Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Yet none of this can fully explain how Kipling came to write with such authority on the psychology of military discipline, courage and cowardice as he does in ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’. ‘Cursed with the rudiments of an imagination,’ Kipling writes of Tommy Atkins,

  this young man is suddenly introduced to an enemy who in eastern lands is always ugly, generally tall and hairy, and frequently noisy. If he looks to the right and the left and sees old soldiers – men of twelve years’ service, who, he knows, know what they are about – taking a charge, rush, or demonstration without embarrassment, he is consoled and applies his shoulder to the butt of his rifle with a stout heart … But, on the other hand, if he sees only men of his own term of service, turning white and playing with their triggers and saying: ‘What the Hell’s up now?’ while the Company Commanders are sweating into their sword-hilts and shouting: ‘Front rank, fix bayonets. Steady there – steady! Sight for three hundred – no, for five! Lie down, all! Steady! Front rank kneel!’ and so forth, he becomes unhappy, and grows acutely miserable when he hears a comrade turn over with the rattle of fire-irons falling into the fender, and the grunt of a pole-axed ox. If he can be moved about a little and allowed to watch the effect of his own fire on the enemy he feels merrier, and may be then worked up to the blind passion of fighting, which is, contrary to general belief, controlled by a chilly Devil and shakes men like ague. If he is not moved about, and begins to feel cold at the pit of the stomach, and in that crisis is badly mauled and hears orders that were never given, he will break, and he will break badly, and of all things under the light of the sun there is nothing more terrible than a broken British regiment.19

  Part of the answer was that Kipling had learned his craft so well as to be able to fool the reader, as the magician fools his audience into believing an illusion to be real. But along with that craftsmanship there is also heightened perception. Just as Charles Darwin’s acute observation of the finches on the Galapagos Islands enabled him to draw conclusions about the evolution of species, so Kipling’s scarcely less rigorous study of the British soldier in India led him to a greater understanding of human behaviour.

  Imagine Jakin and Lew surviving the Second Afghan War and growing into adulthood, only to be discharged from the army for drunkenness or insubordination to become wandering loafers and you have the two heroes of the second of Ruddy’s three valedictory stories. Too long to fit into the CMG or the Week’s News, and too good to be cut to fit, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ was written in bursts between July and November 1888. It opens with the journalist-narrator being accosted by a European loafer and Freemason, Peachey Carnehan, on a train journey and asked to deliver a message to a brother mason, Daniel Dravot, in a manner almost exactly as described in Ruddy’s letter to his cousin Margaret. Six months later the two ne’er-do-wells turn up at the narrator’s office with a scheme to set themselves up as rulers of their own kingdom. They have made enquiries and have located the ideal country. ‘We have decided that there is only one place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a-whack,’ Carnehan tells the narrator:

  They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two-and-thirty heathen idols there, and we’ll be the thirty-third and thirty-fourth … We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find – ‘D’you want to vanquish your foes?’ and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty.

  Kafiristan was a mysterious country inhabited by heathen kafirs, first penetrated in 1883 by Captain William MacNair of the Survey of India and a subordinate, Syed Shah, who was one of the explorer-spies trained by the Survey of India to covertly map the countries beyond British India’s northern borders. MacNair and ‘the Syed’ had travelled in disguise and at great risk of their lives, with MacNair growing a beard and darkening his skin with a ‘solution of caustic and walnut juice’ in order to present himself as a Muslim hakim or doctor. Even if Ruddy had failed to get hold of a copy of MacNair’s Confidential Report, printed at the Survey of India’s headquarters in 1885, he was bound to have read the account of his journey subsequently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Remote and mysterious, Kafiristan provided the perfect setting for the most ambitious and most accessible work of fiction written by Rudyard Kipling in India.

