Ruth A. Symes

Ruth A. Symes

Published: Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Spring, 2007

Excerpt begins

It seemed somewhat trite to be opening E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India on my first flight to the subcontinent¹. Nothing could more obviously have given away the fact that I knew virtually nothing about the place to which I was headed.

I fancied that some of the other travellers international businessmen, rich European families off to exotic islands and manual workers on their way home from the Gulf States, all of them more accustomed to the long haul to Asia than myself were perhaps rather amused by my choice of reading.

It must have looked as if, like the main female character² in the novel, the terribly British Adela Quested, I thought the ‘real India’ could somehow be pinned down and examined, without realizing that there were in fact, as Forster himself puts it, ‘a hundred Indias’ (and probably more).

Excerpt ends

Technorati Tags: british, empire, europe, families, family, india, slightly foxed, the real reader's quarterly, travel, traveller, woman

convert post to pdf?

~~Dictionary~~
1 subcontinent
Definitions

1. a large landmass smaller than a continent
2. a major subdivision of a continent <the Indian subcontinent>

Pronounciation: ˌsəb-ˈkän-tə-nənt, -ˈkänt-nənt
Function: noun
Date: 1863
2 character
Definitions

1. position, capacity <his character as a town official>
2. reference 4b
3. reputation <the scandal has damaged his character and image>
4. moral excellence and firmness <a man of sound character>

Pronounciation: ˈker-ik-tər, ˈka-rik-
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
Etymology: Middle English caracter, from Latin character mark, distinctive quality, from Greek charaktēr, from charassein to scratch, engrave; perhaps akin to Lithuanian žerti to scratch