Rudyard Kipling
JOSEPH Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, to British parents. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and art teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay, had moved to India to study and preserve Indian architecture. His mother, Alice Macdonald Kipling, was the sister-in-law of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones. As a young child, Kipling spent his summers at Sir Edward’s house in England, surrounded by some of the greatest artists and writers of the time, including William Morris and Robert Browning. These quintessentially Victorian summer holidays stood in sharp contrast to his exotic Indian upbringing, where he enjoyed the unquestioned privilege of the British ruling class.
In 1871, following the custom of Britons in India, Kipling’s parents sent him and his sister to England to begin their formal education. The first school they attended, Lorne Lodge, in Hampshire, was run by a cruel couple whose mistreatment Kipling later described in his autobiography. Following a visit from his parents in 1877 during which they witnessed the conditions at his school, Rudyard was sent to the more enlightened, though somewhat undistinguished, United Services College in Devon. Here Kipling flourished, reading voraciously and producing his first poems, later collected and published privately by his mother as Schoolboy Lyrics (1881).
Kipling left school in 1882. Unfit for a military career and unable to afford further education, he returned to India to begin a seven-year career in journalism, taking a job in Bombay as a writer for the Civil and Military Gazette. There he wrote the poems that would be later collected in Departmental Ditties (1886) and the short stories that were collected in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).
In 1888, when a series of Kipling’s short stories were published in inexpensive volumes for rail travelers, the author, who was little known outside of India, soon found his stories being read in all corners of the British Empire. In the wake of the popular and financial success of these books, Kipling moved to England by way of China, Japan, and the United States, arriving in London after seven months of travel. Over the next few years, Kipling wrote many of his most famous poems, including “The Ballad of East and West” and “Gunga Din,” both of which later appeared in Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), a collection of poems concerned with the lives and habits of the British soldier. The success of Barrack-Room Ballads was immediate and universal, appealing to an England ready and willing to read of the objectives of her Empire in plain and unequivocal terms. Despite his growing fame, Kipling remained steadfastly aloof from the London literary scene, largely avoiding contact with other prominent writers.
In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of his friend Wolcott Balestier, the man who collaborated with Kipling on The Naulahka (1892). The couple eventually settled in the county of Sussex, and by 1897 they had two daughters and one son. Their elder daughter, Josephine, died of pneumonia during a trip to the United States in 1899. In the decade following his marriage, Kipling published many of his best-remembered works, including The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and the Just So Stories (1902). It was during this same time that his writing took the decidedly political turn that would color later perceptions of his work, perhaps most famously exemplified by his poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), written in support of the Philippines being surrendered to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War. He was a staunch proponent of the Boer War, writing poetry and war correspondence in support of British efforts in Africa. He was also an ardent opponent of the home rule movement in Ireland. Despite an ideology that may seem objectionable to a contemporary reader, Kipling received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, becoming the first Englishman to be so honored. His acceptance of the Nobel Prize was striking in light of his firm refusal of all official and political honors, including a knighthood and the Order of Merit.
Kipling had long predicted violence between Germany and England, and his patriotic zeal found a fitting subject with the outbreak of the First World War. In poems such as “For All that We Have and Are” (1914), he exhorted his countrymen to action and duty. But his own son’s battlefield death in 1915 was a devastating blow to Kipling and had a fundamental impact on the tenor of his war poetry. Among his most celebrated poems, praised for their technical virtuosity and purity of sentiment, were his thirty-five “Epitaphs of the War,” which commemorated soldiers from a variety of backgrounds. These were included in the collection The Years Between (1919).
The aftermath of the First World War saw a decline in the popularity and quality of Kipling’s poetry, and he was heartbroken to find that the new order ushered in after the Treaty of Versailles was far less sympathetic to his praise of Empire and martial virtue. Kipling’s writings sank into a period of critical and popular decline that he was not to outlive. He published his last major work, the autobiography Something of Myself (1935), a year before he died, after a protracted illness, in 1936. Rudyard Kipling is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
To
Joyce Tompkins
a great Kipling critic
to whom we are all indebted
Contents
Biographical Note
Introduction: Kipling: Controversial Questions by Craig Raine
Editor’s Preface
A Note on the Text
PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS (1888)
In the House of Suddhoo
Beyond the Pale
The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
The Story of Muhammad Din
WEE WILLIE WINKIE (1890)
The Man who would be King
Baa Baa, Black Sheep
SOLDIERS THREE (1890)
Dray Wara Yow Dee
LIFE’S HANDICAP (1891)
On Greenhow Hill
The Dream of Duncan Parrenness
MANY INVENTIONS (1893)
The Disturber of Traffic
‘The Finest Story in the World’
‘Love-o’-Women’
JUST SO STORIES (1902)
The Elephant’s Child
‘I keep six honest serving men’
TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES (1904)
The Runners
A Sahibs’ War
Kaspar’s Song in ‘Varda’
‘Wireless’
The Return of the Children
‘They’
From Lyden’s ‘Irenius’
Mrs Bathurst
PUCK OF POOK’S HILL (1906)
The Bee Boy’s Song
‘Dymchurch Flit’
A Three-Part Song
A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES (1917)
Friendly Brook
The Land
Mary Postgate
The Beginnings
DEBITS AND CREDITS (1926)
‘Late Came the God’
The Wish House
Rahere
The Survival
The Janeites
Jane’s Marriage
The Bull that Thought
Alnaschar and the Oxen
Gipsy Vans
A Madonna of the Trenches
Gow’s Watch
Untimely
The Eye of Allah
The Last Ode
The Gardener
The Burden
LIMITS AND RENEWALS (1932)
Dayspring Mishandled
Gertrude’s Prayer
The Manner of Men
At His Execution
Introduction
Kipling: Controversial Questions
Craig Raine
WAS Kipling a racist? The last stanza of his poem “We and They” is an impeccable statement of cultural relativism:
“All good people agree,
/> And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!”
