[I’m reading this 2014 novel in sections, and so far I have read three chapters (of seven). I write about each section as I read, so I never know what is coming next. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the novel as I read it.]
14 February 2026
Chapter 1, Searight and 2, Masood
I’ve recently read a couple of novels based on real historical figures, and neither of them came close to this. Galgut doesn’t keep reminding us about when and where we are, because he’s embedded in the consciousness of one man, Morgan, in his early 30s in 1912 and on a ship to India. If we didn’t already know, we soon realise this is E M Forster, always known by his middle name, and really, really shy. No, not shy, it’s deeper than that. He can hold his own in social situations, had made genuine and long-lasting friendships at Cambridge, and… he has no faith in his own qualities. He has already published four novels, including A Room with a View which made his reputation and Howards End that sealed it—and he still doesn’t believe himself to be a writer. He’s already told at least one friend that he will never write another novel. As these chapters go on, we realise that he feels he is forced to write about what he doesn’t know. Heterosexual love and marriage? The only woman he really knows is his cold-seeming, ever critical mother.
Everybody knows he did write at least one more novel, based on the very trip he’s embarked on now. But maybe not everybody knows that after A Passage to India, whilst his reputation never faltered, he didn’t sustain it through writing fiction. Instead, he became perhaps the most respected man of letters in England… but that’s long after the timeline of this novel. What’s interesting now is how Galgut is able to lead us to think that Forster’s near-pathological lack of self-belief, and his (so far) lifelong shame about his own sexuality are part and parcel of the same mindset. By the time we’ve read this far, we know that he has been able to voice his sexual feelings, almost frankly, to the first man he has truly fallen in love with. But, after the man seems to make it clear that it’s reciprocal, he also tells him he fully intends to do the expected thing and marry. This thread, in the chapter bearing the man’s name as its title, is also embedded in what is clearly going to be the novel’s other main theme, later fully explored in A Passage to India. Can an Englishman and an Indian ever truly know one another?
The title of Chapter 2 is Masood, the name of the Indian Muslim Forster met when he tutored him in Latin for a few months. But Galgut doesn’t start his novel there, because as Chapter 1 opens it’s some years later and we’re on that ship. And yes, he tells an Englishman he’s met on board, he is going to meet an Indian friend… but that’s all we know for now, because Galgut fills in the background details only when we need to catch up. In this short Chapter 1, the focus is a self-assured army officer, who doesn’t hesitate for a moment to make a pass at his new acquaintance. Forster is a little taken aback, and pretends not to understand, but Searight, the officer who gives the chapter its title, takes this in his confident stride.
Forster is with three Cambridge friends, going to India for different reasons, and all very comfortable in one another’s company. Are there any others among them in the same ‘minority’, as Forster calls it, that he is? Searight has a pretty secure radar, but these are middle-class Englishmen, and no more ready for his kind of adventure than Forster. Is it in this chapter that we first learn of Forster’s deep attachment to one of them when at Cambridge? It’s reciprocated, like his love for Masood but, as Masood plans to do, the friend marries. Forster isn’t good with women, despite the praise heaped on him for his portrayal of female characters, and he finds the new wife impossible to relate to. But that’s in the past and, now the ship is within sight of India, it’s time for Galgud to backtrack…
…because at the start of Chapter 2, Forster is back from Cambridge and living with his mother. His existence, from which Cambridge was apparently only a temporary respite, is stiflingly suburban and stiflingly female. Respectable old and middle-aged ladies fill his afternoons…. Galgut doesn’t suggest that his writing is a means of escape, but the arrival of the seventeen-year-old Masood is more than welcome. He is as outgoing as Forster isn’t, privately educated in India in the best public-school tradition and with all the confidence and sense of self-worth that that such an upbringing often brings. Forster is charmed by everything about him, including his very un-English way of expressing his inner thoughts and feelings. He’s the opposite of Forster in this too, speaking in a way that seems frankly exaggerated and overwrought to a shy Englishman.
But, quite quickly, Forster realises that this at least is merely a difference in conventional expectations. Masood, especially once he is at Oxford, takes to mocking the English way of hiding their true meaning under immovable strata of correct manners. Forster is enchanted by the possibilities of something different from the life of grey monotony he can imagine before him. Is it just a crush? Maybe that’s a part of it—it isn’t the first time that Forster has become love-struck by a charming and intelligent friend—but in Galgut’s presentation of it, there’s more to it than that. Many years later, when he finally decides that yes, he can leave his mother with her friend in Italy and travel to India on his own, he isn’t following a sad little infatuation. It’s India he wants to understand.
