The Hill of Devi by E.M. Forster

One of the first writers whose work I dived into with wild abandon and read and read and read within a year or so until I’d nearly exhausted their oeuvre was Edward Morgan Forster.

When I was a naïve bumpkin nineteen year old (or maybe twenty or even twenty one year old, it’s easy to forget how late I started with even entry-level literature (lol I don’t think that’s fair to Forster, but you know what I mean, right?) due to the cultural desert of my roots – e.g. there was the opportunity to engage with Forster at an earlier age as Howard’s End (oioi 😜) was an A Level set text when I was in high school, however we instead read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which says everything you need to know about Middle England in the noughties (no idea what I mean by that but it sounded bitchy enough to justify))—

Too many digressions, restart that sentence:

When I was a naïve bumpkin x-year old, my first exposure to Forster set me alight…

I raced through those two perfect/imperfect “Italian” novels, through A Passage to India, through Maurice (the only one I’ve re-read recently-ish, though I have been meaning to revisit both The Longest Journey and Howard’s End since about 2012 😬) and the others, through the short stories including the Sci-Fi ones (which I didn’t then approve of, as someone newly discovering the canon and permitting myself only the occasional Ian Fleming as a genre distraction) and the posthumous queer ones (which I did like, of course) and even into his incomplete novel that was briefly in print during the exact window of my peak Forster interest… After that, of course, there was Aspects of the Novel, there was Two Cheers for Democracy and, many years later, I read Forster’s Commonplace Book, too.

Beyond that, there’s another collected essays (I forget the name and I honestly don’t know if I’ve read it or have a copy of it – most of my books remain in boxes since my bitter, stupid and embarrassing return to fucking England almost 18 months ago), there’s like a biography of his aunt or something that I haven’t read (Abinger Harvest, something like that, is the other essay collection, I think?), there’s a travel book about Egypt, I think, there are academic editions of his notebooks and diaries (which maybe one day I’ll go and read in the British Library if I can ever build a liveable life for myself again lolololol whoops (I will, I will, I will, I promise!)) and maybe one or two other obscure and out of print things (Forster lived a long life and even if he didn’t write another novel after 1924 (Maurice was written earlier, as we alllll know) he remained culturally engaged), and then there’s this: The Hill of Devi

The Hill of Devi was published in 1953, but was mostly written decades earlier, as it is largely composed of letters younger Forster wrote to friends and family during two trips to Dewas in India, one in 1912ish where he visited as a friend of a friend of the local prince, the other in 1921, when he spent several months there, working as the private secretary to the same prince, though basically being a talking point/status symbol – e.g. not only did this prince have a white European private secretary, but he had a white European private secretary who was a noted scholar and acclaimed novelist (“have you read A Room With A View? No, oh, you should, you should”)

Dewas was a small state in central India that, already by the time Forster published his book about it, had been subsumed into a larger political entity. During the many changes that took place in the organisation of Indian governance over the middle of the 20th century, the small states with inherited kingly/princely rulers were removed, and even while Forster was there in the early 20s, the likely end point was in sight: an independent India had even less interest in funding luxurious lives for multiple royal families (over 500!) than British India did, and a lot of this text refers to growing economic issues in this small state, matters of succession, struggles with democratic change, expectations of fair and/or consistent treatment from British colonial powers who – of course – didn’t really give a shit about minor Indian royalty, especially if they were a) not preventing dissent and inevitable independence and b) costing them money…

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It’s an interesting picture that Forster paints (that’s a metaphor, I’m talking about a book that he wrote) – his growing understanding of the untenable nature of the palace and court he is briefly employed in, especially as the prince seeks to maintain colonial interests (i.e. suck up to the British) and preserve the unpreservable status quo…

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Forster’s letters from the period are accompanied by later commentaries and digressions, as well as the occasional excerpt from missives he was sent by other people who visited the area and the people he is writing about…

There are a handful of plates, too, the highlights of which are images of the boyish 40-something Forster visibly out of his comfort zone and English poshboy outfits…

Is it a great book? No, sadly, it’s not.

It offers a unique perspective (well, E.M. Forster’s perspective) on a time and a place that I’d never looked at in any detail before (i.e. the Indian “Princely States”), but it’s not necessarily the most illuminating or interesting perspective, as the text is very much rooted in colonial traditions, even if Forster isn’t the most trad exemplar of his class, he doesn’t really transcend it here…

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As with lots of Forster’s writing, though, key questions remain due to what is unsaid: what was Forster doing with his free time while in the middle of India? Was he spending his evenings alone? Who was he fucking? What was he reading? What was he thinking that he couldn’t put into letters going through censored mail? Did he actually have any respect for the prince or are the kind words from the fifties merely taught respectable guff from an old man that the younger Forster would have skewed in a novel?

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I think The Hill of Devi is perhaps more of interest to the Forster biographer than to the casual reader (or the traveller in India), but though it’s not terrible, it’s very far from the literary heights that Forster reached in that power decade and a half he had either side of the first world war.

I will likely never think of this book again.

Byeeee