A passage to cheap fame

Lord Curzon, governor-general of India, drew up a list of princes with homosexual tastes. He attributed it largely to early marriage, to a boy getting tired of his wife, or of women, at an early age, and desiring the stimulus of some more novel or exciting sensation. When he heard that a young prince had shown homosexual tendencies, he sent him to the imperial cadet corps to learn self-discipline. The secretary of state for India was not surprised that this particular prince had taken to ‘the special Oriental vice.’ His own experience of schools, seminaries and colleges for boys led him to believe that these institutions were infected with some immorality or other.

In much of official discourses, homosexuality was despised not only as unmanly, but also dreaded as a threat to military discipline. Hence, Indian prostitutes were seen as necessary to the satisfaction of the soldiers’ physical needs. If those needs were not satisfied, dire consequences were envisaged.

The soldiers’ masculinity would be at risk — the prospect of homosexuality was raised whenever there was talk of excluding prostitutes from cantonments. Various steps were, therefore, taken to register prostitutes, inspect them, and detain them in hospital if they caught venereal diseases.

This may serve as a background to Sir V.S. Naipaul’s recent outburst against E.M. Forster (1879-1970), the celebrated author of A Passage to India (1924), and the Cambridge economist, John Maynard Keynes. When people run out of new ideas, they take recourse to such raving and ranting to capture media attention. Forster and Keynes were homosexuals all right, but it is grossly unfair to describe them as ‘exploiters’. It is ludicrous to suggest, moreover, that Forster visited India in 1912 to solely satisfy his desire for ‘garden boys’.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell had known Keynes, ten years his junior, and had a healthy respect for what he later called the sharpest and clearest intellectual he had ever known. ‘‘When I argued with him I felt that I took my life in my hands,’’ he wrote; and, asked by somebody what he had thought of Keynes, he replied, ‘‘Obviously a nice man, but I did not enjoy his company. He made me feel a fool.’’ I bet Sir Vidia would have felt the same way had he met Keynes, hard at work in King’s College on his Treatise of Probability. In the early 1920s, though, Russell found Keynes busy with politics and moneymaking and doubted if he ever thought about probability. Forster read Kalidas’s Sakuntala and the Bhagavad Gita and learnt all about the Ajanta frescoes before his journey to India. His host was Dr. M.A. Ansari, later the Congress president (1927). He sat in the verandah of the house — Behisht (Paradise)— by the old city’s wall in Delhi’s Mori Gate listening to the doves and green parrots making conversation in the garden. The Behisht was thronged by unexplained visitors sitting cross-legged on the beds or on the luggage. There seemed to be no set meal times, but whenever Forster crossed the threshold, tea and poached eggs were served and Ansari’s wife, who observed purdah, would send cigarettes, betel nut and itr (perfume). ‘‘I am in the middle of a very queer life,’’ he told a friend, ‘‘whether typically Oriental I have no means of knowing, but it isn’t English.’’

Altogether he was charmed with India. It was quite different from anything he had heard. He describes an evening at a nautch party with dancing girls. Arranged by Ansari, it was attended by Mohamed Ali, editor of the Delhi paper, Comrade, who contemplated suicide as the message reached him that the Bulgarians were only 25 miles from Constantinople (now Ankara). Mohamed Ali was indiscreet to share his experience at the nautch with a fellow-journalist, and not long afterwards, there appeared in the London Times a report of how a leading Muslim, on the eve of Turkey’s defeat in the Balkan War, had spent his evening at an ‘orgy’.

Forster interests his readers not because he was a pucca gay, but because he wrote The Passage to India, which is deservedly the best known of his novels. One is also fascinated by his intimate relationship with Ross Masood (1889-1937), son of Syed Mahmood, a judge reputed to be an alcoholic, and grandson of Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of Aligarh Muslim University. Their’s is the only one that I know of in twentieth century India — a brilliantly documented affair. Second, their fondness for each other was reciprocal and based on trust and understanding. Masood, Forster was to say later, woke him up out of his suburban and academic life and showed him new horizons and a new civilisation. The depth of their relationship, though never fulfilled physically, belies the charge levelled by Sir Vidia against Forster. Studying at New College in Oxford, Masood yearned for Forster’s company and expressed his romantic affection in no uncertain terms. Once he suggested, “let us get away from the conventional world [?] and let us wander aimlessly if we can, like two pieces of wood on the ocean and perhaps we will understand life better’’. On another occasion, he wrote: ‘‘Centuries may pass, years may turn into 2000 centuries and you never hear from me and you are not to think that the great affection, the real love and the sincerest admiration that I feel for you has in any way diminished.’’

Masood was a striking and exuberant figure, well over six feet tall, with a sonorous and beautiful figure. He learnt Latin, played tennis, and recited Ghalib. He handled the British splendidly. If they patronised him, he let them have it back, very politely. There was the occasion, for instance, when some undergraduates broke into his room, saying they objected to his ‘unmanly’ use of scent. ‘‘We’ll see who’s unmanly’’, was his reply, and he challenged one of them to a wrestling-match and wiped the floor with him.

Masood returned to India reluctantly in 1912, worked for a few years in a legal practice, joined the Nizam’s service, and played a part in the founding of Osmania University. He became vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University but resigned in 1934, a year after he received knighthood. All these years Forster felt lonely and desolate, but that is not a story I am going to tell. My plea to Sir Vidia is not to demonise gay men but to accord to them the respect they deserve. Keynes and Forster, in particular, were men of distinction and surely not champions of an ‘aggressively plebeian culture,’ a charge he recently levelled against Tony Blair’s government.

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