Am I jumping the gun? Does it matter? Galgut is presenting us with a Bildungsroman for a late developer and, inevitably, he has chosen to make this physical journey to India a part of that. It’s no accident that the voyage is given that colourful added dimension through the presence of Searight. Here is an Englishman who, he frankly tells Forster, has been able to blossom sexually in India. According to the mores of our own times, Searight is a disgusting seducer of boys as well as men. And in Chapter 1 he doesn’t offer any kind of model for Forster and his Cambridge circle. They are slightly bemused by him, and he is given no status beyond that of an exotic vision of what is possible.
Because if this really is a Bildungsroman, it’s an emotional one rather than intellectual. Searight, in fact, was a real-life soldier who developed a well-respected expertise in language and linguistics, but you wouldn’t know that from what we see of him here. Which is true of most of the novel. Forster’s literary achievements are described in terms of their success and their reception by his friends, not for any rigorous commentary they might offer on a stifling and class-bound English society. Which is fine. Galgut doesn’t need to cover that, because what he’s interested in is the plight of a man trapped in a rigid and unforgiving society—and how he might come to terms with that.
This is what Chapter 2, much longer than Chapter 1, is really about. It accounts for that sense we have of being inside Forster’s consciousness, where everything in his life, and his own post-Victorian sense of morality, is telling him he ought to be feeling terrible guilt. Which he does, only very rarely finding even the remotest possibility of sexual and emotional fulfilment. He has a marvellously successful time at Cambridge in every respect but this one, and the one near-sexual relationship he is able to forge is based on a classicist’s appreciation of Ancient Greek sexual mores. His friend H O Meredith (always ‘Hom’) will embrace him, even lie close and caress him—and that’s as far as it ever goes. Meredith isn’t ashamed of whatever feelings either of them might have, but is determined to deny them any outlet. The fact that his marriage is a failure is unsurprising, and Galgut doesn’t make a big thing of it. He does return to Meredith later, as unfulfilled as Forster but, perhaps, not as curious.
There is another near-miss—Forster is already in his 20s—when he gets a letter from a former acquaintance at Cambridge, Malcolm Darling. He is, or is about to be married, Forster is his usual awkward self in the fiancée’s presence… and, one evening, it doesn’t matter. Malcolm has brought a friend of his, another Kingsman called Merz, and they all have a hilarious time. On the way to the station Forster and Merz find themselves walking together. The conversation is textbook, non-specific chat about Malcolm’s marriage and their own slim prospects. Forster makes it clear he has no intentions of ever marrying, says no more than that, and doesn’t really answer when Merz asks him if he’s lonely. So far, so predictable—and it remains so until they part. But next day, Malcolm tells him the bad news. Merz had gone home and hanged himself. Did Forster have any inkling of Merz’s mood? He tells Malcolm, because how on earth could he say anything else, that the conversation seemed ‘normal’. In a way, he’s not lying.
But this is all back-story, to show us the stage Forster is at when Masood comes along. The whole arc of their story tends towards the inevitable—Forster’s understanding that his friend’s expansiveness and frankness is not at all what it would mean if shown by an Englishman. Yes, Masood says, he loves his English friend, and they spend a lot of time together. Yes, when Forster makes it as clear as he can that his own love goes far beyond mere friendship, he seems to understand completely. But, like Meredith in many ways—but far more painfully this time—he stops it going any further. Forster worries that he might have alienated Masood, but he hasn’t… which doesn’t help him at all. They still spend time and go on trips together, and perhaps their friendship seems to be as firm as ever when Masood returns to India, but Forster is left wondering what on earth is possible for a gay man in 1912. Searight’s way? Not his style at all. Meredith’s Greek fantasy? Nope.
So… what?
Chapter 3, India
Don’t ask Forster, because he doesn’t know. And the reader doesn’t know either, because Galgut makes it as confusing for us as it obviously is for poor old Morgan. India opens with one of those pointless little day-trips you get on holiday when everything is second-rate. It only emerges slowly that Forster is half-way through his six-month sojourn in India, and that his long-anticipated reunion with Masood has ended in disappointment. It’s worse than that. He’s reached a kind of abject acceptance of the fact that the expectations he’s been nursing for years were never properly formed, and would never come to anything. We realise, even if he doesn’t—or perhaps he does—that nothing less than lifelong commitment would have been enough. Instead, Masood has been too busy, too committed to making a career in India to spend any meaningful time with him. At first he’s as expansive and generous as ever, given his unfamiliar look of preoccupation and tiredness… but it’s obvious. When Forster tells Masood, on his last night, that he needn’t get up at the crack of dawn to see him off on the train, he is disappointed that Masood agrees.
