Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism

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Kipling and Beyond Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism

Edited by

Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Kipling and Beyond

10.1057/9780230290471 - Kipling and Beyond, Edited by Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai

Also by Caroline Rooney: AFRICAN LITERATURE, ANIMISM AND POLITICS

DECOLONISING GENDER: Literature and a Poetics of the Real

Also by Kaori Nagai: EMPIRE OF ANALOGIES: Kipling, India and Ireland



BOOK UNBINDING: The Ontological Stain

Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism Edited by

Caroline Rooney and

Kaori Nagai



Kipling and Beyond

Selection and editorial matter © Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai Individual chapters © contributors

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–22446–9

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kipling and beyond : patriotism, globalisation, and postcolonialism / edited by Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–22446–9 1. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Globalization in literature. I. Rooney, Caroline. II. Nagai, Kaori. PR4857.K46 2010 828'.809—dc22 2010027550 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



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Acknowledgements

vi

Notes on Contributors

vii

Introduction Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai 1 Kipling’s Unloved Race: the Retreat from Modernity Benita Parry 2 How ‘The White Man’s Burden’ Lost its Scare-Quotes; or Kipling and the New American Empire Judith Plotz

1 18

37

3 Empire’s Children Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney

58

4 The Alterity of Terror: Reading Kipling’s ‘Uncanny’ India Jo Collins

79

5 Kipling’s Other Burden: Counter-Narrating Empire Rashna B. Singh

101

6 ‘Arguing with the Himalayas’? Edward Said on Rudyard Kipling Harish Trivedi

120

7 ‘Blindness’ and the Idea of the Artist in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘“They”’ and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Shirley Chew

144

8 What They Knew of Nation and Empire: Rudyard Kipling and C. L. R. James Claire Westall

165

9 Ex-patriotism Ben Grant and Kaori Nagai

185

Select Bibliography

205

Index

209

v



Contents

Some of the essays in this collection derive from the Kipling Conference 2007 (7–8 September) held at the University of Kent, organised by Jan Montefiore and Kaori Nagai. We wish to express our deepest gratitude for all the help and encouragement we received while editing this collection, especially from Jan Montefiore, Lyn Innes, Julia Borossa and Sarah Wood. We also wish to thank Ben Grant and Donna Landry for their invaluable input at the various stages of preparing this collection, and for carefully reading the introduction. Finally, we wish to thank Paula Kennedy, Benjamin Doyle and Steven Hall of Palgrave, without whose suggestions, help and patience this collection would not have been possible.

vi



Acknowledgements

Shirley Chew is Emeritus Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. She has published widely in the field of literatures from Commonwealth countries and has co-edited Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (1993), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (1999), Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (2001) and the Blackwell Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature (2010). She is the founding and general editor of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. Her work in progress includes the Blackwell History of Postcolonial Literature. Jo Collins teaches in the Cultural Studies and English and American Literature departments at the University of Kent, UK. Her doctoral thesis in postcolonial studies examined the use of the uncanny in colonial literature and travel writing, including the work of Kipling and Conan Doyle. She has co-edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and has published articles on Freud and Jung, and on colonial Australian women writers. Besides postcolonial theory, colonial literature and the uncanny, her interests include trauma literature and theory, cultural theory and modernity. Ben Grant teaches at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (2009). Donna Landry is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent, UK, and Director of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century. Her most recent book is Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (2008). With Gerald MacLean, she is co-editor of The Spivak Reader (1996). With MacLean and Caroline Finkel, she directs the Evliya Çelebi Ride and Way, a project of historical re-enactment. For the project's achievements so far, consult the blog: http://www.hoofprinting.blogspot. com, and the website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/evliya/index.html. In search of worlds vanished, vanishing, and as yet unknown, Landry practises hoofprinting as an indispensable mode of historical enquiry. Kaori Nagai teaches at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (2006) and has also published vii



Notes on Contributors

viii Notes on Contributors

Benita Parry is Emerita Professor (Department of English and Comparative Literature) at the University of Warwick. Her current research interests are in understanding the concept of World Literature, Peripheral Modernisms, and the denigration of Marxism in the Postcolonial discussion and adjacent fields. Recent publications include ‘Aspects of Peripheral Modernism’ in Ariel 40(1) (2009), a special issue on Thinking through Postcoloniality, and ‘Countercurrents and Tensions in Said’s Critical Practice’, in Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (forthcoming 2010). Judith Plotz is Professor of English at George Washington University in Washington, DC where she teaches British Romanticism, Children’s Literature, and Colonial-Postcolonial Studies. A former president of the Children’s Literature Association, she is the editor of the forthcoming Penguin edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories and a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Kipling with an essay on Kipling’s involvements with the United States. The author of Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, she is currently completing a book, Kipling and the Little Traditions, about Kipling’s relation to Victorian children’s literature, to the tradition of the Indian miniature, and to American popular science. Caroline Rooney holds a chair in the School of English at the University of Kent and she acts as the Director for the University of Kent‘s Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research. She is the author of African Literature, Animism and Politics (2000) and Decolonising Gender (2007). Her current research, funded by the ESRC and AHRC under the Global Uncertainties Scheme, is on ‘Radical Distrust’. Rashna Batliwala Singh received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Singh is the author of The Imperishable Empire: British Fiction on India and Goodly is Our Heritage: Children's Literature, Empire, and the Certitude of Character. She has contributed to Asian American Playwrights: a Biobibliographical Critical Sourcebook and to the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture. An essay on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad is forthcoming in a collection of essays on Chinua Achebe. Singh is also the author of scholarly articles and conference papers on British colonial and postcolonial literatures as well as on multicultural and pedagogical issues. Currently she teaches at Colorado College and at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.



articles on British imperial discourses. She is the editor of a journal collection entitled ‘Dream Writing’ (Journal of European Studies, 2008).

Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and has been visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993, 1995), and has co-edited The Nation across the World (2007, 2008), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990 (2000), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1999), and Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (1996, rpt. 2000, 2006). He is currently editing an Anthology of Indian Literature in English Translation, 1500 BC to 2000 AD. Claire Westall teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University, UK where she also completed her doctoral research on cricket’s place in English and Caribbean literatures. This comparative study emerged from C. L. R. James’s postcolonial re-examination of Rudyard Kipling and the relationship between these authors and imperial culture. Alongside a sustained interest in Caribbean literature, her research is specifically concerned with literary and cultural negotiations with national identity and the intersection of postcolonialism and postcolonial theory with questions of Englishness and Britishness.



Notes on Contributors ix



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Introduction

Postcolonial Studies and Kipling have a curious symbiotic relationship. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the foundational text in the field, renewed interest in Kipling as a representative Orientalist, who not only gave ‘imaginative perspectives’ to scholarly Orientalism, but also gave literary expression to ‘the White Man’, ‘an idea, a persona, a style of being’, which made it possible for the West to construct and take hold of the Orient (Said, 1995: 224, 226–7). This study was followed by the timely expiration of Kipling’s copyright in 1987, which led to the reprint of his major works as paperbacks, notably by Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics. Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ appeared in 1986. This attempt to re-evaluate Said’s framework through the reading of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian writing refers to Kipling as being placed at the centre of postcolonial debates (see, for instance, Williams, 1989). At the same time, Kipling became a key to understanding postcolonial literature, as many texts implicitly or explicitly engage with, and attempt to rewrite, Kipling.1 Thus Kipling, whose popularity declined with the demise of the British Empire, was resurrected as a canonical author in Postcolonial Studies. His work became a fertile ground for postcolonial scholars to test new theories. Said, in his Penguin introduction to Kim, problematised the peculiar ‘absence of conflict’ in Kipling’s India (1987: 23): Kipling chose to represent India as a timeless and unchanging Eden (9), in order to deny India a history and avoid registering any real challenge to British India. This essay provided a useful starting point for postcolonial engagements with Kipling. For instance, Sara Suleri, in her The Rhetoric of English India (1992), also sees Kim’s adolescence as an illustration of Kipling’s timeless India, and pushes Said’s argument further to examine the narrative strategy of Kipling’s youthful Empire. On the other hand, Homi Bhabha’s 1



Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai

Kipling and Beyond

essays, collected in The Location of Culture (1994), opened the way to reading Kipling’s texts as sites of colonial ambivalence and hybridity. Kipling’s colonial space is now seen as containing moments of crisis, and as a place wherein can be found examples of the white man’s panic as well as of subaltern agency undermining colonial authority, quite contrary to Said’s view that it is deliberately made devoid of conflict (Bart Moore-Gilbert, 1996). Bhabha also facilitates the reading of Kipling’s work not as an embodiment of racial binaries but as an exploration into ‘syncretic possibilities’ between the coloniser and the colonised ( JanMohamed, 1985: 77; also see Mohanty, 1991). In this vein, much attention has been paid to the figure of Kim, as a cultural ‘hybrid’. Works like Don Randall’s Kipling’s Imperial Boy (2000) and John McBratney’s Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space (2002) define Kipling’s boy heroes as able cultural brokers, due to their hybridity and proximity to the native subjects. Many critics have found Kim, the ‘Friend of all the World’, to be a modern cosmopolite, and Gayatri Spivak (2002) characterises him as a ‘Resident Alien’ – the coloniser as a guest as well as a metaphor of postcolonial migration. Elleke Boehmer likewise chooses Kim as an example to demonstrate parallels between turn of the twentieth-century imperial networks and present-day globalisation, or, in a word, ‘what isn’t new about Empire’: both are shown to be vehicles of imperial power, which are ‘riddled with interstices of resistance’ (2004: 23). Overall, the postcolonial engagement with Kipling, which started as an attack on the figure of the White Man, has now given rise to a new type of the ‘white man’, as a site and dream of cultural interaction. It has transformed Kipling into an allegory of the postcolonial condition; accordingly, the speculation on ‘What is Kim?’, a colonial conundrum set by Kipling, has yielded many ‘postcolonial’ answers. It would then be useful to stop and think what we are doing with Kipling. For instance, has our understanding of Kipling and his imperialist politics significantly changed thanks to the new methodologies which postcolonialism has made available to us, and, if so, in what ways? As Randall Jarrell, in his 1961 essay puts it, Kipling is an author whom the reader already knows ‘too much’ about: ‘They know that Kipling was for imperialism; he talked about the white man; he was a crude popular – immensely popular – writer … he wrote, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” … In short, Kipling was someone people used to think was wonderful, but we know better than that now’ (1965: 133). We might ask whether something in our ‘postcolonial’ ease with Kipling implies similar knowingness and complacency – the sense that we have successfully overcome colonialism and moved beyond it,



2

while unknowingly transforming him into an icon of the new form of imperialism. For instance, what is our ulterior motive in conjuring him as a figure in various guises, just as Kipling himself did with Kim? The 9/11 crisis, as Patrick Brantlinger (2007) as well as Judith Plotz and Rashna B. Singh (in this collection) point out, triggered the revival of Kipling as the bard of the ‘American’ Empire, happily taking up the ‘White Man’s Burden’. Apparently, something of Kipling is still with us, and, after thirty years of our postcolonial exorcism, has not been put to rest. While the work of some writers comes to appear dated after its period of publication or moment of popularity, the work of others is upheld as enduring or endlessly re-readable. With respect to these two categories, the literature of Kipling is hard to place. There are those who argue for his canonical or perennial status and those who regard his work as compromised by both aesthetic and ethical limitations. The perceived value of Kipling’s work on the part of his determined devotees may be considered, at least in part, to be a question of nostalgia: nostalgia for tales encountered in childhood, nostalgia for childhood; nostalgia for a certain old-fashioned public school ethos; nostalgia for the glamour and adventure of Empire; nostalgia for British ascendancy on a global stage, and so on. However, while Kipling may be associated with nostalgia, the nature of this nostalgia is not straightforward. Why Kipling today? One answer to this question is suggested by a passage in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that describes the American national mood after 9/11 through the voice of his Pakistani narrator-protagonist, as follows: There was something undeniably retro about the flags and the uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honour. I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me – a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know – but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent. I felt treacherous for wondering whether that era was fictitious, and whether – if it could indeed be animated – it contained a part written for someone like me. (2007: 131)



Introduction 3

Kipling and Beyond

The nostalgia in question may be specified as not so much a yearning for a lost past, a past registered as lost, but rather as a refusal to accept the loss of a past associated with certain ideals or invested with greatness through idealisation. What strengthens this line of interpretation is that the nostalgia described above is explicitly linked by Hamid’s narrator to the nostalgia being suffered by one of the characters in the novel called Erica, a name which puns with Am-erica. Erica is given to us as being in the grip of an inability to move on after the loss of a youthful love, a predicament reflected on in the novel as follows: Erica was going. I never came to know what triggered her decline – was it the trauma of the attack on her city? ... I think I knew even then that she was disappearing into a powerful nostalgia, one from which only she could choose whether or not to return ... In all likelihood she longed for her adolescence with Chris ... I did not know whether I believed in the truth of their love; it was, after all, a religion that would not accept me as a convert. (129) The kind of nostalgia that is explored in The Reluctant Fundamentalist may be loosely juxtaposed with the kind of yearning in relation to former Imperial grandeur that Orhan Pamuk has drawn attention to in his affective mapping of Istanbul. The Turkish word for this painful nostalgia is hüzün, and Pamuk revolves the diverse meanings that have accrued to the term, from the helpless and unrequited passion of adolescents to the Sufi interpretation of hüzün as ‘the spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot be close enough to Allah, because we cannot do enough for Allah in this world’ (81). While mindful of the philosophical provenance of hüzün, Pamuk maintains that its significance is further transferred to the national and imperial sphere. Pamuk, drawing on El Kindi, notes that hüzün can be construed as ‘an experience at odds with communal purpose’ and maintains: ‘What I am trying to explain is the hüzün of an entire city, of Istanbul’ (2005: 83). A paradox therefore emerges of a communally experienced loss of communal purpose. A further consideration that would arise here is that hüzün might arise precisely through nationalism as the invention of or transition to secular forms of community and therefore as the succession-displacement of a spiritual community. That is, if nationalism is a secular phenomenon, it would not answer to yearning for union with the divine. However, that would not be to suppose the accomplishment of a clean break for nationalism would still occupy the place of former spiritual yearnings



4

and so potentially serve as a site for their relocation or as the locus of a transference. With the above considerations in mind, imperial melancholia may be said to be yearning for the logo-centralising of communal purpose inflected with a spiritual and ethical mission: arguably an imperial logic par excellence. Furthermore, it becomes necessary to distinguish between two forms of nostalgia here: a melancholic nostalgia and a mournful one. What is here being termed ‘melancholic nostalgia’ is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, a nostalgia that is melancholic rather than mournful may be said to be a nostalgia that refuses to accept the loss of that which is yearned for. Secondly, it transfers to an ideal, sovereign logo-centric representation the spiritual communion yearned for and therefore mistakes the thingified ideal or symbol for the reality it merely serves to signify or symbolise. In this way, the communal is homogenised under an ideal representation, and channelled, given a purpose. So, this would be not a case of acknowledged imperial loss but of a utopianism of Empire still perversely clung to and struggled for. Hence in Hamid’s depiction of American nostalgia, what is here being termed a ‘melancholic nostalgia’, there is said to be a rush to bring out the flags and revive the dated costumes of nationalist-imperial struggle: that is to say, a literalising performativity of the symbolic or the ideal is at stake. Moreover, this common purpose and symbolically unified spiritual mission is one that excludes the other: Hamid’s Pakistani protagonist does not feel he can be part of the post 9/11 ethico-spiritual fervour, a sort of fanaticism that hypostasises, and even serves to interpellate, the Muslim as fanatic. Mournful nostalgia differs from melancholic nostalgia in that it accepts and acknowledges conditions of unrequitedness and transience. The communal feeling of hüzün described by Pamuk therefore seems to be primarily mournful (that which is predicated on an avowal of loss) in its orientation rather than melancholic (that which is predicated on a disavowal of loss). Francis Robinson compares the hüzün that Pamuk writes of to the recording of loss of former Muslim grandeur in Altaf Husayn Hali’s Mussadas (Flow and Ebb of Islam), and offers the following invitation: ‘Savour its elegiac note: “When autumn has set in over the garden / Why speak of the springtime of flowers?”’ (2009: 346). The persistent popularity of Kipling may now be said to be bound up with a perverse, melancholic desire for Empire or the spirit of Empire running against the grain of a postcolonial discourse that seeks, as it would necessarily do, to go beyond Kipling, to attain the postcolonial. In that Postcolonial Studies may be somewhat thwarted by such an



Introduction 5

Kipling and Beyond

impulse as something of an impasse, Kipling continues to demand attention: the affective and ideological complexes that the idea of his work serves to animate would seem to keep on returning. For instance, in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Pakistani narrator’s reminiscence of his American experience is located in Lahore, a place haunted by Kipling’s ghosts, being the city in which he spent his formative years as a young journalist from 1882 to 1887. In this city, Kipling began to tell many stories to make India an integral part of the British Empire. It was also here that he developed his attentive listener-narrator recording the events he bears witness to. In Hamid’s novel, which tells the story of the American rather than the British Empire, the English listener is substituted by an American, who meets the narrator in a café in Lahore. Kipling is here implicitly evoked as facilitating America’s appropriation of the British imperial past, and the renewal and continuation of our melancholic nostalgia for Empire. In her essay in this volume, Judith Plotz explores the post 9/11 popularity of Kipling in America with insights that resonate with those of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Her essay further alerts us to the fact that what the contemporary craze for Kipling fails to attend to is the ways in which his writing certainly delivers a lesson with respect to the destructive costs of imperial idealism and its aggressive implementations. If the renewed popularity of Kipling is the sign of imperialist nostalgia, for W. H. Auden, in his 1943 essay on Kipling ‘The Poet of the Encirclement’, it is the absence of ‘nostalgia’ in Kipling which is alarming. We can take it that Auden is here talking about the absence of a ‘mournful’ nostalgia, which refuses to respond to the imperialist yearning for the communal and spiritual union with the divine or patriotic ideal. Auden characterises nostalgia as the ability to see that ‘the dangers threatening civilization [come] from inside that civilization’, while Kipling, ‘obsessed with a sense of dangers threatening from outside’, cannot afford the time for inner reflection which would open ‘the gates to the barbarians of melancholia and doubt’ (2002: 199). The central figure of Kipling’s poetry is ‘the man on guard’, vigilantly protecting civilisation against the threat from outside, be he the gardener in England or ‘the sentry on the Afghanistan frontier’ (200). Kipling’s ‘ethic and his politics are those of a critical emergency’, and this enables him to unite people against the common outside enemy, suspending any political differences between them. It was then natural that Kipling should have been summoned in the aftermath of 9/11, to bring together peoples and nations to fight against what was presented as a massive assault on democracy. The ‘War on Terror’ is always defensive, aiming to protect ‘our way of



6

life’, even when it is fought far away from home, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet to those who are on the receiving end of such a righteous War, it is nothing but an invasive imperialism. Auden’s analysis of Kipling’s poetry gives an interesting insight into a way in which the imperialist nostalgia, or, in his formulation, nonnostalgia, disavows loss and inevitable changes. According to Auden, Kipling’s obsession with the outer evil is closely tied to his celebration of ‘the cyclical and reversible changes of Nature’, as contrasted with history as ‘irreversible temporal changes’. Kipling lives in circular time and employs the rhetoric of the return to ensure that ‘the moment of special emergency is everlasting’ (201). Thus, there is no recognition that there are no more frontiers or colonies left in this world to conquer, as the imperial mission is at once the taming of the danger of nature and the defining of itself against the untameable. Colonies like India, being imagined as and identified with the power of Nature, become indispensable as that which renews itself as a threat to civilisation. Auden intriguingly suggests that America as a nation also recognises this power of Nature which Kipling learnt through his contact with India. America is then a natural heir to Kipling’s project of encirclement, since its nation-building had been against nature on its western frontier, and it now looks to the outer world to perpetuate its national project. Auden’s perceptive essay was written as a book review of A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941) selected by T. S. Eliot, and was published when Britain was feeling the pressures of encirclement by Nazi Germany. In this context, Auden witnesses the return and re-evaluation of Kipling as ‘the mirror’ to the mood of the time ‘in which, if we see anything, we see vague, menacing shapes which can be kept away by incessant action but can never be finally overcome’ (202). Fifty years on, Kipling is again holding up the mirror to us, and it is imperative that we see clearly what it tells us, in order to stop the circular movement of imperial melancholia, so that we can mourn properly and start a new phase of history. The identification of a condition of imperial melancholia in relation to Kipling’s work has similarities with Paul Gilroy’s analysis of Britain as being in the grip of a ‘post-imperial melancholia’. Gilroy writes: I think that there is something neurotic about Britain’s continued citation of the anti-Nazi war [...] That process is driven by the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings [...] I want to show that since then the life of the nation has been dominated by an inability to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods



Introduction 7

8

Kipling and Beyond

Gilroy puts forward the term ‘postimperial melancholia’ to distinguish it from an earlier phase of ‘imperial melancholia’, on the grounds that: ‘An older, more dignified sadness that was born in the nineteenth century should be sharply distinguished from the guilt-ridden loathing and depression that have come to characterize Britain’s xenophobic responses to the strangers who have intruded on it more recently’ (98). To follow Gilroy’s model, Kipling, though he never lived to experience World War Two, can be said to have suffered the symptoms of ‘postimperial’ melancholia. As many Kipling critics testify, his later writing is laden with ‘guilt-ridden loathing and depression’, coupled with xenophobic hatred especially against the Germans, whom he regarded and represented as non-humans (Montefiore, 2007: 144–5). In 1915, Kipling’s only son, John, was reported missing in the Great War, believed to be killed in action. His body, which was never recovered in his lifetime, became for Kipling the symbol for all that which he could never acknowledge that he had lost, including the imperial power and control over the colonies, which he was acutely aware that Britain was losing. The sense of guilt must have been greater for Kipling, since he had secured John’s commission in the Irish Guards for him; without this intervention, he never would have been enlisted due to his poor eyesight. The ‘postimperial’ melancholia in the imperialist Kipling can be seen as an indication that it is not really easy to distinguish between imperial and postimperial melancholia. On another note, as Ben Grant argues, nineteenth-century Orientalism was made possible as the result of the Western incorporation of the Orient as the inassimilable Other. The ‘imperial’ melancholia centred around the corpse of this Other, which the West guiltily swallowed but cannot digest, ‘preserved intact, embalmed, neither living nor dead’ (2009: 64). Analytically speaking (following Freud), if melancholia is an inability to mourn predicated on a disavowal of loss, then it would remain stuck in an imperial mode, precisely failing to attain a postimperial consciousness. Thus, it might be more accurate to speak of different phases and occasions of what remains imperial melancholia. This consideration also addresses the problematic way in which Gilroy tends to couple the ‘postimperial’ with the ‘postcolonial’, imputing to the latter a similar melancholia. For example, Gilroy states: ‘The consolidation of postcolonial melancholia suggests an even more disturbing possibility, namely that many people



that followed the end of the Empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige. (2004: 97–8)

in Britain have actually come to need “race” and perhaps to welcome its certainties as one sure way to keep their bearings in a world they experience as increasingly confusing’ (2004: 116). An elision of ‘postimperial melancholia’ with ‘postcolonialism’ is to be avoided, we hope. It is not that there is no such thing as the possibility of something that may be termed ‘postcolonial melancholia’. A case in point might be France’s inability to come to terms with the loss of its settler colony Algeria. However, it is further interesting to register in this regard the related fact that there has been precisely very little in the way of a postcolonial discourse in France compared with Britain. What have Postcolonial Studies been doing all these years if they have not been engaged in coming to terms with colonialism and its aftermath? To ignore such areas of engagement, ones that cut across borders, is to run the risk of serving to homogenise an implicitly ‘white’ British national consciousness (said to be ‘postimperial’ and ‘postcolonial’) as opposed to participating in the dismantlement of such. Moreover, what should be stressed so as not to be overlooked is that a postcolonialism that does not break with its anti-colonial antecedents and ongoing lessons has always been concerned with the questions of a wider universalism and a new humanism. Clare Westall in her essay on the significance of cricket to C. L. R. James as a response to Kipling shows how Kipling’s emphasis on an English consciousness that may be self-reflexively expanded by knowledge of Empire is countered by a different sense of universality in James. While the sporting code and ethos of cricket has been associated with attributes of Englishness when the game is taken up internationally on the part of the former colonised, the qualities of playing the game well can no longer be owned (colonised) by England. That is, it is not merely a case of mimicry but a case of exposing the exemplarity accorded to the game in the first place: if expertly played by West Indians, Indians, Pakistanis and so on, the game’s supposed very Englishness would constitute an appropriation that emerges, or is perceived, in retrospect. Of course, patriotic feelings continue to be invested in sport, but the question arises as to whether such one-sidedness is only part of a potentially wider picture. Kipling’s short story ‘The Maltese Cat’ is a significant one to consider in this regard.2 The story concerns a polo match told from the perspectives of the polo ponies or horses. More specifically, it presents us with a case of ‘the equine subaltern’ in that the story privileges the equine experience of the game over that of the riders, and not only this, for it sides with and thus privileges the experience of the ‘underdog’



Introduction 9

Kipling and Beyond

(underhorse) team: a ‘subaltern studies’ history from this perspective. This team is comprised of a motley crew of workhorses that is pitched against the other team’s superior equine players, superior both in terms of number and breeding. Nonetheless, the underdog (underhorse) team wins out in the end as a consequence of its qualities of loyalty, resilience, resourcefulness and plucky courage (winning the admiration of not only their riders but of the horses and riders of the team they defeat). Kipling leaves open the question of what readings his readers may wish to read into his literary experiment.3 On the one hand, it would be possible to consider that the story invites a cathecting of patriotic fervour from below if the underhorse lot are aligned with a British working class conscripted to the Great Game and seen as displaying its sterling qualities of courage, solidarity and tenacity (both of the working class and the game). Gilroy observes the way in which the sporting field often becomes the circumscribed and preserved site of a jingoistic patriotic postimperialism on the part of the hoi-polloi rather than the posh, and comments with sarcasm: The party is certainly over, but ‘two world wars and One World Cup’ can be articulated as an overdue invitation as well as battle cry. Come and celebrate, it says, come to the national necropolis. Come and drink and shout and fight. Johnny foreigner needs a lesson in patriotism and we will be handing it out – doo dah doo dah. We may not win many games but we do know how to support our side – doo dah doo dah. (2004: 121) ‘We may be up against the odds but we do know how to support our side’ is one meaning that could be read into ‘The Maltese Cat’. However, the fact that this is far from the only meaning that may be abstracted from the story is indicative of how Kipling is not reducible to mere chauvinism. For instance, it would be quite possible to read this story as supporting what Gilroy alternatively speaks of in terms of ‘a cosmopolitanism from below’ (74–5) – the diverse colours of the underhorse team (grey, bay, ‘red’, ‘brown’, ‘blue’ for example) are displayed, together with allusions to hybridities of otherness (a horse called Maltese Cat), in opposition to the conformity to class type of the posh team of horses. With this, the story also allows a space for the reversal of hierachised expectations in which the space of a convivial (living side by side) cosmopolitanisation of labour towards a new international may also be imagined. And so we are reminded that the outcome of the game/Great Game is not necessarily determined in advance and that this may be the



10

sense in which we cannot yet say that the game is over. The fact that Kipling stages his fable through humanlike horses rather than humans brings to the fore the deliteralising advantages of literary texts, showing us that while there is a sense in which an imperially chauvinistic Kipling may always be guilty as charged, his writing does not foreclose a sense that, with a twist of the kaleidoscope, with another throw of the dice, other constellations still remain and ought to remain possible. If we continue to read Kipling, it is both to reckon with a need for closure as regards the pathologies of imperial melancholia and with a need not prematurely to force the closure of, to foreclose on, possibilities set in motion by imperial history that may have hardly begun to realise themselves. A number of the essays in this volume may be said to address a Kipling that is not at home with himself, both time and place being out of joint. When or where does patriotism arise? Kipling may be said to inscribe a love for a country not his, India, and thereby a disqualified patriotism, as well as to inscribe an attachment to his nominal country of origin through being detached from it. This conundrum, one of settler colonialism more generally, is explored by Ben Grant and Kaori Nagai who put forward a new concept of ‘ex-patriotism’. Their chapter considers the ways in which patriotism is paradoxically dependent upon ex-patriotism as a decentring movement away from the patria: the tie which a patriot has with his or her patria is not one of identity (to be) but relational (to love), and this requires an act of separation. The chapter examines the writings of Rudyard Kipling and Richard Francis Burton, who are seen as representative English ‘ex-patriots’, in order both to suggest new ways of thinking about constructions of Englishness in the imperial context, and to explore the colonial roots of modern-day ‘expatriatism’, an under-theorised condition which is of considerable importance in a world of ever-increasing globalisation. Kiplingesque unhomeliness is also a matter of the uncanny. With respect to this, Jo Collins explores how the uncanny in Kipling’s texts serves to register ‘a potentially terrifying alterity’ and her essay, like that of Judith Plotz, explores how Kipling’s work remains relevant to a contemporary discourse on terror. In particular, Kipling’s work may be seen to be troubled by the unspeakable aspects of colonial rule, its episodes of violence and sado-masochism, with implications for the ways in which imperial violence continues today. What is at stake is that such violence appears disturbingly more systemic than exceptional. Similarly Rashna B. Singh, in her exploration of Kipling’s counter-narrative of Empire which surfaces sporadically to express a distrust of power and



Introduction 11

Kipling and Beyond

hegemony, examines the natures of violence in Kipling’s work. Her subtle reading of Kipling’s early poems of the Afghan frontier and his stories of the Great War shows how these texts capture the violence not only of War but of Empire, which reduces individuals to the status of ‘things’, deprived of any meaning outside the imperial framework. Obviously, and especially from a contemporary perspective of a declared war on terrorism that is itself engaged in terrorising tactics, one of the unrealised possibilities of Empire or colonialism that Kipling’s texts set in motion is that of a cosmopolitan politics of friendship, a question considered by Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney in their contribution to this collection. This essay explores the ways in which Kipling deploys various paradigms of colonialism in relation to anxieties around the loss of childhood. It is Kipling’s child hero Kim who is posited as ‘Friend of all the World’, but in the reifications of identity politics that pit the would-be bearers of civilisation against their enemies with Schmittian vigour and crude certainty, it may be maintained that it is not the utopianism of Kim that is naïve and childish, as played out through Kim’s flirtation with Buddhist philosophy, so much as those who continue to see the world in black and white both ethically and ethnically, as well as categorically so. Kipling may have desperately tried to imagine or create a hope for a benevolent form of colonialism, but in actuality this attempt to couple ‘friendship’ with the enforced power polarities of colonial rule turns out to be about as convincing as Messrs Bush and Blair believing that relentless and often indiscriminate violence against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan is the way to convert them to democracy. Of course, it is not that democracy is not desired by many in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we may assume, it is that the ways of delivering it are unbelievable. The South African poet Sipho Sepamla ridicules the mismatch between fine-sounding moral intentions and oppressive policies in practice in his parodic version of Kipling’s ‘If’. Sepamla’s ‘If’ ends with the following lines: If you have sat at table with servants of other people to talk of building bridges If you have once said: I don’t believe in being unjust to anyone If you insist you are of the 20th century Then for God’s sake match word and deed always (1989: 287) The liberal hypocrisy of a rhetoric of cosmopolitan inclusiveness, of ‘democracy and liberty’ in contexts of oppressive racial or ethnic



