A Passage to India is a 1924 novel by English author E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s.

It was selected as one of the 100 great works of 20th-century English literature by the Modern Library[2] and won the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Aziz's trial, and its run-up and aftermath, bring to a boil the common racial tensions and prejudices between Indians and the British during the colonial era.

Also there is Cyril Fielding, principal of Chandrapore's government-run college for Indians, who invites Adela and Mrs. Moore to a tea party with him and a Hindu-Brahmin professor named Narayan Godbole.

Believing that he is leaving to marry Adela for her money, and bitter at his friend's perceived betrayal, Aziz vows never again to befriend a white person.

Two years later, Aziz has moved to the Hindu-ruled state of Mau and is now the Raja's chief physician by the time Fielding returns, married to Stella, Mrs. Moore's daughter from a second marriage.

[12] Others saw the book as a vilification of humanist perspectives on the importance of interpersonal relationships, and effects of colonialism on Indian society.

[13] More recent critiques by postcolonial theorists and literary critics have reinvestigated the text as a work of Orientalist fiction contributing to a discourse on colonial relationships by a European.

Today it is one of the seminal texts in the postcolonial Orientalist discourse, among other books like Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, and Kim, by Rudyard Kipling.

Forster's novel departed from typical narratives about colonizer-colonized relationships and emphasized a more "unknowable" Orient, rather than characterizing it with exoticism, ancient wisdom and mystery.

Postcolonial theorists like Maryam Wasif Khan have termed this novel a Modern Orientalist text, meaning that it portrays the Orient in an optimistic, positive light while simultaneously challenging and critiquing European culture and society.

He says Forster connects Islam to Western values and attitudes while suggesting that Hinduism is chaotic and orderless, and subsequently uses Hindu characters as the background to the main narrative.

Maryam Wasif Khan's reading of the book suggests A Passage to India is also a commentary on gender, and a British woman's place within the empire.

[17] Sara Suleri has also critiqued the book's orientalist depiction of India and its use of racialized bodies, especially in the case of Aziz, as sexual objects rather than individuals.