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The Curious Case of Professor Godbole: A Passage to India Re-Examined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David Shusterman  and
Paul Fussell Jr.
David Shusterman
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Jeffersonville
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Extract

Although many critics of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India have mentioned that Professor Godbole, the Hindu educator, behaves somewhat queerly during the course of the novel, no one, so far as I can discover, since the book's publication in 1924 has seemed to have any serious doubt that Godbole is a man of genuine goodwill or that he is the source of much that is good. This conventional attitude has been expanded upon within recent years by several critics who have put Godbole forward as Forster's primary spokesman for cosmic and divine truth. Forster's point, they claim, is that Hinduism is closer to this truth than any other religion; the author is using Godbole to make this revelation known. To James McConkey, one of the proponents of the Godbolean viewpoint, “the full measure of the success” of Forster's Indian novel “suggests that Forster has finally come to terms with himself and his universe.” These terms are imparted through Godbole “the only person in all the novels who becomes the character-equivalent of the Forsterian voice.” Godbole's position is “one of detachment from human reality and from the physical world, a detachment obtained by as complete a denial of individual consciousness as is possible, that denial and remove bringing with them a sense of love and an awareness of unity.” Hindu metaphysics “bears a number of definite relationships to the stabilized Forsterian philosophical position.” It is Godbole who is “the one most responsible for whatever sense of hope is granted” in the last section of the novel. The “way of Godbole is the only possible way: love, even though to exist it must maintain a detachment from the physical world and human relationships, offers the single upward path from the land of sterility and echoing evil.” To Hugh Maclean, another Godbolean adherent, Mrs. Moore, the elderly Englishwoman, finds completeness only after death through the intercession of Godbole; the latter “excludes nothing” from his spiritual life, and because of this he “will be able [ultimately] to encompass everything.” It is only Godbole whose mind has seized on the order of the universe. Forster is advocating above everything else that people should become like Godbole, one who is able to accomplish the “absorption of the self within a transcendental frame of reference.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1961 , pp. 426 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 426 James McConkey, The Novels of E. M. Forster (Ithaca, 1957), pp. 11–12, 86, 159–160.

Note 2 in page 426 “The Structure of A Passage to India,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, xxii (January 1953), 157–171.

Note 3 in page 426 Two Cheers for Democracy (New York, 1951), pp. 88–95.

Note 4 in page 426 “The Ivory Tower,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXIII (January 1939), 51–58.

Note 5 in page 427 McConkey, pp. 140–144.

Note 6 in page 427 Two Cheers for Democracy, pp. 67–76.

Note 7 in page 427 “The Challenge of Our Time,” ibid., p. 57.

Note 8 in page 428 Dickinson's great interest in mystic experience and in psychical research is shown in a number of places in Forster's biography, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London, 1934); Forster also occasionally mentions his own much more tepid interest. As to Vicary, see p. 216 of this biography.

Note 9 in page 428 “E. M. Forster's Mrs. Moore: Some Suggestions,” PQ, xxxii (October 19S3), 388–395. If Forster did come under the influence of Mme. Blavatsky (which, in my opinion, is highly doubtful), he would also have learned much about Hinduism, for her Theosophy embodied the doctrines of Ramakrishna and Vivekanda, two Hindu leaders of the 19th century. See in this connection Frederic Spiegelberg, Living Religions of the World (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1956), pp. 204–205.

Note 10 in page 428 “Mohammed Iqbal,” Two Cheers for Democracy, pp. 288–291. In this essay Forster discusses Iqbal's brand of mysticism, which he doesn't like, but nevertheless he finds Iqbal's writings enjoyable and more congenial than any other Indian's. The article was written in 1946 on his hearing of the poet's death, but Forster says that he met Iqbal thirty years before and had read his works in translation.

Note 11 in page 428 The Hill of Devi (New York, 1953), p. 193.

Note 12 in page 428 Ibid., p. 235.

Note 13 in page 428 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York, 1924). All references to this novel will be from this edition and will be cited in my text.

Note 14 in page 430 More than one critic has pointed out that one of Forster's most obvious characteristics, shown throughout his whole literary career, is his ambiguous approach to much of his material; some critics have attributed it to his liberalism. I would agree with Arnold Kettle, in An Introduction to the English Novel (New York, 1953), ii, 163 : “The ‘perhapses’ that lie at the core of his novels, constantly pricking the facile generalization, hinting at the unpredictable element in the most fully analysed relationship, cannot be brushed aside as mere liberal pusillanimity.” This characteristic, says Kettle, is an indication of Forster's “scrupulous intelligence,” his toughness. I would add also that it is an indication of Forster's fundamental scepticism, which cannot see any solution in human affairs as easy.

Note 15 in page 431 When recent interviewers, in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1958), p. 33, asked Forster if he likes having secrets from his readers, they remarked that he appeared to brighten at the suggestion. Forster has admitted elsewhere that his is the type of mind which likes to be taken unawares: “The frontal full-dress presentation of an opinion often repels me, but if it be insidiously slipped in sidewise I may receive it.” This is a technique which he enjoyed in Samuel Butler's Erewhon and which he has often tried to copy : “I like that idea… of muddling up the actual and the impossible until the reader isn't sure which is which, and I have sometimes tried to do it when writing myself.” Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 222.

Note 16 in page 433 The Hill of Devi, pp. 159–171.

Note 17 in page 433 Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 292.

Note 18 in page 433 Thus McConkey writes, p. 91 of The Novels of E. M. Forster: “But The Hill of Devi, despite its wealth of background material, offers little new insight into the richness and depth of A Passage to India: for it is what Forster's creative faculty has done to the material which chiefly matters.”

Note 19 in page 434 Two Cheers jor Democracy, p. 68.