The Return

It is intriguing to note that in a book titled “A Passage to India”, the passage from India for three different characters is each devoted a separate narration. What can be derived from the journey of Mrs. Moore, Adela and Mr. Fielding back to England, is how, the closer the exile gets to home after a period of homelessness, the more ease and peace of mind is afforded to him/her.

The first character of the three to leave India was Mrs. Moore: in her case, however, it is safe to assume that she was not afforded any such peace because she did not survive the “Hot Weather”, which was associated in all manner with India, long enough to get a whiff of home which would have served as a tonic for her condition. Hence, the narration, in her case, uses no exalting and glorifying language to describe the changing landscape and civilization on her way back.

However, in Adela’s case, one finds a certain infusion of “Mediterranean clarity” when she walks out to the Lesseps statue with the American missionary in Levant. As opposed to the frenzy of confusion she had faced in India, she now is imbued with a certain clarity of vision, which borders along a feeling of having a genuinely purposeful existence which was denied to her in India. The fact that she decides to, as a “duty”, meet with the other two children of her friend, Mrs. Moore, before turning to her profession cements that purposeful mood she was in now.

In the case of Mr. Fielding , the journey back to (and through the) "harmony between the works of man and the Earth that upholds them, the civilization ... (and) the spirit in reasonable form" provides an escape from the explicit and metaphoric "muddle" of India. This combined with the fact that Fielding's journey back to England is the last chapter of "Caves", the second part of the novel that is characterized by a mixing of identities, shows that he had separated an identity which made him feel at home. This identity, however, is simultaneously realized by Fielding to be archaic and more importantly incomplete considering the events that he had gone through in India; he subsequently injects in it that which will make it whole: he writes post cards to his Indian friends telling them of the "joys of form" he was experiencing, knowing all the while that they will not be able to appreciate them as he did as they inherently had a different lens through which they viewed everything.

The importance of the notion of home is depicted through these three narratives and as a derivative the detrimental effects of homelessness are also realized. In addition, this entire theme of “’turn and ‘return’” suggests that the exiled figure, upon returning home acquires a certain wisdom by virtue of the homelessness to which he/she was painfully subjected to.