The Curious Case of Professor Godbole: A Passage to India Re-Examined

Abstract

Although many critics of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India have mentioned that Professor Godbole, the Hindu educator, behaves somewhat queerly during the course of the novel, no one, so far as I can discover, since the book's publication in 1924 has seemed to have any serious doubt that Godbole is a man of genuine goodwill or that he is the source of much that is good. This conventional attitude has been expanded upon within recent years by several critics who have put Godbole forward as Forster's primary spokesman for cosmic and divine truth. Forster's point, they claim, is that Hinduism is closer to this truth than any other religion; the author is using Godbole to make this revelation known. To James McConkey, one of the proponents of the Godbolean viewpoint, “the full measure of the success” of Forster's Indian novel “suggests that Forster has finally come to terms with himself and his universe.” These terms are imparted through Godbole “the only person in all the novels who becomes the character-equivalent of the Forsterian voice.” Godbole's position is “one of detachment from human reality and from the physical world, a detachment obtained by as complete a denial of individual consciousness as is possible, that denial and remove bringing with them a sense of love and an awareness of unity.” Hindu metaphysics “bears a number of definite relationships to the stabilized Forsterian philosophical position.” It is Godbole who is “the one most responsible for whatever sense of hope is granted” in the last section of the novel. The “way of Godbole is the only possible way: love, even though to exist it must maintain a detachment from the physical world and human relationships, offers the single upward path from the land of sterility and echoing evil.” To Hugh Maclean, another Godbolean adherent, Mrs. Moore, the elderly Englishwoman, finds completeness only after death through the intercession of Godbole; the latter “excludes nothing” from his spiritual life, and because of this he “will be able [ultimately] to encompass everything.” It is only Godbole whose mind has seized on the order of the universe. Forster is advocating above everything else that people should become like Godbole, one who is able to accomplish the “absorption of the self within a transcendental frame of reference.”