The secret world of E. M. Forster

He is famous for stories that feature clashes between class and culture. But, says Zareer Masani, there is another theme to one of his most famous works: his own, unrequited, homosexual passions

E.M. Forster

When I was growing up in the Bombay of the 1960s, we thought EM Forster’s A Passage to India was the greatest novel ever written about the subcontinent. Later, as a student demonstrating against the Vietnam War, I reread the book as a more timeless and universal critique of imperial arrogance. I often wondered what had made a shy and retiring Edwardian Englishman into such a perceptive observer. Only recently I discovered that his sexuality was the key to his creative leap across racial and cultural borders.

Three years ago, I saw a news item about an American buyer acquiring a collection of 130 unpublished and hitherto unseen letters written by Forster. I persuaded the owners to allow me access; and that led on to many more months of sifting through material on Forster’s life, much of which had never been made public.

Although he lived to see the legalisation of homosexuality, Forster never publicly "came out". Even if he had, the subject would have been taboo in the classrooms I attended in Bombay. Yet this Indian novel contained important clues to his sexual identity.

The book was dedicated to Sir Syed Ross Masood, an eminent Indian Muslim educationalist. He was the great love of Forster’s life and the inspiration for the novel. They met in 1907, when Forster was living at Weybridge in suburban Surrey, an only child, aged 26, trapped in the role of carer for his ailing mother. He complained bitterly to friends that he was "leading the life of a little girl tied to home". And then, into this old-maidish backwater, stepped a flamboyant, aristocratic, moustachioed Indian more than six feet tall. Masood was 17 and preparing to go up to Oxford; and Forster had the hapless task of teaching him Latin.

"Oh dear, I do hope he won’t steal the spoons," fussed one of Forster’s aunts, when she heard that this "black" man would have the run of the drab, suburban semi. But Masood had an arrogant self-confidence that made him immune to British racism. And he quite literally swept Forster off his feet. When he got bored with his Latin lessons, he would physically pick up his slightly built tutor and tickle him till he laughed.

During Masood’s undergraduate years at Oxford, Forster and he wrote to each other almost every day. I spent an afternoon leafing through their letters and was amazed by their romantic intensity: their longing to be alone together leaps off the pages, and Masood sounds every bit as emotionally involved as his mentor. And then, quite suddenly, Masood’s letters become more formal: he stops calling Forster "my dearest boy".

I recognised here a pattern of male love quite common in the subcontinent, where the most intense and physically demonstrative same-sex relationships are acceptable so long as they’re not explicitly sexual. Forster crossed this line in confessing the true nature of his love to Masood, who then felt obliged to make it clear that he could not reciprocate.

"I wish very much he had felt, if only once, what I felt for him," Forster noted in his diary, "for I should have no sense of wasted time." But any coolness between them proved temporary. Masood gracefully accepted his permanent role in Forster’s life as an unattainable object of desire. In later years, he confided in Forster about his troubled marriage; and he lent a sympathetic and amused ear to Forster’s own confidences about his rare homosexual encounters. It was Masood who encouraged Forster to sublimate his thwarted passions in a novel about India, assuring him that he was "the only Englishman in whom I have come across true sentiment and that, too, real sentiment even from the oriental point of view."

When Masood returned to India, Forster followed on a six-month visit in 1912. "I expect to have an interesting time and penetrate into queerish places," he wrote cheerily to his publisher, with no pun intended. It was on this trip that he first met the Maharaja of Dewas (a tiny Central Indian principality) whom he described as a "bright and tiny young Indian", with a long weeping moustache and a "clever, merry little face in a huge turban". His Highness or HH, as Forster fondly called him, must have been very impressed by his English visitor, because he wrote inviting him to return as his secretary. But World War I and other complications intervened; and it was only after several years, and many more persuasive letters and cables from HH, that Forster decided to accept the invitation in 1921.

Forster described Masood and the Maharaja as "the two pillars upon which I rest". It’s significant not only that he was drawn to them both, but that he found himself in a subordinate role in both relationships — a reversal of the traditional Anglo-Indian power equation.

As secretary to the Maharaja, Forster, for the first and only time in his life, had an employer: his duties encompassed everything from palace repairs to the welfare of HH’s cars and carriages.

His Indian friends found him "completely "completely colour-blind", and he seems to have enjoyed going native: dressing in Indian clothes, eating spicy food with his hands, and sitting cross-legged on the floor like other courtiers. He was also remarkably tolerant of the Maharaja’s many eccentricities, describing him as "one of the sweetest and saintliest men I have ever known".

Forster’s 10 months in India also coincided with more serious events: notably the first major movement against British rule, led by Mahatma Gandhi. Though Forster saw little of it from princely Dewas, he sensed instinctively that the Raj was doomed. "Sooner or later the Indians will tell us to go," he predicted. "I hope they’ll tell us nicely."

Back in Weybridge, he threw himself into completing the Indian novel he had begun a decade before. It expressed both his nostalgia for the subcontinent and his deep misgivings about much that he experienced there. The unresolved mystery at the heart of the novel, the incident in the Marabar cave, with its reverberating echoes, can be read as a metaphor for the political complexity and sexual ambiguity of Forster’s India.

In A Passage to India, Adela Quested’s attraction to the central Indian character, Dr Aziz, strictly taboo for a British memsahib, mirrors Forster’s own repressed desire for Masood, on whom Aziz is closely modelled. And Aziz’s doomed friendship with the sympathetic English teacher, Fielding, also echoes Forster’s unrequited love. "Why can’t we be friends now? It’s what I want. It’s what you want," says Fielding to Aziz near the end of the book, as they ride alongside on horseback, locked in an affectionate embrace. "But the horses didn’t want it," says the author, "they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it..."

Their inevitable parting is a moment of deep pathos, and a metaphor, too, for the impending separation of Britain and India. Apart from a brief trip in 1945, Forster never visited India again. His twin Indian pillars, Masood and the Maharaja, both died prematurely in the same year, 1937, and he felt their loss keenly. "It was really through the heart, rather than through that much maligned part of one, the head, that I went out to the East," he declared many years later, "and it is my heart that is there still."

— By arrangement with The Independent

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