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Chapter 1
The first chapter of the Mosque section describes Chandrapore on undistinguished, medium-sized Indian city, located under river Ganges.
Just outside the precincts of the city, on an elevation above it, is located the British colony, consisting of a brick clubhouse and a group of bungalows where members of the Indian Civil Service live, distanced from the natives.
Although Chandrapore has numerous guardians and a few fine houses, Forster informs us that it is essentially meagre and monotonous.
Its only unusual geographic feature is Marabar hills, which contain “the extraordinary caves.”
Only the sky can rein glory upon this insignificant town, because over this endless, mysterious, prostrate Indian plain, only the sky is open so strong and so enormous.
Despite India’s muddle and its divide, the only unifying principle is the over-arching sky under whose canopy all differences are unified. Through the image of the sky, Forster intimates that only when man-made barriers and differences are surrendered to the cosmic entity, the sky, can total unity and harmony be realized.
In this chapter, Forster introduces some of the novel’s central images - the mysteriously changing, all-controlling sky of India; the endless, seemingly meaningless Indian plain, the meagre, impoverished city so shapeless and ‘muddled’ to western eyes; and the ‘sensibly planned’ British colony, cut off from the rest of the town in location and design; most importantly the extraordinary Marabar caves, which is one of Forster’s main dramatic symbols in summarizing his main preoccupations within the novel.
It is generally agreed by all critics that Forster is a writer of the contemplative novel, and that all his novels are an illustration of this single idea.
This single concern is the chasm between the world of action and the world of being.
The novel also examines the search for the wholeness of truth and the harmonizing of the tragic antitheses.
In addition, it delineates the antithesis between the real and the not real, true and false, and being and not being.
Each book develops this single preoccupation in different terms and on many levels.
“Muddle” - India is a muddle; nothing embraces the whole of it; no one race or creed or person can sum it up or know all of it; nor are differences clear-cut: “nothing in India is identifiable; the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.”