  Three years after Carnehan and Dravot’s visit the narrator is working late in his office, waiting for a final item of news to be wired in, when a ‘rag-wrapped, whining cripple’ appears at the doorway and declares himself to be Carnehan returned: ‘“I’ve come back,” he repeated; “and I was King of Kafiristan – me and Dravot – crowned kings we was!”’ Carnehan then recounts how he and Dravot entered Kafiristan disguised as a Muslim mullah and servant, and succeeded in establishing themselves as joint rulers by a combination of courage and guile, exploiting their knowledge of Freemasonry to fool the local tribesmen into believing them to be gods. Initially Carnehan and Dravot are presented as figures of fun, but as the story unfolds they are transformed into tragic heroes: men of action whose ambition sets them apart, only to be brought down by the fatal flaw of the classic hero – in this instance Dravot’s desire to take a wife for himself from his subjects. By doing so Dravot reveals himself to be all too human; their subjects turn against them, and their empire-building ends in disaster. Only Carnehan lives to tell the tale, which he brings to a climax with a macabre coup de théâtre:

  He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist; brought out a black horsehair bag embroidered with silver thread, and shook therefrom on to my table – the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot! The morning sun that had long been paling the lamps struck the red beard and blind sunken eyes; struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold studded with raw turquoises, that Carnehan placed tenderly on the battered head.

  ‘You be’old now,’ said Carnehan, ‘the Emperor in his ’abit as he lived – the King of Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel that was a monarch once.’

  ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ can be enjoyed as a tale of derring-do with a suitably blood-curdling climax, but it can also be read as an allegory on the romance and folly of empire-building, modelled on the British conquest of India. The two loafers may be rogues, but so was Clive of India; what they further have in common and what sets them apart from other men is their ambition. ‘We have decided that India isn’t big enough for such as us,’ explains Davot to the narrator. ‘We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except drink, and we have signed a contract on that.’ He and Carnehan have sworn to govern according to a set of rules, and when they become kings of Kafiristan, they duly set about establishing a government on British lines by taking a census, establishing land rights and setting up a bureaucracy. But then Dravot breaks their ‘contrack’, the fatal consequences of which Carnehan describes as ‘our Fifty-Seven’, by which he means the Indian Mutiny of 1857, provoked as much by British interference with local custom as by naked imperialism. Just as the East India Company forfeited the right to rule over India by breaking its ‘contrack’ with the Indian people in 1857, so by abandoning the rules of non-interference do Carnehan and Dravot lose their thrones.

  The last of the three stories was ‘On the City Wall’, with its tale of Lalun, beautiful as a pearl and ‘a member of the most ancient profession in the world’. It is a multi-layered story that brings together everything Ruddy had learned about Lahore, from his night-time explorations of the city to his first-hand experiences of reporting on the annual Muslim festival of Mohurram and the inter-communal rioting that almost invariably accompanied it. The story of an anti-British conspiracy, into which the narrator is unwittingly drawn because of his attraction to Lalun, is not hugely convincing; what stands out is Kipling’s sympathetic portrayal of Lalun and her circle of admirers. Lalun herself, with all her charms and he
r songs and her unsurpassed knowledge of the ‘hearts of men, and the heart of the City’, may well be the odalisque beloved of Orientalists, but she is also a prime mover in the conspiracy, both seductive and controlling. Her devotees are drawn from all faiths and all levels, the most ardent being the troubled young court pleader Wali Dad, who believes he has lost his identity as a result of his mission education. ‘I am not a Muslim,’ he protests. ‘I am a Product – a Demnition Product. That I owe to you and yours: that I cannot make an end to my sentence without quoting from your authors.’ So Wali Dad wastes his life paying court to Lalun, constantly mourning ‘the shattered hopes of his youth … the country of which he despaired, or the creed in which he had lost faith’. He is just the kind of English-educated, politicised type of Indian that Ruddy most despised, but instead of turning him into the butt of his prejudices, he portrays his plight with enormous sensitivity, so that Wali Dad becomes almost as fully rounded a character as Lalun.