But this isn’t how Galgut tells it. When the chapter opens, Forster is on a trip to see the famous caves, portrayed as the Malabar Caves in A Passage to India, and they aren’t living up to expectations. He’s hungry—the servants supposedly making making breakfast haven’t even started when he arrives with an Indian friend of Masood’s—and the man’s nephews are loutishly reluctant guides. He’s seen far more remarkable things than this, and feels none of the wonder he had expected. And so on. Breakfast still isn’t ready when they get back, so he returns to the caves and, finally, finds himself alone in one. Which is where, for two fairly abject pages, he re-lives his final hours with Masood. The worst moment comes when, unable to sleep, he goes to Masood’s bed and attempts to give him a final kiss. Masood, jolted awake, is shocked and pushes him away—and the friendly embrace that eventually comes can never erase the memory of the rejection.
All this is in one of the mini-chapters that each section consists of. It ends after eight or ten pages, with Forster having eaten his late and badly prepared breakfast and thinking back. ‘Over the past three months, India had already violently rearranged his life, but it wasn’t done with him yet; not by a long way.’ But before we get into the second half of the journey, Galgut has Forster’s problematic time with (and without) Masood to tell us about. Masood’s outgoing manner in India is different from before, because this is his world. At first, Forster welcomes this new reality. ‘Now it as the Englishman’s turn to be the stranger, the visitor. The idea of it pleased him greatly, and took him some way into another world—and yet that world refused entirely to open for him.’
This is one page into the new timeline, starting with Forster’s arrival in Aligarh, the rather dull city where Masood is living. During the week or so Forster is there—Galgut is vague about the passage of time—he is never quite at his ease. Masood has made sure his reputation has gone before him, and he is offered a kind of deference he doesn’t seek. And while all he wants to do is spend time with Masood, there are people to meet, excursions to go on without him… and so on. Masood wants him to be impressed with the liberal college at Aligarh where British and Indians teach together… but he isn’t at all convinced.
Now, and later during his first three months, he meets so many people, Indian and British, that we lose track. Only a few incidents snag the memory uncomfortably, and I think this is exactly what Galgut is aiming for. Indian women are invisible, keeping strict purdah, so he doesn’t meet Masood’s mother. Aligarh is uninteresting, the sites he visits mostly unengaging, and the model of Anglo-Indian relations he has only recently met the Indians who accompany him. At the end of his first stay in Aligarh, a nautch is arranged for him. A party full of excitable men, entertained by unremarkable dancing-girls, offers everything he doesn’t like. And the fact that it is next-door to the offices of a communist newspaper, with its editor obsessing over incursions into Muslim territory such as is happening in Turkey, adds to his misery.
He keeps these thoughts to himself, both now and as he sets off to on a long trip next morning. He tries to persuade himself it will mean only a few weeks without Masood, but it’s a big disappointment. He starts in Lahore with the Darlings, and two fellow travellers on the voyage from England are already there. ‘Goldie’ Goldsworthy, a Kings don and Bob ‘Trevy’ Trevelyan—don’t they love nicknames?—are on their own gap years, or whatever, and it’s like being back in Cambridge. Except it isn’t, of course. Goldie and Bob come with him to take up Searight’s offer of a visit to the frontier, so now we see the British military abroad. And so on.
Next is Simla, without the others. As time goes on, Forster is surprised to find how the strangeness of India continues to perplex and wrong-foot him. Even an old manservant the Darlings have assigned to him is utterly alien—but that’s only a tiny thing. Things are never what Forster would seek out. Nothing about India, on any of his travels, coalesces into an idea he might write about—it had always been Masood’s longed-for dream for him to write the great Indian Novel. He meets very few Britons he is comfortable with. Their patronising dislike of the Indians is tedious, and their keenness never to blame themselves for anything that goes wrong is a sign for him of their small-mindedness and insularity. It’s like being in England—or, he thinks, like being in Tunbridge Wells.
He must hate it that his Indian experience is so thoroughly curated for him. In Aligarh it had been a combination of Masood himself, the strictness of the moral codes and the assumptions about what an honoured guest ought to see that set the parameters. A half-ruined Mughal fort here, some obscure celebration there. Now, it’s the people he knows from England who decide—except, very occasionally, they don’t. In Simla he makes sure he spends a few hours alone, wistfully imagines travelling further into the Himalayas, visible in the distance. He remembers his first two-day journey alone from Bombay to Aligarh: ‘A peculiar second nature seemed to have showed itself in him, a capable other Morgan….’ But not here, where he sees how rigid the hierarchies are, ‘the bewildering social staircase’ in both cultures. He can never simply look, can never be free ‘either of his skin or of the designation it bestowed on him.’
Where next? does it matter? He is to meet his Kings friends at Agra… but Galgut is now far more interested in taking us through the gradual coming together of Forster’s appalling realisation. Not a single other Englishman he meets wants to connect with the country as he does. He had expected Goldie to be just like him but, disappointingly, he is bored and will be glad to continue on his journey to China. Bob seems to hate it. The settled English, those who have been here for over six months—he is assured that nobody enjoys India beyond that—are almost unbearable to be with. One woman upsets him so much he can’t stop thinking about her. ‘I came out here with no o feeling against them. But now I can’t endure them. It is their own fault really. … They say all the English, but especially the women, change inside six months.’ The Indians he meets are much far less predictable and therefore interesting, like the wizened old rajah they stay with, absurdly fixated on Krishna. And he likes the man’s son, another Rajah, but it’s only in passing. It’s Saeed he makes a real friendship with, but that comes later.
Finally, he’s back with Masood, and it’s another painful couple of weeks or so. At the railway station Masood is characteristically lavish in his welcome, but he has stopped listening to Forster’s stories before they get to the house. By the end of his stay, little of their former relationship remains. There’s a moment when Forster thinks it’s back on track. Having told Forster about his dissatisfaction with his career in law, he tells Forster his time in England was worth it: ‘I have met you, apart from anything else.’ Forster is ‘overcome with pleasure’ at the words but, after Masood tells him of his plans to marry, he can’t pretend any more. Bankipore, where Masood lives, is a dreadful place, and he spends far more time with Masood’s friends trying not to be bored than with Masood himself. Soon, it’s almost time to go again, and ‘his anguish rose invisibly, not uncoloured by resentment. Why had he come her—to India—at all?’
It’s Masood’s friends, he muses ruefully later, who come to see him off at the station when he leaves the city for good. He’s on his way to the caves, an expedition he didn’t ask Masood to arrange for him—‘I have arranged an elephant’—with one of the friends. We have a reminder of that dreadful final day, that mortifying attempted kiss. ‘And he had taken those feelings—of sadness and longing and shame—to the caves with him.’ We know what he thinks of them but, as he continues travelling, he realises that their strange other-worldliness is unlike anything else he sees. They are rather meanly decorated, if at all, but there’s something about that polished granite, that unforgettable echo….
But, as weeks pass, something else is getting in the way. He returns to Aligarh, and is told how to write a courteous message to Masood’s mother. ‘Give my salaams to Begum Sahiba and say that I have been at Bankipore and that Masood is very well. … he began to wonder whether his entire Indian visit might not dwindle to those bare facts.’ Galgut wants to show us how a sensitive man like Forster, ultimately treated shabbily by his one-time friend, reaches his limit. After Masood has repeatedly failed to reply to the letters he writes, he stops hiding the truth. ‘You can now go to hell as far as I’m concerned. You didn’t work at law, you don’t write anyone letters, you can’t even stop yourself getting fat….’ And it only gets worse.
Luckily, over time, he begins to realise that he has seen enough in India for a novel to have become a real possibility. It won’t be like his earlier gentle satires on the English abroad, it will be—what?—altogether more searching than that. And those echoing caves… how can he incorporate them into a narrative focused on what might be irreconcilable cultural differences? He’s helped towards an idea by spending time with an old acquaintance, Rupert Smith. He’s now a progressive local magistrate, and is one of the tiny handful of Brits who thinks like Forster. In the courtroom he visits, Forster sees how the cultural and status divide between the British and the Indians works in practice. ‘Even justice, it seemed, was cracked down the middle….’ Smith could be the model for a sympathetic Englishman in the novel and, somehow, the caves will play their part. Perhaps a crime will take place there, or an alleged crime….
Before the end of his stay, he makes a real friend of another man, an Indian he had met in England. Saeed offers, at least in part, a model for a thoughtful, sincere Indian character in his novel. He who sees that there might be sympathetic Englishmen, but that the power relationship as it stands renders equality impossible. I remember Dr Aziz in A Passage to India, and the open-minded Fielding—but I’m beginning to regret that it’s decades since I read it. None of these ideas for a novel come in a rush, although the second half of his Indian journey is covered in a quarter of the number of pages as the first. He knows, and we know, the dreadful truth of British attitudes. But there are exceptions, and Smith might provide the key.
But, as I said, none of it happens in a rush. A Passage to India wasn’t published for another twelve years.
We can read it for you wholesale 