Developing the Heart: E.M. Forster and India

Nigel Collett

Jan 2022 · City University of HK Press

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English novelist E.M. Forster wrote his last and best-loved work, A Passage to India, both as a paean to his love for India and as a tribute to the relationships he formed with Indians. Forster became entranced by the India of the Raj at a young age, and his love affair with the sub-continent, its princes, and peoples, was to last all his life. At his most socially transgressive, it was with Indians that Forster chose to connect and with whom he put into effect his belief in man’s duty to value friendship over state or ideology. His time in India was undoubtedly when he was at his most human and most vulnerable.

At once a contemporary reflection on India’s rich history and a biographical retelling of Forster’s travels through the country in the early 1900s, Developing the Heart delves into the past to better understand the profound impact certain events and people had on his writing. In doing so, it allows readers to look on as Forster matures and softens over time in his behaviour with others as well as with himself. Often using Forster’s own words to evoke a vivid landscape, this is the story of the most dramatic and exotic part of the life of one of England’s greatest novelists.

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Nigel Collett, a retired lieutenant-colonel of the British Brigade of Gurkhas now a biographer based in Hong Kong, is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (2006), Firelight of a Different Colour: The Life and Times of Leslie Cheung (2014), and A Death in Hong Kong: The MacLennan Case of 1980 and the Suppression of a Scandal (2018, second edition 2020).