12

divisions, becomes more damning in Kipling’s case when his antiSemitism is taken into account as it is by Benita Parry in her essay, ‘Kipling’s Unloved Race: the Retreat from Modernity’. Parry’s essay serves to show that melancholic nostalgia is not merely a question of the relation of Kipling’s latter-day readers to his work but a matter of a yearning for an authentic Englishness rooted in a pastoral past, an affect that is entrenched within his writings. It is in defence of such sentimental Anglocentrism, one serving to disavow the economic motivations of imperialism, that Kipling’s phobia towards ‘the deracinated, unaffiliated, free-thinking and nationless Jew’ may be viewed. Ironically such freedom is arguably something that may be associated with the maverick errancy of a young Kim as yet unclaimed by regimental belonging and obligatory flag. This may prompt suspicions of a repressed envy for (or of a phobia based on negated attraction to) the free-floating nomads of modern existence. Those ‘without a country’ have been targeted throughout history as if they were the bearers of the ‘unbearable lightness of being’ in their homelessness. If Kipling were writing today, would he still be antiSemitic or would he be pro-Israeli and thereby against the Palestinians? Would he even be Islamophobic? Harish Trivedi’s essay serves to address the way in which Said makes a special case of Kipling in not objecting to his Orientalism in the manner of his critique of an Orientalised Middle East. Trivedi’s close reading of Said’s seminal Penguin Introduction to Kim (1987) and the revisions he later made to the text for inclusion in Culture and Imperialism (1993) not only throws light on Said’s positionality as a postcolonial critic, but also lays bare academic practices, which, if we are not careful, might reproduce and perpetuate the kinds of institutional frameworks which supported the very Orientalism of which Said was so critical. Many of the essays in this collection take a ‘postcolonial’ distance from the colonial past, while also acknowledging the continuity between past and present. Shirley Chew’s essay on Kipling and Ondaatje, on the other hand, questions this distancing by looking for a shared ground between the two writers, and thereby between colonial and postcolonial spaces of writing. What joins them together is the idea of an artist as a site of mourning and coming to terms with personal loss. The process of mourning is a human act, in which the artists use their hands to overcome their blindness, which Chew, drawing upon Derrida, describes as the struggle to inscribe ‘with visible signs of the invisible’. Her essay is based on her recognition that our colonial past, however violent it was, is nonetheless a ‘human’ history. The success of our mourning the



Introduction 13

Kipling and Beyond

colonial past depends upon our recognition of common human frailty, though certain lessons still have to be learned from our predecessors. As we have indicated, this collection of essays revolves the question of why it is that Kipling continues to be a significant literary and cultural icon together with the question of what the maintenance of this legacy variously means in the counter-currents of postcolonialism and AngloAmerican globalisation. What emerges across a number of essays is that it is an ideological simplification to oppose patriotism or a narrowly focused nationalism, on the one hand, and the international reaches of imperialism and globalisation, on the other hand. Instead of assuming these positions to constitute alternative poles, it is possible to identify a dialectic of mutual enforcement in which the centralising of the universal and the universalising of the centre serve to work in tandem against certain postcolonial understandings of internationalism. These postcolonial understandings therefore emerge as a means of engaging with the aftermath of colonial history beyond the constricted and interimplicated alternatives of nationalism and globalisation. The universality associated with or claimed by globalisation is not, of course, a true universality which is why Postcolonial Studies ought not only to focus on the local (as the binary opposite of the global, and thus potentially underpinning its epistemological privilege) but on the question of a wider universality. Such a question poses the challenge of not resorting to inclusive gestures that dialectically enfold the other within an aggrandisement of the same, or to the prevalent double dynamic of assimilation/exclusion, unification/minoritisation. Through taking into account the transition from British colonialism to US imperialism, a postcolonial approach to Kipling is able to engage with a globalisation implicated in national hegemonies, such as the special Anglo-American relationship, and to question the perpetuation of a geo-historical logic in which a would-be universalising centre seems to require a lawless periphery against which it defends itself. Ali Behad comments that ‘postcolonialism can offer a historical corrective to the celebratory theories of globalization’, adding that ‘postcolonial historiography can provide a critical genealogy to explicate the political shift from European colonialism to US imperialism’ (2006: 77). The ‘beyond’ of ‘Kipling and Beyond’ pertains both to the persistence of imperial desire and to the limitations of the cultural and political attitudes and practices that would sustain a globalisation from above but not ‘a cosmopolitanism from below’ in Gilroy’s terms or ‘vernacular modernities’ in Aamir Mufti’s terms. Mufti in addressing the secular postcolonial criticism of Said maintains that: ‘It implies a scrupulous recognition that all



14

claims of a universal nature are particular claims’ and that ‘Furthermore, and most importantly, it means rescuing the marginalized perspective of the minority as one from which to rethink and remake universalist (ethical, political, cultural) claims, thus displacing its assignation of the site of the local’ (1998: 112). In Enlightenment in the Colony, Mufti considers how Indian nationalism came to entail a minoritisation of Muslim identity and how European nationalism served similarly to minoritise Jewish identity. It may be added that from a further minoritised position, that of the Palestinians, a worldly rather than global sense of the universal arises. With respect to this, Mourid Barghouti in I Saw Ramallah contrasts a border-obsessed world with the cosmopolitanism of Ramallah as follows: It is not only the stranger who suffers at the border. Citizens too can have a bad time of it. There are no limits to the questions. No boundaries for the homeland. Now I want borders that later I will come to hate. Ramallah is odd. Many cultures, many faces. Never a masculine or a solemn city. Always the first to catch on to some new craze. In Ramallah I saw the dabka as though I were in Deir Ghassanah. And there, in my teenage years, I learned to tango. In al-Anqar billiard hall I learned to play snooker. In Ramallah I started to try my hand at poetry, and in the Walid and Dunya and Jamil cinemas I grew to love movies. In Ramallah I grew used to celebrating Christmas and the New Year. (2004: 38–9) Barghouti also remarks on what may be considered to be the nationalistic fetishism of territorial possession: ‘Palestine at this moment is not the golden map hanging on to a golden chain adorning the throats of women in exile. I used to wonder – every time I saw that map encircling their necks – if Canadian women, or Norwegians, or Chinese carried their maps around their necks as our women do’ (23). On this note, we hope that the essays collected here will serve to provoke further critique of the poetics and politics of encirclement. Notes 1. For the reading of Kipling with postcolonial texts, see, for example, Cronin (1987); Randall (1998). Moore-Gilbert (2002) and Plotz (2004) outline how both colonial and postcolonial South Asian writing in English have been deeply indebted to Kipling. 2. I am grateful to Donna Landry for bringing this story to my notice in the context of discussions pertaining to this introduction (CR).



Introduction 15

16

Kipling and Beyond

Works cited Auden, W. H. (2002 [1943]) ‘The Poet of the Encirclement’, The New Republic, 24 October, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume II, 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 198–203. Barghouti, Mourid (2004) I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Souief. London: Bloomsbury. Behad, Ali (2006) ‘On Globalization, Again’, in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 62–79. Bhaba, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Boehmer, Elleke (2004) ‘Global and Textual Webs in an Age of Transnational Capitalism; or, What isn’t New about Empire’, Postcolonial Studies 7(1): 11–26. Brantlinger, Patrick (2007) ‘Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and Its Afterlives’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 50(2): 172–91. Cronin, Richard (1987) ‘The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight’s Children’, Modern Fiction Studies 33(2): 201–13. Gilroy, Paul (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Oxford: Routledge. Grant, Ben (2009) Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire. New York: Routledge. Hamid, Mohsin (2007) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin Books. JanMohamed, Abdul R. (1985) ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: the Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, Critical Inquiry 12(1): 59–87. Jarrell, Randall (1965) ‘On Preparing to Read Kipling’, in Kipling and the Critics, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. London: Peter Owen, pp. 133–49. Kipling, Rudyard (1941) A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, selected by T. S. Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling. London: Faber and Faber. McBratney, John (2002) Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mohanty, Satya P. (1991) ‘Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule’, in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 311–43. Montefiore, Jan (2007) Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1986) Kipling and ‘Orientalism’. London & Sydney: Croom Helm. —— (1996) ‘“The Bhabhal of Tongues”: Reading Kipling, Reading Bhabha’, in Writing India, 1757–1990, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 111–38. —— (2002) ‘“I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim”: Kipling and Postcolonialism’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37: 39–58.



3. It may be noted that Kipling’s story demonstrates his mastery of the short story form, a mastery that may even be considered to resonate in complex ways with the dominance of the short story in Urdu literature in the context of the minoritisation of Muslim identity as analysed brilliantly by Aamir Mufti (2007).

Mufti, Aamir (1998) ‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism and the Question of Minority Culture’, Critical Inquiry 25(1): 95–125. —— (2007) Enlightenment in the Colony: the Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Pamuk, Orhan (2005) Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber. Plotz, Judith (2004) ‘Whose is Kim? Postcolonial India Rewrites Kipling’s Imperial Boy’, South Asian Review 25(2): 3–22. Randall, Don (1998) ‘The Kipling Given, Ondaatje’s Take: Reading Kim through The English Patient’, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 5(2): 131–44. —— (2000) Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, Francis (2009) ‘Crisis of Authority: Crisis of Islam?’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Cambridge University Press) Third Series, 19: 339–54. Said, Edward W. ([1978] 1995) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —— (1987) ‘Introduction’ to Rudyard Kipling, Kim. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 7–46. Reprinted with revision in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 159–96. Sepamla, Sipho (1989) ‘If’, in The Penguin Book of Southern African Verse, ed. Stephen Gray. London: Penguin Books, pp. 286–7. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2002) ‘Resident Alien’, in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 47–65. Suleri, Sara (1992) The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Patrick (1989) ‘Kim and Orientalism’, in Kipling Considered, ed. Phillip Mallett. London: Macmillan, pp. 33–55.



Introduction 17

Kipling’s Unloved Race: the Retreat from Modernity Benita Parry

I have for long cherished a phrase from Kipling’s veiled yet suggestive memoir, Something of Myself. Writing in the 1930s, Kipling warned: ‘Israel is a race to leave alone … It abets disorder’ (1937: 224). This injunction does not of course allude to the state of Israel, but to a dispersed people living worldwide as part and yet apart from the larger societies, subjected to violence, persecution and civic discrimination, and by that time in imminent grave danger from ascendant tendencies within some communities. For me it speaks a yet more complicated Judaeophobia than was common amongst Kipling’s contemporaries, including those who are remembered as critics of Empire and the entrenched social system. Both the anti-imperialist J. A. Hobson and the socialist H. N. Brailsford in the early years of the twentieth century accused the sinister interests of Jewish capitalists, speculators and financial dealers of fostering an imperialism that had contaminated and corrupted domestic society (Hobson, 1988: 56–7; Howe, 1993: 38). Also at that time H. G. Wells’s narrator in Tono-Bungay (1909) used metaphors of morbid growth to excoriate a financial oligarchy, widely assumed to be dominated by Jews, for ‘saprophytically’ displacing the rentiers (1997: 70) – that is, in the manner of an organism parasitically living off decaying matter, the rising class being ‘not so much a new British gentry as “pseudomorphous” after the gentry’ (16) – or having the outward form of another species and thereby connoting deformity and deception (16). In George du Maurier’s best-selling novel Trilby (1891), Svengali, who was to achieve mythic status as the sinister Jew, epitomised filth, hypnotic skills, rage, sexual appetite, parasitism and the hunger for power, implying, according to Daniel Pick, ‘fears of psychological invasion’ of the Gentile world (1998: 107). 18



1

For Bryan Cheyette (1993) hostility to the ‘Hebrew’ perpetuates a literary strain in English fiction going back at least to Anthony Trollope’s novels where the Jew signified the growing power of finance capital and liberal democracy, both perceived as undermining an Old England presided over by the aristocracy. Kipling’s construction of the Jew was more complex: this rehearsed a notion of the Jew as agent of international finance capitalism and hence inimical to industrial capital and the landed middle classes; it borrowed from anti-Semitic literature the figure of the Jew as bearer of social upheaval and revolution; and it alluded to the contaminating all-too-visible presence of poor Eastern European immigrants settled in Europe and North America. Cumulatively, this compound and contradictory configuration presented a threat to Kipling’s invention of an organic and continuous English community rooted in the pastoral and the past. Interestingly, whereas Kipling’s early writings had moved Empire from the margins of English fiction to its centre, in the English stories Empire receded to become the absent condition for an authentic local Englishness. Kipling’s anti-Semitism has largely been acknowledged and quickly passed over by those critics who are content to follow T. S. Eliot in maintaining that he was ‘not particularly’ anti-Semitic (Ricks, 1988: 26–7).1 Because this circumvents any examination of how Judaeophobia reverberates in Kipling’s writing, I will attempt to address the many articulations of the Jewish peril in his stories and late prose. About ‘Jews in Shushan’ (Life’s Handicap, 1891), Cheyette observes how the figure of ‘Ephraim the Jew’, introduced initially as a rather ‘meek’ debtcollector who wishes to build a synagogue in Shushan – ‘never was Jew more unlike his dread breed’ – is quickly transformed into a hideously deformed figure when as butcher to his people, he is seen holding a half-maddened sheep: ‘He was attired in strange raiment ... and a knife was in his mouth. As he struggled with the animal between the walls, the breath came from him in thick sobs, and the nature of the man seemed changed ... A glimpse of Ephraim busied in one of his religious capacities was no thing to be desired twice’ (Kipling, cited in Cheyette, 1996: 80). In the fairy-tale Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) the Spanish Jew, Kadmiel, initially solicits a reader’s sympathy when telling the children that it was Christian persecution which had obliged him, a physician by trade and destined to be a Law-Giver, to become a money-lender. Yet he soon elicits the reader’s fear when he speaks of the creed to which he had turned, one decreed by the Jew’s function in Christian society: ‘we Jews



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know how the world’s gold moves ... a wonderful underground river ... Such power had we Jews among the Gentiles … We did not seek to be paid all in money. We sought Power – Power – Power! That is our God in our captivity. Power to use!’ (‘The Treasure and the Law’; Kipling, 1987: 200–2). A decade later, Kipling’s anti-Semitism had become vitriolic. Written in 1915 and not published until 1919, the verse ‘Gehazi’ uses lurid images associated with leprosy (Moore, 2006) when castigating Rufus Isaacs – lawyer, jurist, 1st Marquis of Reading, Liberal MP, Attorney General, Ambassador and Viceroy of India – who had been accused of financial malpractice on the stock exchange (the notion of malpractice within capitalism’s system has always seemed to me an oxymoron). If ‘Gehazi’ focused on one who has been a spectacularly successful figure in the British establishment, Something of Myself reveals Kipling’s contempt for the dispossessed Jews, ‘the wreckage of Eastern Europe’, whom he feared were swamping the autochthonous North Americans – by which he meant not the Native Americans, but an earlier immigrant population of Anglo-Saxons, Nordics and Western Europeans. In the same book he regrets the extent to which North America had seen ‘the uplifting … of the Semitic strain … in a too-much-at-ease Zion’ (1937: 117, 132). So far, so obvious – sinister rituals, the pursuit of social, political and financial power. Small wonder then that in his later years Kipling consorted with those who gave credence to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First published in 1905 and widely circulated in Europe after the 1917 Revolution, this was a forgery concocted in Tsarist Russia, where Jews were subjected to exclusion and pogroms. According to Ricketts, Kipling, who knew the Protocols to be a fake, made known to Rider Haggard amongst others his fear that an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination did exist: ‘Kipling … is of opinion that we owe all our Russian troubles, and many others, to the machinations of the Jews’ (cited in Ricketts, 1999: 352). By 1923, Ricketts continues, Kipling ‘was encouraging Haggard to write a trilogy about the Wandering Jew, who would turn out to have been responsible for most of Europe’s disorders over the past 2,000 years’ (352).2 It was at about this time that he wrote the rancorous verses ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’,3 whose curious history of long-delayed publication has been recorded by one David Noone: We do not know what God attends



20

The Unloved Race in every place Where they amass their dividends From Riga to Jerusalem.4 The threat from the Jews in Kipling’s writings can conform with the usual stereotypes, some in the vein of Julius Streicher’s portraiture, brought right up to date with the image of opulent and unwholesome Hollywood movie-moguls (see ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’). But Kipling’s anti-Semitism goes further. Cited in Harry Ricketts’s book is a letter he wrote in 1919 to a French friend about his hatred for the Germans where he contrived to merge German, Swiss and Jew into a composite figure of iniquity: Do you notice how their insane psychology attempts to infect the Universe? There is one Einstein, nominally a Swiss, certainly a Hebrew, who … comes forward, scientifically to show that, under certain conditions Space itself is warped and the instruments that measure it are warped also … the phrase that sticks in my mind is that ‘Space is warped’. When you come to reflect on a race that made the world Hell, you see how just and right it is they should decide that space is warped, and should make their own souls the measure of all Infinity … Einstein’s pronouncement is only another little contribution to assisting the world towards flux and disintegration. (cited in Ricketts, 1999: 350–1) From the turn of the nineteenth century, the archetype of the deracinated, unaffiliated, free-thinking and nationless cosmopolitan was the secular, often the socialist Jew of Europe.5 A city-dweller, an initiator of new and experimental thinking,6 a solvent of established society, a yeast within a stable system, an exemplar of modernity and its discontents, this figure was antipathetic to one who conflated flux and change with disorder and disintegration. In an essay ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’, Isaac Deutscher writes of the Jewish heretic who, by transcending Jewry, ‘belongs to Jewish tradition’, alluding to ‘those great revolutionaries of modern thought: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud’ who looked for ideals and fulfilment beyond Jewry: They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions and national cultures.




Kipling and Beyond

They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. Each of them was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future. (Deutscher, 1981: 27) This could serve as a portrait of what the anti-Semite abominated. To think about Kipling’s Judaeophobia is to think about the analyses of modern anti-Semitism. The range of such examinations is extensive, and those which locate the roots of modern anti-Semitism in capitalism and class relations (see Leon, 1950), consider the power of false projection, and advance epistemological interpretations (see Jay, 1986) seem to me to have the most compelling explanatory power. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), literary critic and polemicist, Dreyfusard, anarchist, anti-capitalist and, paradoxically for a short time a Zionist, wrote extensively on antiSemitism, characterising an anti-Semitic state of mind as one which established causal relationships between phenomena that are not related. This notion recurs in Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘Elements of Antisemitism’, where they argue that what radically sets the perceptions of the anti-Semite apart ‘is the fact that they are predicated on a radical exclusion of the reflective and critical faculties from the process of projection’ (cited in Fischer, 2007: 21). In his Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (1894), Lazare related its changing forms to changing socio-economic conditions, class interests and ideological dispositions. ‘The agrarian capitalist, in his contest against the captain of industry’, Lazare argued, ‘had embraced antisemitism’ (1995: 172) because to him the Jew was the representative of commercial and industrial capitalism; industrial and speculative capitalism became anti-Jewish because of Jewish competition; lower middle classes and small tradesmen threatened and perhaps ruined by speculation saw the Jew as a formidable juggler of capital, the destroyer of industrial and commercial capital; while the nationalists were led to consider those without a country as the most active propagators of internationalism, and hence anathema to the sacred idea of fatherland. Since the Jew, formerly outside of society, has entered into society, Lazare suggested, he had become a ‘destructive stranger’ infecting the nation-state with intellectual and moral decadence: ‘By his very



22

presence the Jew acts as a solvent; he produces disorders, he destroys, he brings on the most fearful catastrophes’ (158). Lazare’s account of the anti-Semite’s perception could have been spoken by Kipling. As to the charge that Jews have been agents of revolution, Lazare agrees that this is well-founded, describing with pride the achievements of the Jew in disseminating revolutionary ideas and participating in struggles. Although Adorno and Horkheimer did not produce a systematic analysis of anti-Semitism, they did examine various brands of antiSemitism, observing that ‘Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic reason: the concealment of domination in production’ (1979: 173), an ideological mystification whereby the grasping character of the capitalist system is obscured and deflected through directing opprobrium at the Jews’ role in the circulation process. When looking at the underlying social and psychic mechanisms where pathological projection is without reflection, without the life of reason, they invoked Freud, who saw anti-Semitism as an inner psychical reality holding sway over the reality of the world (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979). In his gloss on their writing, Martin Jay speculates that for Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘perhaps the ultimate sources of antisemitism and its functional equivalents is the rage against the non-identical that characterises the totalistic dominating impulse of Western civilization’; in this way, they go beyond a ‘psychoanalytic reading of paranoid false projections by adding an epistemological dimension to their analysis’ (Jay, 1986: 296). More recently, Zygmunt Bauman, in his essay eschewing class analysis, has written that as the Jews were emerging from ‘the visible and the invisible walls of ghettoes’ (1998: 145) into modernity, they came to signify ‘the world’s contingency, opacity, uncontrollability’ (151). In the world of nation-states they were ‘the epitome of incongruity: a non-national nation’ casting ‘a shadow on the fundamental principle of modern European order’ (153). Arguing that allosemitism – the Jew as permanent other – cannot be reduced to xenophobia or heterophobia, Bauman proposes that ‘the proper generic phenomenon of which the resentfulness of Jews is a part is proteophobia, not heterophobia; the apprehension and vexation related not to something or someone disquieting through otherness and unfamiliarity, but to something or someone that does not fit the structure of the orderly world, does not fall easily into any of the established categories […] and in the result blurs the borderlines which ought to be kept watertight’ (144). A related explanation is offered by Maren Tova Linett in Modernism, Feminism and Jewishness, where she sets out to show how this sense of the Jews’ dislocation permeates modernist literature written by both




Kipling and Beyond

male and female authors. Citing Ezra Pound’s lines – ‘with usura the line grows thick / with usura there is no clear demarcation’ – she observes that Pound had firmly associated usury with Jews in The Cantos as well as in his critical writings (Linett, 2007: 4). So too, she continues, ‘Wyndham Lewis makes clear a similar distaste for slipperiness in a diatribe against what he calls the “time school”, a group of writers and thinkers he associates with Jews and Jewishness – Bergson, Einstein, Stein, Proust – and to which Joyce despite his racial origins accidentally adhered’ (4). In Time and Western Man (1927), Linett points out that Lewis associated literature with different racial categories, writing of his ‘propensity for the exactly-defined … and the concrete’, and a repugnance for ‘surging ecstatic featureless chaos’ (4): ‘I prefer the chaste wisdom of the Chinese or the Greek, to that hot, tawny brand of superlative fanaticism coming from the parched deserts of the Ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness’ (5). Linett also quotes Maud Ellmann’s suggestion that T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism is related to his wish for fixity, his desire to banish ‘the forces of displacement’: ‘The Jews, for Eliot, represent the adulteration of traditions severed from their living speech and native soil … by banishing free-thinking Jews from his utopia, [Eliot] was attempting to banish from himself the forces of displacement’ (4).7 The most ambitious interpretation of modern anti-Semitism as secular and systematic is Moishe Postone’s ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’. Although concerned to understand the specificity of the Holocaust/Judaeocide, Postone provides insights into Judaeophobia as an ideology that emerged in the late nineteenth century when the abstract domination of capital that had caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand was misperceived as the domination of International Jewry. By this they imputed a power to Jews that is ‘mysteriously intangible, abstract and universal, different from racism in general, and the force behind apparent opposites, plutocratic capitalism and socialism as well as vulgar materialist culture, and the decline of traditional groupings, values and institutions’ (Postone, 1986: 304–5). Having observed the contradictions in modern anti-Semitism (the Jews identified with the circulation of money and communism), Postone explains anti-Semitism’s railing against many aspects of the modern, while being affirmative towards modern technology and positive with regard to industrial capital, seen as the linear descendant of ‘natural artisanal labour’ as opposed to the parasitism of finance capitalism. Postone accounts for these forms of thought by drawing on the Marxist concept of the fetish, ‘the strategic intent of which was to provide a social and historical theory of knowledge grounded in the difference



24

between the essence of capitalist social relations and their manifest form’ (307).8 I will return to the Judaeophobia in Kipling’s dream of an England for the English, but first, since this impinges on my identifying the historical consciousness and social affiliations that I see as permeating his later writing, I want to speculate on why Kipling has remained unassimilated into any of ‘the great traditions’ devised by scholars and critics – except for the ‘Kiplingites’ for whom he is the great tradition. My own view is that Kipling’s indeterminate status is a consequence of aesthetic limitations which when tied to a flight from modernity and a retreat to obscuranticism inhibit stylistic innovation, as it did not for Eliot. For other commentators, the search to identify Kipling’s gifts continues. On the one hand there are critics less concerned with his political thinking than with finding the way his writings can be read proleptically as anticipating contemporary social and cultural preoccupations. Here style is not necessarily of major concern and attention is given to matters such as the cultural hybridity of his writings (he has, according to one critic, been cast ‘as an avatar of Homi Bhabha’ [Kucich, 2007: 136]); or inscriptions of the homosocial, or displaced sexuality, or masculinity, gender relations, or constructions and experience of childhood. Jad Adams’s biography (2006) challenges perceptions of Kipling as imperialist, misogynist and racist, and focuses on the confused sexuality of ‘a great writer’ who adored men and was attracted to older and masculine women; while Don Randall’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity situates Kipling as the representative voice of the Age of Empire, his writings registering empire’s ‘professed hopes and disavowed fears’ (2001: 12, 13), and by forging a link between adolescence and transculturation in the figure of the boy, representing the contact zone between imperial Europe and its subject peoples. More interesting, I find, is Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class, where John Kucich connects Kipling’s much discussed ‘sadomasochistic preoccupations (the bullyings, beatings, and cruelty that pervade his work)’ to an aspect neglected by criticism – that is, his class politics (2007: 138). Although I cannot follow Kucich’s insistence on sadomasochism as the site of this convergence, and hence central to Kipling’s class-coded modes of solidarity and domination (171, 188), what I find compelling is Kucich’s argument that ‘Kipling was centrally concerned with rewriting social hierarchy’ by affirming middle-class authority and underwriting middle-class ideological goals, thereby displacing ‘conservative Tory models of power with a newly integrated (if highly factitious) middle-class one’ (139–40).




Kipling and Beyond

Another direction evident in contemporary Kipling criticism is towards recuperating him as a neglected modernist, and here stylistics is of major importance. It is some years since Sandra Kemp (1988) discerned modernist tendencies in Kipling’s use of narrative obscurity and his preoccupation with questions of subjectivity. Subsequently Harry Ricketts in his study-cum-biography has claimed ‘Mrs Bathurst’ as ‘the first modernist text in English’, finding in it all the defining qualities of modernism – ‘deliberate obliqueness, formal fragmentation, absence of privileged authorial point of view, intense literary self-consciousness, lack of closure’ (1999: 287–8); while Janet Montefiore in her essay ‘Latin, Arithmetic and Mastery’ maintains that ‘Kipling’s many-voiced stylistic virtuosity, mastery of the pared-down short-story … and avoidance of narratorial authority … all have strong affinities with the modernist aesthetic’ (2000: 113). Since the claim for Kipling’s modernism largely rests on the late stories, I think it important that these be scrutinised for the presence or absence of a language, a form and a style conjuring up an unsettling new time and with the power to surprise and shock. Instead what I find is a late Kipling who eschewed the volatile present by invoking the revival of an imagined pastoral social order at the moment of its passing from consciousness and the eidetic. Thus I do not consider that Kipling’s fascination for the machinery and technology of modernisation – air travel, the motor-car, cinema, radio – is a sufficient condition for designating his writing as modernist. Notably, Kipling, who embraced the servant and serving classes, military and civilian, but not ‘The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag’ (Kipling, 1996: 181), and who disregarded the proletariat, hails the product as a commodity from which the labour that went into its making is occluded. Moreover his stylistically conservative and structurally closed ‘condition of England’ fictions do not register the profound experiential and sensory changes induced by the sight and sound of new technologies. In this connection, Trotsky writing of Russian Futurism in the 1920s gave an inspired account of artistic form animated by technical innovation: Of course Futurism felt the suggestions of the city – of the tram-car, of electricity, of the telegraph, of the automobile, of the propeller, of the night cabaret … much before it found its new form. Urbanism (city culture) sits deep in the subconscious of Futurism, and the epithets, the etymology, the syntax and the rhythm of Futurism



26


Before contesting the case made for Kipling as a modernist or protomodernist, I want to make clear that this does not rest on Kipling’s recoil from contemporary life and his search for a future in an imagined past. David Harvey has referred to modernism as ‘a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to conditions of modernity produced by a particular process of modernization’ (1989: 99). This suggests a conjectural, but in no way seamless, relationship between material and technological modernisation, the altered temporal and spatial consciousness characterising modernity, and the set of artistic movements known as modernism – which has been credited with providing a vocabulary for the lived experience of social and psychic transformation, whether as celebration or lament.9 For Raymond Williams modernism was a plural literary phenomenon subsuming an ‘internal diversity of methods and emphases’; and in an important qualification to the view of modernism as necessarily politically radical, Williams pointed out: [E]ven the range of basic cultural positions within Modernism stretches from an eager embrace of modernity, either in its new technical and mechanical forms or in its equally significant attachments to ideas of social and political revolution, to conscious options for past and exotic cultures as sources or at least as fragments against the modern world, from the Futurist affirmation of the city to Eliot’s pessimistic recoil. (1989: 43)10 If, according to Williams, modernism can be said to be distinguished by its enunciation of a critical evaluation of the bourgeois social order, this spoken from a position on the right or the left, what stands out as its defining feature for him and other scholars of modernism is the break with traditional form in art, a refusal of conventional and outmoded literary expression, innovation in structure and stylistics, mutations in language – in all, a new poetics inscribed by a deliberate distance from and challenge to existing cognitive modes and morals. I want to press this point by referring to the work of the Marxist critic Adorno on modernism as a negative critique of the real, that is the world of capitalism and the regimes of the bourgeoisie (1977: 190),11 a critique that can only be effected through the artist severing social ties with, and subservience to, the social system – and Kipling as I have



are only an attempt to give new form to the new spirit of the cities which has conquered consciousness. (1957 [1924]: 166)

