Published fourteen years after his previous novel, A Passage to India (1924), a title taken from a poem by Walt Whitman, was the last full-length fictional work E. M. Forster felt he could write. Between his first visit to India in 1912 and his second in 1921, Forster's novel gestated in his mind over a ten-year period which spanned the First World War, the continuance of wartime repressive measures in the Rowlatt Acts, Gandhi's return to India from South Africa and the start of his civil disobedience campaign, the First Government of India Act, an upsurge in Indian Nationalist feeling, British promises of Independence, and the massacre at Amritsar. A Passage to India is firmly rooted in this history even though Forster arg

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Published 08 January 2001

Citation: Childs, Peter. "A Passage to India". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7077, accessed 9 February 2010.]