Maurice without Ending

During their ongoing lives, both Forster’s Maurice and Merchant Ivory Productions’ 1987 film adaptation have suffered parallel forms of critical dismissal and misrecognition which deny their cultural, political or affective significance. In the twenty-first century, however, such responses are challenged by the enduring and profound impact of both novel and film on readers/audiences, vividly evident in post-2000 Web 2.0 participatory culture. This chapter connects Maurice’s evolution across three phases of its (trans)textual history. First, the palimpsestic history of Maurice ‘the’ novel, shaped by multiple ‘peer reviewers’, divergent manuscripts and protracted textual revisions. Second, the 1987 film adaptation, which was the product of a comparably complicated, contestatory genesis and significant structural reworking. Third, Maurice’s still-unfolding public life as manifested in its twenty-first-century popular reception and further (re-)adaptations, sequels and paratexts, including fanworks. Since 2004, more than 170 Maurice fanfictions have been published online in English alone. These are of interest for the work done by fans in extending Forster’s sexual politics, utopian vision and the Maurice/Alec pairing into ‘the for ever and ever that fiction allows’ and for their solutions to perceived difficulties or limitations within the novel and/or film, conversely prompting reflection on the ‘fannishness’ of Maurice itself.

Ivory, James (1928–)

James Frances Ivory is an American film director and co-owner of Merchant Ivory Productions. He and his partner, Ismail Merchant, a film producer, formed Merchant Ivory in 1961, and they collaborated closely with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a novelist and screenwriter. Although Ivory directed a few films set in modern India and New York, he is best known for his adaptations of novels and short stories by writers including Henry James, E.M. Forster, Jean Rhys, John Cheever, and Jhabvala. He and Merchant Ivory are so strongly identified with the genre of period drama that these are sometimes referred to as "Merchant-Ivory films." Ivory has won numerous accolades, both for Merchant Ivory films and for his own work. For each of his films A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993), he received Academy Award nominations for Best Director; Golden Globe nominations for Best Director, Motion Picture; and Directors Guild of America awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures. He won lifetime achievement awards from the Directors Guild of America in 1995, from the Savannah Film and Video Festival in 2000, and from Camerimage in 2003.

Thuggee and Sati Revisited

Films on Indian themes made by western filmmakers have often been ridden with stereotypes and clichés. The wave of Raj films that came out of British and American production companies in the years since India‟s independence have largely been nostalgia-driven, and they almost invariably end up exoticising the region. However, with regard to films made by the nonHollywood film company named Merchant-Ivory Productions, audiences had come to expect more sophisticated and nuanced treatments of themes drawn from Indian history. This paper examines one of their films, The Deceivers, which deals with the twin themes of Thuggee and Sati. The discussion of the film is set against the broader context of the literature and cinema spawned by Western interest in the Raj era. While it is certainly more aesthetically sophisticated than the Hollywood type of Raj films, The Deceivers nevertheless falls short of engaging with the complexities of 19th century India in any meaningful way and is especially blind to the tendency of colonial propaganda to criminalise entire ethnic groups. Such attempts at cross-cultural representation are nevertheless valuable from a pedagogic point of view in the specific context of postcolonial approaches in the humanities classrooms in our colleges. Keywords: Colonial, Empire, Gender, Sati, Stereotypes, Thuggee