YMMV / A Passage to India

• Alternate Character Interpretation: How sympathetic Dr. Aziz (and Adela Quested) are depend on what you think happened in the cave, which we never find out.
  • One possibility is that nothing at all happened, Adela had a panic attack and in her hysteria accused Dr. Aziz of assaulting her even though he wasn't even with her in the cave, and then kept up the lie for a while to keep up appearances.
  • Alternatively, Aziz did go into the cave to try to calm her down, and Adela misinterpreted a friendly gesture as a sexual advance.
  • Another possibility is that Dr. Aziz really did make a sexual advance towards Adela. She may have initially welcomed the advance and then felt guilty over it for reasons of racial and cultural prejudice, and so lied about it being an attempted rape. Alternatively, if the advance was completely unwelcome, her accusations were an exaggeration but not Blatant Lies.
  • The last and least likely possibility is that Dr. Aziz did attempt to rape her. Not only is it unlikely given what we know of his character (especially how offended he was by the accusation, even years later), but there would have been no reason for Adela to later retract her accusations had they been true.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Aziz comments on the religious divisions in Indian society that "We may hate each other, but we hate [the English] more", which is eerily prescient of the bloody, sectarian partition of the Subcontinent during the independence process.
• Ho Yay: Between Fielding and Aziz. It is very easy to misinterpret the last 3 paragraphs of the book as an erotic encounter between them, also, particularly as Forster based Aziz on a close Indian friend with whom he did indeed fall in (unrequited) love.
• Values Dissonance: The film version features the very British Alec Guinness playing the Brahmin Professor Godbole in brown face. Still acceptable in the 80's, but it definitely couldn't be done today without arising mass controversy.
• Values Resonance: This book shows such an enlightened viewpoint that it would not be out of place in modern times, it is hard to imagine that it was indeed written during the British rule of India.