Only Connect – E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Multatuli’s Max Havelaar

Abstract

The novel, A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster is almost compulsory reading for any student of English literature in the world. A course in Dutch literature can never be complete without Multatuli’s Max Havelaar . The Dutch novel may be confined to a smaller readership but its impact is no less explosive. Both Forster’s and Multatuli’s novels have been turned into films, A Passage to India being highly praised and seen by a large non-English-speaking public, not necessarily students of English literature. The film Max Havelaar was confined to those who speak and understand Dutch and are involved with Dutch history and culture. It was no less impressive and was as much a document humain as Forster’s product. The Dutch and the English were major colonial powers. The similarities are manifold. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 but, by 1599, the Dutch had already shown their faces in the Moluccas to trade in spices. So far as the British were concerned, Winston Churchill writes in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (vol. 3): The English East India Company, founded simply as a trading venture, grew with increasing speed into a vast territorial Empire. About the year 1700 probably no more than fifteen hundred English people dwelt in India, including wives, children and transient seamen. . . . 188A hundred years later British officials and soldiers in their thousands, under a British Governor-General, were in control of extensive provinces. 1