I was aware of David Lean’s cinematic adaptation of A Passage to India (1984) before I encountered E.M. Forster’s original novel, which celebrated its centenary in 2024. While the film was being shot on location, I had a vague sense of the ambition as well as the arrogance of those Britishers making a film in the heat and dust of India.
Heat and Dust – the title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 Booker Prize-winning novel, adapted for the screen by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1983 – seemed to be synonymous with the nation that became independent as India in 1947 and was muddling along with its millions.
