The Marabar Caves: Real India Striking Back

The scene with the Marabar caves and the events that it leads to are of major significance in the novel for more than just plot-propelling purposes. The journey undertaken by Aziz, Mrs. Moore and Adela to these caves is initially an attempt to see “real” India. Upon reaching the caves do these characters face what the actual “real” India, and the repercussions that follow. It is almost a mockery on the part of Forster when he does introduce the caves; they appear indistinguishable, ambiguous, unimpressive and, to Mrs. Moore, “horrible,” far from the ‘real’ India anyone was hoping to witness.

Throughout the novel, Forster has distinguished nature from the people of India; with sky and land and bird and moth, where “strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily, size from the prostate earth”, where the trees are “endowed with more strength than man,” India in its natural form is from the first chapter described with more eloquence, power and unity than any of its scattered human inhabitants reveal. The same unity applies to the Marabar caves, which are “entirely devoid of distinction.”

The desire to connect with a land more bound to nature is what our modernist Englishwomen yearn for— yet in nature is where they lose any such possibility: the caves-- the "real" India, saturated with faceless villagers, rears its head and attacks Mrs. Moore with its overwhelming impact. The echo that follows remains unexplained, a broken communication between colonizer and the native land she wishes to infuse herself with. It reverberates within her; “for an instant she went mad” and robs all former hope in India that she had clung to—of the Divine, of possibility, of India as worth knowing-- leaving her dispirited and empty. The caves are a profound physical and psychological attack on these foreign intruders by the very land they infiltrated.

Such is the case with Adela, who faces an attack from the “boum” of the echo so powerfully that it's ironically misinterpreted as an attempt at rape. Certainly one can view this as the “attack” of the real India on a foreign entity. The foreigners who may appreciate, yet cannot name or handle Indian nature (including its “Hot Weather”) now face a “real” India they cannot subdue nor embrace—the native soil that strikes them down, where it is nature that laid its final stroke and ended Mrs. Moore’s life.  

Not only does the colonizer not fit in with “real” India, but it so seems that the “real” India itself spews out any possibility of such a fusion of ruler with the ruled. It is only logical that what follows is the colonizer’s own attack on Aziz, the personification of India, and a demarcation between the two parties of colonizer and colonized with little healing at the end. This demarcation, drawn by “real” India, is only further solidified at the end where, as to friendship between the foreign entity and the native—“the horses didn’t want it…the earth didn’t want it…they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’”