104
PARTISAN REVIEW
behavior of colonial India's rulers is not less deplorable than Forster
made it, it lacks tragic vibration and the happy ending does not mat–
ter.
If
the political seriousness of the book was somewhat inaccessi–
ble, there was a further seriousness which the film did not attempt to
reach . Forster had insisted:
The book is ... about something wider than politics, about the
search of the human race for a more lasting home, about the uni–
verse as embodied in the Indian earth and the Indian sky, about
the horror lurking in the Marabar Caves and the release symbol–
ized by the birth of Krishna.
It
is - or desires to be - philosophic
and poetic.
But instead of searching for cosmic mystery, the movie exploits the
"mystery story" and seems to suggest that what took place during the
mixed racial picnic at the Marabar caves might be uncovered by a
good detective. The right man even seems on hand. Fielding is fair–
minded, intelligent, and no coward, and he is the friend of Aziz, the
accused. Like the classic private eye or amateur righter of wrong he
is, moreover, an outsider, critical of the prejudices of those around
him, negligent of their observances. In the eyes of Turton, The Col–
lector, or Aziz's chief, Major Callendar, or McBryde, the Police
Superintendent, or of their wives, he is not "pukka." He is a middle–
aged - even possibly homosexual- bachelor. His opposite is Ronny
Heaslop, the new Magistrate, a sahib on the way up, whom the
plaintiff, Adela Quested, has come out to marry. But Fielding never
takes up the detective role and is of no practical help to Aziz. He
does not manage to confront Adela before the trial to persuade her to
withdraw her accusation. He makes no attempt to find the missing
witness, a guide who may have committed the crime . He does not
try to get Aziz's only other white friend, Heaslop's mother, Mrs.
Moore, to help, and she leaves before the trial opens. Yet the novel
still provided Lean with a congenial way of unlocking the mystery.
In a moment of thrilling surprise quite acceptable to film convention
the trial is stopped just in time by Adela herself. On the witness
stand she recalls climbing towards the cave with the attractive Aziz
when she realized that she was about to marry without love. She
knows she entered one of the caves alone and now remembers clearly
also that Aziz did not follow her- and says so.
What then happened in the cave? In the film, Adela guesses
