I think it is just a plot device to bring home the theme of the British feeling superior to the natives. I must admit it is all a little 'Much Ado About Nothing' if you know what I mean. The plot development does sort of fall apart at the end and becomes a little contrived and somewhat pretentious.
shareThe Marabar caves had a certain spiritual significance which had adverse effects on both Mrs Moore and Miss Quested. She was out of her depth in India and suffered from the heat and the culture shock. She never says that he raped her on the film, and when Fielding is talking to Mcbride, the latter says that Mrs Callendar brought the charges that were supported by the victim, the victim having been under great distress and sedation when she was (presumably) urged to make the allegation.
shareMiss Quested had been introduced to a totally unfamiliar culture which, in the past, as shown by the statues in the ruins, had openly celebrated sexuality. She was a frustrated and repressed young woman who was battling with her own desires and the seemingly unsensual relationship with her fiance. I think, in the caves, after talking with Aziz on the way up about his marriage, that her own repressed sexuality just created a neurotic episode in which she lost touch with reality and imagined Aziz had assaulted her.
shareI think your making more sense...
The novel explains things more fully : she's wondering about whether her marriage is a good idea, and she's set thinking about it even more by Aziz talking about marriage. As she thinks, she loses track of where the guide is and gets lost among the caves. She wanders into a cave, is scared and confused by the echo, and someone DOES come into the cave, tries to do something (we aren't told exactly what), breaks the strap of her binoculars and she runs away. Aziz then comes looking for her, sees the binoculars and puts them into his pocket. After discovering he has the binoculars, Adela assumes it was he who attacked her in the cave.
I am talking about what the novel says (I've never seen the film), but hopefully this sheds some light onto it.
As is often the case, the key event is left out, both of the book and the film. Both book and film very strongly suggest that nothing happened, but I think it is probably left out, otherwise what goes on next, the hysteria and trial, would be far less dramatic. Aziz is simply not the type to commit rape (rape has nothing to do with sexual attraction, but with power). He is also not stupid, and he knows he could hardly do this and get away with it. Lastly, it is made patently clear that he did not consider Adela attractive. She is very plane, and pale. What this is more dramatizing is the inability of these two cultures to meet and communicate (the metaphorical "passage", if you will), which is not only shown by Aziz-Adela disaster, but also between Aziz and Fielding who part company at the end too.
As to the actual events at the cave, Adela it is strongly suggested that Adela imagined, not that she was raped (nobody touched her, and not an article of clothing was removed), but that Aziz wanted her. This freaked her out, moreso due to the fact that she realized she was attracted to him. Bear in mind the problem of Victorian/Edwardian and so on repressed Europeans, especially the women (and the English worst of all), who basically were denying their sexual attractions (hence Freud's obsession in the other direction). She was too intimate with an Indian, they were alone and talked about sex (marriage), he held her hand to help her up the trail (for repressed people deprived of physical contact, that is like putting the match to the keg of dynamite or opening the floodgates), and she was unable to deal with the resulting feelings and sexual urges. What then occurred is anyone's guess, as it is left out of both book and film, and left to our imagination. But I think she freaked out, slipped into one of the caves (I forgot to mention she was already disoriented by the caves, which I think represented coming face to face with the "real" India, which killed Mrs. Moore, and left Adela completely neurotic, but that is a topic in itself), and either Aziz followed her into one, in which case she panicked and started that crazy run down the hill, or he did not find her, but she panicked and ran down the hill anyway when she realized what had happened to her internally, and Aziz only realized when he saw her running down the hill. Recall that it is quite common in Forster that an internal event psychological event is a major turning point in the story, such as Lucy Honeychurch witnessing the stabbing of the Italian in the square in Florence, resulting in her falling in love with the young man.
I don't quite agree with how glorfindl956 characterized them. We are not clear at all that anybody comes into the cave where she is. She runs away in fright, and drops the binoculars. Aziz of course realizes that something has gone wrong and panics, because he trusts the British only to blame Indians for everything. His panic makes him look guilty.
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Aziz and Fielding part company at the end of the main story, but the epilogue reunites them together. That's the happy ending, and it's fitting Lean put it in.
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Fielding confronts Miss Quested about this after Aziz is cleared of the charges. Fielding says something along the lines of Adela being 'trained' by the Turton's or something. Also, when Miss Quested is on her way to the court behind a full military convoy, the Turton's appear to be putting ideas into her head, whilst she has tears rolling down her face...
That's a fine lookin' fricassee, ma'am
My God is that weak. The basis for a whole film?
shareFemale hysteria.
If we are to be brothers, let us be brothers for life, die together.
You know what's funny? The "rape" scene itself doesn't really work on film but everything around it does. You never understand how she really came up with it, even if she was scared by the caves and shocked by India and had huge wedding jitters and felt attracted to Aziz and was ashamed of it and all the rest.
It might have been better if Lean either left more offscreen until OR if he invented more of a reason why Adela thinks Aziz attempted to rape her.
Or if the story was that she just panicked and ran out of the cave and the Brits who saw her bloodied and disheveled jumped to conclusions and kept pestering her until she told them she was attacked. Or something like that.
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During the trial, Adela realizes her mistake, and that Aziz never followed her into the cave. Although the reader knows that Aziz is wrongly accused, the fact is that an attempted assault did take place. I think that some viewers are trying to write it off as some spiritual enigma/sexual repression/female hysteria while ignoring the logic of the situation.
"Why does the chick accuse the Dr of rape?"
Because Forster wrote it that way.
"If I don't suit chu, you kin cut mah thoat!"
From what I understood, I think Adela was emotionally very taxed at that point of time - she was unhappy in her dull relationship with (a very boring) Heaslop, was intrigued by India as a lot of foreigners are but also overwhelmed by it, and more than a little intrigued by the Indian doctor - a good,simple man who was so diametrically opposite to Heaslop or any other men that she had probably known back home, or among Englishmen in India. I did get the impression, very early on when reading the novel actually, that she found Aziz rather attractive - both in looks and as a person. Talking about the movie,in the scene about that day in the caves, the heat (and the sensuality of the sculptures in the caves, considering she was so repressed) got to her and that, coupled with her emotional turmoil, plus her increasing fascination for Aziz, finally got to her and temporarily unhinged her. She suffered a shock similar to Mrs. Moore's (out of exhaustion and heat), and when she came out of it, she was a little panicky and disoriented, and wrongly assumed that something had happened with Aziz - that he had attacked her. Probably she was attributing to Aziz the attraction that she herself felt towards him, or maybe the idea that he liked her too was somewhere in the back of her mind all the time and in a state of temporary disarray, it came to the fore and she misunderstood it to be real. Anyhow, she was genuinely unsure about the events in the cave (although we aren't), and it took her some time to realize that she had after all been mistaken.
shareIn: Steve Moxon, The Woman Racket, Chapter 11 Rape: Fact, Fantasy and Fabrication The crime that’s ‘worse’ than murder:
“False rape and the rape fantasy in literature: The ‘rape fantasy’ is at the heart of the most famous ‘false rape’ portrayed artistically: the centrepiece of E.M.Forster’s book, A Passage To India. (Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, in common with Forster’s book escaped feminist censure because the victim was non-white and the offence was taken to be racism by the community.) Twenty years ago Forster’s masterpiece was made into an exceptional film. The story centres on a naïve young woman, Adela, who had only recently arrived in India to join the man to whom she was engaged to be married, Ronny; but Adelawas now vacillating as to whether or not to marry him. A group excursion is arranged to the remote countryside by Aziz, an attractive Indian doctor. Through a chain of events Adela ends up alone with Aziz. In a scene reminiscent of Picnic At Hanging Rock, for reasons never explored Adela is emotionally overcome and rushes down the mountainside through thorn bushes that tear her clothes and skin. It is not clear as to whether she has had a delusion of sexual assault or that this is simply inferred by the authorities. Part of the power of the film is that the central mystery is never explained. For all we are told Adela could just have a strong touch of the sun, but the film cleverly suggests that in some way the episode and its aftermath is a cover for a disturbingwish to ‘be taken’ by a man she finds more alluring than her fiancé. At the heart of the story is the psychological insight that there may be a relatively benign origin of ‘false rape’. It would seem that Adela’s trepidation about her forthcoming marriage together with the unacknowledged possibility of a sexual liaison with someone else, brought to a head the tension in her mind between her anxiety at the prospect of the marriage bed and whether she had made a good choice. At the same time Aziz awakens her sexuality. The unconscious pitting of her options of choosing one man against the other seems to have been expressed as an hysterical imagining akin to a rape fantasy, where being carried off by the stranger would free her from her impending cocooning. Not cognizant of the huge damage to others she was causing until she started to come to her senses in Aziz’s trial, Adela was ‘frozen in the headlights’. She was procrastinating between the two female mating strategies, and the motivational importance of the situation was such that her mind blotted out all else. She experienced an emotionally-charged realisation of the conflict between two romantic ideals, though even at this sanitised level she could barely articulate it. It seems that Adela may have been unconsciously accessing a ‘dissociated’ mental state that women have evolved to enter should they find themselves in the scenario of being ‘taken’ by a stranger.”
Actually, Adela was not the one who accused Aziz of rape; the British bureaucrats did. Poor Adela was in no condition to even talk; she'd been so badly traumatized by the ghosts in the caves.
The British heads, eager for juicy "dirt" on the native Indians, seized this and took advantage of the fact that Adela and Aziz had been alone for a while and the fact that Adela had a min-breakdown, was crying non-stop for days, and was in no condition to even talk to create a media circus, esp. in this small Indian town. And most of us know that most small towns are hotbeds for malicious gossip.
I think they probably put the words into her mouth and she was too weak to say anything else or not go along with it.
She seemed sick and delusional.
It wasn't his fault that she was sick or delusional.
I think it wasn't her fault. But then the jolly doctor Aziz became a bitter West-hating man and I think the resolution was that he forgave her. only then was the peace between east and west restored which is true in the evolution of a country after it gets independence of its mother country, if the government goes on with a sense of anger and repression and tries to make policies designed to hate on the mother country , that's counter-productive.
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