (at Hamidullah’s house where he, Aziz and Mahmoud Ali plan the outing) and English (at Heaslop’s bungalow where Mrs Moore says over dinner “sometimes I think too much fuss is made of marriage. Century after century if carnal embracement and we’re still not near understanding one another!).
. Temple - when Adela rides her bicycle, alone, into a wild and overgrown place and comes upon ruins of an abandoned Hindu temple, the music reveals her psycho-sexual response to the ancient erotic sculptures.
What happens in scene 5 (part 2)? (More temple, return to Heaslop, at the club)
. The music conveyors an ambivalent attitude to the temple figures; it seems to both celebrate the joyful sexuality of the stone figures but also to warn of the to trouble that will come
. A low flute (maybe clarinet) suggests something mystical; guitar, voice and urgently increasing tempo suggest sexual excitement; the screaming monkeys cause Adela to flee. Timeless erotic stone people seem to watch without any tumultuous human emotions that are afflicting her.
. Returned to Heaslop, she wants to marry him after all “I’m such a fool, I want to take back what I said at the polo.” To Mrs Turton she admits being disturbed by her “bothers”, and in her mosquito netted bed that night she is stirred sexually by memory of the ancient erotic sculptures - the soundtrack music tells us this.
. At the club, Mrs Moore appears to be unaffected by all the emotions, even by India itself. Her insight “India forces one to come face to face with oneself. It can be rather disturbing” is followed with a comment about how “cold (it is) in England.”
. The East and “oriental” way of seeing the world, is changing her. At the church, she reads gravestones while people congratulate her son and Adela on their engagement.
What happens in scene 6? (Dr Aziz’s house)
. At Dr Aziz’s house - Dr Lal pronounces Aziz to have a “slight fever”. Aziz is embarrassed by Haq’s obsequiousness and Mahmoud Ali’s political question “how is England justified in holding India?”
. The film constructs Aziz as emotional (Fielding gently exposes his “shamming”) and sentimental (“you are the first Englishman she has ever come before”; “I showed her to you; I have nothing else to show”), while Fielding is more matter-of-fact (“the lady I liked wouldn’t marry me”) yet both seem sincere in their intention to be friends.
. However my we see Aziz’s painfully paradoxical dilemma: he admires the English, but he wants to be equal rather than subservient. Mahmoud Ali gives voice to the Indian resistance: British out! Jobs for Indians!
. When Fielding leaves the house the sun is fiercely beating down on hi,m- suggesting that his cross-cultural actions are hard work and that he finds Aziz’s house physically too hot, just as metaphorically it is politically “too hot, for the British in India.
What happens in scene 7? (Train to the caves, in the caves)
. Train to the caves - Aziz feels his expedition is ruined when Fielding fails to be punctual. “Godbole’s prayers” are responsible because “an Englishman never misses a train.”
. Mrs Moore is sanguine (“we’ll be Muslims together”), Godbole rather mystical (“Tuesday is … inauspicious) and Fielding impatient with all nonsense.
. As the train chugs over an enormous chasm, the rhythmic thumping sound again foreshadows Quested’s impending emotional experience. Long shots show us the imposing landscapes through which they travel.
. Camera looks up at Aziz atop the coloured elephant dreaming that he is a “Mogul emperor” or “riding into battle behind Alamgir”. But u,tires are flying overhead, and Mrs Moore, although appreciating everything being “well arranged”, is closer to the mark when she says the place is “horrid” and “stuffy”; the expedition is about to be a disaster.
. Inside the cave, black faces and darkness surround and overwhelm an apprehensive Mrs Moore; when the exuberant echo booms around them, her distress reaches a climax and she leaves. Quested moves closer to Aziz.
What happens in scene 8? (Walking to more caves)
. The landscape around the same mouths of the caves consists if bare grey-brown rocks. Outside and seated at the chairs and tables that Aziz had brought up, along with port that the English women didn’t really want, Mrs Moore wears sunglasses against the midday sun.
. She remarks “Godbole didn’t mention the echo”, and then, apparently abandoning her own Christian religion, “I suppose, like many old people, I sometimes think we are merely passing figures in a Godless universe. Get some water”.
. Aziz and Quested set off to climb higher, seeing everything down below as a”mirage”. She asks whether he loved his wife; his enigmatic reply “we were a man and a woman and we were young” is constructed as sexual by the music, that same music that accompanied Adela’s discovery of the ancient erotic temple sculptures.
. Their joined hands are shown in close-up slow motion, emphasising a moment of friendship across the racial divide.
What happens in scene 9? (In the next cave - Adela runs away)
. In the cave - the match light inside the dark cave, silhouette of Aziz’s body against the glaring sun, the echo, Quested’s tears, water overflowing and stones rolling - all these image suggest emotional and spiritual forces gathering to a peak, followed by release.
. Adela races downhill amongst cacti, Aziz calls out “Miss Quested!” in vain and is aggressive towards his low-caste guide; Mrs Moore asks “what happens?” as if she already instinctively knows.
What happens in scene 10 (part 1)? (Arrest and unrest, Adela revivers at the Calendars’)
. Arrest and unrest - in the police station Hamidullah tells Fielding he “wants bail” but is worried McBryde might be prejudiced by his asking for it, and Fielding tells him “nonsense, this is no way to be thinking. Aziz is innocent.”
. Fielding is confident that sense and justice will prevail. However, yet another chaotic religious festival flows around them, and Indian resentment is palpably dangerous: “the situation is going to become very nasty in the next few weeks”.
. McBryde re-iterates the “East is East” principle: “I’ve never known anything but disaster result when English and Indians attempt to be intimate.”
. The famous British-educated barrister Amritrao agrees to come from Calcutta to defend Aziz, for free. He is know to be anti-British.
. Quested receivers at the Callendars’, but still with the echo in her head. Mrs Moore reflecting Godbole’s philosophy of destiny, remarks “she has stated the machinery; it will work to its end.”
