The Central Role of Aziz in E. M. Forster's
A Passage to India
On January 21, 1924, E. M. Forster wrote in his diary—the sole entry for that day: "Finished A Passage to India and mark the fact with Mohammed's pencil." Mohammed el Adl, a Moslem Egyptian, was Forster's major inspiration when he began the last phase of writing the novel in 1922. At that time the young man lay dying from tuberculosis. Forster had begun working on the novel nearly a decade earlier, before he had ever known el Adl. He traveled to India in 1912-13 at the invitation of another Moslem, Syed Ross Masood, an Indian he had known for six years in England, and with whom he was also in love. During that trip Forster finally realized that Masood did not share his feelings, and the theme of the novel he began after returning is the difficulty of friendship across racial and cultural divides. Soon, however, he laid aside the nascent Indian novel to write Maurice, in which he imagined the kind of homosexual success he had not achieved in life.
Then came the war and Forster's affair with Mohammed el Adl. When he resumed work on Passage in 1922 he had considerable new experience to draw on, including a second trip to India in 1921-22. In the end the novel is the result of a complex interweaving of Forster's experience on his two trips to India and the transformative years in Alexandria that came in between. Furthermore, the various literary influences operating throughout the period—the books he was reading and reviewing—contributed to Forster's final portrayal of a central Indian character. As Leonard Woolf wrote in his June 1924 review of the novel, Aziz was "the only living Indian whom I have met in a book."
When he first arrived in Alexandria in 1915, during World War I, Forster's feelings about the city and its inhabitants were negative, an attitude that persisted well into his second year there. Not long after his arrival he wrote to Masood (29 Dec 1915):
I do not like Egypt...