Barabar Caves: The Repassage

EM FORSTER WAS aware how friends enjoy a good “wrangle about politics… a good knock-about”. The final pages of his celebrated novel A Passage to India (1924) tell us as much. It is in this spirit that I wish to differ, one hundred years after the novel’s publication, with Forster’s famous descriptions of the Marabar Caves.

“No one could romanticize the Marabar,” writes Forster, “because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness….”

Though the Marabar are Forster’s own fictionalised version of Bihar’s Barabar Caves, his experience at the Barabar in January 1913 was powerful enough for him to remember it vividly and later, work it into the principle mise-en-scène for Mrs Moore’s moment of frenzied “madness”, Aziz’s alleged crime of assault and Adela’s headlong fall from colonial grace down the sacred mountain. For his critique of the British administrative classes in his ‘India’ novel, Forster in turn was slighted and maligned ‘back home’—a fact 21st-century, postcolonial readers must keep in mind as they consider and re-read this seminal work at a time when we strive to decolonise our collective pasts.

Having spent most of my life deeply connected to India’s soil and the last seven years living permanently upon it, and though my time there was twenty-odd years after Forster’s death, having coincidentally shared a space of study at King’s College, Cambridge, I felt it was time to make my own ‘passage’ to Bodh Gaya, to visit both the Bodhi tree—now in its fourth genera­tion—and the Barabar Caves, which are situated some 50km away from the sight of Buddha’s enlightenment.

My journey is prompted by a wish to understand the echoes of a shared Indian/British past. I am unprepared, however, for the startling reflections and possible futures those ancient cave walls will throw back at me.

Like Forster, my family and I begin at the centre, at the Bodhi tree and its myriad temples surrounding the Mahabodhi complex, built by Ashoka, the Hindu-Buddhist King in the third century BCE. “I have seen it and have picked a leaf—a descendant of the sacred tree under which Buddha sat when he attained enlightenment,” writes Forster in The Art and Architecture of India.

Contemporaneously to the temples which evolved around the Bodhi tree, Ashoka commissioned caves to be carved into the nearby Barabar hills for the Ajivika sect, a group of monks who believed most firmly of all in the tenet of ‘Niyati’, or absolute determinism. All change, they believed, was illusory.

The caves’ reverberating echoes, made infamous by Forster’s novel, are believed to have been conducive to the monks’ chanting and praying: so, like everyone else who visits them, the first thing I want to do is to make some noise. I try out the notes of a song. Mesmerised, I sing more. The sound the mountain soundbox throws back at me rivals that of the most sophisticated recording tech­nology, transforming my naked voice into a sonorous, resonant instrument that needs no accompaniment. This is a far cry from the hollow ‘boum’ I had expected from descriptions in the novel and Forster’s very own diary.

“Whatever was said and in whatever voice the cave only returned a dignified roar,” wrote Forster to his mother in 1913. For Mrs Moore, the elderly British matriarch of Forster’s novel, the roar takes on a sinister aspect. “The echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life…”

For all his masterful writerly tal­ent, I feel Forster misinterprets the benign energy of these interior spaces; an energy which, on our visit to the Barabar Caves at least, could be tangibly imbibed through every one of our senses. Other pilgrims, on their way back down the mountain after their ascent to the Shiv temple at the top, yell joyful ‘Om’s at the top of their voices, their foreheads smeared in orange and yellow paste, their faces alight with the adventure of pilgrimage—all but one who trails us back and forth between the cave entrances, persistently in pursuit of ‘dollars’ (I have none), and grumbling in a general rant against the universe that “you people come here, wander around, look at everything, do nothing for us and then go away again.”

As much as his words induce a vague sense of touristic guilt in me, they interest me, since they seem akin to those expressed by Aziz, who voices the common sentiment of 1924 by predict­ing that independence for India will happen after the next European war. “Down with the English anyhow,” he shouts. “Clear out you fellows double quick, I say. We may hate one another but we hate you most.” As BBC journal­ist Kavita Puri pointed out in her anni­versary lecture for the London Library, Forster questions whether genuine friendship could in fact connect two contemporaries of different country ori­gins, especially if one of those countries had colonised the other. Did Forster despair as to whether true and lasting love could ever exist between people of different nationalities (himself and his lover Massoud, for example, to whom A Passage to India is dedicated) and is that why the caves throw back such a depressingly violent echo for him?

Within the novel itself, Mrs Moore’s horror of the echo stems from her experience of hearing all the words in the world from “let there be light” to “it is finished” only amount to “boum”. I wonder whether Forster himself was grappling with the complexities of pluralistic faiths, seeming as he does to draw a parallel between Mrs Moore’s tra­ditional (Christian) faith in eternalism and Aziz’s slightly anarchic tendency towards nihilism. “Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing…” argues Aziz. Alike in their belief of extremes, both Mrs Moore and Aziz are intrinsically bound. Multitudinous India, as personified by Godbole— by the horses on which Aziz and Fielding ride, by the Marabar Caves themselves—India, with her infinite possible paths and eventualities, cannot and will not conform to the limited view of either entropy or the theistic adherence to one god and only one god. Forster himself touches on the insufficiency of the prin­cipal religion of his homeland when he says in The Hill of Devi, “One was left, too, aware of a gap in Christianity: the canonical gospels do not record that Christ laughed and played.”

