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I wonder if perhaps this is an easier book to "get" for British readers than American, simply because, as Richard says, we have an much more intuitive "feel" for the "class system" (which, as Richard notes, is very much still "alive and kicking" today, despite what some may think). Even the most enlightened Edwardian (which Forster was) would almost certainly have believed that the British were more "civilized" than the native Indian people, and it would be a rare Englishman (or woman) indeed at that time who could regard a "native" as their truly social equal. We look upon such attitudes as terrible today, but there's no doubt whatsoever that they were almost universally held to be true at the time of this book's writing.
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