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I would like to offer a general comment on the theme. It isn't original with me but is a comment on Forster in general by the brilliant {but rather tendentious} Cambridge literary critic F.R.Leavis. He focuses on a specific conflict in Forster which seems to make a great deal of sense in the novel. Here is what he says:
"Pre-eminently a novelist of civilized personal relations, he has at the same time a radical dissatisfaction with civilization--"
Don't we see this in Passage to India? Both the Indians and the British have what they think is a deeply civilized behaviour pattern. Yet, there is a nearly unbridgeable gap of communication between them. And IMO I think that Forster is consciously rejecting the Imperialistic tradition, "civilization", of the latter for the deeper humanity and "civilized personal relations" of Aziz.
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