A Passage to India
Complete textIn British-ruled Chandrapore, Dr. Aziz encounters English visitors hoping to see beyond the colonial club. Their tentative friendships lead toward an excursion to the Marabar Caves, where personal uncertainty becomes entangled with the racial assumptions of the ruling community.
Continue readingAbout A Passage to India
Forster makes ordinary hospitality politically charged: invitations, missed trains, and overheard remarks expose unequal expectations. The novel shifts between intimate sympathy and a landscape that resists easy interpretation. Its changing perspectives make the limits of goodwill as significant as the wish for friendship across divisions maintained by empire.
Reading focus
Read for the fragile negotiations of friendship, hospitality, and trust within an unequal colonial society.
This reading edition contains 100,929 words in 37 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.
Author: EM Forster. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.
Opening excerpt
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…
Contents
All sections- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER I4 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER II21 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER III17 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER IV5 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER V22 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER VI13 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER VII28 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER VIII29 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER IX19 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER X2 min
- PART I: MOSQUE — CHAPTER XI11 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XII5 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XIII10 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XIV28 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XV5 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XVI13 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XVII6 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XVIII9 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XIX11 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XX18 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXI2 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXII21 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXIII6 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXIV30 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXV10 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXVI17 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXVII9 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXVIII4 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXIX13 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXX8 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXXI15 min
- PART II: CAVES — CHAPTER XXXII2 min
- PART III: TEMPLE — CHAPTER XXXIII13 min
- PART III: TEMPLE — CHAPTER XXXIV7 min
- PART III: TEMPLE — CHAPTER XXXV11 min
- PART III: TEMPLE — CHAPTER XXXVI20 min
- PART III: TEMPLE — CHAPTER XXXVII10 min
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This edition contains the complete English literary text, with 37 sections and 100,929 words. This reading edition preserves the checked English text and its section order. No study notes have been added.
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