Background

E. M. Forster began writing A Passage to India during a stay in India from late 1912 to early 1913 (he was drawn there by a young Indian Muslim, Syed Ross Masood, whom he had tutored in Latin), completing it only after he returned to India as secretary to a maharajah in 1921. The novel was published on 4 June 1924.^[4] It differs from Forster's other major works in the overt political content, as opposed to the lighter tone and more subdued political subtext in works such as Howards End and A Room With a View.

A Passage to India deals with the delicate balance between the English and the Indians during the British Raj.^[5] The question of what actually happened in the caves remains unanswered in the novel. A Passage to India sold well and was widely praised in literary circles. It is generally regarded as Forster's best novel, quickly becoming a classic of English literature.^[6]

Over many years several film directors were interested in adapting the novel to the big screen, but Forster, who was criticised when the novel was published, rejected every offer for the film rights, believing that any film of his novel would be a travesty. He feared that whoever made it would come down on the side of the English or the Indians, and he wanted balance. However he did allow Indian author Santha Rama Rau to adapt it for the theatre in 1957.^[7]

David Lean had read the novel and saw the play in London in 1960, and, impressed, attempted to purchase the rights at that time, but Forster, who rejected Santha Rama Rau's suggestion to allow Indian film director Satyajit Ray to make a film, said no.^[8]

Following Forster's death in 1970, the governing board of fellows of King's College at Cambridge inherited the rights to his books. However, Donald Parry, his executor, turned down all approaches, including those of Joseph Losey, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and Waris Hussein, who after adapting Santha Rama Rau's play for the BBC in the 1960s now wanted to make a feature film. Ten years later, when Professor Bernard Williams, a film enthusiast, became chief executor, the rights for a film adaptation became available.^[9]

Development

Producer John Brabourne, also known as John Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne, whose father had been Governor of Bombay and later Governor of Bengal, and who was married to the daughter of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, had sought the film rights for twenty years.^[8] He and his business partner, Richard Goodwin, had produced Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) and films based on Agatha Christie's mysteries, including the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express. In March 1981, Brabourne and Goodwin obtained the rights to make a film adaptation of A Passage to India.^[8] The contract stipulated that Santha Rama Rau write the screenplay and it reserved the right to approve the director.

"Forster gave us a verbal go-ahead", remembered Goodwin later, "but my partner (John Brabourne) and I never got it in writing. So it was another 10 years before the Forster estate arranged the sale of film rights".^[3] Lindsay Anderson later claimed he turned down a chance to direct the film of the novel.^[10]

Brabourne, an admirer of the film Doctor Zhivago, wanted David Lean to direct the film. Lean was ready to break his 14-year hiatus from filmmaking following mostly negative reviews received for Ryan's Daughter in 1970. Since then, Lean had fought to make a two-part epic telling the true story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, for which he could not obtain financing (the budget was an estimated $50 million), and had given some thought about doing a film adaptation of Out of Africa, from the book by Isak Dinesen, which Sydney Pollack ultimately directed in 1985. By September 1981, Lean was approved as director and Santha Rama Rau completed a draft of the script.^[9]

Writing

The contract stipulated that Santha Rama Rau would write the screenplay. She had met with E. M. Forster, had successfully adapted A Passage to India as a play, and had been charged by the author with preserving the spirit of the novel. However, Lean was determined to exercise input in the writing process. He met with Rau in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and over ten days they talked about the novel and discussed the script.

The initial script pleased neither the producer, John Brabourne, nor Lean. They considered it too worldly and literary, the work of a playwright, and unsuitable for a film. Most of the scenes took place indoors and in offices while Lean had in mind to film outdoors as much as possible. With India in the title of the film, he reasoned, audiences would expect to see many scenes filmed of the Indian landscape. Lean commented: "We are blessed with a fine movie title, A Passage to India. But it has built in danger; it holds out such a promise. The very mention of India conjures up high expectations. It has sweep and size and is very romantic". Lean did not want to present a poor man's pre-independence India when for the same amount of money he could show the country's visual richness.

During 1982, Lean worked on the script. He spent six months in New Delhi, to have a close feeling for the country while writing. As he could not stay longer for tax reasons, he then moved to Zurich for three months, finishing it there. Following the same method he had employed adapting Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, he went through Rau's original script and his copy of the novel, picking out the episodes that were indispensable and passing over those that did not advance the plot. Lean typed out the whole screenplay himself, correcting it as he went along, following the principle that scripts are not written, but rewritten.

Casting

The director cast Australian actress Judy Davis, then 28, as the naive Miss Quested after a two-hour meeting. When Davis gave her interpretation of what happened in the caves — "She can’t cope with her own sexuality, she just freaks out" — Lean said that the part was hers. Davis had garnered international attention in Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) and had appeared in A Woman Called Golda (1982) as a young Golda Meir.

