Millicent Bell
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE CAVE?
The most altering film version of a novel tells us some–
thing about its model by revealing those planes of cleavage to which
the filmmaker has applied his hammer.
In
E . M. Forster's
A Passage
to India
David Lean found a crime thriller inside a drama of colonial
racism . Its central scene is a trial for attempted rape in which the ac–
cused is an Indian , the supposed victim an Englishwoman - the
master's fear being released into symbolic rage by the presumed threat
to his woman's chastity . But Forster's plot has also an "entertain–
ment" theatricality . It is a "mystery" whose solution suits the tradi–
tions of movie melodrama.
The potential of political theater is only weakly exploited in the
film . The novel's pessimistic close (in which the earth and sky say
"not now .. . not there" to friendship between Fielding and Aziz) is
altered to sentimental reconcilement of the good Englishman and the
Indian.
In
a film script prepared in 1981 by Santa Rama Rau (in the
Manuscript Collection of the Mugar Library, Boston University),
who seems to have worked with Lean before production began, the
original ending is first retained, then, in a later draft, edited out to
something resembling what now appears . Was Lean simply yielding
to audience expectations of a happy ending? Or did he feel that the
novel of 1924 was anachronistic? The English school principal and
the Indian doctor would not find the same bar to their friendship to–
day, perhaps, though racism is more with us than ever in a postco–
lonial world. But the leakage of political meaning from the story is
not restricted to the film's last reel. Maybe the medium itself-which
gives the viewer so little opportunity for reflection, for drawing apart
from what is shown - tends to rob us of a sense of history . Film is
always in the present tense . We are "taken out of ourselves" and
become inhabitants of a world too immediate to be analyzed . And
this immediacy is not diminished, it is even greater when the screen
is a casement opening on a scene so exotic that it encloses us in its
spell, separates us from the familiar . We simply gape with wonder
from the moment we are plunged into the "colorful" bazaar at the
opening to the stupendous view of the Himalayas at the end. For
Westerners, characters and story become as picturesque as the now
distant time and the always distant place . Consequently, though the