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Kipling and Beyond

To understand the import of late stories such as ‘“My Son’s Wife”’ and ‘A Habitation Enforced’, we need to consult the critics of another age who inhabited an intellectual environment permitting them to overlook the fact that the England of Kipling’s imagination was a fantasy, and to applaud the idealism of his love affair with an older England and the people of its countryside. Thus Bonamy Dobrée, who had no doubts in affirming that it was there that the Law was kept and community held together by a sense of responsibility (1967: 107), declared that Kipling returned to the Picts and the past in order to explore how these people had come to be like this, to live like this. But perhaps the best guide to what Jed Esty has recently called Kipling’s ‘romance with rural England’ and his ‘redemptive discourse of Anglocentrism’ (2004: 138), is T. S. Eliot’s sometimes uneasy and always measured apologia in the preface to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1942). In seeking beyond content for what is ‘permanent’ in the verse, Eliot praised Kipling as ballad maker and hymn writer, admired his vocation and craftsmanship, and commended his innovations rather than his experimentation. Observing the mutations in Kipling as a poet, Eliot sees his view of the British Empire, which was that of a stranger to England, as expanding and contracting at the same time: In his later phase England … becomes the centre of his vision. He is more concerned with the problem of the soundness of the core of empire; this core is something older, more natural and more permanent … The vision is almost that of an idea of empire laid up in heaven … The simplest summary of the change in Kipling, in his middle years, is the development of the ‘imperial imagination’ into the ‘historical imagination’. (Eliot, 1942: 27, 30) Whereas, according to Eliot, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies ‘give at once a sense of the antiquity of England, of the number of generations and peoples who have laboured the soil and in turn been buried beneath it’, and of the past as contemporary, the later stories show that because ‘highly conscious of what ought to be preserved’, he ‘is discovering and reclaiming a lost inheritance’ (32–3). What for Eliot is most important in these stories, ‘is Kipling’s vision of the people of the soil. It is not a Christian vision, but it is at least a pagan vision – a contradiction of the materialist view: it is the insight into a harmony



suggested sought saviours to sustain a social order under threat from the forces of modernity.12

with nature … What he is trying to convey is … a point of view unintelligible to the industrialized mind’ (33). Received by Dobrée, Eliot and Tompkins as redemptive, Kipling’s vision of an uncontaminated rural idyll could to other readers appear as shackled. By contrast we can consider E. M. Forster’s cold-eyed speculations on pastoralism as an escape from modernity’s afflictions. This is discussed by Jed Esty in a chapter entitled ‘Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England’ where he teases out the consciousness informing the fable by reading ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ as confronting ‘a bifurcated world’: The protagonist, who has always walked the Road and knows no other world, suddenly slips and crashes through the hedge. Once on his feet, he finds himself in a green and pleasant land cosily encircled by the hedge – a land whose citizens are unaware of the great gray road beyond. Although he develops a quick affinity for the soothing pastoral existence … he is troubled by the curiously static nature of his newfound Eden … [and] comes to appreciate the virtues of life on the Road. (2004: 23) By contrast, Kipling’s ‘“My Son’s Wife”’, written in 1913 and published in 1917, is structured according to the requirements of a morality tale that allows for no double or troubled perspective – this is a tale which J. M. S. Tompkins many years ago read as demonstrating the power of the countryside to heal the disease of city life (1959: 51). At the time that Midmore, a man about town, inherits a house and land from an aunt, he is in the grip of the Immoderate Left of Hampstead, the chattering classes who dwell on their personal relationships and devise fantasy schemes for social improvement. His rite of passage to hunting-and-shooting landlord, and husband-to-be of a solicitor’s taciturn daughter, is predetermined and proceeds with the laconic assistance of stock characters of county and countryside fiction – a genre which, for all I know, Kipling may well have initiated: the wily tenant farmer occupying a tied cottage, the loyal and motherly domestic servant who knows more than she says – both of whom live contentedly within and protected by their ordered estate, which allows for the strictly bounded feudal intimacy with the landowner – and the village idiot conceived out of wedlock and cared for in the community. Also there is the solicitor and his daughter, who although not born gentry are definitely county and as such reincarnations of the figures in Surtees’s Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities. So vulgar is the travesty of the




Kipling and Beyond

Left, and so sentimentalised the ways of the countryside, that a city– country dialogue and a Socialist–Conservative exchange are ruled out in advance, ensuring the anticipated and correct narrative closure. Stylistically the story, laden with intrusive commentary, is further coarsened by the crassest sarcasm and the broadest humour. Nothing is intimated, nuance and irony are absent. Everything is said and more than once. In a similarly ingratiating vein the mawkish ‘An Habitation Enforced’ recounts the spiritual homecoming of a rich and childless American couple. Here an antiquated aristocracy are represented with respectful regard for their quaint, traditional ways, a legacy to the new bourgeois blood about to supplant them. It emerges that before emigrating to America, the wife’s family had hailed from the very place where she and her husband were destined to settle; troubled souls who could get no satisfaction from city life are healed, their union is at last blessed; and as if to the manor born, they spontaneously perform the noblesse oblige incumbent on their newly acquired elevation to the rank of squires. For me these manipulated and manipulative tales are celebrations of a condition where the future lies in the past. Reactionary seems the most fitting term for fictions that are indelibly etched by and consolidate an imagined English exceptionalism. At this point I should admit that the one Kipling fiction I warm to, even if tepidly, is the novel deemed even by admirers to have failed – The Light That Failed – not that it does not also bear the stamp of violently expressed masculine imperial heroism, class snobbery, a narrow perspective on craftsmanship, and a predetermined ending. All the same, the book does obliquely acknowledge the inflictions, temptations, gratifications and energies of the city, this time inhabited by aspirant artists and the flotsam and jetsam of the Anglophone newspaper world. In this ambience, Dick Heldar gains a reputation from the sketches he had made as a non-combatant in the Sudan – the Mahdi rebellion that is a mere backdrop in the novel, came to be enshrined within the memory of colonial resistance.13 Here in London his childhood sweetheart, Maisie, once a spirited young girl in rebellion against authority, now a dispirited artist-manqué cowed by the opinion of the art establishment, struggles with her painting. As to the meagreness of Maisie’s talents, we have only the negative estimates of her idle and opportunist French tutor and of Dick Heldar, one himself a failure, the other a successful populist hack, neither reliable judges of artistic excellence. But if only Maisie’s paintings had been revealed as those of a Gwen John, and if only the servant and amateur-prostitute



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Bessie, by slashing and smudging Dick Halder’s competent and conventional ‘Melancholia’, had turned it into a work of expressionist art – then the novel could perhaps have been hailed as moving towards modernism. Negative critiques of Kipling’s writings may be met with dismay, even hostility, by the many common readers for whom his prose and poetry have spoken to their hearts and minds, as well as academic enthusiasts who receive his work as innovative and generative. Kipling’s popularity in the old Soviet Union – where Stalinist orders had grotesquely distorted literary standards and in-your-face patriotic-verse was favoured – or the influence of Kipling’s demotic verse on Brecht, are routinely cited as evidence of Kipling’s universal appeal and ecumenical sympathies. Other audiences recoil from his proclivity for nudging the reader into compliance with an embedded point of view, his drawing attention to the carefully planned forthcoming twist and surprise, his intrusions of lower-class bad taste into the higher grief of the genteel (see ‘The Gardener’), his patent manipulation of plot and imposition of ideologically ordained endings. Such resistance is apparent when Christopher Ricks, elaborating on the meaning of ‘bull’ – sometimes defined as ‘A blunder, or inadvertent contradiction of terms, for which the Irish are proverbial’ – has this to say of Kipling: at its best it [the bull] is an act of principled self-defence, of guise and guile … So there is something odious about the bull when it is wielded by the powerful … Take the opening of Kipling’s ‘How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin’: ‘Once upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-Oriental splendour.’ This, with its more-than-occidental superiority, is too thick with the prejudice that an island inhabited by a Parsee is, to our intents and purposes, uninhabited. How the Bull Got His Thick Skin, Just so. (1993: 199) In Edward Said’s unfinished, elliptical, sometimes recondite and always perturbing meditations on late style, he considers how the work and thought of great artists in old age or near the end of their lives, ‘acquire a new idiom’. This can reflect ‘a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity’, or it can inscribe ‘a nonharmonious, nonserene tension’, stirring up anxiety, tampering ‘irrevocably with the possibility of closure’, ‘unreconciled, uncoopted by a higher synthesis’, intransigent, and without




Kipling and Beyond

transcendence (2006: 6–13). Late style, as Said observes, has affinities with literary modernism. As I receive Kipling’s writings, irreparably marred by thematic assertion, rhetorical coercion and enforced closure, the antiquated stylistics emerges as that of an author whose alienation from the advancing cosmopolitanism and volatility of the contemporary world made him a stranger to the times. Neither at home within modernity, nor a modernist, I see him as a writer in retreat from the complexities of the modern to a place where boundaries were fixed, a place from which the Jew appeared as sign and symbol of entropy. Notes 1. Also see Claire Clairborne Park’s review (2003) of David Gilmour’s biography, in which she critically analyses Gilmour’s treatment of Kipling’s anti-Semitism. 2. Ricketts adds that one can ‘increasingly see anti-Semitic elements beginning to enter his own work’ (1999: 352). Citing Kipling’s poem ‘The Waster’ (1930), he calls it an ‘adroit satire on the English public-school code’, its ‘racist’ verses ‘[flaunting] its prejudice in its refrain, by replacing the rhymes “the Jew”, “the Hun” at the end of successive stanzas with “etc”’ (382). Of ‘The Church That Was at Antioch’ (Limits and Renewals, 1929), in which the Roman Chief of Police declares, ‘Israel is a race to leave alone. It abets disorder’, and the story proves him right, Ricketts remarks that is at heart deeply anti-Semitic (381–2). See also, Park (2003) and Ricks (1988), where he discusses Lionel Trilling’s exchange with Eliot on Kipling’s anti-Semitism and provides his own critique of Eliot’s anti-Semitism. 3. For the full text of ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’ and the circumstances of its publication, see www.heretical.com/miscella/kipling2.html. 4. In response to my request for a gloss on the whole poem, Deirdre Levinson Bergson sent me the following spirited account: ‘In the autobiographical story, “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” the reader is meant to accept without question that no blame attaches to Punch’s parents for depositing their two small children in England, to be lodged with total strangers for the next five years of Papa’s term of service. That is the done thing. “We are only one case among hundreds, said Papa bitterly”. Punch bears his father no grudge for abandoning him to a life of almost unrelieved misery. Or so Kipling, writing this story some eighteen years later, would have us believe, just as he would have himself believe. “If I was with my father”, says Punch when he is sent to a day-school attended by low-class boys, including two Jews and a negro, “I shouldn’t speak to those boys. He wouldn’t let me. They live in shops ... where their fathers live and sell things”. Standing indeflectably by the notions his father inculcated in him in his infant years, the little boy thus defends himself against his unbearable feelings about the father who, unlike the fathers of his despised schoolmates, won’t have his son live with him. The 23-year-old Kipling evidently knows no more about Punch’s true feelings than Punch knows. More than forty years on comes “The Burden”. By that time all Palestine was under British rule, which consequently had to bear the burden of the strife between the increasingly aggressive Jews and



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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

the outraged Arabs. No doubt that is what occasioned the poem, but that isn’t its subject. Kipling’s argument here, as it lurches from the Biblical epigraph to the final stanza, is that the Jews have displaced the blame for their ancient loss of Jerusalem upon the “burthened Gentiles”, who accordingly “Must bear the weight of Israel’s hate”, whereas the guilt properly rests upon their founding father, Abraham, that coward, who “was not brave enough” to do the right thing by his bondsmaid. “He wrought thy woe, Jerusalem.” But whose father was it who sent his five-year-old son far away from his idyllic home, his Jerusalem, to a place where he learnt such “Hate, Suspicion, and Despair” that, as the narrator observes in the final sentence of “Baa Baa, Black Sheep”, not “all the Love in the world” could subsequently wholly repair the damage? Let Kipling reflect on his own lousy father, I say, and leave Abraham to us. Damn right it doesn’t pay to interfere with Cohen of Jerusalem.’ See Jacobs (2001). Founded in Tsarist Vilna (Vilnius) in 1897, the Jewish Labor Bund became a mass movement among the Jews of Eastern Europe. A social democratic party, it opposed both Soviet Communism and Zionism. See also Hofmeester (2004: 243), where she quotes from a French labour activist: ‘Jews have double the right to be revolutionaries.’ Slezkine (2004) examines Jewish confrontations with secularism which he sees as a characteristic of modernism. Slezkine argues that the skills the Jews had been obliged to adopt over many centuries as ‘service nomads’ made them adept at capitalist enterprise as well as science, medicine, law and journalism. Moreover, because of the limited success of Jewish emancipation, the young were predisposed to reject their parents’ way of life, and to be drawn towards revolution. Linett also writes: ‘Like Lewis’s chaotic Eastern Jews, the Jews of feminist modernism cross more boundaries than those of national identity. They also fail to fit properly into categories of race, class, gender, and even religion. As this study demonstrates, they signal multiple boundary-confusions: poor workers paradoxically suggest greed, young people are burdened with history, the “ancient race” conjures both timelessness and modernity, and Jewish male characters are feminized’ (2007: 5). Underlying this, Postone argues, is Marx’s analysis of the commodity as expressing, veiling and objectifying social relations so that they appear as natural. Naming anti-Semitism as a pernicious fetish form, the forms of social relations objectified, though remaining bound to the forms of appearance, Postone writes: ‘When one examines the specific characteristics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism – abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility – it is striking that they are all characteristics of the value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx. Moreover this dimension, like the supposed power of the Jews, does not appear as such, but always in the form of a material carrier, the commodity’ (1986: 308). Fredric Jameson has proposed that if modernisation is something that happens to the base, and modernity ‘describes the way “modern people feel about themselves”’, then modernism can be seen as ‘the form the superstructure takes in reaction to that ambivalent development’ (1991: 310); see also his A Singular Modernity (2002). Tony Pinkney, in the introduction to Williams’s The Politics of Modernism (1989), writes, ‘In remaining anti-bourgeois, its representatives either choose




Kipling and Beyond

the formerly aristocratic evaluation of art as a sacred realm above money and commerce, or the revolutionary doctrines, promulgated since 1848, of art as the liberating vanguard of popular consciousness. Mayakovsky, Picasso, Silone, Brecht, are only some examples of those who moved into direct support of Communism, and D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound of those who moved towards Fascism, leaving Eliot and Yeats in Britain and Ireland to make their muffled, nuanced treaty with AngloCatholicism and the Celtic twilight’ (4). 11. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes: ‘it is precisely as artefacts, as products of social labour, that they [artworks] also communicate with the empirical experience they reject and from which they draw their content … Even the most sublime artwork takes up a determinate attitude to empirical reality by stepping outside of the constraining spell it casts’ (1997: 5). 12. Interestingly, Gramsci, who has been credited with or discredited for advancing a position of literary functionalism, at one time argued for art’s mobilising counter-hegemonic energies; and although he was subsequently to modify his position, he gave an enthusiastic reception to Futurism for the iconoclastic hostility of its forms to the mummified traditions of bourgeois art, a position, according to David Forgacs, that reveals his affinity with pro-avant-garde positions in the Soviet Union at that time (Gramsci, 1985: 71–2). 13. The Mahdi rebellion had overthrown British military occupation, during which General Gordon was killed. This was followed by the subsequent destruction of Khartoum by the British at the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

Works cited Adams, Jad (2006) Kipling. London: Haus Publishing. Adorno, Theodor W. (1977) ‘Commitment’, in Aesthetics and Politics, by Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács. London: New Left Books, pp. 177–95. —— (1997) Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, newly translated and edited and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone Press. —— and Max Horkheimer (1979 [1944]) ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, pp. 168–208. Bauman, Zygmunt (1998) ‘Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern’, in Modernity, Culture and ‘The Jew’, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus. Oxford: Polity Press, pp. 143–56. Cheyette, Bryan (1993) Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1975–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1996) ‘Neither “black” nor “white”’, in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin. London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 31–41. Deutscher, Isaac (1981 [1968]) The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. London: Merlin Press. Dobrée, Bonamy (1967) Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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Eliot, T. S. (1942) ‘Rudyard Kipling’, in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. London: Faber, pp. 5–36. Esty, Jed (2004) Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fischer, Lars (2007) The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, Antonio (1985) ‘Marinetti the Revolutionary?’ in Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 49–51. Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobson, J. A. (1988 [1902]) Imperialism. London: Unwin Hyman. Hofmeester, Karin (2004) Jewish Workers and the Labour Movement: a Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London and Paris, 1870–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Howe, Stephen (1993) Anticolonialism in British Politics: the Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jacobs, Jack (ed.) (2001) Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: the Bund at 100, Foreword by Feliks Tych. New York: New York University Press in association with the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw). Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. —— (2002) A Singular Modernity. London: Verso. Jay, Martin (1986) ‘The Jews and the Frankfurt School’, in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes. New York: Holmes and Meier, pp. 287–301. Kemp, Sandra (1988) Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. Oxford: Blackwell. Kipling, Rudyard (1891) Life’s Handicap. London: Macmillan. —— (1937) Something of Myself. London: Macmillan. —— (1970 [1891]) The Light that Failed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —— (1987 [1906]) Puck of Pook’s Hill. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —— (1996 [1891]) ‘The English Flag’, in The Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Ltd., pp. 181–3. Kucich, John (2007) Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Lazare, Bernard (1995 [1894]) Antisemitism: Its History and Causes. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Leon, A. (1950) The Jewish Question: a Marxist Interpretation. Mexico: Ediciones Pioneras. Linett, Maren Tova (2007) Modernism, Feminism and Jewishness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montefiore, Janet (2000) ‘Latin, Arithmetic and Mastery: a Reading of Two Kipling Fictions’, in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 112–36. Moore, Julian (2006) ‘Gehazi’, http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_gehazi_moore.htm (accessed 31 July 2009). Park, Claire Clairborne (2003) ‘Artist of Empire: Kipling and Kim’, Hudson Review 55(4): 537–61. Pick, Daniel (1998) ‘Powers of Suggestion: Svengali and the Fin-de-Siècle’, in Modernity, Culture and ‘The Jew’, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus. Oxford: Polity Press, pp. 105–25.




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Postone, Moishe (1986) ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’, in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes. New York: Holmes and Meier, pp. 302–14. Randall, Don (2001) Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ricketts, Harry (1999) The Unforgiving Minute: a Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus. Ricks, Christopher (1988) T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber and Faber. —— (1993) Beckett’s Dying Words: the Clarendon Lectures, 1990. Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press. Said, Edward (2006) On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon. Slezkine, Yuri (2004) The Jewish Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tompkins, J. M. S. (1959) The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen. Trotsky, Leon (1957 [1924]) Literature and Revolution. New York: Russell and Russell. Wells, H. G. (1997 [1909]) Tono-Bungay, ed. Bryan Cheyette with biographical preface by Patrick Parrinder. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Williams, Raymond (1989) The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney. London: Verso.



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How ‘The White Man’s Burden’ Lost its Scare-Quotes; or Kipling and the New American Empire Judith Plotz

We are poor little lambs Who have lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa! We are little black sheep Who have gone astray! Baa! Baa! Baa! ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’ (lyrics by Meade Minniferode and Rudyard Kipling)

Kipling redivivus Ever since its founding in 1909, the Whiffenpoof Society, Yale’s a capella singing group, has been identified by a signature tune, titled ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’ but recognisable to readers of Kipling as a partial redaction of ‘Gentleman Rankers’. The Yale version contains some minimal sweetening of the original, notably substitutions of ‘gentleman songsters’ for ‘gentleman-rankers’ and lambkin noises (‘Baa! Baa! Baa!’) for cynical snorts (‘Baa! Yah! Bah!’). According to Whiffenpoof tradition, an earlier sung version of Kipling’s poem had been circulating in Ivy League musical circles at the turn of the twentieth century, ‘composed (of all things) by a Harvard man … Guy H. H. Skull, Harvard class of 1898’ (Howard, n.d.), but it was not specifically adapted to the Yale group’s needs until one winter evening in 1909 in Mory’s Temple Bar, a private club, when two seniors of the ‘founding Five’, Meade Minniferode and George Pomeroy, unveiled the now-famous introduction: From the tables down at Mory’s, to the place where Louis dwells, To the dear old Temple Bar we love so well, Sing the Whiffenpoofs assembled ... 37



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Kipling and Beyond

Anyone familiar with Kipling’s poem can appreciate how these new words transmute the cynicism of the old barrack-room at some forsaken outpost of the British Empire to the atmosphere of Mory’s … The bitterness disappears in the Whiffenpoof Song … The whole spirit of the song is changed to a light and playful humor in perfect keeping with the name and the mood of the Whiffenpoofs of 1909. When we sang it for the first time that evening at Mory’s we knew that was IT! One can almost hear Lohmann’s characteristic exclamation: ‘Gentlemen, this is immense!’ ‘This’, cried another ‘should be our national anthem!’ (Howard, n.d.) This souvenir of Yale 1909 suggests Kipling’s popularity among American elites at play at the turn of the twentieth century. It is more surprising to note, however, that Kipling has regained his old role at the turn of the twenty-first. He is once more a powerful cultural presence in America, especially among opinion-makers in journalism and policy studies. Kipling is being regularly invoked among American readers not as the author of that perennial British favourite ‘If’, but for the same text that he offered to the United States in 1899, ‘The White Man’s Burden’.1 More than a century after this gift, the poem is once more frequently cited and respectable among American and Anglo-American writers and readers, as Brantlinger, Foster and others have cogently noted. In this chapter, I examine some of the ramifications of Kipling writing in his most imperial mode. ‘The White Man’s Burden’, with the subtitle ‘1899 The United States and the Philippine Islands’, was composed by Kipling in 1899 to sway American public opinion – especially the Senate – to confirm a treaty annexing the Philippines in the wake of the US victory over Spain in the Spanish–American War. Even before the poem was written, Kipling’s urgent letters of late 1898 revealed his intense conviction that Americans must shoulder ‘the White Man’s Work’ to assume ‘The White Man’s destiny’: ‘In plain English, if you don’t annex and administer the Philippines, you ought to be hung’ (Kipling, 1990: 344, 347). The hortatory poem appeared simultaneously in three American publications on the eve of the 6 February Senate vote on the treaty: McClure’s Magazine for February 1899 and the New York Tribune and San Francisco Examiner of 5 February 1899. There was fierce opposition to the annexation both from the new Philippine Republic under the revolutionary leader President Emilio Aguinaldo and from indignant Americans,



The Whiffenpoofs’ chronicle continues:

including Mark Twain, William James and Andrew Carnegie. But President McKinley and the imperial party were unshakeable in their conviction. A night in prayer convinced the President that ‘God Almighty’ specifically wanted the Philippines to be a US colony; and McKinley’s Senate ally Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana likewise had assurances from Above: ‘God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic people for a thousand years for nothing … He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples’ (Foster, 2001: 123). The history of the Philippine insurgency (also known as the Philippine–American War) was long and gory. It lasted officially from 1899 until 1902 but bitter fighting actually continued through years of so-called ‘banditry’ until 1914. It led to the deaths of 4,200 US soldiers and a large but uncertain number of Filipinos; the lower estimate is 250,000, the high estimate a million. This ‘savage war of peace’, as Max Boot characterised it in Kipling’s fierce phrase, broke down the widespread Philippine resistance through the systematic destruction of villages, the burning of crops, the resettlement of large populations in concentration camps, and sanctioned torture, including the so-called ‘water cure’, a precursor to water-boarding of more recent days.2 The striking historical parallel with the Iraq War may partly explain the reintroduction of Kipling into serious contemporary imperial discourse. ‘The Iraq operation most resembles the conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902’, Michael Ignatieff observed in 2003: ‘Both were wars of conquest, both were urged by an ideological elite on a divided country and both cost much more than anyone had bargained for. Just as in Iraq, winning the war was the easy part’ (2003b). Indeed, during his October 2003 visit to the Philippines, President Bush himself noted the connection between the 1898 American ‘liberation’ of the Philippines and American plans for Iraq. ‘Bush Cites Philippines as a Model in Rebuilding Iraq’ headlines the New York Times story in which David Sanger reports that ‘Mr. Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain.’ Though the President did emphasise that the United States had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule, using the same verb he often uses to describe American action in Iraq’, he ‘skipped past’ the fact that the occupation lasted 48 years (New York Times, 18 October 2003). Long a marker, more derided than honoured, for heavy-handed Western intervention, Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ has since 9/11 become



Kipling and the New American Empire 39

Kipling and Beyond

part of a larger stream of discourse relegitimising imperialism. Instead of being parodied and mocked,3 the poem is being seriously, respectfully and frequently invoked both through direct quotation and through indirect dependence on its line of argument. In a word, it has been flattened and normalised as a catch-phrase, losing its once-habitual scare-quotes and its one-time comic inconsequence. By August 2003 the Economist could ask in neutral prose – no irony, no inverted commas – whether the USA ‘would really be prepared to shoulder the white man’s burden across the Middle East’ (Foster, 2001: 121). It is possible that the phrase has lost its oddity and repugnance because an American Empire no longer seems an oxymoron, but has become, in Max Boot’s term, ‘attractive’ because ‘we are an attractive empire’ (Johnson, 2004b: 70) or in Dinesh de Souza’s phrase ‘the most magnanimous imperial power ever’ (Ferguson, 2004: 3). This amazing and rapid transvaluation of empire/imperialism has taken place since 9/11.4 As late as August 2001, Thomas Donnelly, a director of the Project for the New American Century,5 noted a general American aversion to imperialism: ‘not all that many people will talk about it [empire] openly. It’s discomforting to a lot of Americans. So they use code phrases like … “sole superpower”’ (Ferguson, 2004: 4). Another pre- (also post-) 9/11 cover phrase is ‘nation building’, which Ignatieff describes as coded language for ‘a distinctive new form of imperial tutelage’ (Ignatieff, 2003a: 2). But after 9/11 ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and the discourse of Empire in general ceased for many Americans to be either archaic or embarrassing. As Charles Krauthammer exulted: ‘People are now coming out of the closet on the word “empire”’; and Dinesh de Souza proclaimed: ‘Let us have more of it’ (Ferguson, 2004: 3). Other examples abound. Deepak Lal has insisted that ‘imperialism is precisely what is needed to restore order to the Middle East’ (Foster, 2001: 11) while Robert Kaplan has praised Empire as ‘the most benign form of order’ (Ferguson, 2004: 3), extolling American fighting men and women as ‘imperial grunts’ (the title of his 2005 book) who heroically bear the ‘White Man’s Burden’ (Kaplan, 2005: 1). Vice-President and Mrs Cheney’s 2003 Christmas card bore a quotation from Benjamin Franklin: ‘If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that a great empire can rise without His aid?’ (Washington Post, 26 January 2004). Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), a book which represents the American war in the Philippines as the most successful of all Western counter-insurgencies, admits that the term, ‘white man’s burden’, is embarrassing but urges the USA to ‘embrace the practice’ and ‘its imperial role unapologetically’ (13). Boot’s journalism suggests little embarrassment, however, at



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least not in such articles as ‘The Case for an American Empire’ (Weekly Standard, 15 October 2001) and ‘Washington Needs a Colonial Office’ (Financial Times, July 2003). This latter suggestion indicates that the new imperialists such as Boot take their role models from the British Empire and, like the British themselves, from the Romans: ‘The US military … are the true heirs of the legendary civil officials … of the British Empire’ (Ferguson, 2004: 3). Indeed, General Antony Zinni, commander of the US Central Command, has referred to himself (as had British military administrators in India) as ‘a modern-day proconsul, descendants of the warrior-statesmen who ruled the Roman Empire’s outlying territories’ (Ferguson, 2004: 6). Though such imperial rhetoric has been most prominent among neoconservatives, it is not confined to them. Human rights activist Michael Ignatieff, former head of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights and now the head of Canada’s Liberal Party, argues: ‘Imperialism used to be the white man’s burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary because it is politically incorrect.’ And he too emphasises – how ironically is hard to say – the niceness of American imperialism, ‘an empire lite, a global hegemony [with] free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known’ (2003b). These examples are a mere sampling but surely adequate to justify BBC correspondent Jonathan Marcus’s statement in summer 2004 that ‘Kipling’s sentiments are as relevant today as they were when the poem was written in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War’ (Foster, 2001: 121). Nowhere is Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ more actively present as a guiding principle than in Niall Ferguson’s two volumes on the British Empire and its afterglow. As their full titles indicate, Empire: the Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2002) and its American successor, Colossus: the Price of America’s Empire (2004) represent a revisionist apologia for the British Empire. They are also a Last Will and Testament of the British Empire that is both Kiplingesque and neo-colonialist. Indeed, Ferguson has cheerfully described himself as ‘a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang’ (Arnove, 2007: 26) who extols the British Empire for its noble past and even more for its pedagogical potential to train up the next great imperial power. Ferguson’s two volumes defending Empire represent a kind of elaborate explication and commentary on ‘The White Man’s Burden’. Empire and Colossus argue that the British Empire was a vastly beneficent (if not benevolent) force that brought to its domains the English




Kipling and Beyond

language, English land tenure, British banking systems, common law, Protestantism, team sports, the limited state, representative assemblies, liberal capitalism, free trade, honest government and the idea of liberty. It died a noble and self-sacrificial death, winning an exhausting pyrrhic victory against the evil empires of Germany, Italy and Japan at the price of its own survival. But even now in its last post-mortem spasm it continues to offer its legacy to its natural successor, the USA. An American successor empire can and should continue to enforce a world order based on capitalism and democracy. If the USA does not pick up the burden where the British left off, the world is certain to explode into war, chaos and tyranny (what Kipling in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ called ‘Sloth and heathen folly’). In Colossus, Ferguson sets forth his fears that the USA is ‘an empire in denial’ (2004: 13), afraid fully to assume the responsibilities of power (Senator Fulbright noted as far back as 1968 that ‘responsibilities of power’ was just American for ‘the White Man’s Burden’ [23]). To Ferguson, the USA has undeniably acquired an empire but has thus far failed to cultivate an adequately ‘imperial cast of mind’ (29) that will enable it, in terms taken from ‘The White Man’s Burden’, to send American elites, ‘the best ye breed’ abroad for the full duration of their careers ‘in patience to abide’. He fears that Americans are too comfortable, too impatient, too provincial, and too fat (‘Today, it seems, “The white man’s burden” is around his waist’ [295]) to carry out the hard work of remaking the world safe for capitalism and democracy’ (300), to endure that long slog ‘(Ah, slowly!) toward the light …’ This is no moment for Americans to mouth tired clichés about selfdetermination (‘nor call too loud on freedom / To cloke your weariness’) because the world needs the new Colossus of the American Empire and its imperial elites (210).6 Ferguson closes Colossus with a final minatory turn to the Kipling of both ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and ‘Recessional’. However much these works may seem to be written in ‘the language of a Bygone Age’ (310), his American readers must either commit to the challenge of the one or the prophetic gloom of the other or sink, in the words of ‘Recessional’, to become ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre’.

Kipling for Americans The contemporary haunting of American foreign policy discourse by Kipling’s imperial vocabulary and cadences is no novelty. The connection between Kipling and an imperial America goes back to the first decades of the twentieth century when American readers drew reassurance about their national destiny from Kipling, or, more precisely, from the



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Kipling texts they elected to read. Though Kipling had a vast international popularity during this period and was ‘the most popular writer in English, in both verse and prose throughout the English-speaking world’ (Rutherford, 1996: vii), that popularity was nowhere more exuberant than in the USA. This popularity was coincident with and instrumental in the rising Anglophile belief on both sides of the Atlantic in a world-historical destiny for the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ of English-speaking peoples.7 Yet it also managed to stoke American exceptionalism. Though it is easy enough to establish the fact of Kipling’s turn-of-thecentury popularity (colouring books, birthday books, calendars, travel books, decorative plates, milk jugs, matchbook holders, musical scores, trinkets, dolls, puzzles, films, editions),8 it is more difficult to tell what readers of the past took away from Kipling. In trying to understand how Americans during the peak of Kipling’s reputation responded to his work, I have looked at a series of textbooks expressly edited for American schoolchildren and also at three widely circulated American Kipling gift books, anthologies of Kipling’s work, published in the United States between 1909 and 1912.9 Such works, expressly designed to mould the young, open a window into the cultural work Kipling was summoned to do. From these school and gift anthologies emerges a narrow American canon. Out of 150 or so of works anthologised (selected from a field of close to a thousand), some fifteen works appear with great regularity. These are predominantly animal stories (mostly from the Just So Stories plus two Mowgli stories from The Jungle Books), machine stories, and Boy stories; the most common poem is ‘Recessional’. (The chosen works are ‘The Elephant’s Child’, ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’, ‘The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo’, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, ‘A Trip across Continent’ [an extract from Captains Courageous], ‘The Ship that Found Herself’, ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’, ‘Wee Willie Winkie’, ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ and ‘Recessional’.) This narrow American canon – certainly not the only Kipling Americans read but emphatically that which was consciously pushed by the schools – has several clear themes and implicit advice to the young persons of the young nation fronting its destiny. First, the animal fables from the Just So Stories – by far the most frequently read Kipling texts – thematise self-invention under comically distanced adversity. All foreground bold curiosity and a cheerfulbrutal no pain/no gain Lamarckian self-fashioning in what is almost a Panglossian tone. This is especially the case with the cheery brutalisation of the Elephant’s Child endlessly spanked and spanking, who endures the agonising stretching of his trunk with such happy results.




