Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… an English headmaster in a colonial school for Indians. Fielding has a reputation for being a bit unconventional. Unlike his compatriots, who stick their noses up at most Indians, Fielding believes in treating them with compassion. As he tries to immerse himself in the “muddle” of India, he discovers deep racial tension hidden beneath the surface of the ostensibly benign colonial occupation.
Personality… charming, sophisticated, and independent. Fielding tends to be a bit cynical about his own rational and organized Western culture. He wants to do something useful with his position of power in the school, but it seems that he’s dwarfed by the complex social forces that swirl around him.
Get to Know him in...
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The film is set during the period of growing influence of the Indian independence movement in the British Raj. It begins with the arrival in India of a British woman, Miss Adela Quested (Judy Davis), who is joining her fianc
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(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Britain’s three-hundred-year relationship with the Indian subcontinent produced much fiction of interest but only one indisputable masterpiece: E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, published in 1924, at the height of the Indian independence movement. Centering on an ambiguous incident between a young Englishwoman of uncertain stability and an Indian doctor eager to know his conquerors better, Forster’s book explores, with unexampled profundity, both the historical chasm between races and the eternal one between individuals struggling to ease their isolation and make sense of their humanity.
