E.M. Forster was one of the great novelists of the 20th century, but his delicately wrought novels seem to have fallen out of fashion. He is perhaps remembered mainly through the finely crafted period dramas that Merchant-Ivory made of his Room With A View, Howard’s End and Maurice. The pity, however, is that when it came to his masterpiece, A Passage to India, Merchant and Ivory didn’t get to make the film, and nor did Satyajit Ray: Forster didn’t want this book to be filmed, because he felt that any director’s stance on the colonial divide could unconsciously disturb the ambiguity he had so carefully written into its heart. Ultimately, it was David Lean who charmed and bullied Forster’s literary estate into giving him the rights, and went on to turn it into that great big clunker of a movie (featuring, among other embarrassments, a brown-painted, head-wobbling Alec Guinness playing Professor Godbole, as if he were Peter Sellers).