Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

The Hill of Devi

Rate this book
The author's experiences as private secretary to a brilliant young Maharajah. Forster creates a complex portrait of a true ruler. Photographs.

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

Loading...
Loading...

About the author

E.M. Forster

752 books4,364 followers
Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. He is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism. His other works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Maurice (1971), his posthumously published novel which tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
19 (15%)
4 stars
49 (39%)
3 stars
48 (38%)
2 stars
6 (4%)
1 star
2 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
Profile Image for George Ilsley.
Author 12 books328 followers
June 19, 2025
A strange book, a queer melange of memoir and letters, reminiscences and speculation.

Forster writes about his time at the court of an eccentric Indian prince. He admires the prince, for his wisdom and humour, his apparent saintliness, but Forster is also frustrated by the excesses and chaos of the court, and baffled by innumerable incongruities.

Reading this I kept thinking back to A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster, which fills in some of the blanks in Forster's personal life while living in India. Forster’s omissions in his own book were revealed in his letters to personal friends and disclosed in the biography.

The back cover refers to "bewildering contradictions" and "the court of a brilliant young Maharajah." This memoir from Forster touches on colonialism, the perils of modernization, the mysteries of religion, cultural conflicts, personal relations, bureaucracy, and all that is India in its glory.

I found the experience of reading this book to be a little bit overwhelming, because of the wealth of contradictions and uncertainties. This probably reflects how Forster felt during his time at this court, observing the baffling palace intrigues but never quite understanding anything.

Plus his personal undercurrents, not detailed in this book but present nonetheless, add to the general unease and bewilderment.
Profile Image for Jean-Luke.
Author 3 books493 followers
February 17, 2026
E. M. Forster first visited India in 1912, and in 1921 he returned to spend six months as interim secretary to a minor and spendthrift prince. He published A Passage to India in 1925 and more than a quarter of a century later published this nonfiction account of the time he spent at the royal-residence-in-progress in the state of Dewas Senior. By the time of his second visit, the affairs of state were even more chaotic than in 1912, and the work Forster ended up doing there could hardly considered secretarial. Court intrigues and domestic squabbles abounded, and on ritual and ceremony no expense was spared, to Forster's bafflement. He relayed these details in letters to friends and family, decades later using them as a framework throughout which to intersperse commentary and so shape this memoir.

Evocative and quietly beautiful, The Hill of Devi is forever doomed to the shadow of Forster's fiction, which is a genuine pity. Much like Agatha Christie's Come, Tell Me How You Live, EM Forster's The Hill of Devi offers a unique snapshot of an era now lost to time. The British are long out of India, and although Maharajas, wealthy and influential, still exist, they haven't had official powers or priviledges since 1971.
Profile Image for Jason.
1,327 reviews144 followers
October 9, 2022
I’m with the group of people who have never read anything by E. M. Forster, I had heard of his work but never had a copy to read. The Hill of Devi gives you a real good feel for the man and I think it will give me an added level of knowledge when I get around to reading his work.

This book covers the time Forster spent in India, both as a visitor and for work. This was in a time when the British set the rules and local rulers tried to adapt. Forster comes across as very considerate, while he is a bit out of his depth, he does his best to help in a situation that is quite crazy at times. One of my favourite parts of this book is him showing his dedication to the local customs by training his feet to be tougher ready for when shoes must be removed. He witnesses all the religious festivals and is quite blown away at times with the epic events that go on. The book is a collection of his edited letters, and you can really feel his love for the place and its people, his descriptions of the scenery were marvellous, but his writing truly comes alive when he is invited to a party, he is a man who loves to see how things are organised…he even goes into detail mapping the layout of his plate at one meal. In between the letters Forster gives the reader a bit of insight into what was happening, how he felt and who was involved, this does a grand job tying all the letters together.

The last pages of the book cover the events that happened after he left India and it’s all rather sad how quickly things fell apart and you can see how much it affected him. This was a very interesting read, seeing as these events all happened at the time Forster was writing A Passage to India, but I felt there was one thing missing, the letters have been edited too much, all the personal details have been removed, family gossip and maybe the odd complaint, I recently read Mary Wortley Montagu letters where those bits were left in, and it worked for me. Maybe I’m just a big old gossip!

Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2022...
Profile Image for Paul.
2,241 reviews
June 29, 2022
In the early 1900s E M Forster twice visited India where he served in the post of private secretary of the Rajah of Dewas. Even though he lost his father when he was two years old, he had grown up in a life of privilege in the UK and had an inheritance to ensure that he could live of independent means.

Arriving in this country was somewhat of a culture shock to him and this book is a collection of letters that he wrote describing what he saw all around him. They reveal details of the ancient court system that treated the Maharajah as a saint. He doesn’t quite go fully native, but he partakes in the rituals and court life and was in a uniquely privileged position.

I thought that this was a fascinating insight into life in the last days of the Raj in India. Forster gives a glimpse of what life was like for those at the top end of Indian society and the way they had been moulded under English rule. He never judges what he sees, rather he is amused and bemused with what he witnesses considering sometimes to be stranger than fiction.
Profile Image for Greg.
397 reviews149 followers
October 28, 2013
I really enjoyed 'The Hill of Devi.' E. M. Forster's reflections, looking back at his two periods in India as the private secretary of the Rajah of Dewas. E. M. Forster's experience in India was a culture shock, greater I think than it would be today. It was a world in transition. That time of the early 20th Century would have been amazing, it still is of course, but one wouldn't have had to experience the incessant car and motorbike horns, even in narrow market laneways. They also wouldn't have had the problem of disposing of all the plastic packaging waste as today.

The way things worked drove E. M. Forster to frustration and despair - money was spent on expensive new clothes for a small Deity when they didn't have the funds for much needed irrigation pipes or a pump.

E. M. Forster quotes Malcolm Darling in 1907 after he had taken up a position in India. He wrote to Forster that it was "the oddest corner of the world outside Alice in Wonderland". India transformed all who went there. An Englishman felt racially superior, but not for long. In a few months India did its magic and the superiority was lost, never to return.

Preceding the birth of a baby in the palace, musicians played constantly and loudly for days on end with combined with other rituals that the Maharajah agreed was monstrous, 'but says tradition is too strong to be changed' - Sound like Titus Groan? Sound familiar to those who've read Gormenghast?

After Forster's first time in India, on returning to England he started writing A Passage To India. When he returned to India the second time, he scrapped what he wrote and started afresh.

This is a slim book, but has a lot to think about.
578 reviews46 followers
September 26, 2017
The estimable novelist E.M. Forster spent two sojourns at in independent Indian kingdom, the second one as the private secretary, so to speak, of one of the two maharajahs of Dewas. Evidently, English private secretaries with ill-defined duties were all the rage among the maharajahs. This book contains the letters that Forster sent home to friends and family. In the Preface, Forster claimed that he had edited them to remove all traces of "Aren't Indians Quaint?" (his words). There is much interesting material here, about religious ceremonies and the operation of an independent kingdom under the British Empire, but it cannot be said that Forster tried very hard to do much more than observe (for that matter, he seems never to have figured out precisely what a private secretary to a maharajah was supposed to do). He did not successfully remove all observations about "quaintness" or to understand much at all. One has only to glance at his snide comments about Gandhi to see how unperceptive and condescending he was. Granted, Forster went to India long before Naendra Modi, "The White Tiger" or "The Inheritance of Loss." One cannot foresee everything. But one could at least have taken off the glasses with British imperialist lenses once in a while.
Profile Image for Rosamund.
888 reviews66 followers
April 28, 2023
This surprised me by being enormously enjoyable. Forster had a degree of sensitivity in his response that was often lacking amongst the British in India. And looking back on his letters decades later, he recognised that his perspective at the time was limited.
Profile Image for Josephine (biblioseph).
798 reviews123 followers
Read
November 20, 2013
"E. M. Forster, Morgan to his friends, sits down after WWII and puts together this slim volume collecting letters and remembrances of two visits to India. In 1912 he is introduced to the Maharajah of Dewas Senior and nine years later is employed for a brief time as his private secretary. He recollects the time with minimal self-consciousness, his brief mentions of unrest and Gandhi relegated to his letters, and a tinge of antiquated nostalgia. In 1921 he already sees Dewas gone, absorbed into Madhya Bharat, before it actually happens. The India he visited in 1949, for the modern reader, has already changed dramatically. Sharing similar culture, having the history, but this India as different for us as pre-WWI India was for Forster. ..."