Kipling and Beyond

It is worth emphasising the Americanness of the Elephant’s Child, a character devised for his children and modelled on Kipling’s beloved ‘American daughter’ Josephine. This tale has been extraordinarily popular in the American book trade – there are two new editions and some ten other editions circulating now. Indeed, it has historically been five times as popular in the United States as in Britain (Alderson, 1992: 170–1).10 This popularity may suggest that the elephant is perceived as an American type, even as an allegory of the United States. He has the qualities Europeans from the mid-nineteenth century to the present have attributed to American children: bumptious, inquisitive, irrepressible, undeferential, fresh, and much too talkative. He is an enterprising young beast whose new-found superpower (an extension of his general nosiness) confounds his complacent elders. Like the other Just So Stories, ‘The Elephant’s Child’ is a personal moral allegory of grit and determination but it is also easily read as a flattering national allegory of the emerging power of the United States as it learns to stretch itself. The Mowgli stories, notably ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ and ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ were only slightly less popular in the USA. These are both tales honouring the solidarity of wolf pack life. Even though commentary on Kipling has frequently critiqued the brutality of jungle law and life, the American anthologies through illustrations, headnotes and careful selection depict pack life as irresistible, adorable. One collection (Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know [1909]) frankly turns the wolf pack into a parable of the American melting pot. The headnote affixed to ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ gives the account of a five-year-old German immigrant boy Bennie whose membership in the school family and in the American family is consolidated by this story: It was a great day at the School Council when the teacher read the story of ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ from ‘The Jungle Book’ to the children. They clapped their hands and Bennie clapped loudest of all. He clapped in English and in German. Bennie was interested. He wanted to be a monkey and run in the tree-tops. But when the big boys laughed at him, he changed his mind, and wanted to be a man-cub and live in a cave with the wolves. (Kipling, 1909: 7) Both the commentary and the inclusion of the monkey-bashing ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ established Bennie’s identification with the law-enforcing wolf pack – strong, handsome, good citizens – rather than with the repulsive trouble-making monkeys, Kipling’s demagogic radicals endlessly agitating for their so-called rights.



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A third strand in the American Kipling canon is the fiction of mechanism, much more popular among American than among British or Commonwealth readers. The two most frequently anthologised works valorise mechanism in ship and train. Both tales dramatise the thrill of becoming a good machine, of losing individual inwardness in the ecstasy of powerful space-annihilating mechanical process. The title of ‘The Ship that Found Herself’ is a pun that adds to the psychological process of ‘finding oneself’ the mechanical process of moulding metal (as in a foundry) and shaping it for its functionality.11 The ship ‘Dimbula’ on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York becomes herself by fusing herself into a unity of all the many disparate rivets, engines, plates, ribs, beams, stringers, screws Kipling delights in describing. Such human interest as this story possesses is simply a vivid naming of the ship’s parts – the capstan, the rivets, the cogs, the stringers, the deck beams – and the anthropomorphic creation of different voices for all the different pieces of metal: every piece had its own separate voice, in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent on it. Cast-iron, as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and wrought-iron, and ribs and beams that have been much bent and riveted, talk continuously. (Kipling, 1911a: 242) The plot, another melting-pot tale, culminates in the assimilation of these many mechanical voices into a single ‘new, big voice’ that is the ‘Dimbula’, ‘for when a ship finds herself all of the talking of the separate pieces ceases and melts into one voice, which is the soul of the ship’ (263). In the other repeatedly anthologised machine tale – the swift train journey from Captains Courageous – there is a similar suppression of individual psychology. Though the larger novel has real human interest in the interactions of spoiled rich boy and working seamen at sea, the ‘Trip Across the Continent’ is strictly about the ascendancy of mechanical and financial power. Millionaire Harvey Cheyne, the master of the American future, as Karlin (1989) has argued, hurdles unimpeded across continent in his ‘Great and gilded “Constance’ private car”’ which is ‘expedited’ over two thousand three hundred and fifty miles. The train would take precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven others meeting and passing … Sixteen locomotives; sixteen engineers; and sixteen firemen would be needed ... ‘Warn the men and arrange tanks and chutes … for Harvey Cheyne is in a hurry, a hurry – hurry,’ sang the wires. (Kipling, 1917: 268)




Kipling and Beyond

This rushing railway engine is the outward mechanical emblem of the relentless will of the great railway magnate, a Cecil Rhodes figure whose coast-to-coast railway system annuls time and space just as his companies annul all competition. These two machine tales are not simply national allegories of melting pot and abundant mechanical mastery of the material world, but also gendered allegories of steely male will. The Captains Courageous extract juxtaposes Mr. Cheyne, the multi-millionaire embodiment of will, with his limp, torpid, wife Constance (notably less steely and useful than the railway carriage, the ‘gilded Constance’, that bears her name) who moans, complains and dozes through the recordbreaking dash across country. One editor, Mary Burt, even prescribes Kipling, ‘one of the most virile writers of our age’ (1909: vii) as an antidote to the softness that ‘feminizes our [American] schools’ (viii). Though it is hardly surprising that all protagonists of all the anthologised tales (both of the narrow canon and more broadly) are male, the habitual fragility of so many of the popular boy heroes seems puzzling. Most frequently anthologised of all Kipling tales for Americans are two stories of boyhood suffering: ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’ and ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’. In the former, death overtakes the imaginative little Muhammad Din, a kind of Indian double of the Anglo-Indian Punch; in the latter, the similarly imaginative ‘Black Sheep’ is deformed for life by his treatment in the English ‘House of Desolation’. But the fragility of the young and small, surely daunting and painful for many American child readers, is presumably the pedagogical intention. Given the ascendancy of the animal and machine stories over the boy stories in these collections it is easy to perceive the subtext that says: ‘Listen American Boys: to be a human child is to be vulnerable. Better to be a wolf in a pack; better still to be a machine or a man with a will of iron.’ A word on one other feature of these collections: their sequence. Virtually all the collections open with tales of individuals in a domestic sphere and conclude with collective statements in or about a wider world. The Kipling Reader for Upper Grades, for example, opens with the story of a heroic railway apprentice (‘The Bold ’Prentice’) and ends with ‘The Ballad of East and West’ and ‘Recessional’. Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know opens with a poem in praise of childish curiosity and ends with a cycle of poems dedicated to Anglo-Saxon achievement throughout the English-speaking world: in India, Canada and the Philippines (‘The White Man’s Burden’ is the last poem). Thus these collections exhibit a pattern of movement from individual can-do to larger communal activities in which self is lost or hardened, a movement from home to a wider international sphere ‘where two



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strong men stand face to face / though they come from the ends of the earth’ and where Anglo-Saxon responsibility is assumed. The pattern that emerges is that of a translatio regni, the vision and ethic of an imperial dominion that is passing from Britain to a youthfully buoyant and curious America. These collections of works by Kipling selected by Americans for Americans build up this vision of a global role, once sustained by a now-wearied Britain (evident in the fatigued always-cited cadences of ‘Recessional’) but now devolving on the hard, masculine, united, technologically savvy young American republic, the Elephant’s Child of the nations. Anglophile early twentieth-century Americans read Kipling as a benign presider over, and well-wisher of, the United States. Kipling’s admiration, however, was guarded and would grow ever more so with the advent of World War One. Andrew Hagiioannu (2003), in particular, has noted how much Kipling even at his most indulgent saw the United States through an imperial lens, generally satirising those qualities which would impede, valorising those qualities which would promote a coming American Empire. Kipling derides as impediments to America’s international mission the mass democracy incited by journalistic openness and semi-literacy (‘Democracy ... always ruins style’ [Kipling, 2004: 91]) and organised labour but habitually idealises plutocrats, American patricians and technological processes commanded by masters of industry. In general, Kipling sardonically criticises nonimperial America, a realm of what his spokesman King in ‘Regulus’ calls ‘democracy ever getting in the way’ (Kipling, 1987a: 163). Opposed to these portraits are his fictions of the American future which reconfigure properly obedient modern American labour as ecstatic mechanism (‘.007’) and American plutocratic monopoly as global progress covering the world.

More burdens It is clear that Kipling and many of his American readers of the early twentieth century, like Niall Ferguson and the Projectors for the New American Century today, envisioned Americans as a potentially imperial people able to sway ‘the world with one foot as a man tilts a seesaw plank’ (Kipling, 1910b: 209). But Kipling feared then as Ferguson fears now that Americans might falter at the brink, lacking the stomach for this ‘thankless’ task of imposing enlightenment and prosperity in exchange for ‘blame of those ye better’ and ‘hate of those ye guard’. Naïve Americans, fed on the pretty slogans of democracy, were liable, in




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the words of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, to ‘call too loud on Freedom / To cloak [their] weariness’. Just as the annexation of the Philippines in 1899 kindled an intense US discussion, inflamed by Kipling’s contribution, of a possible American Empire, so has the Iraq intervention rekindled that imperial debate. Ferguson and other neo-conservatives have invoked Kipling to glamorise and dignify the project. But Kipling might just as plausibly be invoked to problematise it. For Kipling’s account of the burdens of Empire goes far beyond the familiar sentiments of the endlessly quoted ‘White Man’s Burden’. Though vulgar anti-imperialists have historically confused Kipling with Colonel Blimp, Kipling is anything but blind to the costs and consequences of Empire. Nobody has better sketched out ‘the structures of feeling’ (to use Raymond Williams’s term) that are required for a sustained imperial follow-through; no one has been more aware of the concomitants of imperial responsibility.12 Kipling makes clear that shouldering the burden of an empire requires submission to four grave propositions. The first burden of Empire is the denial of democracy. Empires are inherently anti-democratic and incompatible with real democracy. Indeed, just a century ago, Kipling noted that ‘the only serious enemy to the Empire, within or without, is that very Democracy which depends on the Empire for its proper comforts’ (1920: 239). As Chalmers Johnson (in Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire) and Charles Maier (in Among Empires) have made clear, empires are necessarily undemocratic abroad (‘If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made’, Lord Salisbury noted in 1873 [Ferguson, 2002: 239]). They also deform democracy at home (i.e. ‘blowback’): perhaps by cordoning off ‘overseas military and intelligence commitments from the scrutiny of representative assemblies’ (Maier, 2006: 21); sometimes as in the Roman Republic turned Empire, retaining the form of the representative assembly but eroding its substance to merely plebiscitary voting. In addition, they generate a high level of hypocrisy to maintain the illusion of democratic values: ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute imperialism pays to democracy’ (Maier, 2006: 64). Kipling’s school story ‘Regulus’ from Stalky & Co. embodies the incompatibility of Romanitas and Democracy. The school prepares its boys for imperial service, conferring Roman titles (‘lictor’) on schoolboy officials. Each will be a ‘regulus’, a common noun meaning ‘small king, ruler’, if not ‘Regulus’ himself, a rigid Roman hero valorised in one of Horace’s Roman Odes. The Ode, a high-minded depiction of imperial duty, is central to the tale as a set text for the Army Exam at which most



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of the boys are aiming. In this Romanised setting, democratic values are deemed an impediment to the imperial mission: the admired Latin teacher Mr. King (thus the ‘Rex’ to the schoolboy ‘reguli’), spokesman of the military and civil elites, speaks contemptuously of democracy as ‘eternally futile’ (Kipling, 1987a: 165), and as given to standing ‘about futilely pitying [Regulus] and getting in the way’ (163). In various Anglo-Indian tales and poems too, Kipling depicts the advocates of representative government for natives as comic buffoons (‘Pagett, MP’), as fatuous fools (the reforming Viceroy of ‘The Head of the District’ whose good intentions result in the decapitation of a Bengali babu sent to bring native rule to a martial tribe who much prefer the tough paternalistic Brits), or as sentimental ideologues who fantasise about the sweet bye and bye in which India may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone, but the idea is a pretty one … Overmuch tenderness of this kind has bred a strong belief among many natives that the native is capable of administering the country, and many devout Englishmen believe this also, because the theory is stated in beautiful English with all the latest political colours. (‘On the City Wall’; Kipling, 1987b: 233) The second burden of Empire is psychosis, the fracture of the self, even full-blown madness. All empires, especially the empires with a democratic metropole, are schizoid, simultaneously professing (and often believing in) the values of civilisation and ruling by violence. Always empires ‘are about civilizing missions … [and] also about violence and bloodshed’ (Maier, 2006: 19) with the effect that ‘Imperial ideology must always be an exercise in lofty denial’ (61). A convenient contemporary example was furnished in 2003 when Ron Ziegler, White House Press Secretary, argued that factual evidence and the ‘realitybased community’ had become obsolete: ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’ (cited in Maier, 2006: 11). Ziegler here acknowledges the double-thinking that enables illusion and the facts that contradict the illusion to coexist in the same temporarily compartmentalised consciousness. That empires rest on the hard power of the sword and the soft power of culture is a venerable axiom, famously expressed in Virgil’s description of the duty and the art of Rome: ‘Roman, these will be your arts: / to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, / to spare defeated




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peoples, tame the proud’ [pacisque imponere morem / Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos] (Mandelbaum, 1972: 160–1; Virgil, 1930: 250). Fidelity to both creates a bipolar cultural imperative impossible to rationalise. More than any other colonial writer except perhaps Fanon, Kipling is alert to the familiar paradox that has been so well captured in William Dillingham’s (2005) account of Kipling’s rhythm of overreaching heroism and breakdown. Kipling focuses repeatedly on the madness that the imperial double bind generates among those who must live with the contradiction. In his ‘In the Matter of a Private’, a tale of a hysterical soldier who murders a comrade, Kipling treats such ‘dithering, rippling hysteria’ as only to be expected: ‘If you call [the British soldier] “the heroic defender of the national honour” one day, and “a brutal and licentious soldiery” the next, you naturally bewilder him’ (Kipling, 1911d: 440). Kipling’s imperialists go crazy.13 Like Conrad’s Kurtz, Kipling’s imperial agents fall apart under the conflicting rules they must follow: they run ‘berserk’, go dumb, slide into madness. Thus Private Ortheris’s break-out, Private Learoyd’s nearsuicide, Aurelian McGoggin’s aphasic collapse, Morrowbie Jukes’s and Hummil’s descent into a paranoid nightmare world, Fleete’s bestial transformation, Kim’s breakdown, Simmon’s homicidal mania. It is for these afflicted foot soldiers, field agents of Empire, that Kipling shows the most knowing sympathy because they are every day forced to live out two contradictory mandates. To take one instance: in ‘Regulus’ the schoolboy Winton, nicknamed ‘Pater’ for his Aeneas-like loyalty to authority, with his future laid out as a middling officer in the colonial army, loses his gravitas and administers a savage ‘berserk’ beating to his best friend because that entirely kind and sympathetic friend had questioned the disciplinary beating that Winton was about to receive. (The beating itself was crazy, a punishment for failing to be in two places at one time.) Good, pious, imperial Winton, figure of Roman and British rectitude, becomes as violent as a barbarian madman (a berserker), when the impossible rules under which he serves are questioned. He breaks under the strain of having to reconcile violence with civilisation, of having to be – in the terms of this schoolboy story – a Roman and a barbarian at the same time. The third burden of Empire is dread, a sense of vertigo on the brink. Every empire has a fixation on the frontier as a place of fear and of imminent imperial disillusion. Empires are always metropolitan, great centres troubled by their periphery, always worried, always serious, sometimes paranoid. By definition the metropole is the sphere of peace or pacification while the border is the place marked by disorder,



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banditry, resistance. The border is the ‘contested fault line along which acts of violence … accumulate’ (Maier, 2006: 9) and must be policed in order to maintain peace within, repel incursions from without, and consolidate imperial identity. Kipling’s imperial stories accumulate at walls and frontiers (principally but not exclusively of the Northwest frontier) in such stories as ‘On the City Wall’, ‘On the Great Wall’, ‘With the Main Guard’, ‘Wee Willie Winkie’, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, ‘The Man Who Was’, ‘The Lost Legion’, ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’. In virtually all of these tales the frontier is the place where the Empire is unravelling; where it is being barely sustained at the price of sacrificial death and/or of dehumanisation as in the mutilation of Carnehan, the death of Dravot, and the abjection of ‘the man who was’. A coming loss is ever in view; the writing is always on the wall. The young BritoRoman centurions who arrive for duty at the edge of Empire come up against Hadrian’s Wall: ‘At some time or other the Great North Road ran under it into Valentia; but the far end of it had been blocked up because of the Picts, and on the plaster a man had scratched “Finish!”. It was like marching into a cave’ (‘On the Great Wall’; Kipling, 1993: 101). To police a frontier, as empires do by definition, is to be in constant apprehension of disaster, of the end of the world as we know it. Heroism doomed to fail on the brink of the world gives to the imperial text a note that is noble, self-dramatising and glamorous. The fourth burden of Empire is ‘glamour’, the proud self-dramatising heroism of bearing too important a fate. In a line characteristic of himself but also of all imperial eras, Matthew Arnold called the British Empire ‘the load / Well-nigh not to be borne, / Of the too vast orb of her fate’,14 for empires are always melancholy and self-pitying. Italo Calvino has imagined his great Kubla Khan contemplating both the boundless extent of his Empire and the endless prognostication of its dissolution: There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evenings … [with] the dispatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and [the emptiness] flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. (Calvino, 1972: 5)




Kipling and Beyond

All empires are conscious of the ‘“Finish!” on the plaster’ (Kipling, 1993: 101) that spooked Kipling’s young centurions. As Coetzee’s magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians notes, ‘One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era’ (1982: 133). Because Kipling fully understands that ‘finish’ is the irrevocable future, his vision of the imperial mission is always tragic, always, that is, seductively pessimistic and seductively glamorous. The Puck books, implicitly set at the end of British history (both national and imperial), set out both the pessimism and the glitter. In the three stories of Roman Britain, the young hero, Parnesius, prototype of all young imperial soldiers defending Empire’s frontiers against impossible odds, understands rationally that his Rome is a corrupt and irrational institution (‘“There is no hope for Rome”, said the Pater, at last’ [Kipling, 1993: 90]). But he chooses not to act on that knowledge. Indeed, the thesis of the Puck books is that we cannot know history; we can only live it out. Parnesius as imperial culture hero models a willed acceptance of what must be. He would say with Nietzsche: ‘My formula for greatness in men is amor fati: that one should not wish things to be otherwise, not before and not after, in the whole of eternity’ (quoted in Danto, 1980: 212). Parnesius lives out such ‘amor fati’; he keeps returning to our present to affirm the necessity of what he has done, however useless to the survival of Roman Britain.15 This position is at once a deeply irrational triumph of the will over the intellect and a seductively tragic posture.16 Even though history starring Parnesius makes no utilitarian sense, Kipling’s imperial protagonist still goes out with a glitter. The young centurion of the Thirtieth Legion keeps his glow over 1,500 years and young Una can still fall for him in 1906: A young man covered with a hoopy bronze armour all glowing among the late broom. But what Una admired beyond all was his great bronze helmet with a red horse-tail that flicked in the wind. She could hear the long hairs rasp on his shimmery shoulder plates. (Kipling, 1993: 84) Like other historical figures in the Puck books and like the plucky subalterns of Kipling’s Northwest frontier stories, Parnesius – he has no choice – has embraced his fate. The auratic godlike ‘glitter’ and ‘shining’ and ‘glowing’ that surround Parnesius and Kipling’s other imperial subjects come both from the fact that they are doomed and also from the fact that they have joyfully, self-dramatisingly embraced their fates. That fate seems attractive because their end is implicated with an



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institution so large, so melancholy, so endangered as the Empire. Even at the end of the line – with ‘finish’ written on the wall – it attracts with its promise of a kind of grandeur. In this extended gloss on ‘The White Man’s Burden’, I have offered a reinterpretation that diverges from that of Ferguson and others. For Kipling’s heritage of imperial burdens involves a danger to democracy, a cultural schizophrenia, a constant terror of the unnameable at the very borders of control, and a self-dramatising playing at tragedy: hypocrisy, madness, dread and (alas) glamour. Those buoyant Yale Whiffenpoofs back in 1909 found British Kipling a bit ‘cynical’ for their taste and therefore smoothed down his grim lyrics and Americanised the setting of their so-called ‘national anthem’. Now, a hundred years on, Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is again contending to become the new ‘national anthem’ for a triumphalist American Empire. The Whiffenpoofs of 1909 would construct for themselves a Kipling without tears but the burden of this essay is that neither Kipling nor Empire can come without tears. Whatever else the readers of the twenty-first century may say for or against Kipling, we can’t say that he didn’t warn us. Notes 1. The poem, frequently cited in this article, is too long to be quoted in full. It is readily accessible in the Definitive Edition (Kipling, 1989b) and in many other collections. It can also be easily found on the web. See in particular the excellent website of the Kipling Society: http://www.kipling.org.uk/ bookmart_fra.htm (accessed 29 June 2009). Some key phrases should be kept in mind. From stanza one: ‘Take up the White Man’s burden – / Send forth the best ye breed – / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need ...’ From stanza three: ‘Take up the White Man’s burden – / The savage wars of peace ... And when your goal is nearest / Then end for others sought, / Watch Sloth and heathen Folly / Bring all your hopes to naught.’ From stanza six: ‘Take up the White Man’s burden – / Ye dare not stoop to less – / Nor call too loud on Freedom / To cloak your weariness ...’ 2. For a full account, see Zwick (2007). 3. A long tradition of parody and co-optation of the poem began almost as soon as it appeared. For four especially cogent versions, see Gregory McNeill’s ‘The Poor Man’s Burden’ (1899), H. T. Johnson’s ‘The Black Man’s Burden’ (1899), Henry Labouchère’s ‘The Brown Man’s Burden’ (1899), and Ernest’s Crosby’s ‘The Real White Man’s Burden’ (1902). Brantlinger (2008) gives an astute account of redactions of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ from 1899 until the present. 4. Though Robert Haas, a policy planner in the State Department, floated an ‘Imperial America’ (‘from nation-state to an imperial power’ [Ferguson, 2004: 219]) as early as 2000, the great sea change occurred with the Iraq intervention.




Kipling and Beyond

5. The Project for the New American Century continues to extol and promote whatever augurs an American Empire, just as the American Empire Project continues to interrogate and oppose the same prospect. 6. Not only will the elites, of course, bear the burden. Citing Timothy Garton Ash who has noted of the American military that ‘“the white man’s burden” was visibly being borne by a disproportionate number of black men’, Ferguson commends these Afro-American soldiers as ‘the Celts of the American Empire’, recouping abroad those opportunities closed at home (2004: 210). 7. Because Cecil Rhodes (whom Kipling idolised) held that ‘the Anglo-Saxon race was the highest point of evolution in fulfillment of a divine plan’, he earnestly supported the union of all English-speaking peoples and especially urged the restoration of the Anglo-Saxon USA to the British Empire (‘Rhodes’, Encyclopedia Britannica 19: 2762). Ferguson quotes Rhodes’s plans for the Rhodes Scholarships (many to be awarded to Americans) as forming ‘a society selected for the good of the Empire’ (2002: 228). 8. Some representative titles: A Kipling Calendar (1891), The Kipling Birthday Book (1899), Kipling’s Sussex (1921), Kipling Country (1914), The Just-So Painting Books for Children (1922–3), The Just-So Song Book, Being the Songs from Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So Stories” set to Music by Edward German (1903), a dozen settings by Percy Grainger (1930). 9. I have inspected all the American collections published before 1930 which are listed in the NUC. Of the thirteen collections listed in my bibliography, only three are explicitly school texts: The Kipling Reader for Elementary Grades (1912), The Kipling Reader for Upper Grades (1912), and Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know (1909). I have drawn on these three works as well as three widely circulated gift collections: Kipling Boy Stories (1916), Songs for Youth (1925), and Kipling’s Stories for Children (1928). I would be grateful to learn of any additional collections which I have missed. 10. Readership figures are hard to come by. However, Brian Alderson’s (1992) authoritative study of all pre-1990 English-language editions of the Just So Stories indicates substantially more American than British editions of this work. Of complete editions, he cites twenty-three joint American–British editions, thirteen exclusively British editions, and forty exclusively American editions. Of the sixteen different republications he finds of ‘The Elephant’s Child’, ten are USA only, two are UK only, and four are binational. 11. The story evokes four different senses of ‘found’: (1) being well provisioned and maintained; (2) being moulded (as in a foundry), so that the mechanism can be said to be (3) established as a high functioning mechanism that runs well and that (4) has achieved self-discovery of its mission. 12. In the analysis that follows, I am especially indebted to Charles Maier’s illuminating discussion of the topology of empire in ‘Recurring Structures’ in Among Empires (2006). 13. Such mental pathology was no mere fiction; Mrinalini Singha cites an 1882 Government of Bombay Report to the effect that ‘of the British civilians sent to Bombay in the last ten years; of a total of thirty-seven, five had gone insane, seven had returned, and thirteen were in poor health’ (1995: 107). This is a 14 per cent insanity rate, a 68 per cent attrition rate, and a 49 per cent morbidity rate. Singha’s account of the Ilbert Bill Controversy obliquely



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reveals additional information about mental pathologies. She cites some heated rhetoric on the part of Anglo-Indian opponents of the Bill, a rhetoric that teeters towards paranoia. Thus: ‘Many English officers have English servant girls attached to their families in the mofussil; a native magistrate, puffed up with importance might set eyes upon one of the girls and make overtures to her. If she refused, as she probably would do, what would be easier than for this native, acting under the smart of disappointment to bring a case against the girl to be tried in his court? A few annas would bribe all the native servants of the household and we might guess the result’ (51–2). 14. ‘Heine’s Grave’; Arnold (1894: 203). 15. The subtext of the Puck books is fatalistic. ‘What else could I have done?’ (‘Cold Iron’); ‘I don’t see what else they could have done ... I don’t see what else she could have done’ (‘Gloriana’); ‘what else could I have done?’ (‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk’) is the refrain that runs through the Puck books. To know that one is doomed and to accept that fate with joy, panache and style is to be become heroic, glamorous, godlike. 16. See Morefield’s recent critique of Ignatieff’s and Ferguson’s liberal apologias for Empire. She places ‘tragedy’ at the centre of their arguments, maintaining that both emphasise the self-serving pain liberal democracies profess – a pain ennobling them and justifying them – in their repressive imperial practices. She also argues that Ignatieff and Ferguson are themselves writing in the tragic vein, ‘blindly committed to an endeavour which failed before and from all indications will fail again’ (2008: 2).

Works cited Alderson, Brian (1992) ‘Just-So Pictures: Illustrated Versions of Just-So Stories for Little Children’, Children’s Literature 20: 147–74. ‘American Empire Project’. http://www.americanempireproject.com/ (accessed 29 June 2009). Arnold, Matthew (1894) ‘Heine’s Grave’, in Poems by Matthew Arnold: Lyric and Elegiac Poems. London: Macmillan and Co, pp. 199–209. Arnove, Anthony (2007) Iraq: the Logic of Withdrawal. New York: Metropolitan Press of Henry Holt. Boot, Max (2002) The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books. Brantlinger, Patrick (2008) ‘Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and its Afterlives’, The Kipling Journal 82 (328): 39–58. Burt, Mary (1909) ‘Preface’, Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, ed. Mary Burt and W. T. Chapin. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co, pp. vii–viii. Calvino, Italo (1972) Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Coetzee, J. M. (1982) Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin. Danto, Arthur C. (1980) Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Columbia University Press. Dillingham, William B. (2005) Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferguson, Niall (2002) Empire: the Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons of Global Power. New York: Basic Books.




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—— (2004) Colossus: the Price of America’s Empire. New York: Penguin. Foster, John Bellamy (2001) Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance. New York: Monthly Review Press. Haas, Robert A. (2001) ‘Imperial America’, paper presented at the Atlanta Conference, 11 November 2000, www.brook.edu/views/articles/haass/2000imperial. htm (accessed 22 October 2001). Hagiioannu, Andrew (2003) The Man who would be Kipling: the Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Howard, J. M. (n.d.) ‘An Authentic Account of the Founding of the Whiffenpoofs’, http://www.whiffenpoofs.com/storage/Whiffenpoofs_History.pdf (accessed 11 May 2010). Ignatieff, Michael (2003a) Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Toronto: Penguin Canada. —— (2003b) ‘The American Empire: the Burden’, New York Times Magazine, 5 January. Johnson, Chalmers (2004a) Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt and Co. —— (2004b) The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books of Henry Holt. Kaplan, Robert (2005) Imperial Grunts: the American Military on the Ground. New York: Random House. Karlin, Daniel (1989). ‘Captains Courageous and American Empire’, Kipling Journal 251: 11–21. Kipling, Rudyard (1909) Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, ed. Mary Burt and W. T. Chapin. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. —— (1910a) From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel Part I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1910b) From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel Part II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1911a) The Day’s Work. Part I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1911b) The Day’s Work. Part II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1911c) In Black and White. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1911d) Soldiers Three and Military Tales. Part II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1912a) The Kipling Reader for Elementary Grades. New York and Chicago: D. Appleton & Co. —— (1912b) The Kipling Reader for Upper Grades. New York and Chicago: D. Appleton & Co. —— (1916) Kipling Boy Stories. Chicago: Rand, McNally Co. —— (1917) Captains Courageous. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1920) Letters of Travel 1892–1913. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— (1925) Songs for Youth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page. —— (1928) Kipling’s Stories for Children, illustrated by Lloyd Osborne. New York: J. H. Sears and Co. —— (1937) Something of Myself. New York: Scribner’s Sons. —— (1987a) The Complete Stalky & Co., ed. Isabel Quigley. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. —— (1987b) The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.



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—— (1987c) Plain Tales from the Hills, ed. Andrew Rutherford. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. —— (1989a [1897]) ‘Recessional’, in Rudyard Kipling: Complete Verse: Definitive Edition. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, p. 327. —— (1989b [1899]) ‘The White Man’s Burden: the United States and the Philippine Islands’, in Rudyard Kipling: Complete Verse: Definitive Edition. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, pp. 321–3. —— (1990) The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. II, ed. Thomas Pinney. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. —— (1993) Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, ed. Donald Mackenzie. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. —— (2004) The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. V, ed. Thomas Pinney. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Maier, Charles S. (2006) Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Mandelbaum, A. (trans.) (1972) The Aeneid of Virgil: a Verse Translation. New York: Bantam Books. Morefield, Jeanne (2008) ‘Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff’, Theory and Event 11(3): 1–20. http://muse. jhu.edu.proxygw.wrlc.org/journals/theory_and_event/v011/11.3.morefield. html (accessed 20 March 2009). ‘Project for the New American Century’, http://www.newamericancentury.org/ (accessed 29 June 2009). ‘Rhodes’ (1987) The Encyclopedia Britannica. Vol. XIX. London: Benton, 1968; Oxford University Press, pp. 272–3. Rutherford, Andrew (1996) ‘General Preface’ to Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. vii–xi. Singha, Mrinalini (1995) Colonial Masculinities: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Virgil (1930) The Aeneid, ed. J. W. Mackail. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zwick, J. (2007) Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the AntiImperialist League. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing.




