It is a film classic that garnered 11 Oscar nominations, but David Lean’s adaptation of A Passage To India faced strong opposition from the executors of author E. M. Forster’s literary estate.
Newly unearthed letters reveal that after reading the script, senior academics at Cambridge University’s King’s College, which controls the rights to Forster’s works, had a ‘major worry’ about Lean’s finale, believing he was trying to over-simplify the complex tale of sexual and racial tensions set against the backdrop of the British Raj.
The original novel, published in 1924, explores the fallout from a false allegation of sexual assault by Adela Quested, a newly arrived British woman in India, against the mild-mannered Dr Aziz.