A Passage to India

The final film of David Lean was the first feature the legendary British director had made in the fourteen years since his wonderful Ryan's Daughter was poorly received by critics, shaking his confidence to the core. The epic historical drama explores the cultural anxieties that fueled the independence movement in India during the end of the British Raj—the 90-year rule of the British over the Indian subcontinent. EM Forster centered his acclaimed anticolonial novel on several fictional characters in the fictional city of Chandrapore, and Lean does a marvelous job of translating Forster's intellectual themes into the more visual and visceral medium of cinema.

Judy Davis, who came to international prominence for her lead role in Gillian Armstrong's acclaimed 1979 Australian crossover hit My Brilliant Career, gives a wonderful lead performance, playing one of the only reserved characters in her brilliant career. In A Passage to India, she stars as Adela Quested, a sheltered but curious young Brit who travels from England to India with the mother of her fiancé. The enchanting Peggy Ashcroft plays the equally charming and open-minded Mrs. Moore in one of the few movies the legendary stage actress consented to appear in. When these two ladies arrive in India, they are made instantly aware of the racist, condescending, and dismissive way their fellow countrymen view the native population. Adela's intended husband, city magistrate Ronny Heaslop (Nigel Havers), shares this colonialist attitude, which causes Adela to question whether she wants to marry him.

With the British community segregated from the Indian population, Adela and Mrs. Moore find it difficult to meet any Indians for themselves. The one Englishman who doesn't seem to share the imperious, contemptuous attitude of the ruling class is the local school superintendent, Richard Fielding (James Fox in one of his greatest roles). He agrees to introduce them to the eccentric elderly Hindu Brahmin scholar Professor Narayan Godbole (Alec Guinness) and another Indian local, Dr. Aziz Ahmed (Victor Banerjee). Dr. Aziz shared a chance encounter with Mrs. Moore soon after her arrival and was taken by her kindness and lack of prejudice. Mrs. Moore and Adela naively believe their budding friendship might lead to bridging the growing cultural gulf between the British and the Indians and eagerly accept Dr. Aziz's invitation to take an excursion to a local site, the Marabar Caves. But after the long, tiring journey to these glass-smooth walls, which produce a resonant echo that spookily amplifies any sound made within them, Mrs. Moore is overcome with exhaustion, and Adela, who ventures off alone with Dr. Aziz, undergoes some sort of mysterious experience that leads to Aziz getting arrested for attempting to rape her. The trial that ensues stirs up hostilities that fuel the growing Indian independence movement.

The picture possesses all of Lean's signatures—brilliant acting, lavish production values, amazing location photography, and a deliberately paced narrative in which characters exist as both fully dimensional human beings and metaphorical representatives of ideas. Still, Lean, who, in addition to directing, wrote the screenplay and edited the film, is far more reserved in his approach to storytelling than we might expect from the notoriously lavish and perfectionistic director of Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Dr. Zhivago. We might assume the story's anti-colonialist themes would be somewhat in conflict with the sweeping, romantic grandeur Lean is known for, but his depiction of the English way of life during the British Raj, while opulent, is hardly romantic. Lean's screenplay is a surprisingly economical adaptation of Forester's dense novel. There are sequences that one could easily imagine lasting another twenty minutes than they do, but Lean, the expert film editor, only lingers on events when he feels they should be given significant weight.

The picture is, of course, visually sumptuous. It was photographed by Ernest Day, who served as camera operator for Lean and cinematographer Freddie Young on Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter before becoming a director of photography himself, and the production design by John Box (Lawrence, Zhivago, Nicholas and Alexandra, Sorcerer) recreates the British Raj in spectacular period detail. Yet the images in A Passage to India never overwhelm the story or present the world they create as a kind of paradise. The film is shot in 35mm in the standard 1.85:1 aspect ratio rather than a special large format process, and its use of both sweeping outdoor photography and exquisitely art-directed interiors serves the narrative and themes splendidly.

The way this movie handles the novel's central event, the mystery of what happened at the Marabar Caves, is perfectly preserved in a way few films could pull off. Where literature can effectively conceal the unknown reality of the actions on which its entire plot revolves, it is much more difficult for a film to achieve this. Lean hints at what may have occurred with a terrific sequence earlier in the picture in which Adela is riding her bike and discovers a garden of erotic statues. All the smoothly carved erotica, which resembles the statutes at the Khajuraho temples created by priests to encourage infertile couples to experiment with different sexual positions, has an effect on the sheltered, virginal English girl. Whatever she's allowing herself to feel in the moment is abruptly interrupted by the intrusion of a troop of monkeys that invade the space and chase her out. This scene brilliantly foreshadows how something both sexual and racist buried deep within Adela's subconscious may have been triggered when she was alone in the Marabar Caves awaiting Dr. Aziz's entrance, but it never spells anything out, leaving the vagueries of the story's key turning point perfectly intact. It's an incredibly visual and visceral sequence that compliments something that works better on the page with something that can only be achieved cinematically.

The biggest misstep in Lean's film is his insistence on casting Alec Guinness, who had by now become a kind of good luck charm for the director, in the role of a Hindu Brahmin. While the great English actor played many characters of various ethnicities in various degrees of brownface make-up, this is the one time it gets in the way of the film fully aligning its ideas with its presentation. There are multiple reasons for this. Professor Godbole is a somewhat comical character, and while each of his appearances is critical to the film's narrative structure, he doesn't feel like he necessarily needs to be played by a recognizable movie star. Even if he did, by the early 1980s, India had its own thriving film industry with major international movie stars like Roshan Seth (already a known face in the West from his key supporting part in the 1982 Best Picture-winning Gandhi and this same year's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and Saeed Jaffrey (who also appeared prominently in Gandhi and had a career in British and Indian cinema that stretched back to the late '50s). Both men appear in key roles in the trial sequences late in A Passage to India, as does the terrific up-and-coming British-Pakistani actor Art Malik, but their presence underlines the wealth of more authentic star casting options that were available to Lean by 1984 in ways that perhaps weren't when he was casting for Arab leader Prince Faisal in 1962's Lawrence of Arabia. Also, by 1984, this type of "blacking up," as the Brits used to call it, was increasingly out of step with contemporary cultural mores. It is not modern-day criticism applied retroactively to call out the casting of Guinness; many who wrote about the film in its day, and indeed many who worked on this movie, expressed such feelings.

Interestingly, watching A Passage to India on the 40th anniversary of its release, I found myself much less taken out of the movie by Guinness than the first two times I saw it. I was surprised and delighted to discover myself immersed in the world of this historical picture far more than when I was younger. It is a compelling and provocative film that taps into the viewer's own perceptions, prejudices, and hang-ups, building distinctive tension over most of its lengthy running time. It's meditative without being listless, rich without being overly complex, and showcases ugly behavior in a breathtakingly beautiful setting. That the film is occasionally at odds with itself makes it all the more interesting.