 Adela Quested, a young Englishwoman, travels to India in the late 1920s to visit her fiancé, a British magistrate posted in a small town; her traveling companion is his mother Mrs. Moore. They want to see something of the country and to meet everyday Indians, but are frustrated by the British community s insistence that relations with the locals are best experienced from a distance. Finally, a friend introduces them to a Muslim doctor whom Mrs. Moore had seen briefly on her visit to a mosque. He takes them on an outing to the nearby caverns (a local attraction), but what happens there threatens to destroy any civility between the British and Indian societies.