Read the rest of my review on my blog or on Booklikes.

I'm sorry about this, but I'm not yet comfortable having my reviews backed up to the Amazon cloud servers. Maybe I'll get over it.
Profile Image for Annie Holmes.
Author 14 books16 followers
July 15, 2013
Fascinating, too brief. Of its time, so there are some limits in terms of perspective for the modern reader but they are few and his sympathies are many - most simpatico, as he insists in Where Angels Fear to Tread.
Profile Image for Jeremy.
791 reviews17 followers
September 13, 2019
A fascinating account of life in an Indian court in the 1920s. An era long gone and never to return. Lots of insights into both the Indian and British attitudes and mores for this period but I found the text not always easy to follow and the multiplicity of names very confusing at times.
Profile Image for Pooja.
41 reviews16 followers
August 23, 2015
Beautiful for its insight into Passage to India, the birth of Krishna scene, and the easy poetry of his casual letters. Also much charm.
Profile Image for Tom Stanger.
81 reviews9 followers
July 18, 2022
To my shame I hadn’t read anything by E.M. Forster, but there was something about The Hill of Devi that I found encapsulating, enigmatic in its description that encouraged me to delve into reading. I think the allure of an India of the past is something few can put aside, it’s a land still very much shrouded in mystery, with a history stretching back tens of thousands of years to the ancient religions of the Indus Valley that, although, very much changed since then, are still fervently practiced today.

E.M. Forster’s account of his temporary posting as Private Secretary to the young Maharaja of Dewas (now a part of the Madhya Pradesh state), Tukojirao III, whose image is on the front cover of the book, and described by Forster as ‘certainly a genius and possibly a saint’. These are not words used in any derogatory sense, as the account of his time spent in India and in the Maharaja’s service is not just affectionate, but loving, sincere and incredibly funny.

Although a memoir of Forster’s travels to India in the 1910s and 1920s, The Hill of Devi predominantly contains a collection of letters written, mostly, to his mother, showing a fascinating insight into the Maharaja’s court and the state of India in the 1920s, a very much ‘warts and all’ approach which not just defined an English predominance for society and manners, but also the self-depreciation of one that looks at the world as it is without any sense of pretension. In The Hill of Devi, Forster often hilariously highlights his own ignorance and inabilities just as much as others.

One of the most captivating parts of the book was the chapter on the Gokul Ashmati festival, the festival to celebrate the birth of Krishna, and it is really here that the state of India is really brought to the forefront. Although a country with great richness, it is also a country of great poverty, and set among a time of great financial difficulties the celebration highlights some of the issues India was facing in the 1920s and under British rule. This is something that Forster reminds us of on occasion, with mentions of Gandhi and the particular political movements growing at that time. The Hill of Devi finally reminds us that British rule was not all the glory it has been believed to be in more recent times, the eventual fate and humiliation of the Maharaja is not just tragic but highlights the intolerable attitude of the former British empire and it’s dominance over the country.

The Hill of Devi is set among the time Forster was writing A Passage to India, which was made into a major film in 1985, and stands the test of time as one of the finest commentaries on India and the lives of those not just in the Maharaja’s court but also the lives and times of India in the last years of British rule.
33 reviews4 followers
March 29, 2022
Forster and his escapades in Dewas Sr State in Central India and his liaison with the then Maharajah who ruled in early part of the 20th Century have been documented largely through his letters back home .
Forster has documented well the fading light of the last Maharajah who befriended him and kept him close to him splurging on the British writer even when he was loosing his riches .
Forster does come across as a great opportunist who later moved to greener pastures with Masood Khan grandson of Sir Ahmad Khan who was an ADC to the Nizam .
The story of Dewas Sr Maharajah fleeing to Pondicherry to be away from British laws and his death in abject poverty are sad recount of mismanagements that abounded in princely states that threw away their riches on white men .
A very light read book that makes me urge to travel to Dewas and see what is left of that era there now .As I finished the book the last two paragraphs left deep imprint "I am not concerned to rehabilitate his memory , still less to present him an object of pity ; men have always misinterpreted the past and always will misinterpret it; the past must be left to its own dead who knew that it was alive ".... and then " One of the puzzling things about the dead is that of thinking of them evenly .They all go out of sight and are forgotten , they all go into silence , yet we cannot help assigning some of them a tune ..."
Reading Forster at his personal best despite racist overtones he showed softer side of his mind .
Profile Image for Carol Neves.
41 reviews4 followers
May 30, 2020
This book is a light and interesting reading, with so many curiosities and funny facts that I’m glad I read it.