You couldn’t have a more complete and enlightened statement of the case for cultural relativity if the poem had been written by Edward Said.
I want to look at Kipling’s racism and its complications. I think that even Kipling’s admirers are prejudiced against him. We know he must be a racist—patronizing and condescending at his least obnoxious; loathsome and ugly at his worst. I want to complicate this caricature. Part of me thinks the caricature exists because it is easier for advocates to concede the worst and move on than it is to haggle over detail.
For example, in his introduction to his Oxford Authors selection of Kipling, Daniel Karlin resumes two central mitigating arguments. First, retrospective justice—the injustice of retrospective justice—the sense that Kipling must be seen in his historical context and not judged anachronistically by contemporary standards. And, second, the ransom argument—that positive racial portraits sometimes balance negative ones. The example Karlin gives is Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the babu in Kim, who can be weighed against Kipling’s incessant libels of the Bengali babu.
Karlin then rejects both arguments completely. For him, the nuances never eliminate the uglinesses, cannot eliminate the uglinesses.
And it is true that Kipling’s stories constantly place before us observations that are morally unpalatable. Think of “An Habitation Enforced,” where the obnoxious pushiness of the nouveau riche Mr. Sangres is heightened by the pigment of his skin. Mr. Sangres is Brazilian and therefore “dusky” as well as pushy. Finally, one of the peasants refers to him as “that nigger Sangres.”
At junctures like these, it does seem appealing simply to concede Kipling’s racism—so that one can get on and quote the writing.
But we need, for accurate justice, to consider each case. Which is impossible. I propose to avoid the usual instances: “Beyond the Pale,” “Lispeth,” “Without Benefit of Clergy.” “Loot” I have already defended in my 1994 television program, “J’Adore Kipling.” What about the letters? What about the private man in the secrecy of his correspondence? What about the travel writings? I want to concentrate on these two aspects of Kipling. So far, I think neither has been read well by critics. It is partly that, because there is so much of Kipling to read, the travel writings tend to be read once and once only, leaving the biographer with misleading index cards.
This is the only way I can account for the misreading by Harry Ricketts and Andrew Lycett of a passage in From Sea to Sea (vol. 1, chapter XXIV, p. 489).* This is Kipling. He’s describing a murder in a Chinese gambling den in San Francisco: “Mark how purely man is a creature of instinct. Rarely introduced to the pistol, I saw the Mexican half rise in his chair and at the same instant found myself full length on the floor.” While dropping to the floor, Kipling hears “an intolerable clamour like the discharge of a cannon.” In the great silence following, Kipling gets to his knees. And from there gives us an unforgettably downbeat description of a death. “The Chinaman was gripping the table with both hands and staring in front of him at an empty chair. The Mexican had gone, and a little whirl of smoke was floating near the roof. Still gripping the table, the Chinaman said ‘Ah!’ in the tone a man would use when, looking up from his work suddenly, he sees a well-known friend in the doorway. Then he coughed and fell over to his own right, and I saw that he had been shot in the stomach…. I became aware that, save for two men leaning over the stricken one, the room was empty.” And Kipling flees.
Who could possibly forget this?
Well, anyone who has read the whole of Kipling. Certainly Andrew Lycett and Harry Ricketts.
This is Andrew Lycett getting it wrong: “When he picked himself up from the floor, Rudyard found that everyone had fled the room.”
This is Harry Ricketts getting it wrong: “A sortie to a gambling den in Chinatown produced a dead Mexican, shot before his eyes over a poker game.”
And these are uncontroversial facts. Think of the scope for misreading and inaccurate transcription when interpretation is involved—interpretation of controversial questions.
I propose to sift the evidence for and against Kipling—taking in sequence his attitude to Indians, Blacks, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, and Germans. I do not expect to exonerate Kipling in every instance, but the evidence is more intricate than our initial inclinations might suggest. Our contemporary condemnations are blanket—like our terminology. Our terminology has evolved. Though “African American,” like “Asian American,” is precise enough, ethical purity has, on the whole, entailed terminological vagueness. The Negro was first “colored,” briefly “Nation,” and then “black” in an apparently courageous embrace of racial insult—except that “black” now applies to any “person of color.” Some Asians prefer to be called “black,” though Salman Rushdie recently described himself as “brown.” Arabs are usually called Arabs. “Person of color” is the currently favored overall term—an ethical strategy to neutralize all those petty distinctions of color so prized by racists of all complexions. But it is a strategy not particularly helpful in this context.