3 Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney

The time has come to set aside childish things. Barack Obama, ‘Inaugural Address’, January 2009 When I was a child, I spake as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. I Corinthians, 13:11, King James Bible Take up the White Man’s burden— Have done with childish days— The lightly offered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers! Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once characterised the Bush administration’s attitude to empire as making a virtue of arrested development. ‘George W. Bush as boy-hero, speaking the language of hunting down his prey, Osama bin Laden as the named enemy’, Spivak remarked, ‘belongs to the semiotic field of the Wild West: “we’ll get him dead or alive”, or, as he said to the Congress on September 22, 2001: “If you are not with us, you are with the terrorist.” The boy-hero can redefine democracy – predicated on the possibility of responsible opposition – as feudalism’ (Spivak, 2002: 62). The cowboy president who shoots first and considers the consequences later, if at all, behaves in colonial space 58



Empire’s Children

as if on a frontier in which boy heroes act up, act out, and act at will without fear or responsibility. Kipling too gives us boy heroes of empire in his fiction. As Spivak comments in the same essay, ‘Kipling’s text wins assent by figuring the imperialist as child’ (62). However, there is a difference between Kipling’s child-imperialist as a strategy through which to invite readers to delight in empire as the Great Game, and George W. Bush’s representation of the President of the United States as perpetually starring in his own Hollywood Western. Bush may have originally succeeded in garnering ‘mass approval by figuring the Empire as the Wild West’, as Spivak observes (62), but the failure of this sleight of hand as imperialist policy has been all too evident in the ensuing years. Bush’s newly elected successor even drew attention to this very gap between rhetoric and what was required by political circumstance in his inaugural address, declaring that the time had now come ‘to set aside childish things’ (Obama, 2009: 1). The biblical allusion may be heard as especially addressed at the outgoing President with his simplified and essentialist notions of good and evil. Kipling’s boy heroes are not Bush-league. Canny about the demands of colonial administration, and aware of the constraints upon imperialist ambition and achievement, Kipling distinguishes sharply between able servants of empire and the ineffective or useless. Kim’s particular brand of imperial childhood invites approval precisely because it is set off against other forms of incomplete or less-than-assured masculinity that serve as foils. In Kim and in a number of short stories, Kipling carefully distinguishes between the kinds of territory or territorial claims within which such an approved form of youthful masculine subject might or might not be achieved. It is Kipling’s great gift to be able to show the limits as well as the accomplishments of empire. His treatment of imperial masculinity is similarly nuanced. The most profoundly unconfessable vulnerabilities that trouble the masculine subject of empire echo in his texts, often in the interstices or between the lines. That which from a manly point of view can never be owned up to or confessed often fissures Kipling’s texts in the form of eloquent silences. Displacements abound in Kipling’s project, which is in its textuality seductively akin to dream-work.1 In writing Kim, Kipling in a sense gave himself the childhood he failed to have. The first piece of relevant evidence for this thesis is that the novel represents, on Kim’s behalf, the years of childhood and early adolescence that Kipling spent outside of India in England. Second, in being sent to England away from his parents and home at so young an age, subjected to what he experienced as



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Kipling and Beyond

a harsh and abusive environment, Kipling faced the common (middleclass) colonial predicament of being forced to grow up much too soon. We might read Kim as the compensatory substitute for an unwritten autobiographical narrative, one that could be called The Boy Forced to Grow Up Too Soon. Kim is clearly a fantasy, in the mode of Freud’s understanding of art and literature as wish fulfilling day-dreams (Freud, 1991). Freud’s may be a reductive understanding of art but an adequate account of certain kinds of escapist popular fiction, such as James Bond novels with which Kim shares some features (the invincible roaming of the world in glamorous spy adventures). The kind of childhood Kipling constructs for Kim is remote from the conditions – not charmed and charming conditions but ones of misery and hardship – faced historically by children forced to live on the street. Moreover, instead of directly confronting the suffering and emotional ambivalences of his own exilic childhood, and exile from childhood, Kipling chooses to immunise himself from the pain of such reminiscences through the fabrication of a fantasy childhood. Such a sentimental vision of childhood as a marvellous space of freedom and infinite possibility – as opposed to a place of coercive discipline and deprivation – has elements of kitsch or contrived authenticity, to be sure. We might say the same about William Blake’s vision of innocence in Songs of Innocence, all laughing children on the echoing green, however sinisterly shadowed this vision may be by the hardships of Songs of Experience. That said, this compensatory and retrospective fiction of childhood nonetheless may be shown to coincide, even if tangentially, with what Mannoni sees as typical of the psychology of the colonial settler (Mannoni, 1956). Moreover, neither Kim nor Kim entirely conceals anxiety and vulnerability, this being a matter of Kipling’s strength as an artist. Mannoni distinguishes between the European subject at home and at home with himself, so to speak, and the colonising subject in terms of the latter’s difficulties in accepting manly maturity. For Mannoni, the settler as a type is one who is implied to have difficulties adjusting to the loss of his childhood. This, Mannoni maintains, leads the colonising type to seek alternative, fantasised worlds where the coloniser can play at still being amongst what he sees as children (namely natives), these disempowered others constituting a site of colonial projections. Mannoni offers the fictional examples of Crusoe whimsically playing with Friday and Prospero with Caliban and Ariel in exotic environments. Mannoni further implies that the colonial has difficulty in accepting the Caliban aspects of human nature, and observes: ‘But man



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is both Ariel and Caliban; we must recognize this if we are to grow up [...] and if my analysis is correct no one becomes a real colonial who is not impelled by infantile complexes which were not properly resolved in adolescence’ (Mannoni, 1956: 104). Moreover, as Mannoni notes, the coloniser exists in relation to the colonised as one who occupies a position of dominance in this game or Great Game of childhood sustained or regained. He states: What the colonial in common with Prospero lacks, is awareness of the world of Others, a world in which Others have to be respected. This is the world from which the colonial has fled because he cannot accept men as they are. Rejection of that world is combined with an urge to dominate, an urge which is infantile in origin and which social adaptation has failed to discipline. (108) In psychological terms, it may be surmised that the unwelcome loss of childhood is mastered through repeating childhood on a fantasy level while at the same time the vicissitudes of childhood and of growing up are averted through dominating and controlling the recreated childhood scene in such a way that the coloniser is no longer subject to the painful vulnerabilities he once experienced through loss or helplessness. Mannoni sheds light on the European’s desire to find non-Europeans childlike in their seemingly willing dependency upon their colonisers. The Europeans who seek empire as their theatre of action, he says, are avoiding their own sense of inferiority and enjoying a childlike sense of mastery over an infantilised colonial other. It should not surprise us, in Mannoni’s terms, that Kim continues to delight by recruiting readers to an imaginary Great Game of empire through the protagonist’s boyishly enthusiastic eyes. Spivak notes that Kim, like Tagore’s Gora after him, is a ‘resident alien’ – not a native but a product of the British Raj, its occupation, military presence, and efforts at colonial administration and command of commerce in India. When the resident alien can pass as a native, as a true child of the bazaar, fathered and mothered, as it were, by a heterogeneous array of ‘local’ Asian or Oriental types, then his entitlement to be in India, and of India, is not supposed to be in doubt. It is not that cultural hybridity and cross-cultural allegiances are automatically untenable for the European, as if hybridity were merely a matter of Westernisation on the part of the colonised with respect to an ideology that equates Westernisation with progress and maturation. Rather, the difficulty is one of what it means to try and occupy the positions of coloniser and native at once.




Kipling and Beyond

In Kim, Kipling indicates that there are different approaches to childrearing gathered together in colonial space. The harsh British approach is to make a Man of the child, as Father Victor repeatedly asserts, for example: ‘“You’ll live to be grateful to your friend the Red Bull yet. We’ll make a man of you at Sanawar”’ (Kipling, 2002: 83). We are told that the regimental red bull is ‘the sign of War’ (70), and Kim makes no secret of the fact that the British model represents a quasi-militaristic approach to education. It is as if Kim from the British point of view is to be taught less how to become the citizen of a peaceful nation than how to become a toughened soldier in the service of imperialism. Beyond this, the question of educating and civilising as a breaking/breaking-in process – arguably an ‘enabling violation’2 – is broached through the repeated metaphor of Kim as colt to be trained. Here, the British share a collaborative understanding with Mahbub Ali, the red-bearded Muslim horse trader from beyond the Border, a representative of the wilderness that lies beyond the frontier. Within Mahbub Ali’s discourse, Kipling has instantiated in miniature a broader Islamic notion of politics. Karen Armstrong notes: ‘In the west the word “politics” derived from the Greek polis (“city”), a static administrative unit, but the Islamic equivalent was siyasat, which literally meant “taming a wild horse”, a process implying a forceful struggle to bring out an inherent perfection’ (Armstrong, 2000: 255). Certainly, the pedagogical ideology in Kim pertains to this political perfectibility of the useful subject. However, what is also implied is that the boy has to lose a natural freedom in order to be of service to his masters and therefore go on to take his place amongst them. There is the sense in Kim that the state of nomadic, forceless freedom may actually be the state of perfection, from the child’s point of view at least, although what averts this is Kim’s general willingness to be of constant service, an untaught, spontaneous willingness, together with his conscripted acceptance that it is his fated and unquestionable inheritance to serve the Empire with a militaristic obedience (the two not being the same thing). Kim’s strange allegiance to the Mavericks, and his quest to find their sign, the logo of the red bull in a green field, crystallises this contradiction. Mavericks are unbranded cattle, and this pertains to the not owned status of Kim whereby he may have multiple fluid loyalties, rootless cosmopolitan ones, as ‘Friend of all the world’. Given this, bizarrely, the Maverick status of ‘no logo’, ‘no brand’, is appropriated as Kim’s very brand and limited company, economically and militaristically. There are no doubt several ways in which this branding or owning of



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maverick brandlessness could be construed from a universalisation of the brand to cover all the unbranded, an imperial or even multicultural endeavour, to a fetishisation of what eludes and so creates an economy of the fetish: in this case, presumably a case of what eludes ownership or reification. What seems to be at stake is not simply a colonisation of the free, but an ideological colonisation or appropriation of the concept of freedom together with the concept of universality. Kim’s quest is both linked to and differentiated from that of the lama. Suspending ambivalences for the moment, the lama seems to signify that which Kim is supposed to leave behind or, at least, separate himself from. Would the lama then be mama? Yes, in one sense. Kim is mute about Kim’s birth mother, a possibly resentful erasure on Kipling’s part given what must have seemed to him like abandonment by his own mother, and the lama seems to be cast in a substitute maternal role as the feminine, gentle parent as opposed to the forceful, paternal one. Moreover, the text plays a strange fort/da game with the lama. The lama keeps going off, but the consoling thing is that this lama, unlike mama, keeps coming back thanks to the tie or string between mama/lama and boy. Thus, in the come-and-go life on the road of lama and boy, does Kipling express his love of India, and indicate the inconceivability, for him in his historical moment, of Britain not possessing India. Edward Said grants Kipling this much – that his investment in India is authentic and powerful. It may be added that Harish Trivedi in this collection sees Said as paradoxically seduced by Kipling’s Indian-Orientalist fantasy. Said writes: Kim most assuredly is not a political tract. Kipling’s choice of the novel form to express himself, and of Kim O’Hara to engage more profoundly with an India that Kipling obviously loved but could never properly have, this is what our reading should keep resolutely as its central strand. Only then will we be able to see Kim both as a great document of its historical moment, as well as an aesthetic milestone along the way to midnight 15 August, 1947, a moment whose children have done so much to revise our sense of the past’s richness and its enduring problems. (Said, 2002: 350) In Said’s view, it is no good blaming Kipling for not being able to foresee the need for Indian independence, and Kipling’s text is implicitly placed as an aesthetic precursor to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (while we will come to consider the implications of the way in which Kim ends). What Kipling did see was the need for Britain to govern India well, and with




Kipling and Beyond

the understanding of those who could enter into and play the game of empire with passionate dedication. It helped if they were infatuated with the sights, smells and tastes of India, if they were as little alien as possible to the scene. The fragility of this enterprise is, however, palpable both within and outside British India’s colonial frontiers. Only a certain boyishness, one of affective enthusiasms, could willingly and effectively enter into this design, Kipling seems to be saying. And yet, that very boyishness, if ungoverned and untempered by a certain wisdom (arguably, of countering possessive or self-aggrandising desire with restraint or renunciation), will end tragically, in either death or disgrace. It is the genius of Kipling to anticipate the pitfalls of the very imperial mentality that he appears to be recruiting his readers into cathecting. That is to say, if allowed to remain a form of arrested development that makes the bearer entirely unsuitable for any sort of governance whatsoever, this boyishness must be chastened or rejected out of hand. This latter category, which is not Kim’s, finds its theatre of action not within British India, but beyond ‘the Border’, up the Khyber Pass, in lawless mountain territory beyond the ‘Frontier’. Two short stories by Kipling shed light on the fate awaiting the perpetual child of empire, and which Kim’s youth prevents us from having to address in the novel: ‘Only a Subaltern’ and ‘The Man Who Would be King’. Both these stories, like Kim, are not so much tracts or manuals for imperial self-justification, though they could be read that way, as unstable entities that open up spaces in which the possibility and impossibility of a ‘just’ empire are simultaneously entertained. Kipling should be read attentively with regard for his diagnosis of the ills of imperialism as well as his revelling in the sensuous significance of empire as completing European lack, much in the way Mannoni describes it. A playing field of empire peopled by boys suffering from arrested development will be bound to come to grief. Coming to grief is itself a metaphor from the English hunting field that finds its starkest expression in the lawlessness to be found beyond ‘the Border’ to the north of India. ‘Up the Khyber Pass’ will be found the refusal of colonialism, colony-status, and even of nation, of any bounded, governable identity, precisely because it lies ‘beyond the frontier’, beyond ‘our’ grasp. ‘Only a Subaltern’ is a very Spivakian story, from its title all the way down. Bobby Wick (who burns brightly, if not for very long, bringing enlightenment within military discipline together with the ‘bobbyish’ aspect of friendly policing) is a fresh-faced and idealistic English boy who has the right stuff to make a soldier and compassionate leader of men. He is ‘only’ a subaltern, at the beginning of a promising army



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career. Sent out from a country village via Sandhurst, the son of a former Commissioner who had once had authority over ‘three millions of men in the Chota-Buldana Division, building great works for the good of the land, and doing his best to make two blades of grass grow where only one grew before’ (Kipling, 2008a: 155), Bobby looks set fair to be a chip off the old block. He is of average intelligence. His range of reference is largely derived from rural sporting experience. The Shires produce masses of him. Yet he is that rare thing, a genuinely rightthinking idealist about India. Like subalterns in the stricter sense within a macrocosmic social formation, within the army as microcosm, Bobby Wick represents the ‘demographic difference’ between the military elite and the rest of the social order.3 Like his father, old man Wick, whose idea of colonial service echoes Jonathan Swift’s description of good governance – making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, in the manner of the King of Brobdingnag (Swift, 2005: 124) – Bobby makes a material difference in a benevolent way while internalising imperial-military ideology and giving it a human face. He learns quickly that his Regiment, the Tyneside Tail-Twisters, ‘was his father and his mother and his indissolubly wedded wife, and that there was no crime under the canopy of heaven blacker than that of bringing shame on the Regiment, which was the best-shooting, best-drilled, best-set-up, bravest, most illustrious, and in all respects most desirable Regiment within the compass of the Seven Seas’ (Kipling, 2008a: 157). Here we have affectionately ironised the mystique of the Regiment that compels Kim, willy-nilly, in his earnest search to find salvation with the Mavericks. What is offered as inchoate but unquestioned knowledge in Kim is wittily ventriloquised in this story, as Bobby absorbs the Tail-Twisters’ myths of themselves: ‘And every one of those legends told him of battles fought at long odds, without fear and without support; of hospitality catholic as an Arab’s; of friendships deep as the sea and steady as the fightingline; of honour won by hard roads for honour’s sake; and of instant and unquestioning devotion to the Regiment – the Regiment that claims the lives of all and lives for ever’ (157). Hereby lurks a premonition of the end, while the homosocial bonds that keep the colonial machinery in working order are trotted past ever so jauntily, as if on parade in Kipling’s syntax as well as in the story. Bobby drinks in loyalty to the Line and devotes himself to ‘the dark art and mystery of managing men, which is a very large part of the Profession of Arms’ (158). The very capitals give us simultaneously a sense of the sententiousness of regimental rhetoric and Kipling’s affection for it, however archly expressed. Ironic distance




Kipling and Beyond

allows these imperial-military values to be professed without embarrassment. Like some of Kipling’s other protagonists, Bobby Wick has the common touch, he is a natural democrat, and his men respect him for it. So although he may be ‘only a subaltern’, he represents what is best about the British military presence in India. This India, however, is a sacrificial killing ground, even without military action involving controlling the natives or putting down rebellions. Soldiers are dying in their hundreds, if not thousands, because of the fever. They are suffering for the Empire and giving their lives for it. Bobby is in his element, his country village upbringing coming to the fore as he keeps up the spirits of his men against the odds: Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying, rebuking, mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the faint-hearted; hailing the sound into the watery sunlight when there was a break in the weather, and bidding them be of good cheer for their trouble was nearly at an end; scuttling on his dun pony round the outskirts of the camp, and heading back men who, with the innate perversity of British soldiers, were always wandering into infected villages, or drinking deeply from rain-flooded marshes; comforting the panic-stricken with rude speech, and more than once tending the dying who had no friends – the men without ‘townies’; organizing, with banjos and burnt cork, Sing-songs which should allow the talent of the Regiment full play; and generally, as he explained, ‘playing the giddy garden-goat all round.’ (163–4) That Bobby is made of the right stuff would seem not to be in doubt. However, what is all this cheering, chaffing, correcting, nursing and generally ‘managing’ – the metaphor from horsemanship, both ‘cherishing’ one’s mount and administering firm corrections, is entirely appropriate here4 – in aid of? Does suffering ennoble? Do the deaths of English soldiers somehow in their wastefulness justify the self-sacrificing altruism of empire? The cynicism of the military brass in Kipling’s story suggests not. Bobby’s death, when it comes, is a real loss because he had a genuine commitment to his mission and a genuine aptitude for it. Kipling’s textual complexity and ambiguity here suggest that Bobby’s loss signifies tragically because he is not ‘only’ a subaltern – a mere youth, at the beginning of a promising career of doing good for the Empire, because doing his best is what he does, and he has some aptitude for it – but also because he is ‘only a subaltern’. His lowly rank is the rank at which such idealism and effectiveness can best be expressed and



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enacted. It is as if Kipling, anticipating both Gramsci and Spivak, were to coin the phrase in the story’s title expressly to reverse the polarities of coloniser/colonised. Bobby as an English subaltern in the Indian army, a resident alien, becomes for Kipling the horizon of possibility for a just empire. But it is also a horizon of impossibility, an ethical void. Bobby dies. The text cannot sustain such idealism in ‘real’ time. Bobby may shed some light on two figures in Kim besides Kim himself, from whom we part before he has left adolescence behind, thus leaving his characterological trajectory forever open, and even open to an optimistic narrative arc or reading. The first is the District Superintendent of Police, who engages in witty repartee with the Kula woman on the road, eliciting from her a kind of ungainsayable praise for English governance. Because he is ‘the right sort’ – ‘suckled’ by a ‘pahareen, a hillwoman of Dalhousie’, and though ‘dark, sallowish’, nevertheless ‘faultlessly uniformed, an Englishman’ (Kipling, 2002: 66–7) – he strikes the old woman as perfectly fit to ‘oversee justice’, in other words to be her master: ‘These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence’ (67). Kipling’s weasel-words in the likeable foul mouth of the Kula woman are emotional blackmail. Through her, a native is heard to justify empire, if properly administered by those who know and love India. And the District Superintendent of Police, flirting with her outrageously from the back of his tired horse, embodies exactly that combination of qualities. He anticipates with brief and dusty glamour what Kim might become. The second figure is the grotesquely comic yet effective intelligencegatherer Hurree Babu, whose chief ambition, in the words of the authoritative Lurgan Sahib, is to be ‘made a member of the Royal Society by taking ethnological notes’ (147). Aspiring hopelessly to imperialanthropological laurels from the metropole, Hurree Babu both exemplifies the despised ‘Babu English’ of the Bengali mimic man, and lacks the physical dignity attributed to the other colonial stereotypes in the novel. The lama has his spirituality and his physical agility on snowbound hills, and Mahbub Ali has his beard, his pipe, his predilection for the ladies, and his undoubted equine mastery. Hurree Babu, fat, sweaty, waddling, fearful, speaking a wretched excuse for Brahmin-Bengali English, yet clever at disguising himself and strategising in a tight place, embodies the fractures in the imperial sign-system imposed on already worlded, yet relentlessly re-worlded, space. ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ presents the rogue alternative to subaltern Bobby Wick and the unnamed District Superintendent of Police.




Kipling and Beyond

There are boy-men of empire out there in the tropics who should, Kipling seems to be saying, just grow up. If they do not, they will face the consequences, with fates more grotesque, and in a tragic not a comic way, than Hurree Babu’s perpetually perspiring stasis. Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan cannot be contained within lawful imperial territory. Their names suggest Scottish and Irish breeding, not English. Does this give them some chippie minority status? Since Kim is Kimball O’Hara, it would seem not necessarily; although often an ethnicist, Kipling is also a sifter of ethics.5 Dravot and Carnehan belong to the fortunehunting class; they are ‘Loafers’, denizens of the ‘underside’, wastrels and outlaws (Kipling, 2008b: 244–5). As Carnehan himself puts it, ‘We have been all over India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler-fitters, engine-drivers, petty contractors, and all that, and we have decided that India isn’t big enough for such as us’ (252). They cannot operate within a realm in which ‘justice’ is ‘overseen’, as the Kula woman would have it, by a properly administered rule of law. For such men, the land of the ‘governed’ as British India is governed offers no scope for those who lack family connections, who by temperament and education find no easy fit within the groove of the colonial bureaucracy and hierarchy. As Carnehan opines, ‘The country isn’t half worked out because they that govern it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can’t lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that, without all the Government saying, “Leave it alone, and let us govern.” Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn’t crowded and can come to his own … [W]e are going away to be Kings’ (252). The unexploited potential of India, its natural resources (unmined or undug lands, finds geological or archaeological, oil), is matched by a wastage of human talents and energies in Peachey’s summation. Why should men be kept down when they have drive and ambition? Are the British not an imperial race, fit to be kings? Because such masterless men as Dravot and Carnehan cannot come into their own within the governable, they must light out for the territory beyond the Border. Their only alternative is to seek a new theatre of operations in terrain that was the site of Russian incursions and unreliable hill princes in Kipling’s day, and has now become a perpetual war-zone. In Dravot’s words, ‘They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawur’ (252). There they meet their grisly fates, after having succeeded in briefly ruling the local tribes through a combination of military know-how and hubris. Dravot imitates Alexander the Great,



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meeting a similar fate, when his desire to wed reveals that he is not a god but a man. Mutiny ensues, with Dravot being dropped to his death from a bridge across an abyss, and then beheaded by the natives still wearing his golden crown, and Carnehan living to tell the tale after surviving crucifixion, only to expire after having unburdened himself, Ancient Mariner-like, to the Kiplingesque journalist-narrator. There are limits to British imperial ambition, clearly. The possibility of ruling an empire is shadowed by its impossibility. That impossibility is tragically brought about by both ‘the wrong sort’ in human terms and territorial ones. ‘Beyond the Border’ remains a no-go area in both ‘The Man Who Would be King’ and in Kim. For a white man to go beyond the Khyber Pass is to court the unleashing of uncontrollable violence. Against this violence, and the violence that lurks unacknowledged in the militarism of the Mavericks or Bobby Wick’s devotion to duty, Kim proposes something else. It sits uneasily alongside the intelligencegathering derring-do of Kim’s education by Lurgan Sahib, Colonel Creighton, Mahbub Ali and Hurree Babu. Against the worldliness of this education, and the forcible worlding going by means of colonial governance, military occupation and perpetual policing, stands the ‘other-worldly’ lama. If the lama is rather a feminine foil to the masculine schooling Kim receives as a spy, we might apply to him Freud’s question, ‘What do women want?’ What do lamas want? More pertinently, what is Kipling’s understanding of Buddhism, which is offered as another way that is not the English one? The text makes it clear at several points that the lama follows Buddhism of the Middle Way. This Buddhism of the Middle Way is specifically, with due acknowledgement, the clarification of Buddhism philosophically undertaken by Na¯ga¯rjuna in the Mu¯lamadhyamakaka¯rika¯ (Na¯ga¯rjuna, 1995). Was Kipling acquainted with this work and if so to what extent did he understand the subtleties of its path to enlightenment? It may be claimed that Na ¯ga¯rjuna’s philosophy of the Middle Way is not without relevance for the themes or potential philosophemes of Kim. In Kantian terms, enlightenment is precisely a matter of emerging from a condition of childishness, what Kant terms ‘a self-incurred minority’ of reliance on guardians and on received or conventional wisdom, in order to attain a mature freedom conceived of in terms of autonomous non-dependence on others (Kant, 1996: 17).6 Enlightenment in Buddhist terms offers a different understanding of freedom. Broadly, this is a question of attaining freedom from suffering and, more specifically in the tradition inaugurated by Na ¯ga¯rjuna, this entails the question of our relation to reality.




Kipling and Beyond

Only a brief philosophical engagement with the Mu¯lamadhyamakaka¯rika¯ is possible here, although it remains necessary to what follows. Na¯ga¯rjuna undertakes his clarification of Buddhism precisely to refute those followers who have come to maintain Buddhism as a form of nihilism. This nihilism arises through believing that because the world of phenomena is a world of illusion, conventional reality is assumed to be unreal in favour of the ultimate underlying reality posited as the void or emptiness (the usual approximate translation of s´u¯nyata¯). For Na¯ga¯rjuna, the dualism thus assumed between the illusory phenomenal world and an ultimate or essential reality is untenable. In Na ¯ga¯rjuna’s explication, the realm of samsa¯ra (conventional reality) is misunderstood if conceived of in terms of self-contained or inherent essences. He states: ‘Those who see essence and essential difference … They do not see / The truth taught by the Buddha’ (Na¯ga¯rjuna, 1995: 40). Instead of an essentialist and thus reified view of entities, Na¯ga¯rjuna argues for a principle of co-dependent arising, a network of interdependencies, continuities and processes that furthermore resists a causal logic. Na¯ga¯rjuna states: In the several or united conditions The effect cannot be found. How could something not in the conditions Come from the conditions? (4) Garfield succinctly comments: ‘Effects lacking inherent conditions depend precisely upon conditions that themselves lack inherent existence’ (Na ¯ga ¯rjuna, 1995: 121). However, the importance of the philosophy of the Middle Way is its assertion that to see phenomena as without essence (since interdependent) and thus as ‘empty’ is not to deny their existence. Nirva¯na as a realisation of ‘emptiness’ is also a realisation of the emptiness of that emptiness which is not itself an essential reality that could be posited as some thing. Garfield observes: ‘Seeing the conventional as conventional, we argued, is to see it ultimately. At this point, Na ¯ga ¯rjuna makes a similar move with regard to nirva ¯na and draws one of the most startling conclusions of the Mu ¯lamadhyamakaka¯rika ¯: Just as there is no difference in entity between the conventional and the ultimate, there is no difference in entity between nirva ¯na and samsa¯ra; Mu¯lamadhyamakaka¯rika ¯ nirva ¯na is simply samsa ¯ra seen without reification, without attachment, without delusion’ (331). Na ¯ga¯rjuna asserts: There is not the slightest difference Between cyclic existence and nirva¯na.