The judgement of what is different, the way we see the Other, the expectation that things will be the same everywhere are the points that drew my attention while reading this book. Whilst it’s clear how fond Forster was of the place and its people, he couldn’t hide his judgements.

The reader is presented with rich details on Indian culture, religion and politics. There are sad passages and the funny ones, which made me laugh so much. My favourites are when they had to take a cow to the Hospital for Indisposed Cows, the snake attack and when Forster received an Official Insult.

It’s not a book for everyone, but certainly a great reading for those interested in Indian culture, politics, colonisation and the view of the Other by the coloniser.

Full review on my blog:
https://thoughtsofonesown.home.blog/2...
Profile Image for Revanth Ukkalam.
Author 1 book31 followers
May 31, 2023
A through and through colonial account of a petty Maratha princely state in Malwa, Dewas (reading this made me nostalgic of my own Malwa journey and brought to memory how I had given it the slip, now I know I should visit the town with this old copy of the book in hand). Students studying 'Orientalism' should read this book for it fits the tropes perfectly in Forster's characterisation of Hinduism (much to my delight - he employs the predominantly Nietzschean usage 'Dionysiac') as wild, the essentiality of Caste to India, and the hopeless slowness and tedium of Indian customs and society. However one should also read it for the British humour taken to its most amusing extent by Forster, something Postmodernists absolutely lack. The book is more than all a testimony to the appalling shallowness of Indian princely system.
105 reviews
September 16, 2023
An interesting look into the mind of E.M. Forster

This book is a fascinating glimpse into the experiences that helped make Forster the great writer he was. It gives us a point of view to accompany A Passage to India which I will certainly now reread. I couldn’t help wondering if things might have gone very differently if all colonial people had had minds and hearts as open as Forster’s. Not to say that colonialism was a good thing but it might have done more of the good it pretended to.
Profile Image for Steven.
981 reviews8 followers
February 4, 2024
This is a peculiar but well written account of Forster's time in India through letters and reflection. While the writing has moments of exquisite, often its not interesting enough to keep the momentum. It is however a document of value and we see the love he had of the country, the culture and its people.
Profile Image for Mohammad Sabbir  Shaikh.
271 reviews38 followers
March 24, 2021
This book is a collection of letters E. M. Forster wrote to his relatives and friends in England when he was a private secretary of an Indian prince, Tukojirao III. He didn't enjoy his stay, but you'll definitely enjoy reading about his experience. A good, fun read.
Profile Image for Kiki.
34 reviews
June 10, 2020
Another era, another world beautifully evoked by Forster, one British writer that earned appreciation by Indians themselves.
Profile Image for Akanksha.
13 reviews
August 24, 2024
Really interesting if you like history.
Contains letters which reveals the untold history.
Profile Image for Persephone Abbott.
Author 5 books19 followers
October 9, 2015
Honestly I enjoyed Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday better, yet who can resist the following information:

"The Maharaja's chief problem at this minute is the finding of an English Private Secretary, and he is keener than ever because Dewas has secured one in me. Having been greatly struck by a character named Olaf in a novel by Sir Rider Haggard, he wrote the author asking him to send him someone as near like Olaf as possible."

Or:

"Bertrand Russell's advice...denied that the universe has any consideration for man, but equally denied to man the right to neglect his own hopes and ideals, since this would be 'to bow down before an alien power.'"

Now I really must go write a poem about walking on lotus leaves, and dead bodies that hum "RamRam."
Profile Image for Liza.
173 reviews7 followers
Read
March 7, 2010
The hill of Devi by E. M Forster (1965)
Profile Image for Joanne.
829 reviews50 followers
December 2, 2012
An interesting book. A bit hard for me to understand at times. A different world.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews