Character guide

Dr. Aziz

major

Also known as Aziz, VI Aziz, Unluckily Aziz, Dear Dr. Aziz, XXXI Aziz, Doctor Aziz, Aziz⁠

Aziz is a widowed physician in Chandrapore who pours his longing for beauty and belonging into a single grand expedition for his English guests. His sensuality is tangled with snobbery — he is enraged to be linked with a woman he finds unbeautiful — and this vanity sits uneasily beside his genuine tenderness. His friendship with Fielding and his devotion to Mrs. Moore lift him; his fear of English power undoes him. He matters because the novel's central crisis runs through his body and his name.

Cyril Fielding

major

Also known as Mr. Fielding, VII This Mr. Fielding, Poor Mr. Fielding, good Fielding, Fielding, Cyril, old Cyril, Fielding⁠

Fielding is the Principal at Government College, unmarried, unhurried, and unimpressed by the Anglo-Indian club's pieties. He believes in the individual over the category, which makes him Aziz's ally and, in Chandrapore, a mild heretic. Yet his detachment is also a limitation: he can analyze Aziz's snobbery without quite feeling it, and his loyalties are tested when friendship collides with the machinery of empire. He is the novel's conscience, and its most honest portrait of a man caught between two worlds he cannot fully join.

Adela Quested

major

Also known as Miss Quested, XV Miss Quested, Adela, Presently Adela, poor Adela, Madamsell Adela, Miss Quested

Adela comes to Chandrapore half-engaged to Ronny Heaslop and wholly determined to understand India rather than merely tour it. She is honest, plainspoken, and slightly tone-deaf to the feelings around her — she asks whether she likes anyone, and means it. Her restlessness and her need for experience rather than affection make her both sympathetic and dangerous. What happens to her in the Marabar caves becomes the hinge on which every other character's fate turns.

Mrs. Moore

major

Also known as Dear Mrs. Moore, this Mrs. Moore, poor old Mrs. Moore, Moore, Miss Moore, Mrs. ¬ÝMoore, Mrs. Moore⁠—she

Mrs. Moore arrives in India as Ronny's mother, tired, curious, and free of the race-consciousness that governs the civil station. She treats Aziz as a young man rather than a native, and he responds with a devotion that outlives her. But her openness is shadowed by something older and stranger — a sense that the universe is indifferent, and that the Marabar has said something to her she cannot unhear. She is the novel's spiritual center, and its most haunting absence.

Ronny Heaslop

supporting

Also known as Ronny, Mr. Heaslop, Heaslop, nice little Heaslop, young Heaslop, Poor young Heaslop, Even Heaslop

Ronny is young, decent in his own terms, and utterly at home in the Anglo-Indian club's assumptions about Indians. He loves Adela in a lukewarm, career-conscious way, and he loves his position more. His mother's mysticism embarrasses him; Aziz's friendship with Fielding irritates him; the trial forces him to choose between the woman he is engaged to and the system he serves. He is not a villain but a portrait of how ordinary men become instruments of empire.

Mahmoud Ali

supporting

Also known as Mr. Mahmoud Ali, Mahmoud, Pleader Mahmoud Ali

Mahmoud Ali is a lawyer in Chandrapore, quick to take offense on behalf of his community and quicker to shout it aloud. He is genuinely devoted to Aziz, but his anti-British passion is theatrical and indiscriminate — he yells 'Down with the Collector' even when the crowd has no plan. His agitation, and his willingness to believe the worst rumors about the English, help turn Aziz's arrest into a communal crisis. He matters because he shows how legitimate anger can curdle into something that endangers the very people it means to defend.

Hamidullah

supporting

Also known as Hamidullah Begum, Mr. Hamidullah, good old Hamidullah, XIX Hamidullah, Meanwhile Hamidullah

Hamidullah belongs to Chandrapore's Muslim gentry, a respected elder whose home becomes the setting for the novel's first attempt at cross-cultural intimacy. He carries a quiet grief for his Cambridge years and a weary skepticism about the nationalist committees he attends, where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Parsis agree only in resenting the English. His affectionate, protective bond with Aziz gives the story its warmest early anchor, and his disillusioned realism foreshadows how fragile those bridges will prove.

Professor Godbole

supporting

Also known as Godbole, old Godbole, poor old Godbole, Professor Narayan Godbole, Dear old Godbole, funny old Godbole

Godbole teaches at Fielding's college, moving through Chandrapore with an otherworldly calm that both charms and baffles his British colleagues. He is a man of ceremony and abstraction, capable of forgetting a name mid-sentence yet wholly absorbed in the divine; his religious sensibility is not a set of beliefs but an atmosphere. His presence in the novel's middle chapters offers a third way of seeing, neither Anglo nor Muslim, that quietly reframes what the story's conflicts are even about.

The Collector

supporting

Also known as the Collector, IV The Collector

As the district's chief British official, the Collector presides over the civil station's rituals of power, from club gossip to the arrangements for visitors and trials. He prides himself on understanding Indians better than his colleagues do, yet his understanding never quite becomes friendship, and his wife's disdain for the native community sharpens the divide he claims to bridge. His measured, faintly melancholy presence establishes the imperial world that the novel's central crisis will expose and strain.

Mr. McBryde

supporting

Also known as McBryde, XVIII Mr. McBryde

McBryde is the most educated and self-aware of Chandrapore's officials, a man of unhappy marriage and settled pessimism who receives Aziz with unnerving gentleness. His philosophy, that climate determines character and natives south of latitude thirty cannot help themselves, lets him treat the accusation as inevitable rather than shocking. He becomes the instrument through which the novel's central charge is processed, and his calm certainty is more chilling than any bully's rage.

Nawab Bahadur

supporting

Also known as Nawab, the Nawab Bahadur, The Nawab Bahadur

The Nawab Bahadur is one of Chandrapore's leading Muslim figures, a man of inherited prestige whose hospitality and public generosity earn him wide respect. He moves between the English officials and the Indian community with practiced grace, but the trial and its aftermath force him to weigh where his true allegiances lie. His dignified presence gives the novel a sense of the old, cultivated Indian aristocracy that empire both flattered and eroded.

Mohammed Latif

minor

Also known as old Mohammed Latif, Mr. Mohammed Latif, Latif

A poor, comic relative of Hamidullah, often treated as a servant.

Mr. Turton

minor

Also known as Turton, Mr. Turton

The British collector's assistant, a typical Anglo-Indian official.

Mrs. Turton

minor

Also known as Mrs. Turton

The collector's wife, snobbish and racist.

Miss Derek

minor

Also known as Derek, Excellent Miss Derek, Miss Derek⁠—she

An Englishwoman who works for a Maharani and drives the party to the caves.

Mr. Das

minor

Also known as Das

The Indian magistrate who presides over Aziz's trial.

Dr. Panna Lal

minor

Also known as Dr. Lal, Panna Lal, worthy Dr. Lal, Old Panna Lal, Doctor Panna Lal

A Hindu doctor who testifies against Aziz at the trial.

Major Callendar

minor

Also known as dour Major Callendar, Callendar, The Major, Major, Old Callendar

The British civil surgeon, Aziz's superior, rude and dismissive.

Stella

minor

Mrs. Moore's daughter, who later marries Fielding.

Ralph Moore

minor

Also known as Ralph, Dear Ralph, ÄúRalph

Mrs. Moore's son, who visits India in the final section.

Antony

minor

A servant of the Heaslop household.

Amritrao

minor

Also known as Mr. Amritrao

A prominent Indian lawyer who defends Aziz at the trial.

Mrs. Lesley

minor

Also known as Lesley

A British memsahib, part of the colonial social circle.

Lady Mellanby

minor

Also known as XXIII Lady Mellanby

The wife of the Lieutenant-Governor, who supports Adela after the trial.

Rafi

minor

A young Muslim student and friend of Aziz.

Nureddin

minor

Also known as poor Nureddin

The Nawab Bahadur's grandson, who falls ill.

Mrs. Bhattacharya

minor

Also known as the Bhattacharya

A Hindu lady who invites Adela and Mrs. Moore to her home.

Hassan

minor

Aziz's servant, loyal and helpful.

Mrs. Callendar

minor

Also known as Callendar

Major Callendar's wife, a typical Anglo-Indian woman.

Mr. Harris

minor

Also known as Harris, Harry

A British official who assists at the trial.

Ahmed Karim

minor

Also known as Ahmed, Karim

A young Muslim man, possibly a friend of Aziz.

Mr. Haq

minor

Also known as Haq

A Muslim lawyer who appears at the trial.

Colonel Maggs

minor

A British military officer, briefly mentioned.

Cousin Kate

minor

A relative of Adela's, mentioned in letters.

Young Mr. Sorley

minor

Also known as Mr. Sorley

A Christian missionary who debates inclusion with Godbole.

Mr. Quested

minor

Also known as Quested

Adela's father, mentioned but not appearing.

Mr. Ram Chand

minor

Also known as horrid Mr. Ram Chand, Ram Chand

A Hindu lawyer who testifies at the trial.

Mr. Syed Mohammed

minor

Also known as Syed Mohammed, Messrs. Syed Mohammed

A Muslim lawyer involved in the trial.

Mr. Zulfiqar

minor

Also known as plain Mr. Zulfiqar

A Muslim lawyer, briefly mentioned.

Mrs. Blakiston

minor

Also known as Blakiston

A British memsahib, part of the club circle.

Mrs. Bannister

minor

A British woman, briefly mentioned.

Sir Gilbert

minor

The Lieutenant-Governor of the province.

The Maharani

minor

Also known as Maharani

A local Indian queen, employer of Miss Derek.

Young Hugh Bannister

minor

Also known as little Hugh

A British child, briefly mentioned.

Mary

minor

A servant or minor character, briefly mentioned.

Mrs. Das

minor

The wife of Mr. Das, briefly mentioned.

Mr. Bhattacharya

minor

The husband of Mrs. Bhattacharya, briefly mentioned.

Nancy

minor

A British woman, briefly mentioned.

Mr. Lesley

minor

Also known as Lesley

The husband of Mrs. Lesley, briefly mentioned.