Lean wanted Celia Johnson, star of Brief Encounter, to play Mrs Moore, but she turned down the part and died before the film was released. The director then offered the part to Peggy Ashcroft, a stage actress who had appeared in films only sporadically. She was not enthusiastic when Lean asked her to be Mrs Moore. "Mr Lean, I’m 75 years old", she protested. "So am I", he replied. Although she had recently worked in India on the TV miniseries The Jewel in the Crown, she said, "I thought, 'Oh dear, I really don’t want to do it', but it's very difficult to turn down a Lean film".

Satyajit Ray, who had hoped to direct his adaptation of A Passage to India, recommended 38-year-old Bengali actor Victor Banerjee for the role of Dr Aziz. The character required a combination of foolishness, bravery, honour and anger. After some hesitation, Lean cast Banerjee, but the director had to overcome the restrictions of British equity to employ an Indian actor. Lean got his way, and the casting made headlines in India. "It was a matter of national pride that an Indian was cast instead of an Asian from England" observed Banerjee.

Peter O'Toole was Lean's first choice to play Fielding. The role eventually went to James Fox. Despite having quarrelled with Lean in the 1960s about a proposed film about Gandhi that ultimately was scrapped, Alec Guinness agreed to portray Professor Godbole. The relationship between the two men deteriorated during filming, and when Guinness learned that much of his performance was left on the cutting room floor due to time constraints, he saw it as a personal affront. Guinness would not speak to Lean for years afterwards, patching things up only in the last years of Lean's life.^[11] Nigel Hawthorne was cast as Turton but fell ill and was replaced on-set by Richard Wilson.

Financing

Financing the film was difficult. EMI provided some initial money, but Lean paid his own expenses scouting locations and writing the screenplay. Eventually the budget was raised from EMI, Columbia and HBO.^[9]

In December 1984, Thorn EMI offered investors the chance to invest in several films by issuing £36 million worth of shares. The films were A Passage to India (1984), Morons from Outer Space, Dreamchild, Wild Geese II and The Holcroft Covenant^[12] (all 1985).^[13]

Filming

Filming took place from November 1983 to June 1984.

The Marabar Caves are based on the Barabar Caves, some 35 km north of Gaya, in Bihar. Lean visited the caves during pre-production, and found them flat and unattractive; concerns about bandits were also prevalent. Instead he used the hills of Savandurga and Ramadevarabetta some tens of kilometers from Bangalore, where much of the principal filming took place; small cave entrances were carved out by the production company.^[14] Other scenes were filmed in Ramanagaram (Karnataka) and Udhagamandalam (Tamil Nadu) and in Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir). Some interiors were shot at Shepperton Studios in Surrey and in Bangalore Palace.

Music

The film's score was composed by longtime Lean collaborator Maurice Jarre. According to Jarre, the director told him, "Maurice, I want you to write music right from your groin for this very long scene in the cave. This isn't a story of India, it's a story of a woman. I want you to write music that evokes awakening sexuality".^[3]

Jarre wrote 45 minutes of music in two and a half weeks. He said, "David talks to me in images. A film artist never asks for an oboe to cover up a bad scene; a film artist doesn't think of music as medicine for a sick movie. David talks to me as he would talk to an actor."^[3]

Critical response

Lean's final film opened to tremendous praise worldwide, and became a critics' favourite of 1984. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "[Lean's] best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter. Though vast in physical scale and set against a tumultuous Indian background, it is also intimate, funny and moving in the manner of a film maker completely in control of his material … Though [Lean] has made A Passage to India both less mysterious and more cryptic than the book, the film remains a wonderfully provocative tale, full of vivid characters, all played to near perfection."^[15]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed that "Forster's novel is one of the literary landmarks of this century, and now David Lean has made it into one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen … [He] is a meticulous craftsman, famous for going to any length to make every shot look just the way he thinks it should. His actors here are encouraged to give sound, thoughtful, unflashy performances … and his screenplay is a model of clarity."^[16]

Variety called the film "impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous" and added, "Lean has succeeded to a great degree in the tricky task of capturing Forster's finely edged tone of rational bemusement and irony."^[17]

Time Out London thought the film was "a curiously modest affair, abandoning the tub-thumping epic style of Lean's late years. While adhering to perhaps 80 per cent of the book's incident, Lean veers very wide of the mark over E.M. Forster's hatred of the British presence in India, and comes down much more heavily on the side of the British. But he has assembled his strongest cast in years … And once again Lean indulges his taste for scenery, demonstrating an ability with sheer scale which has virtually eluded British cinema throughout its history. Not for literary purists, but if you like your entertainment well tailored, then feel the quality and the width."^[18]

Channel 4 said, "Lean was always preoccupied with landscapes and obsessed with the perfect shot – but here his canvas is way smaller than in Lawrence of Arabia, for instance … Still, while the storytelling is rather toothless, A Passage to India is certainly well worth watching for fans of the director's epic style."^[19]

On Rotten Tomatoes, A Passage to India holds a rating of 79% from 28 critics, with an average rating of 7.20/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A Passage to India is a visually striking exploration of colonialism and prejudice, although it doesn't achieve the thematic breadth of director David Lean's finest work."^[20] The film is assigned an average score of 78 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 14 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[21]

Box office

Awards and honors