  Unknown to the narrator-journalist, Lalun and Wali Dad are involved in a plot to free an elderly rebel from the Lahore Fort, where he has been imprisoned for many years. The Shia festival of Mohurram is always a time of tension in the city, when the ancient enmity between Hindus and Muslims comes to a head. The prisoner in the Fort is to be sprung under cover of the ensuing violence. Unaware of the plotting, the narrator-journalist turns up unannounced at Lalun’s salon, which he finds full of strangers, including ‘a fat person in black, with a gold pince-nez’ – a seditious babu type who is the brains behind the plot. Wali Dad draws the narrator away by taking him out to watch what he mocks as a disgraceful exhibition of superstition: the gilt and painted-paper taziyas representing the tombs of the martyred saints Hassan and Hussain being carried in procession through the streets. As the taziya processions enter the city the tension mounts:

  The drums were beating afresh, the crowd were howling ‘Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!’ and beating their breasts, the brass bands were playing their loudest, and at every corner where space allowed, Muhammadan preachers were telling the lamentable story of the death of the Martyrs. It was impossible to move except with the crowd, for the streets were not more than twenty feet wide. In the Hindu quarters the shutters of all the shops were up and cross-barred. As the first tazia, a gorgeous erection ten feet high, was borne aloft on the shoulders of a score of stout men into the semi-darkness of the Gully of the Horsemen, a brickbat crashed through its talc and tinsel sides.

  The cry goes up that the Hindus are dishonouring the faith and fighting breaks out in half a dozen places across the city. The police move in but are powerless to stop the mobs surging through the streets. Hitherto Wali Dad has watched the proceedings with the eye of a cynic but now he too gets caught up in the fervour and plunges into the thick of the fighting. The narrator rides back to Lalun’s house by the city wall, where he helps her pull an old man out of the ditch surrounding the Fort. She then asks him to do her a special favour by escorting the old man across the city. Quite unaware that he is the rebel from the Fort, the narrator leads him through the lines of British troops to hand him over to the fat gentleman with the gold pince-nez. The narrator returns to Lalun’s door to find Wali Dad transformed: ‘He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh of his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, “Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!” as I stooped low over him.’

  ‘On the City Wall’ is replete with ironies, one of which is that, once freed, the old rebel finds that India has moved on and has no place for him and his vision of liberating India with the sword: ‘He went to the young men, but the glamour of his name had passed away, and they were entering native regiments or Government offices, and Khem Singh could give them neither pension, decorations, nor influence – nothing but a glorious death with the back to the mouth of a gun.’ So he gives up and returns to imprisonment in the Fort. The narrator, too, is finally made aware of the extent to which he has been a pawn in a game played entirely over his head. Having unwittingly participated in a conspiracy against his own people, he must remain silent or face ruin. At an early stage of the game Lalun has joked that his role is to be that of vizier at her court, and at the end he has to acknowledge that is what he has become: counsellor to a queen of courtesans.

  In all three stories the leading characters are outsiders and lowlifers: two foul-mouthed barrack-rats; two ex-Army loafers; a prostitute and an Anglicised Muslim who has lost his faith. All are dreamers and losers, who nevertheless achieve the status of heroes because they chance everything; even when they lose, they do so gloriously. The three stories constitute a second milestone in Ruddy’s literary life. There were plenty of Simla tales, plains tales and Soldiers Three stories still to come, many of them as frivolous as any that had gone before, but in the nine months that had passed since he had left Lahore Ruddy’s outlook on life had undergone a radical transformation. In growing older and wiser he had become more serious and reflective. A growing identification with the common man, whether in the guise of a British Tommy, an Afghan horse-dealer or a Jat peasant farmer, had been accompanied by an increased antipathy towards those he perceived as their exploiters, British and Indian – not the virile men of action who sweated it out in the district or on the frontier but those who sat behind desks in headquarters or on committees, writing reports or manifestos and tying themselves and others in red tape. Perhaps there was an element of self-loathing here, for what were these last but men like himself: thinkers and intellectuals, physically inadequate either by breeding or through soft living, who lived by the pen rather than the sword or the ploughshare?

