There is a moment in EM Forster’s A Passage to India in which the book’s four main characters – three Brits abroad and one increasingly restless native – are at a tea party discussing a matter that left two English ladies confused about Indian etiquette and worried that they had caused offence. Did they make a stupid ‘blunder’ or was it all an innocent ‘misunderstanding’? ‘I do so hate mysteries,’ declares the young schoolteacher, Adela Quested. ‘I like mysteries but I rather dislike muddles,’ replies her companion, Mrs Moore. ‘A mystery is only a high-sounding term for a muddle,’ says college principal Mr Fielding, before adding: ‘India’s a muddle.’ Desperate to allay concerns, strengthen relations and show there is method in his country’s madness, Dr Aziz promptly invites his new friends to his home. ‘There’ll be no muddle when you come to see me,’ he assures them.

More muddles ensue. The novel is full of them, from crossed lines to knotty entanglements. Muddles arise after Adela announces that she wants to see the real India, which leads to her meeting and mingling with Indians. The chattering ladies at the Chandrapore club are amused by this (‘Natives! Why, fancy!’) while her possible fiancé Ronny Heaslop, the city’s magistrate, tells his mother that they haven’t come to India to befriend Indians. ‘We’re out here to do justice and keep the peace’, he explains, ‘to hold this wretched country by force.’ Nevertheless, a small coterie of the ‘Ruling Race’ sets out to overcome cultural differences and form a bond with Aziz. But that bond unravels with the biggest muddle of all, the perplexing incident at the Marabar Caves, which leaves Adela disorientated and Aziz disgraced. (It is such a muddle that even by the end of the book, the reader is still none the wiser as to whether Adela was assaulted, or ‘insulted’, and by whom.)

Two British sahibs make it clear, after the event, that any muddles with Indians can be circumvented, or better prevented, by keeping such people at arm’s length. Mr McBryde, the district superintendent of police, believes that his compatriots’ friendship with Aziz was an accident waiting to happen: ‘All unfortunate natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30,’ he says. ‘They are not to blame, they have not a dog’s chance.’ Mr Turton, the district collector, also draws on his experience to try to convince Fielding that East is East, West is West and never the twain should meet: ‘I have never known anything but disaster result when English people and Indians attempt to be intimate socially. Intercourse, yes. Courtesy, by all means. Intimacy – never, never.’

This year marks the centenary of Forster’s masterpiece, a book that remains a searing portrait of India during the Raj. Despite its critical acclaim and commercial success, Forster rested on his laurels and didn’t write another novel. (Maurice, his taboo tale of homosexual love, was written earlier and published posthumously, one year after his death in 1971.) One major contributing factor to Forster’s early retirement as a novelist was the creation of A Passage to India. Researching it was a sizeable undertaking. Writing it was an arduous ordeal – one that sapped his strength and left him, in his words, bored by ‘the tiresomeness and conventionalities of fiction-form’.

The book’s origins date as far back as 1910. A couple of months after the publication of Howards End, Forster’s Indian friend – and object of affection – Syed Ross Masood, wrote him a letter. Praising Forster’s insight into the ‘oriental point of view’, Masood expressed a fervent hope: ‘You know my great wish is to get you to write a book on India, for I feel convinced from what I know of you that it will be a great book.’ A seed was sown; an idea incubated. Then, in 1912, after preparations involving reading books (everything from Ramsay MacDonald’s The Awakening of India to the Mahabharata), taking riding lessons, collecting advice, invitations and introductions, and deliberating over whether to pack the likes of cummerbunds, pith helmets and deckchairs, Forster, and several friends, set sail for India.

His biographer, P.N. Furbank, wrote that ‘Appropriately, India began for Forster with a muddle.’ The servant they had arranged to meet at the quayside in Bombay didn’t speak a word of English, the hotel he took them to was full, and when venturing off to find another with Forster’s luggage he disappeared. (The luggage mysteriously resurfaced, and after a two-day search of the city and a case of mistaken identity, the servant did, too.) Forster visited Masood in Aligarh, then journeyed on to a range of destinations including Delhi, Lahore, Simla, Agra and Jaipur. Unlike his travel companions, he was largely relaxed and routinely captivated by everything he experienced. He stayed open-minded and refused to be culture shocked; he embraced the confusion and accepted the contradictions.

Some sights he would utilise for his India novel: the rough and the smooth of Bankipore were incorporated into his fictional city of Chandrapore; the Barabar Caves were transformed into the Marabar Caves. One tour guide’s impassioned anti-British vow – ‘It may be fifty or five hundred years, but we shall turn you out’ – Forster put into the mouth of Aziz on the last page of his book.

That book, however, was a long way down the line. While on his travels, Forster was unable to find any creative spark. ‘I am dried up. Not in my emotions, but in their expression. I cannot write at all,’ he wrote to a friend in February 1913. ‘I see beauty going by and have nothing to catch it in. The only book I have in my head is too like Howards End to interest me… I want something beyond the field of action and behaviour: the waters of the river that rises from the middle of the earth to join the Ganges and the Jumna where they join. India is full of such wonders, but she can’t give them to me.’

On his return to England, Forster realised India had changed him for the better, but he was still unable to channel his memories of his trip into material for his novel. He tried to work on his India book, but eventually abandoned it to write Maurice. Then, in 1921, he accepted a post as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas and headed out to India a second time.

Once again, Forster’s trip began with a muddle. Despite assurances to the contrary, no emissary was there to meet him. A couple of days later, Forster was in a post office when two nobles from Dewas rushed up to him and explained apologetically that they had been searching for him at a wrong address. During Forster’s seven-month stay, he made himself useful to the Maharajah, who was, according to Furbank, ‘a great muddler’. But Forster had his fair share of muddles and mishaps. Convinced that the Maharajah had found out about his ‘carnal intercourse’ with an indiscreet palace servant, Forster awkwardly came clean to him – only to discover that his employer had known nothing of his escapade or indeed his ‘perversion’. Another mix-up, in which Forster’s predecessor accused him of opening his private letters, left him not humiliated but enraged, and resulted in a bitter war of words.

When Forster finally said goodbye to the Maharajah, it was with both relief and reluctance. ‘I hated leaving him,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘but it is his tragedy not to know how to employ people, and I could not feel it any use to go on muddling with work that gave me no satisfaction, and was of no essential importance to him.’ It didn’t help that in his free time, when not sating his sexual desire, Forster had tried unsuccessfully to make progress with his Indian novel. The opening chapters that he had written back in England now felt inert. As he put it later in The Hill of Devi (1953): ‘I used to look at them of an evening in my room at Dewas, and felt only distaste and despair. The gap between India remembered and India experienced was too wide.’

Back in England, Forster again had difficulty bridging that gap. His novel wouldn’t take off, but gradually, with encouragement from friends, especially Leonard Woolf, he found a way forward. It still wasn’t easy: he admitted that from time to time he had the urge to ‘spit or scream like a maniac’, and the book’s trial scenes and attendant legal details proved troublesome and caused him to slow down. He finished it in a burst of positive energy on 21 January 1924 and it was published less than five months later. His struggles, which had lasted more than a decade, had paid off.

In later years, Forster had this to say: ‘I tried to show that India is an unexplainable muddle by introducing an unexplained muddle – Miss Quested’s experience in the cave.’ His novel, as elusive as it is incisive, highlights the muddles, or mysteries, within India; at the same time, it lays the muddles, or mayhem, at the door of the country’s colonisers. As he told an old friend: ‘My deepest feeling is that you are all the most awful shits at the Club, and are to blame for the muddle.’ For a while it seemed he would never be able to complete his novel and convey that feeling or any other. In the end, he muddled through and produced the finest work of his career.