Home | News | Rewind 100 Years Of A Passage Rewind: 100 Years of a Passage The iconic novel about the ‘East-West encounter’, A Passage to India, with its exploration of the class-race intersection, gender and humanism, turns 100 By Telangana Today Published Date - 15 June 2024, 11:59 PM – By Pramod K Nayar A cave, an English girl, an Indian tour guide. All the elements in conjunction for a mystery, a misunderstanding and a mishap. The novel’s opening though seemed the antithesis of a mystery in its account of drabness and monotony: Also Read Rewind: A Tale of Two Rivers Except for the Marabar Caves — and they are twenty miles off — the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest.
Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. The.