Deeply absorbed in these philosophic thoughts, I emerge from the darkness of the belly of the caves into the streaming sunlight. Around the entrances to them, ubiquitous plastic bottles and piles of dry human faeces. Rising from the forests, clouds of butterflies and the overwhelm­ing sweet scent of yellow acacia, divine as soma, transcending all human debris, riotous colour and jangle of spiritual trin­kets on display, oblivious of the “people in bright dresses going up and down the winding paths,” as they must have done during festivals in Forster’s time just as in our own.

After Adela’s direct and confusing allusion to marriage, Aziz instructs the guide to remain at her side while he re­covers his composure and has a smoke. For reasons we never discover, the guide abandons her, thus incriminating Aziz in a case of indecent assault, a stint in prison and a highly stressful trial, not to mention loss of professional reputation and personal public shame.

On our own adventure to the caves, Nandu Baswan, the appointed ‘chabi walla’ or keeper of the keys to the gates, which now stand guard at the cave en­trances, could not have been more atten­tive. On the dot of 10, the exact time the internet confirmed that the caves would be open to the public, there he was hang­ing out in a local police tent. Jumping to attention when he saw us, presenting himself as our personal guide, Nandu clasped my hands religiously and led me from one mysterious space to another, describing the caves’ history in no uncer­tain awe. In amongst the more familiar facts, I understood from Nandu that the whole of the Barabar Cave complex is “like a crocodile”, “like a whale’s back”, and in the last where a roughly hewn ceiling distinguishes the cave as unfinished, “like a tortoise”.

It made perfect sense to me that Nandu’s similes should compare the ancient rocks to animate, animal forms. The surrounding landscape is today, as in Forster’s time, rich, fertile and animal populated. “India in the country is fields, fields, then hills, jungle, hills and more fields,” writes Forster in the novel, and in his autobiographical account of time spent as the secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas in the 1920s, “such glorious trees and so many wild flowers clinging to the cliffs and lurking in the grass and dahlias turning into creep­ers.” It is clear that vast fertile expanses, whether wild or agricultural, were something Forster loved about India, finding in her natural beauty the soli­tude that writerly souls crave and the wildness that animates and connects us. In another description of his life at Dewas, he paints an almost paradisiacal landscape: “Within five minutes I saw a black and white kingfisher, crossing in its flight a little heron (the ‘Paddy Bird’), a blue kingfisher sitting upon a submerged mimosa tree and three enor­mous cranes… when the light failed a quantity of huge fruit bats flew out of a grove and kept dipping in the water.”

THE FIELDS THAT surround the Barabar are still, as they must have been then, green with paddy or bright with brinjal flower. Not far away, buffalos wallow in the muddy, mauve Niranjana River. As midday approach­es, goat herders take refuge in the shade of banyans whose roots stretch back to other times, telling an unbroken story.

Since Forster’s attention to land­scape detail is generally so sharp, I wonder why he made cactuses grow on the slopes of the Marabar hills: for when Adela flings herself away from her supposed assaulter, she becomes so entangled with the foliage on her way down that “hundreds of cactus spines” have to be picked out of her flesh. Through Pankaj Mishra’s excellent Notes to my Penguin Classics edition of the novel, I learn that Forster himself experienced a similar incident with cac­tuses somewhere completely different from Bihar. However, no cacti grow on the slopes of the Barabar hills, no spiky plants of any kind that I could discern; the stones, far from being “thrust” spik­ily into the sky, amble up slowly, taking on the form of a recumbent Buddha, smooth, gentle and time-worn. Yet if Forster’s urge for drama surpassed descriptions of the setting in which the caves were positioned, his portrait of the caves’ “extraordinary” polished interiors, is indeed precise.

I discover for myself that in a camera’s flash, the cave walls light up to show their reflectiveness, polished smooth as glass with tools of Neolithic descent. To this day, scientists are still baffled as to how such technology evolved at that time and in this place. To prove its wonder, Nandu gets me to stand with one hand against a wall, while he grabs my phone and shows me, seconds later on the screen, how my mirror image has been reflected. The revelation leaves me so astounded that I feel the Barabar Caves to be as mythical and meaningful as Plato’s Cave of Shadows, if not more so. Aziz, Fielding, and Mrs Moore, in all their well-meaning passion, love for each other and for India have failed to grasp this vital point: though no one thing may be able to embrace the whole of India, yet she is able to embrace—and reflect—the whole of us.

Long before the echo of transmit­ted prayer and song came the rustle of the forests that covered the earth. The Bodhi tree itself predates Buddha’s enlightenment by centuries. And the rocks from which the Barabar Caves were carved out by Ashoka’s techno­logically advanced masons have been of the earth “since the days of prehis­toric ocean… have been land since land began” and are “older than anything in the world”. Above the cave entrances are comforting inscriptions: the caves will stand as a “refuge that will last as long as the sun and moon”.

For Forster, the Barabar cave walls show us “a mirror inlaid with lovely colours… delicate stars of pink and gray… exquisite nebulae, shadings fainter than the tail of a comet or the midday moon, all the evanescent life of the granite, only here visible.”

Revisiting a hundred years after this beautifully detailed description was published, I feel I have discovered a refuge and experienced a revelation. I am grateful to Forster for prompting this passage into the deep. The echo has not gone away; the words have just become clearer.

A Passage to IndiaAshokaBarabar Hill CavesEM ForsterInscriptionsMarabar CaveTravel Issue 2024