INDIANS
Kipling’s story “The Head of the District” is sometimes read as racist and patronizing. It was written in 1890, seven years after the Ilbert Bill, which is its ultimate subject. The bill was liberal in orientation and supported by the viceroy, Lord Ripon. One of its revisions to the Criminal Procedure Code was to invest native magistrates with jurisdiction over British subjects—including, most controversially, the power to try white women. Kipling was hissed in his club when the seventeen-year-old’s paper, The Civil and Military Gazette, “ratted on the bill,” supporting it after initial opposition. “The Head of the District” is usually read as Kipling’s mordant comment on native Indian inability to govern and administer state affairs competently.
When Yardley-Orde, the white head of the district, dies, the government in its liberal wisdom appoints a Bengali as his replacement, one Grish Chunder Dé, M.A. The new Deputy Commissioner’s Afghan subjects are unimpressed, indeed insulted, by the appointment. They revolt and the Bengali panics. “I have not yet assumed charge of the district” is his cowardly response to the crisis. His brother, Debendra Nath Dé, is beheaded in the rebellion.
So far, this reads like a narrative of higher administrative incompetence told by the complacent voice of Anglo-India, chortling with racist condescension. No backbone, these natives. In fact, the story can only be read in this way if the reader is as prejudiced against Kipling as he believes Kipling to be prejudiced against Indians.
The rebellion is really put down by Khoda Dad Khan, an Afghan warrior loyal to the Bengali’s white predecessor, Yardley-Orde, and to Orde’s second in command, Tallantire. It is Khoda Dad Khan who kills the mullah behind the uprising. In other words, it is he, Khoda Dad Khan, who is effectively the head of the district. It is he who realizes that revolt against the British is futile—a drain on human resources—and it is Kipling who realizes that the British can govern only with the consent of the indigenous population. Without consent, there can be only conquest—not the same thing as government by any means. Kipling knows that the Afghans rule themselves. What is more, they know it too, and it is marked in the story by a single subtle shift. When Orde dies, he speaks affectionately to the Afghans as children. “For though ye be strong men, ye are children” is his almost final word. “Children”—the great, standard, patronizing imperialist epithet, designed to demean the dignity of another race.
Kipling is careful, though, in his coda, to mark and salve this sensitivity. Tallantire and Khoda Dad Khan are discussing the Bengali’s successor. Fully aware of where power really lies, both men connive at the myth of British rule. Tallantire “thunders” at Khoda D
ad Khan that his people are “children and fools,” that “the Government will send you a man” to rule the district. To which Khoda Dad Khan, momentarily lapsing from his part in the imperialist charade, lets slip the truth: “Ay,”…“for we also be men.”
The moral of “The Head of the District” for literary critics is that there is no such thing as “the Indian” or “the native.” In this story there is the Afghan (or the Pathan) and there is the Bengali. Kipling distinguishes between them.
Two crucial letters maintain this distinction and complicate it. They were written to Margaret Burne-Jones when Kipling was still working at The Civil and Military Gazette. They are dated September 27, 1885, and November 28, 1885, to January 11, 1886. I want to discuss the second letter in detail because I think it is seriously misrepresented in Andrew Lycett’s account (p. 119 ff).
Kipling’s second letter first of all attacks the concept of “the native”: “When you write ‘native’ who do you mean? The Mahommedan who hates the Hindu; the Hindu who hates the Mahommedan; the Sikh who loathes both; or the semi-anglicised product of our Indian colleges who is hated and despised by Sikh, Hindu and Mahommedan….”
Kipling recorded these distinctions. He didn’t invent them. And they still exist. In the aftermath of the 2001 race riots in Oldham, the Today radio program had an interview in which a Hindu woman complained about the blanket label “Asians”—and blamed the riots on sections of the Moslem community.
You might maintain that, nevertheless, Kipling despises the Bengali babu, whom he makes his target in “The Head of the District.” It is true that, on the whole, Bengalis get poor press from Kipling. The panic of Grish Chunder Dé is reproduced in From Sea to Sea (vol. 2, “The Giridih Coal-Fields”) where Kipling sketches an imagined mining accident in which the Bengali babu panics and blames everything on the gang-Sidar. Kipling’s verdict is “The best of accountants, but the poorest of coroners is he.”
“The best of accountants.” Kipling does pay tribute to this specific quality, this aptitude, in the Bengali babu. In “Among the Railway Folk” (vol. 2, p. 281), he closes with this paean: “The Babus make beautiful accountants, and if we could only see it, a merciful providence has made the Babu for figures and detail. Without him, the dividends of any company would be eaten up by the expenses of English or city-bred clerks. The Babu is a great man, and, to respect him, you must see five score or so of him in a room a hundred yards long, bending over ledgers, ledgers, and yet more ledgers—silent as the Sphinx and busy as a bee.”
The Wish House and Other Stories Page 1