Sunday Feature - Forster in India: Sex, Books and Empire

EM Forster's personal passage to India was the key to both his great novel and his political radicalism. What drew this shy and retiring figure from British suburbia to the mysterious heart of a faraway subcontinent? Taking a fresh look at the links between Forster's homosexuality, his critique of the Raj and his remarkably modern capacity for crossing racial and cultural borders, Zareer Masani rescues him from the stereotype of an old-maidish, closeted gay, writing tea-table novels.