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Therefore, the perception of the world of phenomena as non-essential and not amenable to reification serves to affirm the way of the world, its very reality, rather than nihilistically to negate its unreality. Moreover, when reification is understood to be a delusion the desire to grasp or possess an entity becomes futile, and since this possessive desire is the cause of suffering, overcoming the delusions entailed in a conventional grasp of reality is the means of attaining a release or freedom from suffering. That is, nirva¯na is not so much an elsewhere as an awakened or enlightened relation to the world. Regarding the Kantian concept of enlightenment as a freedom arrived at through independence, self-possession and autonomy, this would constitute a delusion from the point of view of the Buddhist philosophy of the Middle Way. It would even be possible to say that this delusion would be tantamount to ‘the childish thing’ to be put away. This is because the failure to appreciate co-dependent arising is bound up with the tendency to ‘thingify’ in essentialist terms. Returning to Kim, the ending of the novel brings together the lama’s attainment of nirva¯na or enlightenment with Kim’s attainment of a certain return to reality. Firstly, it could be pointed out that Kipling’s presentation of the attainment of enlightenment somewhat inauthentically relies on Western metaphysical assumptions alien to the Buddhist philosophy in question. For instance, although Kipling’s lama seems aware of a holistic unity beyond phenomenal appearances – ‘the Great Soul which is beyond all things’ (Kipling, 2002: 239) – he nonetheless still expresses himself in terms of a mind/body dualism in which the soul transcends a nihilistically rejected phenomenal or physical reality: ‘the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body and went free’ (239). This leads Kipling’s lama into a metaphysical apprehension of ‘the Cause of all Things’, that is to say to an apprehension of what sounds suspiciously like a logocentrically reified conception of a Single Origin rather than a realisation of s´u¯nyata¯. Moreover, Kipling has recourse to a Christian image repertoire in positing the lama’s experience as a sort of baptism that purifies him from all sin. The text leaves open the question of what implications the lama’s spiritual experience may hold for the future of Kim. On the one hand, in a non-enlightened logic, it may be that the lama’s supposedly ‘other world’ spirituality is to be contrasted with the pragmatic realism of imperial governance, where Mahbub Ali’s ironic indulgence of the lama



There is not the slightest difference Between nirva¯na and cyclic existence. (75)

Kipling and Beyond

serves to posit him as naïve in his imagined influence over the development of Kim. On the other hand, there is the suggestion that there may be a way in which the lama’s metaphysics is considered to be somehow compatible with imperialism in a wider scheme of existence. This would imply some ultimately redemptive teleology to imperialism about which it would only be possible to advance wild conjectures. Earlier in this essay, it was argued that Kipling sets up two different paradigms of the colonial mission which are indeed privileged paradigms of wide ideological import. On the one hand, there is the idealistic notion of an imperial and colonial project to which young men offer up their very lives in the course of bringing the presumed benefits of Western modernity to the ‘undeveloped’. This would be the thankless task of ‘the white man’s burden’ in which the selfishness of childhood or the childish self is sacrificed to a greater cause. In opposition to this, there would be the infantile colonialism of those who would break away from the imperial centre in the separatist pursuit of potentially anarchic cults of self-aggrandisement: men who would be King (or Prospero or Crusoe). It is the latter that Mannoni is especially critical of, and anticipating him, Kipling seems to imply that the responsible idealism of a Bobby Wicks is more manly, less infantile than the opportunism of a rogue colonialism. (Historically, it may be noted that there is a rift between a colonialism that maintains its loyalty to an imperial centre and colonisers who break away to seek their ‘free’ self-determination, in declarations of unilateral independence if need be.) It is also worth noting that Obama praises an ethics of what may be termed ‘subaltern sacrifice’ in his appeal to a responsible non-childish America, as follows: ‘Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might have a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all differences of birth or wealth or faction’ (Obama, 2009: 1). As already discussed, Kipling’s manly model of imperialism seems problematically to rely on an ethics of sacrifice: not merely self-sacrifice but more extremely a willingness to become a martyr for a cause, as if it were a case of ‘jihad’. The concept of imperialism as a spiritual mission might be one explanation of the ending of Kim, the lama serving to authenticate Kim’s quest.7 However, whereas the Buddhist may seek to abandon the self, as regards its ‘properness’ in essentialist terms and its grasping ‘mineness’, this is not ultimately comparable to or compatible with a logic of martyrdom. This is because the latter obeys a logic of painful life-abandonment as opposed to life-affirming mystical



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self-abandonment. That said, the lama may yet constitute a hope of redemption for Kim with respect to limits of the demands that a militaristic imperialism may make of its subjects (when service is equated with martyrdom). While the lama attains enlightenment, Kim’s parallel experience is of a return to a reawakened sense of reality. Oddly, this could make Kim the one who really undergoes enlightenment without quite realising it. Kipling writes: He did not want to cry – had never felt less like crying in his life – but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked on, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true – solidly planted upon the feet – perfectly comprehensible – clay of his clay, neither more nor less. (234) Is this a return to a conventional reality (a logic of identity) or does it constitute a new vision of the world of phenomena in their suchness (free of our categorisations)? What the text does seem to affirm is that reality is not elsewhere but right at your feet, if you could but see it. The lama’s final summation, almost the summation of the novel, is: ‘So thus the search is ended … [T]he River of the Arrow is here. It broke forth at our feet, as I have said’ (240). But this awakening to the river that breaks forth right where you find yourself must have been happening all along, as an early passage in the novel serves to suggest, as follows: The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have it – bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and the beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within ear-shot went to work. India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it, more awake and more excited than anyone, chewing on a twig that he would presently use as a toothbrush; for he borrowed




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However, the awakened ‘seeing of the world in real truth’ is immediately followed by what could be heard (although not necessarily) as a somewhat egocentric assertion of will: ‘this was life as he would have it.’ What appears unresolved throughout the text is the tension between an open-hearted love of otherness in its (familiar and delighting) otherness, even an empathetic being ‘possessed’ by otherness, and the grasping, colonising desire to appropriate otherness so as to make it a property of the self. Equally, the text is ambivalent in its constant interplay between the deconstruction of ethnic essentialisms and the reformulation of those reifications of others. The lama famously instructs Kim: ‘To those who follow the Way, there is neither black nor white, Hind or Bhotiyal. We be all souls seeking escape. No matter what thy wisdom’ (178). In the light of this the Great Game could be considered a childish form of identity politics. A recent travelogue entitled Children of Jihad: a Young American’s Travels Among the Youth from the Middle East by Jared Cohen has something of the Kiplingesque spirit of Kim to it. Cohen, a Jewish American, roams around countries of the Middle East in the manner of ‘friend of all the world’. He finds that the experience both challenges the essentialist notions of identity that he has grown up with and reveals to him that the youth of the Middle East are themselves sceptical of identity politics. Cohen writes: My impressions of the Middle East were largely shaped and colored by the mutually antagonistic relationship between the older generations of America and Middle Eastern countries. I learned from my travels throughout the Middle East, however, that the youth can only be understood as their own phenomenon. They are far more tolerant than older generations and seemingly more sophisticated in their ability to distinguish between people, governments, and cultures. (Cohen, 2007: 6) Cohen further remarks of the hybrid, ‘glocal’ cultures he visits: ‘I wanted to see this multiplicity in every sphere possible. I wanted to feel and experience it all’ (7). However, while the youth he encounters are like youth anywhere, Cohen seems baffled by as well as thwarted in his attempts at friendship by the fact that the young people he encounters, especially the



right- and left-handedly from all the customs of the country he knew and loved. (65)


They have Coca-Cola and Pepsi, they have McDonald’s, and their clubs play American music. But they viewed the United States government as something different. They saw my government as far too close to Israel and seemed to think it was out to destroy Islam. They were emphatic about this, but like most young kids in the Middle East, their justification was not rooted in facts, but instead bumper sticker slogans that had been inculcated upon them by extremists. (202) Thus, for Cohen, to see America’s support for Israel as far from friendly is merely a matter of ideological brainwashing. Cohen does not reflect on whether he himself may have been ideologically conscripted by his elders in this matter. It seems that he sees his own position as rooted ‘in facts’, in the realities of the global situation. Cohen objects to how Hezbollah youth who can present themselves as looking like and acting like Americans may have the capacity to infiltrate America in secret, stating: ‘the visual of what I saw in Beirut made me fearful that those thugs were in America “being” Americans at the same nightclubs that I frequent’ (143). However, he seems affronted when the Hezbollah youth refuse to meet with him, he ‘being’ their friend come from afar to socialise with them, giving him no reason for this brush-off. Cohen speculates: ‘While I had felt safe around Hezbollah so long as they were cordial to me, knowing that I had somehow pissed them off was a different story. Was it possible they had done a Google search and found the photo of me holding an Israeli flag at a 2002 protest at Stanford? Had they found out about my internships at the Department of Defense and the State Department, information that could also be obtained in articles written about me on the Internet?’ (155). While Cohen feels threatened by the mere thought of Hezbollah youth infiltrating America, he fails to understand how a pro-Israeli American who works for the American government might be felt to be a threat in his own infiltration of the worlds of Hezbollah youth particularly when his mask of calculated – or is it naïve? – friendly neutrality has been exposed. Cohen’s Children of Jihad exists in a certain relation of continuity with Kipling’s Kim in that both texts serve to effect a dissociation between an ethos of benevolent globalisation – one full of shared youthful enthusiasms, no doubt genuine, be it for the connection of terrains, ‘te-rains’



Palestinians, Syrians and Iranians, emphatically refuse to entertain the notion of a pro-Israeli America as their friend. Cohen observes of his experience in Syria:

Kipling and Beyond

(trains) or mobile phones – on the one hand, and the divisiveness of violently maintained inequalities of power and territorial control, on the other. Both Afghanistan, beyond the ‘Border’, and the Northwest Frontier, within it, but nevertheless a contested space of tribal politics, refugees and the unrest that often accompanies forced shifts of population, remain a theatre of operations for imperialist opportunists. In the context of her reading of Kim in the light of Bush’s cowboy politics, Spivak attends to attempts at national self-determination within Afghanistan’s own history, and she comments: The Afghan ‘national identity’ is a provisional moment in the alternative internationality of Islam … But the production of the colonial subject in order to administer a settled colonial possession could not appear on the agenda of this region, perceived always as an in-between, a buffer … The generation that came of age in the 1960s, my generation, produced Najibullah, a man radicalized at university. He attempted once again to establish a ‘constitutional state’, this time with the validating agency of communism. Gorbachev sold him out in the end. (Spivak, 2002: 55–6) Intriguingly, in his Inaugural Address, Obama exhorts: ‘know that America is a friend of each nation … and that we are ready to lead once more’ (Obama, 2009), asserting thus the Kiplingesque sentiment of a ‘politics of friendship’ coupled with a ‘politics of supremacy’, where taking the lead has entailed an intensification of George W. Bush’s operational fantasies in pursuit of Osama bin Laden. That is, Barak Obama has chosen to bomb, and to strike repeatedly, at this same terrain, on both sides of the border, as if to justify his more peaceable rhetoric as somehow not unmanly, or unmanned. Bin Laden still remains within America’s sights. Nonetheless, Obama, putting aside childish things, taking up the white man’s burden (did he or his scriptwriter have a sly sense of humour?) may yet be trying to negotiate his middle way through the ‘mine-fields’ that precede him. While, as discussed, Kipling ideologically attempts to distinguish an imperially centralised and ‘logo-centralised’ form of colonialism from the alternative of an immature form of colonialism, one subject to anarchic and potentially violent loss of control, in historical actuality such paradigms do not always hold. What would require further investigation is the way in which the two paradigms – paradigms that aim at a separating out of the dutiful from the roguish – may be produced



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through the will to displace force and violence from their association with centralised power to the ‘disowned’ spaces of the periphery or the peripheral space of the ‘disowned’. And while Kipling may well have hoped for a friendly form of colonial imperialism, would he have seriously understood how, from the point of view of the colonised, the realities were otherwise? Yet, along with Said, we should remember that Kim is a literary text in which ambivalences around the clinging onto and the letting go of ‘colonial youth’ are partially expressed and partially cathected with continuing implications for empire’s children. Notes 1. Kaori Nagai observes: ‘Kipling was a dreamer …With this gift, Kipling created his literary world, deeply in touch with his unconscious dream life’ (2006: 133). 2. The expression is one used by Gayatri Spivak; for example: ‘the enabling violation of the culture of imperialism’ (1990: 159). 3. The term ‘demographic difference’, first offered by Ranajit Guha, is one that Gayatri Spivak has discussed (1996: 203). 4. See Donna Landry (2008: 28–33) on the question of horsemanship and training. 5. For a fine-grained consideration of Kipling’s deployment of Irish identities see Nagai (2006). 6. For a discussion of Kant’s essay in a postcolonial context, see Caroline Rooney (2007: 44–74). 7. Bart Moore-Gilbert explores the ways in which military regiments, such as the Mavericks, are endowed with religious significance in Kipling’s work (1986: 165–9).

Works cited Armstrong, Karen (2000) The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. London: HarperCollins. Cohen, Jared (2007) Children of Jihad: a Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East. New York: Gotham Books. Freud, Sigmund (1991) ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IX, trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 142–53. Kant, Immanuel (1996) ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–22. Kipling, Rudyard (2000a) ‘Only a Subaltern’, in The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, ed. Louis L. Cornell. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 155–69. —— (2000b) ‘The Man Who Would be King’, in The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, ed. Louis L. Cornell. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 244–79. —— (2002) Kim: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company.




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Landry, Donna (2008) Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mannoni, Octave (1956) Prospero and Caliban: the Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland. London: Methuen. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1986) Kipling and ‘Orientalism’. London and Sydney: Croom Helm. Nagai, Kaori (2006) Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press. Na¯ga¯rjuna (1995) The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Na¯ga¯rjuna’s Mu¯lamadhyamakaka¯rika¯, trans. and commentary Jay L. Garfield. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Obama, Barack (2009) ‘Inaugural Address’, New York Times, 20 January. http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html (accessed 1 December 2009). Rooney, Caroline (2007) Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real. London and New York: Routledge. Said, Edward W. (2002) ‘Kim as Imperialist Novel’, in Kim: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 337–50. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. London and New York: Routledge. —— (1996) ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 203–35. —— (2002) ‘Resident Alien’, in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 47–65. Swift, Jonathan (2005) Gulliver’s Travels, Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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The Alterity of Terror: Reading Kipling’s ‘Uncanny’ India Jo Collins

Terror … is associated with subjective elevation, with the pleasures of imaginatively transcending or overcoming fear and thereby renewing and heightening a sense of self and social value: threatened with dissolution, the self, like the social limits which define it, reconstitutes its identity against the otherness and loss presented in the moment of terror. (Botting, 1996: 9) The story we tell ourselves today has simply reinscribed the old imaginaries – purity, plenitude, virtue, progress – into a new fable of triumphant planetary capitalism. We have, once again, misrecognized the structural barbarism of economic war as the source of our freedom. And so we are … acting out our trauma, today in the form of a war on terror. (Ray, 2005: 4) How do we imagine terror today? What does it mean to ‘imagine terror’ in the midst of a global ‘war on terror’? Terror, as Botting and Ray argue, is an imaginative act, a threatening of pre-existing narratives (of self or nation), an encounter with alterity which resists being grasped. Terror calls into question what is ‘real’, what seems ‘absolute’ or fundamental. Yet terror is itself ‘real’, and today, seemingly inescapable. Beneath this assertion, however, there lurks a larger question: what is the nature of this pervasive presence of terror? With the destruction of the World Trade Center, which killed three thousand people (Roy, 2004: 19) and symbolically demolished the security of Western economic power and technological rationality, terror has become a central discourse in contemporary society. By 2005 in excess of 8,000 books had been published since 9/11 on the subject of terror and terrorism (Furedi, 2007: xix). This emerging field of knowledge needs to be examined for its ideological assumptions. How exactly is the 79



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otherness of the terrorist imagined in this discourse? What does such terror tell us about the way we imagine Western ‘civilisation’? Strathern and Stewart suggest that, while deaths resulting from terrorist incidents are ‘exceptional’, they ‘create a spectacle of horror which inscribes itself into the cultural imaginary of the international community’ (2005: 21). Terrorism becomes a shadow or ‘insidious and darkly imagined power … which randomly assaults the integrity of our history, institutions, community and being’ (21). Yet, if terrorism functions in the cultural imaginary as an ‘antithesis of our modern project’ (21), terror and terrorism are also ‘violent manifestations of state power’ (Berendse and Williams, 2002: 19). Terror is both part of and mobilised against ‘the modern project’. If Western ‘civilisation’ has both perpetrated terror and is threatened by it what then are the connections between imperialism and the discourse of terror? Said, in Orientalism, remarked that ‘One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed’ (1995: 26). This can be extended to include representations within the discourse on terror, which as a field of knowledge ‘reinscribes old imaginaries’ of Orientalism, whilst often appearing oblivious to them.1 The appropriation of Kipling’s writings and poetry on Afghanistan in recent news reports (Fowler, 2007) is an example of the resurgence of Orientalist narratives. Kipling’s Afghanistan is a place where the enemy are often masked by a treacherous terrain, evoking recent reporting on the labyrinthine Tora Bora caves and confusion over Osama bin Laden’s vanishing.2 Beyond this thematic connection, Kipling’s writings have been taken to be authoritative descriptions of the country; according to Corine Fowler: During the 2001 conflict, newspaper references to Kipling were legion. Indeed, they were almost standard in tabloids such as the Daily Mail and the Mirror as well as in the Independent and the Scotsman, the Times and the Sunday Times. Some newspaper articles confined themselves to commentaries on Kipling’s fascination with Afghanistan, or to Tony Blair’s rediscovery of Kim while at Chequers. More generally, however, journalists turned to Kipling as a resource for describing Afghanistan to British audiences at the beginning of the conflict. (2007: 165) Kipling’s writings are then a key element of the contemporary discourse on terror. However, if, as Berendse and Williams suggest, ‘the tabloids and television journalism make the words terror and terrorist meaningful by simplifying the complex politics of valuation’ (2002: 18), the



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political and historical constellations of meaning underlying this terror need to be unpacked. It is also important to consider what notion of Kipling is being circulated in contemporary discourse now. Indeed, Kipling’s writing in the late 1880s and 1890s was interpreted with a specific ideological slant by critics: ‘reviewers excluded possibilities in the stories that did not accord with imperialist ideology’ (Kemp, 1988: 1, discussing Ann Parry). Thus if Kipling is an important popular resource in terms of ideas of empire, and our perceived knowledge of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, then to revisit Kipling’s writings opens up possibilities for reflecting on imperial violence and the rhetoric of terror in today’s society. Reading Kipling’s treatment of explicit and implicit violence and his portrayal of the terror of the coloniser in his Indian stories not only reveals the centrality of barbarism to imperialism, it also uncovers aporias in representation, aporias which are significant for the understanding of terror in a postcolonial context.

Kipling and the alterity of India The long prevalence of order and security, broken only by the catastrophe of 1857, has … profoundly modified the aspect of the country and the character of the people … The general increase of wealth and intelligence has told on the faces of the people as well as on the face of the land, they have probably altered more in the last twenty five years than for centuries previously; they now wear the look of a settled, industrious population, far less liable than heretofore to superstitious panics or to those commotions, half-political, half religious which suddenly stir Asiatics. (‘Editorial’, The Edinburgh Review, January 1884: 9) According to this British editorial from 1884, in India it is possible to witness the triumph of a project of empire, where the Enlightenment ideals of abating superstition and heightening productivity have been achieved through the colonial ‘civilisation’ of indigenous populations. Nevertheless, doubt punctures this confident narrative: the two references to Indian ‘uprisings’ (the Mutiny and potential ‘commotions’) suggest that perhaps the people are less than satisfied with colonial hegemony. Furthermore, the threat of violence is directed towards the colonisers. What remains tacit here is the underside to the Enlightenment narrative – the violence (and terror) that helped to uphold colonial dominance, repressing indigenous resistance.3 Kipling develops a more nuanced view of empire in his Indian short stories, which consider the colonial project from a variety of perspectives



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(civilians, administrators, soldiers, a Muslim on a visit to England,4 to name but a few). According to Kemp, not only did Kipling employ multiple and conflicting narrative voices of ‘victim and persecutor, the languages of trades, professions and the gentleman’s club and the discourses of dream, drugs and insanity’, he also occupied numerous authorial personas by writing ‘under more than thirty pseudonyms’ (1988: 6). This variety of perspectives can be read as evidence of the fragmentation rather than coherence of the imperial project. According to Zohreh T. Sullivan, ‘Kipling’s fiction … gives voice to … the colonizer’s many subject positions and ambivalence. It operates within the framework of an imperial culture, yet constantly shifts position in relation to that dominant ideology’ (1993: 11). Thus, while Kipling’s writings might support imperial rhetoric, they do not unproblematically reinforce or endorse colonial ideologies. Rather, his fictions need to be examined in terms of their inconsistencies and aporias: ‘what is left unsaid in Kipling’s narratives becomes as important as what is stated’ (Kemp, 1988: 10). One central aspect of ambivalence about empire in Kipling’s writing emerges in his depiction of India as uncanny, where India continually challenged habitual understandings of the self and its place in the world. The uncanny is an experience of disorientation, a sense that the ordinary and reassuringly familiar has suddenly become strange and dislocated.5 Kipling evokes the uncanny in his stories to draw attention to the ostensible alterity of India, and to explore the unease with which Anglo-Indians encountered this (imagined) India. The uncanny also allows Kipling to leave certain issues unresolved and resonating suggestively at the close of the narratives. Kipling’s representation of India as uncanny marks what lies beneath the ostensibly rational routines and practices of the imperial bureaucratic apparatus. The post-‘Mutiny’ transfer of the administration of India from the East India Company to the Crown not only consolidated this bureaucratic apparatus,6 it also signalled ‘a distrust of “natives” and a withdrawal from all but official and the most superficial contact with them’ (Pafford, 1989: 6). Thus, if this bureaucratic apparatus solidified the segregation of the Indian and Anglo-Indian populations, for many, such as Kipling, such state knowledge structures failed to make sense of native life. For Kipling: Underneath our excellent administrative system; under the piles of reports and statistics; the thousands of troops; the doctors; and the civilian runs wholly untouched and unaffected the life of the peoples of the land – a life as full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian nights … [I]mmediately outside of our own English life, is



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the dark and crooked and fantastic, and wicked, and awe inspiring life of the ‘native’. Our rule, so long as no one steals too flagrantly or murders too openly, affects it in no way whatever – only fences it around and prevents it from being disturbed. I have done my best to penetrate into it. (Letter of 28 November 1885 – 11 January 1886, to Margaret Burne-Jones, in Pinney, 1990: 99) For Kipling, then, colonial bureaucracy can be read as a set of practices and knowledges whose insularity prevents an understanding of the alterity of Indian life. Furthermore, India unsettled this colonial authority, as a potentially terrifying alterity lurked in the ‘crooked and fantastic and wicked’ life of the native. However, this realisation presents a double bind in Kipling’s writings, which plays out within the ambivalences of his stories. India, as a space and people to be ruled, must be seen as ‘other’, yet the uncanny threat which may lurk within this alterity must be suppressed in order for imperial rule to continue securely. However, when the uncanny threat becomes literalised the coloniser experiences terror; not only individually, but also where alterity threatens to undermine the colonial project itself. Stories such as ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ (1885), ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ (1886) and ‘The Return of Imray’ (1891) play out, in various ways, fears of native life beyond the knowledge and understanding of the colonisers. The uncanny emerges in rebellious acts by Indians in ‘The Return of Imray’, and leads to palpable terror for Morrowbie Jukes who is trapped in a sand crater with outcast Hindus (Kipling, 2000: 33). The uncanny also surfaces in the Suddhoo’s house as the terror evoked by indigenous magic instigates intrigue and inevitable murder. In each of these stories the rationality of the coloniser proves insufficient to render India safe or knowable. We see that Imray’s lack of recognition for native ‘superstitions’ is fatal, Jukes’s attempts to map and escape the crater are futile (he has to be rescued), and reference to the penal code only serves to display the helplessness of the narrator in ‘The House of Suddhoo’. These stories mark ambivalence within the Indian colonial project. Indeed, according to Peter Morey, ‘The tradition of India as uncanny picks out blind spots within rationalist colonial discourse … [I]n positing extreme alterity of this kind, colonial discourse itself identifies a space beyond its tenets and operation’ (2000a: 27). It is precisely these blindspots that signal the emergent terror of alterity, a ‘space’ where the colonial project is imperilled. In Kipling’s writing, the uncanny is not simply a function of the ‘life of the native’, but can also be found in the poor adaptation of




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British colonialism to the terrain and climate. Kipling’s stories and articles repeatedly return to the theme of the colonial establishment being undermanned, with the result that men are destroyed by being overworked.7 In India, the Anglo-Indians were ‘out of place’, ‘a species apart’ (Ernst, 1991: 4), a foreign body for whom cultural adaptation was difficult.8 Not only did the Anglo-Indians not integrate with the French and Portuguese, their insularity became problematic: ‘those character traits which in the British Isles were at worst looked upon as signs of eccentricity … in India [became] exaggerated’ (4). Bart Moore-Gilbert argues that the size of the territory juxtaposed with the proportionally small number of scattered Anglo-Indians ‘appears to have caused tremendous strains [which] translated graphically in an astonishingly high incidence of suicide, mental breakdown and murder’ (1986: 139). Alienation lay not simply in the inhospitable climate and the atomisation of the population, it also ‘got on the skins and nerves of [Anglo-Indians]’ in a series of recurrent physical and mental conditions from ‘prickly heat to insubordination … heat stroke to adultery and manslaughter, depression and paralysis’, which were attributed to the heat and dust (Ernst, 1991: 162). Kipling’s stories explore the difficulties of carrying out the work of empire in the Indian climate and depict the ‘atmosphere of latent insecurity and constant fear’ (Naik, 1991: 30) in which the Anglo-Indians lived. For example, in ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’ (1888), the eponymous protagonist overworks himself (as well as lecturing his colleagues on religion), and eventually suffers a terrifying loss of ‘control over speech and memory’ (Kipling, 1994a: 107–13, 112). This uncanny disintegration of self-control figures the potential collapse of colonial rule, despite and perhaps because of overreaching attempts to uphold order (McGoggin in his work always aims to improve ‘order’ [110]). In the narrative, McGoggin stands for imperial ideals transposed to India. The narrator emphasises that McGoggin’s learning and his faith in the colonial bureaucracy is misplaced and inappropriate to India, ‘where you really see humanity – raw, brown naked humanity … and most folk come back to simpler theories’ (108). The narrator also describes how governance of India is based on a complex chain of command. But, even as this is described, he raises the possibility that there is nothing to secure this hierarchy (108–9). What if, the narrative asks, there are no principles really propping up empire? What if there is no God (no Maker) to legitimise this empire? Kipling, after posing this question, does not address its implications directly. Instead, he uses the terror of aphasia to signify metonymically the terror of the failure and disintegration of the ideology of empire.



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This dissolution of empire is allegorically implied in McGoggin’s terrifying decline, his realisation that those whom he wants to indoctrinate refuse to be subject to him or acknowledge his views. If McGoggin stands for what is ineffectual and potentially brittle about empire, it is possible to read Kipling’s use of aphasia (as a failure to communicate) as metonymically signifying his own approach to representing terror. Terror in Kipling is what is unsaid or encoded, what marks the limits of the text through the presence of unspeakable alterity. We see that although McGoggin’s voice returns, he lives on in ‘latent insecurity’, fear and mistrust, precisely because the breakdown is something his theories can never explain – the alterity he experienced is utterly incomprehensible. In ‘The Return of Imray’, terror is also unspoken but implicit – the murder of Imray by his own ‘loyal’ servant leaves the narrator wondering about the trustworthiness of his own apparently ‘impassive’ servant. This is signalled by the phrase ‘I shuddered’, and the narrator’s comment that his servant has served for the same duration as Imray (Kipling, 2000: 131). The reader is not told what exactly the narrator is thinking, but is left to construe what is buried beneath the story. Thus, while the uncanny impression of India is explicit in this story, the terror is implied. Similarly, it is possible to argue of ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ and ‘The House of Suddhoo’ that what is most terrifying is left as a possibility on the edge of the narrative. In the former, a frame narrator assures us of the veracity of Jukes’s narrative, declaring ‘he certainly would not take the trouble to invent imaginary traps’ (Kipling, 2000: 29). Inevitably, this preface raises doubts about the ‘veracity’ of the account: but could this not be Kipling’s way of deflecting the ostensible allegorical truth of what has been written, that the condition of Jukes, buried alive in a violent and treacherous terrain, with disloyal servants (46) and disrespectful Indians is precisely the condition of the AngloIndian in India? India is a trap, which for Kipling and his characters is not imaginary, but real. In ‘The House of Suddhoo’, while we see the characters (temporarily) terrified by native magic, and the narrator’s fear that Janoo will eventually poison the seal cutter, the real terror resides in the fact that while the law is present in India, it means nothing to the Indians. The narrator’s remark about his ‘helpless’ violation of the Penal Code actually signals that the law is relevant only to him.9 The ‘dark and crooked and fantastic and wicked’ ‘life of the “native”’ continues, oblivious to the laws: the narrative and the Penal Code are merely superficial ordering devices – Western intervention into this world cannot regulate it. Terror, then, is what seeps in at the limits of Kipling’s narratives, confronting the coloniser with the possibility of the dissolution of empire.




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But what light does Kipling’s representation of terror shed on modern-day terror? Today’s terror is mediated globally through the image, and even though the terrorist appears on the limits of what can be known or predicted, terror has an overstated ubiquity which appears to contrast with the realisation of terror in Kipling’s work. It seems that terror today, as Anthony Kubiak argues, is ‘terrified of its own disappearance’ (1991: 4). However, as an attentive reading of Kipling’s writings has shown, terror can be what is hidden, foreclosed. For Kubiak, terror is Phobos (Panic) and Deimos (Terror), Phobos being what is revealed, Deimos, what is concealed and unspoken (6–8). It is precisely in this foreclosure of terror that we find parallels between Kipling’s writings and today’s discourse on terror. In both, terror is played out in dislocated ways, which function as disavowals of alterity whilst appearing to confront what is terrifying. If the circulation of terror in current discourse registers a threat to Western military, political and economic hegemony, terror is also what is unspoken, unthinkable. For David Punter: without terror, as Aristotle implies, how would we begin the process of soul-forming, how would we know what is ‘appropriate’ to the human, how would we know what is forbidden? Or, perhaps better: how would we find a tremulous language in which to express these limits, a primitive torch to shine out into the darkness where otherwise there would just be the eyes of the wolves, seeking their endless reflection in our own? (2008: 202) If terror is inextricable from knowing the self, and positing the limits of the self, it is this aspect of terror which must remain unspoken, disavowed; with it comes the possibility that terror will reflect back to us that the alterity is us. We posit alterity in order to make the self knowable, and we must ensure that an ‘other’ occupies this space to establish the limits of the ‘self’. As such, within the discourse of terror, while it seems that terrorism is frightening because it is an unpredictable ‘danger beyond understanding’, such a view also, Furedi suggests, prevents us from confronting uncomfortable truths (2007: xxxiii). In fact: ‘When terrorism is unmasked we see an all too-familiar, albeit uncomfortable face. Maybe we should be asking the question, “why do we hate ourselves”’ (xvi).