  Ruddy’s last two political squibs written in India were both directed at men and institutions he despised. Published in the same month, October 1888, they represent the two faces of the Kipling coin, the one a sneer at the native press for its presumption in criticising Lord Dufferin’s viceroyalty, the other an attack on a Government Commission which had delivered a report on the conditions of the Indian peasantry and found no cause for concern, despite the fact that several regions of India were experiencing drought and famine. This last allowed Ruddy to expound his view that the Pax Britannica, for all its proclaimed achievements, had done nothing for the ordinary Indian:

  His speech is of mortgaged bedding,

  On his kine he borrows yet,

  At his heart is his daughter’s wedding,

  And his eyes foreknowledge of debt.

  He eats and hath indigestion,

  He toils and he may not stop;

  His life is a long-drawn question

  Between a crop and a crop.20

  These same concerns about the nature of good government and the fitness of those who wish to govern can be seen in two short stories begun in Ruddy’s last months in India but subsequently completed and published in England: ‘The Enlightenment of Pagett, MP’,21 and ‘The Head of the District’,22 both written with the intention of educating the English public as to the true state of affairs in India.

  The visiting Parliamentarian Pagett had already made an appearance in Kipling’s writing as the ‘fluent liar’ Pagett, MP, in the poem of that name. In ‘The Enlightenment of Pagett, MP’ the same man embarks on a fact-finding tour of British India but has the good fortune to encounter an old school chum who is now a Deputy Commissioner. His friend Orde soon puts him right by producing a string of local witnesses who each in turn profess loyalty only for their own caste or racial group and hatred for the rest. ‘Pride of race, which also means race-hatred, is the plague and curse of India and it spreads far,’ he explains. To keep India’s racial and caste divisions in check requires a strong and impartial government, which the Indian National Congress will never be able to provide.

  The Enlightenment of Pagett MP, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  The other story, ‘The H
ead of the District’, is less polemical but no less prejudiced against the babu and the Bengali intellectual. The British head of a District on the North-West Frontier dies of fever and, despite his pleas for a strong man who can command the respect of the volatile local tribesmen, is replaced by a well-educated Bengali, Grish Chunder De. When word of the appointment gets out, law and order break down, and the Bengali’s brother is murdered by the tribesmen. Grish Chunder De cannot cope and his British deputy has to step in to restore order. Both stories carry the same message: Indians are unfit to rule themselves, and only Britain can provide the firm hand that India requires.

  J. L. Kipling reflecting his son’s anti-babu prejudices (National Trust)

  Today both stories leave a bad taste in the mouth, but they had a specific context: the decision of the Indian National Congress to hold its fourth annual conference in Allahabad at the end of December 1888. Initially the Pioneer’s response had been to declare the body an irrelevance. However, this time there were twelve hundred delegates in attendance, drawn from all over India, and the movement could no longer be ignored. The Pioneer was now the leading mouthpiece of those Anglo-Indians determined to preserve the political status quo in India. Under George Allen’s direction the paper waged an unrelenting campaign against the Indian National Congress, one in which the young Rudyard Kipling more than punched his weight. Always conscious of the debt he owed his chief proprietor, Ruddy was more than happy to do his bit, having convinced himself that the Indian National Congress was a Hindu-dominated political party made up of men disqualified by breeding, religion, history and education from ruling over the Indian masses – in marked contrast to the Muslims, in his view ‘the most masterful and powerful minority in the country’, possessing strength of character, strong moral convictions based on their religion, and a long history as the traditional rulers of India. In Allahabad Ruddy had found a champion of the Muslim cause in Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of the progressive Alighar Muslim University, and he had come to share the Muslim leader’s fears that if the Indian National Congress ever came to power, the voices of India’s Muslim minority would cease to be heard.