Forster's accounts of India and Indians show clearly that in writing A Passage to India he was very selective, lifting from personal experience only those elements that contributed to the novel's meaning. Life inevitably goes beyond art in these matters—the real person (Syed Ross Masood [the Indian friend he met at Oxford and later visited in India], for example) is far more complex and immediate than his fictional counterpart (Aziz)—so Forster simply took from experience what he needed and no more. In this sense, A Passage to India offers an intensely personal view of India under English rule, and Forster would have been the first to identify the book as such: he detested authors claiming to be purveyors of universal truths about "the real India." (pp. x-xi)
Although this study approaches A Passage to India primarily as a work of art, I hope that it also suggests indirectly the value of the novel as social history. One would certainly not want to take the book as the sole source for a portrait of social relations in British India early in this century. But as a corrective to and departure from the mainstream of Anglo-Indian writing, it has considerable significance. The heroism, courage, and efficiency that characterized so many of the English in India had already been amply chronicled in fiction; until A Passage to India, however, their darker qualities had not. Forster's novel rejected the traditional stereotypes which formed the basis of Anglo-Indian fiction and replaced them with characters of recognizably human proportions. (p. xi)
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