The violence of empire It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get



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money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve of what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct – on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is orally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start admitting that, and then trying to find out why it is that he survives. (Orwell, 1965: 70) Is Orwell’s account of Kipling’s representation of violence accurate? A case in support of Orwell could be made in a reading of ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, where Jukes’s violence against his disrespectful Indian fellow captives is rendered as unremarkable (Kipling, 2000: 32). However, the terrifying violence in the story is the threat of the gunboat, manned by invisible assailants, which keeps Jukes trapped in the crater. In ‘The Return of Imray’ Strickland directs a gun at Bahadur Khan during interrogation. This could be read as a metaphor for colonial penal justice, the possibility of which is so disgraceful that Khan commits suicide. But there are also other, often implicit or problematic, kinds of violence in Kipling’s stories. In ‘The House of Suddhoo’ while the Penal Code represents the potential force of the colonial police, it is ineffective in dispelling native violence. The narrative of McGoggin raises the possibility of ideological violence: if the narrative is read allegorically as an attempt to ‘convert’ the coloniser to idealising imperial thinking, what results is the revelation of the emptiness of this discourse, where the hollow violence of ideology returns to undermine empire. Violence, then, lies within the administration of empire, in its overt physical practices against the colonised and in indigenous resistance.10 But what Orwell is pointing to, more specifically, is an ideological blindspot in Kipling’s work, where violence is inevitably justified by the project of empire. For him ‘Imperialism as [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed “natives,” and then you establish “the Law,” which includes roads, railways and a court-house’ (1965: 72–3). Orwell’s service in the Burmese police force after the ‘golden age’ of empire11 conditions his perspective on imperial violence. His accusation that Kipling is unusually sadistic seems to mask his own ambivalent feelings about perpetuating violence against subject peoples. His 1931 essay ‘A Hanging’, based on an event Orwell witnessed, describes the ambivalence of condemning a Hindu man to death: the narrator struggles against the ‘unspeakable wrongness … of cutting a life short’ (1968: 45), and duty to the rule of




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empire. In the face of the irreconcilability of these dual imperatives the story ends with laughter (like the laughter of the Major and the narrator of Kipling’s ‘Thrown Away’, and of the narrator and Strickland in ‘The Mark of the Beast’), a kind of hysteria, indicating an attempt to fend off the conflictual feelings raised by empire. What this story suggests, which Orwell’s essay does not, is that Kipling’s ostensible sadism is not exceptional, rather it is unavoidably integrated into the apparatus of empire. It is not simply that Kipling does not condemn this violence, but that the sanctioning of such violence by empire is so pervasive it can pass unnoticed. All this is not to suggest that critical voices did not exist. However, the first reviews of Kipling’s early work do suggest blindness to the violence of empire. The second British review of Kipling’s early writings in 1888 singled out ‘The Taking of Lungtungpen’ for extended commentary.12 It is notable that the section quoted in this review features an incident of overt violence against the colonised (the same event described above by Orwell). The story describes how Privates Mulvaney and Ortheris locate and storm a Burmese village which is harbouring rebels: in a gesture to the ‘Great Game’ theme which recurs throughout Kipling’s writings they manage to subdue the indigenous peoples whilst being naked. What is significant in the review of this story, and which returns us to Orwell’s commentary on Kipling, is that the critic focuses on the section where in order to obtain information pertaining to the location of the village, Mulvaney tortures a Burmese prisoner: Evenshually, we puckarowed wan man … I tuk him away into the jungle, wid the Burmese Interprut’r an’ my clanin’ –rod … I introjuced him to the clanin’ –rod, an’ he comminst to jabber; the Interprut’r interprutin’ in betweens, an’ me helpin’ the Intilligince Department wid my clanin’ –rod whin the man misrimembered. (Kipling, 1994a: 116) The critic’s gloss describes this as an ‘astonishing story’, but in alignment with Orwell’s criticism of Kipling, the conduct of the coloniser is not condemned. Nor is such brutality condemned elsewhere in the early reviews of Kipling’s writings that mention this story. This might suggest then that the ideological blindspot is not simply a feature of Kipling’s work; the critical response also suggests that violence was viewed as a justified facet of the project of empire.13 Torture, whilst being legally abolished throughout Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of the Enlightenment backlash against barbarism, was ‘re-instituted in many parts of Europe and in



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its colonial empires from the late nineteenth century on’ (Peters, 1985: 90–1, 5). The status of torture then, in its colonial context (and indeed in current society), represents the problematic legacy of an inheritance of Western concepts of barbarism and civilisation. If becoming civilised and ‘enlightened’ in Europe entailed the widespread disappearance and concealment of state violence (as Foucault suggests in Discipline and Punish [1977: 8]) violence and torture nonetheless remained as integral elements of empire. Could such a seeming contradiction between the civilised state and barbaric violence be justified? Is there an implicit sense that the perceived racial/cultural ‘inferiority’ of subject peoples vindicated such measures – that, being ‘barbaric’ and ‘violent’ themselves, the ‘other’ would respond to force? Perhaps, but this is to oversimplify imperial violence, as what this violence shows is that dualisms of civilised/primitive, colonial order/indigenous disorder become problematic. While Kipling is silent about torture in ‘The Taking of Lungtungpen’, ‘The Mark of the Beast’ (1890) is more ambivalent and the legitimacy of torture is not wholly determined, precisely because the binary opposition between British civilisation and Indian alterity is troubled. In ‘The Mark of the Beast’ there are two trajectories of violence. The first occurs in Fleete, who is transformed into a snarling beast after drunkenly desecrating a temple idol. Fleete’s uncanny transformation confronts Strickland and the narrator with what is ‘beyond human and rational experience’, as the familiar inexplicably becomes strange, the civilised uncivilised. The uncanny emerges as colonial systems of rational knowledge are shown to be inadequate. The second is the torture of the temple’s silver leper, thought to be the cause of Fleete’s mutation, by the narrator and the colonial policeman Strickland. The ‘recourse to violence [torture] in the face of the unknown’ (Morey, 2000a: 42) persuades the leper to change Fleete back into his ‘original’ state. Yet Fleete’s transformation would seem to anticipate and parallel the sense that by resorting to torture, Strickland and the narrator are becoming something other than ‘Englishmen’. Rod Edmond argues: Fleete’s plight justifies the savage attack on the leper but leaves the assailants feeling they have crossed the divide separating the Englishman from the Oriental. The infected other can only be defeated by letting go of one’s Englishness and becoming a version of that other. (2001: 512) Furthermore, it seems that India reveals the ‘otherness’ and propensity for ‘barbarity’ of the coloniser, literally in Fleete, and more implicitly in




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the violence of the narrator and Strickland. It is significant that the leper and beast confront each other in a scene of mirroring before the leper is tortured (Kipling, 2000: 78). The leper in the story symbolises the alterity of India: the abject, that which troubles knowledge and binaries. The leper resists categorial and physical containment. The narrator comments: ‘even through my riding boots I could feel that his flesh was not the flesh of a clean man’ (78). Furthermore, the leper is male, Indian and human, but is described as a silver ‘she otter’ which speaks but makes animal-like noises. However, he/‘she’ is also a kind of blank body where identity has been erased (by disease), and significantly has ‘no face’ (71). Thus, if the monstrosity of the leper mirrors that which Fleete becomes, it is because Fleete projects his own identity onto the leper: the leper’s face is his own. In other words, it is possible to read the alterity and monstrosity of the leper and India as representing the externally projected ‘otherness’ of Fleete himself. The intrinsic ‘otherness’ of Fleete is also registered by his physical transformation – he cannot sustain a façade of civilisation in India; his mutation reveals him for what he is. If Fleete’s reversion to an animalistic state is allegorically paradigmatic of the dangers of sustaining ‘civilisation’ in India, then the torture in the narrative plays out this problem in a more tacit way. The narrator assuages his own ‘doubts’ about torturing the leper by connecting Fleete’s ‘degradation’ (metonymically the degradation of the coloniser) with the foulness of the ‘creature’, justifying the forthcoming violence by seeing the leper as less than human. The description of Fleete as ‘degraded’ is loaded. Degradation is surely an insufficient reason to resort to torture. Indeed, Fleete is more than disgraced – he has physically degenerated. Fleete’s ‘degradation’ surely points to the fragility of the colonial project by implying the potential ‘degradation’ of all Anglo-Indians. Furthermore, it is the narrator and Strickland who have been ‘brought to degradation by so foul a creature’ (78) by having to resort to torture to save the reputation of the Anglo-Indian. While the narrator purports to have ‘put away all [his] doubts’, the unreconcilability of the duty to empire (in violence) and the civilised status of ‘Englishmen’ returns at the end of the narrative in the fit of hysteria that he shares with Strickland (78, 80). The term ‘degradation’, then, points to the conflict between duty and identity, between the necessity of imperial violence and the sense that the coloniser rules precisely because he/she is more civilised/enlightened. ‘Degradation’ reveals that beneath the apparent rationality of colonial bureaucracy and institutions of governance, the coloniser is savage like Fleete, for all the veneer of civilisation.



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Yet, if this theme can be deciphered in the story, it is a possibility that the narrator tries to censor. The narrator retreats from the actual scene of torture (and from confirming the savagery of the coloniser), stating ‘This part is not to be printed’ (78). However, the reader is given sufficient information to construe a narrative scenario – the heated gun barrels, which the narrator contemplates using ‘from the loins to the head and back again’, the heating of the gun barrels in the fire, the securing of the leper ‘comfortably to Strickland’s bed’.14 By excising the torture from the narrative, the narrator has removed the possibility of the reader’s understanding of the leper’s pain (see Morey, 2000b: 13). Instead, the reader is allowed to anticipate the pain, in the following sentence, which is just prior to the commencement of the torture: I understood then how men and women and little children can endure to see a witch burnt alive; for the beast was moaning on the floor, and though the Silver Man had no face, you could see horrible feelings passing through the slab that took its place, exactly as waves of heat play across red-hot iron – gun-barrels for instance. (Kipling, 2000: 78) But how is the reader to comprehend this? The lack of logical connection between the disparate images seems to preclude complete understanding. The passage can only be deciphered by considering its implications and in exploring what is elided. The image of witch-burning seems to suggest a regression to ‘uncivilised times’, but also the possibility of collective connection through observing a spectacle of violence. It is not clear, however, how the narrator is able to understand what motivates people to witness appalling violence. Firstly, he is not just watching the torture, but actively participating in it. Secondly, while the passage moves to the image of ‘the beast’ (Fleete), there is no logical connection between this and justifications for witch executions. The image of the leper, placed next to that of Fleete, is both suggestive of the pain to come (the feelings on the face are like the heat waves of the gun barrel to be used), but also indicates the impossibility of understanding this pain, because the man has a slab instead of a face, there is blankness instead of expression. The reader is presented with what cannot be entirely known, a barrier to understanding which ensures that the reader (unlike the witnesses of the witch execution) is not implicated in the violence. While Kipling tries to bracket off the unacceptable violence, the attempted containment is as ineffectual as the colonial bureaucracy’s attempts to ‘fence off’ the lives of the Indians. Indeed, denial escalates to




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the point that it threatens to cancel the narrative, as Strickland returns to the temple, only to be told that the vandalism by Fleete never happened (79). Nevertheless, violence cannot be expurgated in the story (the hysteria indicates irresolution). The brutality depicted is not isolated or exceptional, but is an integral aspect of the consolidation of empire. This is why the narrator characterises his hysterical laughter as ‘shameful’ (80), precisely because it is a response to the shamefulness of violence that is a necessary part of empire, but has to be denied. It is through the partial acknowledgement of this that the men come to consider themselves as having ‘disgraced themselves as Englishmen’ (80). Daniel Bivona suggests that Kipling’s writings represent corporal punishment in a way that transforms it into a ‘publicly palatable myth’ (1998: 80). He continues: ‘the treatment of corporal punishment in Stalky and Co. suggests that the author had to work overtime to reconceptualise the everyday brutality of the upper-class education as a metaphorically valuable upbringing’ (80–1). In Kipling, violence can be connected to heroism precisely because the violence is justified by its end – in the case of ‘The Taking of Lungtungpen’ and ‘The Mark of the Beast’, to perform the duty of empire. Even if the order to torture is not directly given, and the act of torture might involve the coloniser’s dismissal from his post (Kipling, 2000: 79), it is still implicitly sanctioned within the ideological apparatus of empire – which may explain why, while early reviews criticised ‘The Mark of the Beast’ as ‘tasteless’, they did not condemn the violence. We might then infer that reviewers objected to the representation of the leper and/or the transformation of Fleete rather than the story’s colonial politics – none of the reviews clarifies what exactly they find to be ‘in bad taste’ (see Green, 1971). This apparent blindness to violence is described by Žižek as ‘objective violence’. For Žižek, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in the ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. (2008: 2) Thus, with violence, as with terror, it is necessary to look beyond what is perceptible. Obvious violence is a distraction from other, hidden kinds of violence, in the case of Kipling’s writings, the systemic violence of empire (physical and ideological), which extends back into public school discipline.



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What can this analysis of the violence of empire tell us about violence today? The presence of torture in ‘The Taking of Lungtungpen’ and ‘The Mark of the Beast’ opens possibilities for reflection on the photographic evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib. The pictures were made public in 2004, and, unlike ‘The Mark of the Beast’ where the actual torture is ‘not printed’, the pictures palpably uncovered a stark and shocking truth about the abuse of prisoners. And yet the obviousness of the image does not reveal all. Consider the image which became iconic (Figure 1). The snapshot does not expose any essential truth about the violence in terms of revealing pain, or gore. It represents an isolated moment, and as such the image enables a reading of implications of violence, rather than a witnessing of violence. As with Kipling’s representation in ‘The Mark of the Beast’, pain, voice and the act of torture by a Western force are all bracketed off from the image. Indeed, as with ‘The Mark of the Beast’ where the narrator and Strickland are careful to arrange the torture in full view of Fleete, there is a sense of staging here (more explicit in other images featuring grinning Americans making ‘thumbs up’ signs) – the picture is ‘posed’,

Figure 1

Abu Ghraib Prison, 2003




Kipling and Beyond

the hooded man’s stance evokes the crucifixion. As in ‘The Mark of the Beast’, the victim is manoeuvred by the will of the torturer. But why does this most famous image of torture depict an anonymous prisoner? Rafael Behr suggests that this image was more widely circulated because it did not contain the nudity that would ‘preclude its publication in the mainstream media’. Furthermore, he suggests ‘a less explicit image leaves more to the imagination, where potential suffering is infinite’ (2008: 22). Surely, the shawl and hood (peculiarly reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan garb) function as a kind of barrier to viewing and understanding pain – it leaves the viewer with a blankness, a barrier to understanding and empathy (as with the case of the leper). Even if it were possible to imagine infinite suffering the viewer cannot put himself or herself in the torture victim’s place to understand his pain. As E. Valentine Daniel argues, pain is radically untranslatable: it is ‘highly localized. Its outermost limit is the boundary of the victim’s body’ (1994: 233). Furthermore, Daniel illustrates that the pain of torture is ‘unshareable’ and ‘incommunicable’ (237). In order for it to approach some kind of articulation, it has to ‘pass through the liminal phases of either terror, beauty [in art], or both’ (238).15 Thus, in confronting this image we encounter another kind of violence – that of an interpretation which misses pain, that searches for meanings and associations (such as the Crucifixion and the Ku Klux Klan, or Žižek’s ‘latest performance-art show in Lower Manhattan’ [2008: 146]), but only circles itself without broaching the alterity of pain. What is truly violent, then, is our reading which assimilates the ‘other’ to the ‘self’, and projects our own nightmares onto what we allow ourselves to see as blankness.

Terror, empire and the postcolonial They made me raise my hands and sit on my knees. I was like that for four hours. Then the Interrogator came and he was looking at me while they were beating me. Then I stayed in this room for 5 days, naked with no clothes … They put handcuffs on my hand and they cuffed me high for 7 or 8 hours. And that caused a rupture to my right hand and I had a cut that was bleeding and had pus coming from it. They kept me this way on 24, 25, and 26 October … And one day in November, they started a different type of punishment … (Sworn statement from 21 January 2004 by an anonymous prisoner of Abu Ghraib, in Danner, 2005: 12–13)16 [These scenes] do not represent America. (George W. Bush, cited in Danner, 2005: 5)



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Does the violence at Abu Ghraib suggest that imperial violence continues today? If the iconic photograph of the hooded torture victim effectively brackets off violence from public view, then there are also many critical voices arguing that America’s military empire17 sustains itself through endemic violence: Abu Ghraib is not exceptional but representative. For critics like Danner, the Abu Ghraib abuses stand for what still remains hidden in Bagram (Afghanistan), and Guantánamo (Cuba) (2005: 10). For Žižek the violence is even more pervasive: [the tortures] cannot be reduced to simple acts of individual soldiers, they were, of course, also not directly ordered – [but] they were legitimised … Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture. They were given a taste of its obscene underside, which forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. Bush was thus wrong: what we are getting when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages is precisely a direct insight into American values. (2008: 149–50) As with the institutionalisation of violence in the public school system of Kipling’s time, the violence of ‘the War on Terror’ is also an integral part of American culture. It might also be argued that Britain’s military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan signal a continuing ideological investment in empire, recalling Kipling’s imaginative interest in military missions to Afghanistan18 (at a time when there were sporadic skirmishes at the border) – a place he had never actually visited.19 An ongoing ideological investment in empire is signalled by the contemporary appropriation of Kipling as a source of knowledge in the discourse on Afghanistan (Fowler, 2007: 165–6). Kipling’s writings are significant for understanding terror and violence in a postcolonial context as the imperial violence Kipling described has never really gone away, but continually returns in translated forms. While there is currently a global discourse of terror, what has been overlooked is a close analysis of its contents – the Phobos (visible) and Deimos (unspoken) aspects of terror. For Gene Ray, the discursive deployment of terror is symptomatic of an ideological paradox: the semantic slip ‘War on Terror’ indicates the impossible fantasy of American hegemony, ‘the fantasy of a level of security that would banish fear itself’ (2005: 154). For political commentators such as Walter Laqueur, global terror is




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not fantasised, but grounded in an ongoing terrorist threat to Western democracies. How is it possible to negotiate an apparent divide between current political and ‘aesthetic’/philosophical approaches to terror? Is the ubiquitous circulation of the notion of ‘terror’ in contemporary discourse commensurate with the sense of terror described as pleasurable ‘subjective elevation’ by Botting? Indeed, according to Berendse and Williams, terror has now become a kind of open signifier, invested with different meanings according to the political objectives (2002: 18). Thus it seems that while the political analyses of terror are in evidence, these have not been linked with the more overlooked aesthetic approaches. While a small number of interdisciplinary studies have addressed literary and political aspects of terror,20 the current polarisation of approaches between politics (terror as terrorists) and literary critical studies (terror in aesthetics) suggests that there is a need to reformulate current perspectives on terror, to integrate the ‘historical/political’ with the aesthetic, effectively to examine our ideological investments in our knowledge and imagining of ‘terror’. In both political and literary engagements with terror what is being examined, in varying ways, is the ‘imagination of otherness’. To bring the aesthetic and the political together is to begin to examine exactly how this otherness is represented, and to investigate such representations diachronically. Thus we need to extend our analysis of terror and violence, not just to consider what colonial literature can tell us about imperial violence, but also to examine terror in terms of postcolonial politics. Notes 1. I am thinking specifically of books such as Laqueur’s No End to War (2004) and Weinberg’s Global Terrorism (2005). Both purport to be ostensibly objective, factual examinations of the history of the development of modern terrorism, and Laqueur traces the history of individual members of al Qa’ida. However, both texts overlook the larger context of terror, in imperialism. Laqueur dismisses Arundhati Roy’s writings linking terrorism to American imperialism (2004: 20). He refuses to countenance the possibility that imperial powers might perpetrate their own kinds of terror, remarking: ‘Of course colonial powers have exploited their colonies, but the powers also contributed to the colonies’ economic development … [H]ad they remained colonies, the economic situation of many would be better today’ (18). 2. See Punter (2008). In ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ (1889; Kipling, 1994b: 185–211), Afghans are a hidden enemy who pick off British soldiers from invisible positions (198). 3. This editorial also discusses whether there is a need for strategic incursions into Afghanistan, to protect the security of the Indian borders. It suggests that, unlike India, the country is too ethnically and politically fragmented



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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

to be redeemed by British civilisation (1884: 7). This dualism of Western ‘civilisation’ against Afghan barbarism, and the idea that these are an ‘untamed’ tribal people (6), returns in contemporary discourse. See ‘One View of the Question’ (1893; Kipling, 1912: 71–95) where Kipling’s treacherous Muslim visitor to the metropolis plots the downfall of the coloniser and various Indian opponents. The uncanny is conceptually evasive. Freud’s essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919) approaches the notion from a number of directions (etymology, a psychoanalytic reading of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, autobiographical anecdote, speculation, recounting of clinical experiences, cultural history and literary examples) yet Freud never manages to pin down the concept in any definitive way. See Collins and Jervis (2008). An example of this is the restructuring of policing measures, resulting in the Police Act of 1861, which effectively extended what were considered successful policing practices across British India, and introduced new laws and codes which effectively solidified the English bureaucratic hold over India (Bayley, 1969: 44–5). See for example ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ (1885; Kipling, 2000: 11–28) and ‘At the End of the Passage’ (1890; Kipling, 2000: 81–9). Kipling is also exploring his own experiences. He worked 10- to 16-hour days in temperatures of 85–100°F for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, a combination which made him frequently ill. See Boehmer (1995: 69) and Naik (1991: 32). Benita Parry suggests that the Penal Code of 1860 and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1861 operated through ‘the legislative authority of the state and not from religion’ (1972: 113). In this story we can see that this law has been sabotaged by Indian belief systems such as it tried to exclude. Kipling’s writings coincided with the rise of the Indian National Congress, a cause with which Kipling was unsympathetic. Orwell served in the Burmese Police Force from 1922 to 1927 before resigning. Blackstock points out that Burma was ‘considered part of British India – by the British at least’ (2005: 194). Review of Plain Tales probably by Walter Herries Pollock, Saturday Review (9 June 1888), in Green (1971: 36–7, 36). Ann Parry’s essay on critical responses to Kipling’s writing suggests that critics framed their response to Kipling to accord with imperial ideologies, by focusing on masculine virility, his portrayal of the soldier, and the idea that he was providing an insight into India for metropolitan audiences (1985: 256, 257, 260). Part of the process of torture involves instilling the expectation of pain. Scarry suggests that ‘What assists the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power is an obsessive, self-conscious display of agency’ – the victim is intimidated by being shown the weapon with which they will be hurt. Thus ‘torture is a process which … announces the conversion of every conceivable aspect of the event and the environment into an agent of pain’ (1985: 27–8). By arguing that pain can be explored in dislocated ways through terror or art, Daniel (1994) is critiquing Scarry’s (1985) argument that pain cannot be communicated through language.




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16. The ‘different type of punishment’ referred to here is the sexual humiliation which characterised the Abu Ghraib abuses, and contrasts with the implicit physical violence represented in Kipling. 17. Michael Mann makes the argument that while ‘the Bush administration is seeking an Empire … it is doomed to failure because it is based solely on military power … [America] invaded Iraq without significant political power on the ground, it lacks ideological legitimacy within Iraq’ (2005: vi–viii). 18. For instance, ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’, ‘The Lost Legion’ (1892; Kipling, 2000: 132–41) and ‘The Mutiny of the Mavericks’ (1891; Kipling, 1999: 70–88). Another notable Kipling story is ‘The Amir’s Homily’ (1891; Kipling, 1899: 332–7) – an account which shows the despotism and cruelty of the Amir. In ‘The Man Who Would be King’ (1889; Kipling, 1994b: 115–43), the protagonists pass through perilous Afghanistan to Kafiristan. 19. Kipling visited the Northwest Frontier only once, to correspond on the meeting between Lord Dufferin and the new Amir of Afghanistan. According to Mallett, ‘In Something of Myself Kipling recalls being shot at, “without malice”, by a Pathan sniper after he had ventured into the mouth of the Khyber Pass, but there is no mention of this in the articles he was writing at the time’ (2003: 21). Kipling described this frontier space in ‘The City of Evil Countenances’ as a place of menace, filled with ominous darkness and the ‘varieties of the turbulent Afghan race’ which spit and scowl at the narrator (Kipling, 1986: 83). In this space the authority of the ‘ubiquitous police’ (read colonial rule) was tenuous (84). 20. Gene Ray’s Terror and the Sublime brings together contemporary political discourse, the sublime and current art. Also see Berendse and Williams (2002) and Scanlan (2001).

Works cited Anonymous (1884) ‘Editorial’, The Edinburgh Review, 325 (January): 3–15, in H. Mallins, ‘An Incident of Empire’: Collected documents on India in The British Library. Bayley, David H. (1969) The Police and Political Development in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Behr, Rafael (2008) Review of Standard Operating Procedure: a War Story, by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, The Observer: Review, 25 May, p. 22. Berendse, Gerrit-Jan and Mark Williams (2002) ‘Introduction’, in Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, pp. 9–33. Bivona, Daniel (1998) British Imperial Literature 1870–1940: Writing and Administration of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blackstock, Alan (2005) ‘Beyond the Pale: Women, Cultural Contagion, and Narrative Hysteria in Kipling, Orwell and Forster’, ARIEL 36(1–2): 183–206. Boehmer, Elleke (1995) Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Botting, Fred (1996) Gothic: the New Critical Idiom. London and New York: Routledge. Collins, Jo and John Jervis (2008) ‘Introduction’ in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–9.



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Daniel, E. Valentine (1994) ‘The Individual in Terror’, in Embodiment and Experience: the Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. T. Csordas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–47. Danner, Mark (2005) Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. London: Granta Books. Edmond, Rod (2001) ‘“Without the Camp”: Leprosy and Nineteenth Century Writing’, Victorian Literature and Culture 29(2): 507–18. Ernst, Waltraud (1991) Mad Tales from the Raj: the European Insane in British India, 1800–1858. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books Ltd. Fowler, Corine (2007) ‘“Replete with Danger”: the Legacy of British Travel Narratives to News Media Coverage of Afghanistan’, Studies in Travel Writing 11: 155–75. Furedi, Frank (2007) An Invitation to Terror. London: Continuum. Green, Roger Lancelyn (ed.) (1971) Kipling: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kemp, Sandra (1988) Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell. Kipling, Rudyard (1899) Life’s Handicap. London: MacMillan and Co. —— (1912) Many Inventions. London: MacMillan and Co. —— (1986) ‘The City of Evil Countenances’, in Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches, 1884–88, ed. Thomas Pinney. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 81–5. —— (1994a) Plain Tales from the Hills. London: Penguin. —— (1994b) The Man Who Would be King. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. —— (1999) Rudyard Kipling’s War Stories and Poems, ed. Andrew Rutherford. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2000) The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales, ed. S. T. Joshi. Mineola and New York: Dover Publications Inc. Kubiak, Anthony (1991) Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology and Coercion in Theatre History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Laqueur, Walter (2004) No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century. London and New York: Continuum. Mallett, Phillip (2003) Rudyard Kipling: a Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mann, Michael (2005) Incoherent Empire. London and New York: Verso. Moore-Gilbert, B. J. (1986) Kipling and ‘Orientalism’. London and Sydney: Croom Helm. Morey, Peter (2000a) Fictions of India: Narrative and Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —— (2000b) ‘Gothic and Supernatural: Allegories at Work and Play in Kipling’s Indian Fiction’, in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–17. Naik, M. K. (1991) Mirror on the Wall: Images of India and the Englishman in AngloIndian Fiction. New Dehli: Sterling Publishers. Orwell, George (1965) ‘Rudyard Kipling’, in Kipling’s Mind and Art, ed. Andrew Rutherford. London: Oliver and Boyd Ltd, pp. 71–84.




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—— (1968) ‘A Hanging’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 44–8. Pafford, Mark (1989) Kipling’s Indian Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Parry, Ann (1985) ‘Reading Formations in the Victorian Press: the Reception of Kipling 1888–1891’, Literature and History 11(2): 254–63. Parry, Benita (1972) Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930. London: Allen Lane. Peters, Edward (1985) Torture. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell. Pinney, Thomas (ed.) (1990) The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume 1, 1872–1889. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Punter, David (2008) ‘Terrorism and the Uncanny, or, The Caves of Tora Bora’, in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–15. Ray, Gene (2005) Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory from Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roy, Arundhati (2004) The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. London: HarperCollins. Said, Edward W. (1995) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. Scanlan, Margaret (2001) Plotting Terror: Novelists, Terrorists and Contemporary Fiction. London: University of Virginia Press. Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart (2005) ‘Introduction: Terror, the Imagination and Cosmology’, in Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable, ed. Andrew Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart and Neil L. Whitehead. London: Pluto Press, pp. 1–39. Sullivan, Zohreh T. (1993) Narratives of Empire: the Fiction of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weinberg, Leonard (2005) Global Terrorism: a Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Žižek, Slavoj (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd.



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Kipling’s Other Burden: Counter-Narrating Empire Rashna B. Singh

‘This was how it happened; and the truth is also an allegory of Empire.’ ‘Naboth’ (Kipling, 1899: 71) ‘Recessional’ and ‘White Man’s Burden’ have been crucial in establishing Rudyard Kipling’s reputation as the de facto poet laureate of the British Empire. ‘Recessional’ celebrates the sacrosanct nature of the civilising mission and chastises those who cheapen it through ‘tumult’ and ‘shouting’ (Kipling, 1996a: 266). Written for Queen Victoria’s jubilee, it serves as a reminder of the fate of empires that forget divine providence and indulge in displays of pride and pomp. Kipling intended it as a nuzzur-wattu, ‘an averter of the Evil Eye’ (1977: 120). ‘White Man’s Burden’ operates as a virtual manifesto of empire’s purpose and the racial theories on which it was constructed. The poem upholds the certitude of race even while it covertly acknowledges the nature of conquest by using the imagery of trapping and hunting. Yet other poems and some short stories reveal a subversive side that surfaced only occasionally and was coded in complex ways. Read against such poems and short stories, the works which afford Kipling his reputation as a jingoist would seem to be rehearsing empire. At the very least, Kipling’s oeuvre reveals what Angus Wilson describes as ‘the poetry of tension, not of “give”’ (1977: 117). Nowhere is this more apparent than in his writings about war. Undoubtedly, Kipling believed that the British Empire was a benevolent force for good and participated fully in its production and privilege, sounding ‘like nothing so much as a high-paid publicity agent’ in Edmund Wilson’s words (1964: 47), ‘rotten with racial-consciousness’ in E. M. Forster’s (2008: 185). George Orwell unequivocally confirms that ‘Kipling is a jingo imperialist’ (1964: 70) but also confirms that ‘he 101



5

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was not a Fascist’ (71). In fact, some of Kipling’s works clearly express a distrust of power and hegemony and examine their effect on the individual. While critics have disagreed about the nature of Kipling’s politics, few have read these works as far-reaching hermeneutics on the moral core of empire. David Gilmour writes that Charles Carrington, Kipling’s official biographer, argued privately that Kipling ‘was really neither a Tory nor an imperialist’ (2002: x). Nirad Chaudhuri, on the other hand, could make the extraordinary claim that Kipling’s politics ‘are no essential ingredient of his writings’ (1972: 29). But what all the debate and dissension most clearly indicate is that Kipling’s writings are bipolar in nature, veering between an exaltation of empire that was often extreme, mawkish and certainly jingoistic, and a recognition that the essence of empire is constituted in power, and power can be dangerous and destructive not only for those on whom it is exercised but also for those who wield it. While it may seem anomalous to associate Kipling in any way with the great anti-colonialist poet and politician, Aimé Césaire, Kipling, like Césaire, was concerned with relationships of domination and subordination and the problematics of power. Given the times, and Kipling’s celebrated place within those times, his anxieties about empire could not be confronted head-on but had to be displaced in stories about troubled relationships, violent confrontations, hallucinatory spectres and science fictional events. In her seminal essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak points to Pierre Macherey’s formula for the interpretation of ideology: ‘What is important in a work is what it does not say.’ This is not the same, Spivak points out, as what a work refuses to say but what the work cannot say (1994: 81). In this essay I will explore some of the things Kipling’s works cannot say. The tension in Kipling’s work is an internecine tension; it is realised between works rather than within a work. The Eyes of Asia, a putative series of letters written by wounded Indian soldiers hospitalised in England during World War One, extols the virtues of the British and is often maudlin and thinly disguised agitprop, yet it is contemporaneous with the cynical stories in A Diversity of Creatures. As such Kipling participates in what Spivak in a different context terms ‘the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism’ (1994: 76). These works are mapped on each other but neither cancels each other out nor necessarily contradicts each other. They constitute a multivalent body of work that, while not exactly iconoclastic, is often questioning of systems of power and privilege, of the ways in which power operates and how it impacts others. Kipling’s engagement with issues of power and hegemony is most evident in



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some of the stories of his later collections, which can be read as antiheroic counter-narratives that destabilise his panegyrics of empire. The point is that there are almost as many Kiplings as there are Kipling stories and poems. The Imperial vision of a man who admired Cecil Rhodes and Lord Roberts was authentic, but, as Angus Wilson points out, it was not ‘the whole of him’ (1977: 143). The same man turned down every official honour offered him, including a knighthood, although he accepted honorary degrees and the Nobel Prize. There is the Kipling who was pompous, super patriotic and an unashamed subscriber to ethnic and gender stereotypes, and there is the Kipling who wrote wry, complex, sophisticated works that are intricately psychological and political at the same time. This is especially true of some of the stories in A Diversity of Creatures, which were written at a time of national insecurity and increasing self-doubt. This essay will offer a reading of two early poems and the final three stories in A Diversity of Creatures, a somewhat understudied collection published in London and New York in 1917 and comprising fourteen stories and fourteen poems. A number of the stories in this collection expose the structures of dominance and examine the rendering of power. As such, the stories in the collection offer a particular currency in terms of globalisation and postcolonialism. I will argue that these works challenge the certitude of empire by examining the effects of unchecked power and its resultant violence. My choice of the final three stories of the collection was determined by their thematic coherence and relevance to my argument, while the two poems I examine remind us that Kipling was problematising issues of power and dominance from the beginning of his career. Kipling’s only son, John, was declared missing in the World War One Battle of Loos in 1915, an event that all his biographers agree was the most devastating in his life after the death of his eldest daughter at age six. This is the year in which ‘Mary Postgate’ and ‘“Swept and Garnished”’ first appeared, while ‘The Vortex’ appeared the year before. These stories are among the most powerful accounts of the dehumanising effects of war; at the same time, their hidden subject1 is empire, not only because without wars empires cannot be sustained but also because they examine ontological issues abstracted from the historical and material reality of empire: life and death, love and hate, power and powerlessness, domination and subordination, order and anarchy, guilt and redemption. Although these stories were written prior to John going missing and presumed dead, there is no doubt that this was a feared and almost predictable event, as Kipling saw so many of John’s friends reported missing or killed. Edmund Wilson comments that it was easy enough



