Following his third and final visit to India during the last three months of 1945, Forster reflected on the increasing politicisation he had found among the educated class of a country which was on the brink of winning independence from Britain. This change appears to be behind an undercurrent of regret that runs through his essay, 'India Again', subsequently incorporated into Two Cheers for Democracy. Yet although the Indians he met on this trip were more interested in discussing politics than art for its own sake as Forster would have preferred, nevertheless he comments that beneath this educated crust:

In this statement Forster acknowledges that notions of what makes for the 'authentic' India (and authentic Indians) are sites of political controversy. He also demonstrates his own acute consciousness of the pitfalls of the tradition of writing and thinking about India of which his most famous novel, A Passage to India, is a part. If Passage is the great anti-colonial statement in English fiction of the first half of the twentieth century, and Forster the great debunker of imperial pomposity, then we can gain a stronger sense of his unfolding relationship with India, of which the novel records only a fragment, by paying attention to some of his other utterances on India.