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for Kipling to have been ‘grimly romantic’ about warfare in India, when he had never seen fighting, but World War One was a different proposition (1964: 61). However, these bleak and cynical stories are anticipated by some of the poems in the much earlier Departmental Ditties (1886) and Barrack-Room Ballads (1889–91), his first real collections of verse, indicating that Kipling’s uncertainties about war pre-dated the national calamities and personal tragedies that were a result of World War One. Andrew Lang, one of Kipling’s earliest reviewers, heard a despondent note despite the often slapstick humour of the ditties, noting that ‘On the whole these are melancholy ditties’ (Carrington, 1955: 63). The preamble to Departmental Ditties hints at a more serious subtext beneath the doggerel verses: I have written the tale of our life For a sheltered people’s mirth, In jesting guise – but ye are wise, And ye know what the jest is worth. (Kipling, 1996a: 1) Two poems in particular expose the underbelly of the wars of empire: ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ (1886) and ‘The Young British Soldier’ (1890) both reveal a clear-sighted understanding of what war is really about and are, in their way, as anti-heroic as the more famous anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen, although the wars in question here are the Afghan wars. So melancholy and so cynically prophetic is ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, written about the Second Afghan War, that it is consistently being referenced in newspaper articles, letters to the editor and blogs in the context of the current campaign in Afghanistan waged by US and NATO troops. Following his speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point on 1 December 2009, announcing the escalation of troop levels, President Obama was advised by a number of commentators and ordinary citizens alike to read Kipling’s poem. The resignation letter of Mathew Hoh, a US diplomat and the first official to resign in connection with Afghanistan, also harks back to Kipling’s poem. Hoh warns that leaders have inadequately prepared and resourced US forces and have committed them to conflict ‘in an indefinite and unplanned manner that has become a cavalier, politically expedient and Pollyannaish misadventure’ (The Washington Post, 10 September 2009). Kipling’s title stresses the arithmetic on (my italics) the frontier because his concern is for conditions on the ground, not something abstract or conceptual. Kipling’s point is that an expensive public school education



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No proposition Euclid wrote No formulae the text-books know, Will turn the bullet from your coat, Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow. (Kipling, 1996b: 37) Kipling notes the superior advantage of local warriors, ‘any Kurrum Valley scamp’ whose education comes cheap and who knows nothing of ‘moods and tenses’ but knows local conditions. ‘The odds’, he says, ‘are on the cheaper man’ (37). This is a double entendre, of course, and refers to the lower cost of educating the Afghan soldier as well as to the perceived cheapness of Afghan life on the frontier. Kipling may well have subscribed to the prevailing view that British life is more valuable than Afghan life, which is cheap because it is bountiful and also perhaps because it is not white. But it is possible that phrases such as ‘home-bred hordes’ that ‘teem’ the hillsides (37) are used ironically. The choice of semiotic words such as ‘hordes’ and ‘teem’ seems to be deliberate and highlights the depersonalisation of the enemy in contrast to the perceived individuality of British soldiers who are brought ‘one by one’ on troopships. The last two lines of the poem in particular support such a reading: The ‘“captives of our bow and spear” / Are cheap, alas! As we are dear’ (37). The reference to Afridis as ‘captives of our bow and spear’2 displaces the perceived primitivism of the Afridis onto the British, and Kipling’s insertion of ‘alas!’ in the final line suggests his lament at this disparity in the valorisation of life. This poem is particularly sardonic in light of the fact that public schools were considered the best training grounds for battle and for grooming empire builders. Whereas ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ concerns the lack of preparedness of the public school trained officer, ‘The Young British Soldier’ from Barrack-Room Ballads bewails the inadequacy of an ‘’arf-made recruity’ (Kipling, 1996c: 335) that is immature, inebriated and vulnerable to cholera and the tropical sun. The poem warns against heroic actions: shooting a comrade caught in adultery with one’s wife or saving a fellow soldier who has been struck by enemy fire. Instead: ‘Be thankful you’re livin’, and trust to your luck / And march to your front like a soldier’ (337). ‘The Young British Soldier’ is rife with allusions to weakness and fear: sergeants that look white and admonitions not to run from



ill prepares one for the real-life circumstances of the frontier, and it is this facet of the poem that seems to attract the attention of contemporary analysts:

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When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier. (337) Of course Kipling may be mocking such cowardice, but the poem is preoccupied with practicalities and, like ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, with realities on the ground. And it is also being quoted widely in the context of the current situation in Afghanistan; one contemporary young British soldier or ‘squaddie’ serving in Afghanistan has even offered an update of Kipling’s ballad: ‘Just like your forebears in mud, dust and ditch / You’ll march and you’ll fight, and you’ll drink and you’ll bitch’ (The Sun, 4 August 2009). The sardonic, almost mocking voice of Kipling’s poem signals a counter-narrative to celebrations of heroic deeds which, in turn, disrupts nineteenth-century race theories that elevated the Anglo-Saxon race and saw the British Empire as the sign of its aptitude to rule and the realisation of its historic destiny. Kipling’s poem would seem to scoff at the very qualities that constituted Anglo-Saxon manhood and the cult of the new imperialism as Lawrence James describes it in The Rise and Fall of the British Empire: ‘an abstraction compounded in equal parts of patriotism, physical toughness, skill at team games, a sense of fair play (sometimes called “sportsmanship”), self-discipline, selflessness, bravery and daring’ (1994: 206). The fact that the poem takes the form of a drinking song and employs a Cockney persona further disrupts the discourse of superiority on which the ideology of empire relied, for it was a superiority premised openly on race but more covertly on class as well. These clear-sighted poems that were among Kipling’s earliest publications are predictive of some of the stories in one of his final collections, A Diversity of Creatures. The poems are cautionary: they warn not only about the real nature of battle on the Frontier, but also about the real nature of violence. The sanctioned violence of war is often turned against oneself in the form of the unsanctioned violence of suicide, as the ending of ‘The Young British Soldier’ indicates and the high suicide rate of returnees from current battle situations in Afghanistan and Iraq bears out. Violence, Kipling knows, is a corollary of power, and violence was so often the instrument of empire. How hasty readings of Kipling often are is indicated by the comments made by one of his earliest



a fight. And the end is not only unheroic but anti-heroic – suicide is a distinctly un-soldier-like act:

critics, Richard Le Gallienne, whose Rudyard Kipling: a Criticism (1900), according to Kingsley Amis, set the tone for over a generation (1975: 110). The man ‘who in India had been taken to be a hostile observer of the workings of the Empire was now emerging as its apologist, as the “unofficial M.P. for British Possessions”’ (110), a phrase coined by Le Gallienne. Amis points out that Le Gallienne’s claim that Kipling glorifies war and approves of violence has been echoed by Kipling’s detractors to this day (111). But, as with Joseph Conrad, Kipling’s willingness to confront horror is often misunderstood as indulgent of that horror. In The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy writes with much greater nuance and amazing prescience, considering what was to follow with the ‘War on Terror’, that Kipling knew that the difference was not between violence and non-violence but between two kinds of violence, a violence that is direct, open, legitimised and authorised, the violence ‘of selfconfident cultural groups’, and ‘the violence of the weak and the dominated’ who must confront it with overwhelming disadvantages (2005: 69). ‘There is in this second violence’, Nandy claims, ‘a touch of nontargeted rage as well as of desperation, fatalism and, as the winners or masters of the world would have it, cowardliness. This violence is often a fantasy rather than an intervention in the real world, a response to the first kind of violence rather than a cause or justification for it’ (69). The first kind of violence Nandy connects with British rulers in India, the second with subjugated Indians. ‘Kipling correctly sensed’, Nandy declares, that ‘the glorification of the victor’s violence was the basis of the doctrine of social evolution and ultimately colonialism, that one could not give up the violence without giving up the concept of colonialism as an instrument of progress’ (69), a mode of thought Nandy considers moral blindness. Nandy comments on Kipling’s refusal to look within while indulging his extraversive nature, his work stressing all forms of collectivity and privileging the bonds of race and blood over person-to-person relationships. Yet many of Kipling’s short stories reveal that when he does examine person-to-person relationships, relationships mediated by bonds of race and blood in the context of power, he can be insightful and in some stories, such as ‘Mary Postgate’, Kipling exposes the pathology of power in a manner that anticipates Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, that great psychological study of empire. Oliver Baldwin, Kipling’s cousin, famously described ‘Mary Postgate’ as ‘the wickedest story ever told’ (Gilmour, 2002: 265), and it has been interpreted most often as a piece of fierce anti-German polemic or as a study of female psychology: the orgiastic release of a sexually repressed




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woman. Kingsley Amis sees the message of the story as ‘Serve him right!’ (1975: 100), the same message as ‘Sea Constables’ (1915), written slightly earlier. Amis’s reading of the central message of ‘Sea Constables’ is accurate. ‘Sea Constables’ does not invite us to sympathise with the deceitful captain carrying oil to the enemy, and it forces us to measure Maddingham’s mercilessness against the larger mercilessness of fuelling a brutal fighting force. Besides, Maddingham was only following protocol, and even if we cannot agree with him we can certainly see his point. ‘Mary Postgate’, on the other hand, solicits revulsion but also a strange sort of sympathy for the protagonist. Mary serves as the staid companion to a woman nearing her sixties, Miss Fowler. When Miss Fowler’s nephew, Wynn Fowler, is orphaned at age eleven and comes to live with them it is Mary who takes charge of him from his education to his mislaid boots and is his champion in all matters. In return she is treated by the ‘unlovely’ (Kipling, 1917b: 422) youth as ‘his butt and his slave’ (423) and subjected to his misogynistic verbal abuse. Miss Fowler’s response to his degrading and dehumanising words is interesting: ‘I suppose that’s how your superior officer talks to you?’, she asks (424). The inference here is of a hierarchy, a hierarchy not only of rank but of power, a power afforded by rank but also by class which can stand in for race or gender. In fact Miss Fowler also nullifies Mary to some extent, saying ‘Mary, aren’t you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?’ (426). When World War One comes, Wynn joins the Flying Corps and is killed, quite unheroically, during a trial flight. Mary and Miss Fowler find themselves unable to cry but immediately set about putting away his things and having ‘a general tidy’, which always does them good (429). His clothes are disposed off to Belgian refugees and his uniform donated to the son of the Rector’s friend. They decide to burn all the rest of his possessions in the open-air furnace for burning refuse at the bottom of the garden they call the destructor. On her way to the village to get paraffin, Mary sees the heath where Wynn used to land his plane and thinks she can almost hear the beat of his propellers overhead, but nothing is visible. As Mary tarries to talk to the village nurse, they hear a sound like the firing of a gun followed by a child’s shriek that dies into a wail. The nurse finds the injured child and brings her into the house, her body ripped and shredded. When the nurse asks what in God’s name it was, Mary replies that it was a bomb released from an aeroplane and recalls the beat of propellers she thought she heard on the heath. She points out that the plane must have shut off its engines as it came



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down and that is why they didn’t notice it at which the nurse exclaims ‘The filthy pigs!’ Asking if she is ‘hurted bad,’ the little girl dies ‘between Nurse Eden’s dripping hands’ (434). Mary returns with the paraffin, frowning and muttering a phrase Wynn used to apply to the enemy: ‘Bloody pagans!’ (435). Before she reaches the house the doctor, apparently trying to conceal something, endeavours to convince her that the accident had been caused when the publican’s stable came tumbling down, but Mary remains doubtful. It has turned to twilight when Mary is ready to set the heap alight and hears a groan or a grunt behind the dense Portugal laurels. She sees, half hidden but close by, a bareheaded man sitting stiffly at the foot of one of the oaks. A broken branch lies across his lap, one booted leg protruding from beneath it. He is dressed in a uniform something like Wynn’s, but Mary dismisses the thought that he might be one of the young flying men she had met at Wynn’s funeral. Thrice he calls out ‘Laty!’ (438). Based presumably on his accent, Mary thinks there is no doubt as to his nationality but does not specify it. The man whimpers in some sort of French, asking for a doctor and pleading that he is hurt. Mary replies harshly in German, ‘Nein!’ and tells him that she has seen the wounded child (439). What follows is the scene that has shocked so many who have read and critiqued this story. It is a scene of sexual gratification and release, accentuated by the fact that Mary leans on the phallic poker while she waits for the airman to die and a growing rapture comes upon her until she experiences an orgasm: ‘Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot’ saying ‘That’s all right’ (442) as she goes into the house. Earlier in the story, at Wynn’s funeral, she had asked two young members of the Flying Corps about the height Wynn fell from, and they speculate that it must have been nearly four thousand feet. Mary responds ‘Then that’s all right’ (429), emphasising ‘that’s’ just as she does here. The fact that she repeats this phrase at the culmination of her orgasm, with the identical emphasis, establishes a counterpoint between Wynn’s death and her sexual release. Although some critics have acknowledged that the aviator may not be German and may only be a figment of Mary’s imagination, most see him as German and the piece as anti-German polemic. In fact the only reason to see him as German at all is the fact that Mary speaks to him in German and uses the same swear terms Wynn had used to curse the enemy. The aviator in fact speaks a hybrid French with a rasping accent and even one (mispronounced) English word: ‘Toctor’ (439); his




Kipling and Beyond

uniform resembles Wynn’s, raising the possibility that if Mary is hallucinating this could be Wynn himself or, if she is not, another young man in a Flying Corps uniform. Was the doctor trying to hush the fact that the pilot ditched his bomb to increase his chances of surviving the crash and that he was in fact English? Or was it the beams after all? Kipling deliberately confounds the reader because the aviator’s nationality is not the point. The point is that Mary has completely dehumanised him and has made him into an ‘It’, which is how she refers to him repeatedly (440 and passim), also calling him ‘The thing’ (440), even ‘The head’ (439). He is no more than the sum of his body parts: ‘one booted leg’, a ‘head [moving] ceaselessly from side to side’, a pink scalp, lips, a mouth, ‘one eye’ (437–9). Potentially humanising details such as the turning down of the corners of his mouth like the child’s, or the tear trickling from one eye, are rendered insensible by detaching them from the human being in question. Mary’s treatment of the wounded aviator is one of the best demonstrations we have of Aimé Césaire’s equation: ‘colonization = “thingification”’ (1972: 42). Césaire tells us that colonisation works ‘to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him … to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism …’ (35). In this story we witness the decivilisation of Mary who wields power and control over the aviator, and it is this that affords her orgiastic excitement. The poker becomes her instrument of power, perhaps even her ‘penis’. That only ‘awfulness’ on the British side will check German ‘awfulness’, as it used to be called, is not Kipling’s sole point, Angus Wilson argues. Mary gains a sense of satisfaction, and ‘only a nation that can demand such satisfaction can hope to wage sufficiently fierce a war upon evil people who maim or kill children’ (1977: 311). But there is a difference between awfulness and fierceness, and Mary’s behaviour is awful. In a moment of moral relativity she acknowledges that a man (and Wynn himself) would have behaved differently.3 What is at issue here is that someone who has been oppressed and dehumanised herself becomes the oppressor, and Mary’s thrill is not only sexual, it is the thrill of dominion, her violence what Nandy calls ‘the violence of the weak and the dominated’ (2005: 69), and it is directed at Wynn. Unlike the violence of war, or even Wynn’s verbal (and possibly sexual) violence, Mary’s ‘violence’ is not legitimised and authorised. Moreover, as Nandy points out, such violence is often a fantasy rather than an intervention in the real world, a response to the first kind of violence rather than a cause or justification for it (69). A propaganda poster from the time depicts a German nurse pouring water on the ground rather



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than giving it to a desperately thirsty wounded British soldier.4 ‘There is no woman in Britain who would do it’, the poster proclaims, adding ‘There is no woman in Britain who will forget it’. ‘Mary Postgate’ tells us otherwise. In this amazing story, Mary transforms from object to subject, from oppressed to oppressor and from powerless to empowered. She seizes agency and assumes control of the situation. That much is clear on the level of narrative. On a metonymic level the allusions to empire suggest that empire is the concealed subject of the story. Mary speaks German to the aviator even though he seems to speak French; by speaking to the aviator in a language he does not use, Mary demonstrates the imposition not only of a language but of a knowledge system, hinting at the ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1994: 76) of colonial rule. She refuses the aviator a history – we have no idea where he came from or what his nationality and background are. Earlier, it may be recalled, Wynn had accused Mary of having no mind, and the technical charts he gives her to study may be seen as his attempt to ‘colonise’ her mind. She refers to the aviator as a bloody pagan, using Wynn’s term, and thumps like a ‘pavior’ through the settling ashes just for the secret thrill of it (Kipling, 1917b: 441), recalling the British propensity for building roads. Among Wynn’s possessions are an assegai, and his books include ‘Hentys, Marryats, Levers, Stevensons, Baroness Orczys and Garvices’ (432), all writers of historical fiction, naval adventures, wildlife tales and so on. G. A. Henty was in fact one of the most prolific and widely read authors of historical fiction about the feats of the British Empire. This is not simply, as most critics see it, Kipling’s signature inventory of items. When the Secretary of the Empire League solicited reading lists for schools Kipling put forward explorers’ tales as well as adventure stories (Wilson, 1977: 250). He well understood their role in firing the imagination of future empire builders. Wynn’s books must be understood hermeneutically, and it is significant then that they are referenced as ‘catching well’ (Kipling, 1917b: 438) in the bonfire and that it is ‘Wynn’s charring books’ that Mary churns up with the poker (439). It is also significant that early in the story we are provided with a detail that has no narratological significance in this extremely economic story: Miss Fowler’s father had been a minor court official at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, described somewhat sarcastically as having ‘set its seal on Civilisation made perfect’ (421). This apparently arbitrary detail also contributes to a reading of the story as metonymical of empire. The child’s body becomes the site where the struggle plays out and the text that is written upon, both literally and figuratively the site




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of rupture. Twice Mary says to the aviator: ‘Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn’ (439, 441): the child’s body is bloodied, ripped and shredded like a contested land, land seen as empty space, virgin land ready for the taking and in the taking there is not only dispossession but also violence. Unlike in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, what we are dealing with here is not an elemental evil but an evil that is located in place and time and historicised, through hints admittedly, but historicised nevertheless. It would be a mistake to read ‘Mary Postgate’ as a clear-cut parable and expect all its elements to fall into place. The best we can do is to look in the interstices for clues and, rather than piecing them together, hold each clue in our hands and examine it. Kingsley Amis complains that ‘It was Kipling’s not very rewarding habit to preface and follow his stories with short poems’ (1975: 100) and advises the reader that these can usually be skipped and read out of context in the collected verse. But it is different with ‘Mary Postgate’, he says, because it has as suffix ‘The Beginnings’, literally a hymn of hate according to Amis, and the purpose of the poem is not just to be another piece about war but to project the message alluded to earlier: ‘Serve him right!’ (Amis, 1975: 100). But the message of the poem and the story is so much more. Kipling often uses these poems self-reflexively as a form of paratext, in this case epitext, a discursive zone that has no narratological purpose. Gérard Genette describes the paratext as ‘the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author … a zone between text and off-text’ (1997: 2). The poem then becomes a liminal space that mediates the story to the reader. That the poem is about the English, not the Germans or the French, supports the reading of ‘Mary Postgate’ offered here: It was not preached to the crowd, It was not taught by the State. No man spoke it aloud, When the English began to hate. (Kipling, 1917a: 443) The hatred is not inborn, nor is it imposed upon them; it is the effect of being colonisers described by Césaire. ‘A first principle of Kipling’s world is revenge, the humiliated must become the humiliator’, Edmund Wilson states (1964: 64), but ‘Mary Postgate’ is far more than an avenger tale. It proposes Césaire’s very point: oppression ‘thingifies’ the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and what we witness here is the ‘thingification’ of Mary as well as her ‘thingification’ of the aviator. While critics have focused on the avenging female and on female sadism in ‘Mary



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Postgate’, the poem extends the subject of the story to the English as a whole. ‘The Hun is at the gate!’ (1996a: 267), Kipling warns in his poem ‘For All We Have and Are’ (1914), but in this story he warns that the Hun is also within the house. Indeed, one of the main effects of the story is to blur or soften rigid boundary lines between binary dichotomies. This is reflected in the breakdown of order in the story, in the scandalising of routine when Mary takes a luxurious hot bath before tea. The Empire depends on order for its maintenance just as the jungle does. The literature of empire is rife with tropes of anarchy and fecundity, which threatened social order and natural order respectively and thus the survival of the carefully ordered system of imperial rule.5 It is also significant that Miss Fowler describes Mary as ‘deadly methodical’ (Kipling, 1917b: 432), tidy, in possession of ‘a trained mind’ and excellent at ‘domestic accounts’ (421).6 Her German counterpart in ‘“Swept and Garnished”’, the story that precedes ‘Mary Postgate’ in the collection, is Frau Ebermann. Sick with the influenza, she lies in bed frustrated by a lace cover that should have been positioned mathematically square in the centre of a radiator top but has slipped so that one corner hangs over the steam pipes. Extremely disturbed by this disorder, Frau Ebermann attempts to straighten the cover but gets dizzy, so she waits for her maid to return with her medicines. ‘Swept and garnished’ is how the Lord should find all her belongings; the phrase also prefigures the ethnic cleansings of Nazi Germany and of our own times. Frau Ebermann has hallucinatory visions of children in the room, children who are mysteriously waiting for their people to come for them. They tell her that they are from two villages that have been wiped out and where, the children insist although the Frau is disbelieving, hundreds and thousands have been killed. The reference is to atrocities committed during World War One by the Germans in Belgium, and when the elder girl plucks the younger boy’s sleeve he cries out in pain. Angus Wilson tells us that this is meant to recall to the reader how the Germans had cut off the right arms of little Belgian boys so that they could never serve their country (1977: 309). The Bryce Committee found that children were brutally slain, young and old mutilated, women attacked and systematic arson and pillage committed. Children’s bodies once again become the site of battle, and upon their bodies are written the brutality of war. Instead of Mary’s masturbatory pleasure, however, Frau Ebermann experiences guilt, and she uses, in an act of redemption, the lace cover that so bothered her to clean the floor she is convinced is covered with the blood of the five children.




Kipling and Beyond

Ironically, the New York Times only six years earlier told of atrocities in the Belgian Congo where the hands of Congolese workers were cut off by the Belgian Force Publique in the brutal business of collecting rubber. It is entirely possible that Kipling had heard or read about this – King Leopold and his foul deeds had become big news by this time – and that the amputated arms are meant to recall this atrocity as well.7 Both these stories are told in stark, straightforward terms even if their subject is not straightforward. The narrator almost never inserts himself and thus the reader must rely on a heuristic method to understand their full import. In many ways, ‘“Swept and Garnished”’ answers Spivak’s call to ethical singularity and responsibility. Not only is the relationship between Frau Ebermann and the children a transactional relationship where both speak and listen, but discursive space is made in the text for the ‘Other’. In Imaginary Maps, Spivak writes: ‘“Ethical Singularity” is neither “mass contact” nor engagement with “the common sense of the people”. We all know that when we engage profoundly with one person, the responses come from both sides: this is responsibility and accountability’ (Spivak, 1995: xxv). The object of ethical action is not benevolence, for responses flow from both sides, but ethical engagement, and this we see fully in this story, as Frau Ebermann and the children engage with each other. Angus Wilson has written of Kipling’s fear of social disorder (1977: 240), but his treatment of disorder in ‘“Swept and Garnished”’ and ‘Mary Postgate’ is deeply ironical, the love of household order and the fear of disorder treated as neurotic, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that domestic disorder might symbolise social disorder. Kipling knows that power produces order but order, constituted in rigid hierarchies and unquestioning obedience, can become repressive, even fascist, and this notion factors into these stories as well.8 The way in which Kipling gesticulates towards his anxieties about power is to treat it as phallic, and nowhere is this more evident than in ‘The Vortex’. Order for Kipling was never mindless or petty bureaucracy but a need for a higher law or social cohesion upheld by self-discipline and responsibility (Wilson, 1977: 48). Social cohesion is of course code for Social Darwinist notions, yet ‘The Vortex’ uses humour to problematise social cohesion and to play up the precariousness of the entire ecosystem of empire. The Hon. A. M. Penfentenyou brings for a visit someone who wishes ‘to have a Voice in Your Councils’, as he tells the narrator. The ‘Voice’ is in earnest, says Penfentenyou, ‘and he’s got It bad’ (Kipling, 1917d: 384). ‘What’s he suffering from?’ asks the narrator, and Penfentenyou answers ‘The Empire’ (384). Earlier the narrator asks for the visitor’s



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name, and Penfentenyou replies ‘We call him all sorts of names, but I think you’d better call him Mr. Lingnam. You won’t have to do it more than once’ (384). There is much that is cryptic and not altogether comprehensible in this story, including the line ‘You won’t have to do it more than once’, but the point of Mr. Lingnam’s name seems clear to me, although no other critic to my knowledge has picked up on it. The name is a decoy for the word ‘Lingam’, a representational phallicshaped object worshipped by Shaivites in Hinduism and symbolising the strength and regenerative power of the god Shiva. Kipling certainly knew the word; he uses it in Kim and elsewhere. When Mr. Lingnam arrives he discourses at length on ‘things Imperial’ (385) and presents three plans for federating the Empire of which the narrator supports the third: ‘Reciprocally co-ordinated Senatorial Hegemony’ (385), which Mr. Lingnam then elaborates in detail. Before retiring he urges the narrator to have faith and to remember that nothing matters except the Idea (385). While references to ‘the Voice’ and ‘the Idea’ relate intertextually to Heart of Darkness, might the ‘Idea’ here be something quite different from what Conrad was talking about: not the mission civilasatrice at all but instead hegemony? It is after all Mr. Lingnam who presents it. Another possibility is that when a higher law is not upheld and authority becomes hegemony, social cohesion collapses and the result is chaos. Either way ‘The Vortex’ exposes the nexus of power, control and violence. Mr. Lingnam is a ‘Pan-Imperialist’ bore and continues his peroration on all things imperial as he drives a party of people, including the narrator, on a country outing. As a result of a collision with a bicycle, swarms of bees are released, emptying the village, causing chaos and disrupting social order. Kipling obviously sees bureaucrats like Lingnam who prattle endlessly about the ‘World’s Work’ (389) and the Empire and Federation in the same light as a swarm of bees who have been set loose, and the story ends with an Orwellian passage about ‘the Federation of the Empire on the lines of Co-ordinated, Offensive Operations, backed by the Entire Effective Forces, Moral, Military, and Fiscal, of Permanently Mobilised Communities’ (404). Kipling and his fellow Imperialists were committed to the federalism Lingnam keeps promoting, yet the reader senses a sympathy with the unnamed narrator of this farcical story who challenges Lingnam at the end when the latter says that the trouble with ‘Us’ is that ‘We’ take so long making sure ‘We are right’ that ‘We’ don’t act (404). That the pronouns are frequently capitalised reiterates the egoistic nature of these bureaucrats. Again, Kipling, ever the good Freemason, throws us




Kipling and Beyond

some clues: the play on Mr. Lingnam’s name, the fact that he is suffering from ‘The Empire’ and the title of the story itself: ‘The Vortex’. Written in August 1914 and preceding in the collection two of his bleakest stories, ‘The Vortex’ refers not simply to escaped bees but to the vortex of power that draws us into war. There is sufficient evidence in these poems and stories that Kipling was more uncertain and anxious about war and imperial rule than his more public and partisan works would lead us to believe. Kipling resorts to metonymy, allusiveness, traces and clues to examine the effects of power and violence. He may lack the unequivocal moral indignation of George Orwell whose message of anti-imperialism was loud and clear, or the discerning wit of E. M. Forster who questioned the practice of empire if not its principle. Unlike Joseph Conrad, he tends not to elevate historical and material inequities into larger ontological principles. But in his practical, sometimes humorous, sometimes grim manner, Kipling also questioned the nature and exercise of power. Orwell contends that Kipling ‘believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris’ (1964: 72) – this is clearly expressed in ‘Recessional’, and in Something of Myself he notes the Boers’ ‘primitive lust for racial domination’ (Kipling, 1977: 131). Yet there was the supreme hubris of bearing the burden of race not merely as a right nor even as a duty but as a responsibility, the burden he exhorts Americans to take up in his infamous poem. Orwell contends that Kipling sold out to the British governing class, emotionally not financially, and this warped his political judgement (1964: 84). But the works discussed here, as well as many others, point to the ‘despair’ and ‘fear of nameless psychological horror’ that Trilling sees as his dominant themes in common with T. S. Eliot (1964: 89–90). Kipling’s viewpoint, Edward Said indicates, is not only of a white man in a colonial possession but of a massive colonial system (1993: 134), and this perhaps accounts for the difference between the ceremonial anthems of empire and some of the stories in his later collections – the first are produced by a system, the second by an individual sensibility. Edmund Wilson in fact sees Kipling as resisting his own sense of life and discarding his own moral intelligence in favour of the viewpoint of a dominant political party (1964: 48). But there were times when the individual sensibility prevailed. Although Kipling has been so closely associated with the British Empire, India in particular, another way of reading his works is to see them, above all, as being about the English; there is in fact a certain amount of essentialism in his pronouncements on the English



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character. Even Kim embodies a sort of reverse mimicry in Homi Bhabha’s sense of the term. It is illuminating to apply to Kipling’s works Fredric Jameson’s argument that relations between the subjective and the public or political are wholly different in third-world culture,9 the story of the private individual destiny always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society (Jameson, 1986: 69). It is entirely possible to similarly read Kipling’s stories of the private individual destiny as always an allegory of the embattled situation of English culture and society in the context of empire. Here we would do well to heed Jameson’s caveat that we must extend our traditional notion of allegory and not look for a one-to-one table of equivalences unless we are willing to accept that such equivalences might be fluid and flexible ‘at each perpetual present of the text’ (73). Just as Ah Q is allegorically China, but his persecutors are also China, in the story ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1918) by Lu Xun that Jameson examines, both Mary Postgate and Wynn (if we take the aviator to signify Wynn as persecutor turned victim) are England. One-to-one equivalences are also difficult to establish in ‘“Swept and Garnished”’, because although it is clear that Frau Ebermann and Germany have a synecdochical relationship, she has, by implication, the same relationship with all hegemonic regimes, which might just possibly suggest Britain’s relationship with her colonies. Even if the author does not intend such an association the reader might make it, which would disarray the story’s taxonomy. Another important intervention that Jameson makes is to remind us of the association by Robert C. Elliott between satire and the utopian impulse. All utopias are driven by the satirist’s rage at a fallen reality, Elliot claims (Jameson, 1986: 80). ‘The Vortex’ contains something of this rage, expressed in the anger of the bees, while the utopian aspect of the story emerges in the scene of English village life where a Foresters’ Fête is underway on the village green. ‘The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the poverty of the individual experience of isolated monads, to dying individual bodies without collective pasts or futures bereft of any possibility of grasping the social totality’ Jameson declaims (1986: 85–6). But even when Kipling was writing from this elevated view there was always some awareness of what lay before and below, of the social totality. When he writes from an individual sensibility his stories are situational and materialist, which is how Jameson reads ‘third-world’ stories: the telling of the individual story and the individual experience ultimately involves the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself (85–6). By writing about the lived




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Notes 1. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak writes that the broader question of the constitution of the sexed subject is hidden by foregrounding the visible violence of sati (1999: 300). Similarly, Kipling foregrounds the visible violence of war but the broader question of empire is hidden. 2. Kipling also uses this phrase in ‘The Captive’ (Traffics and Discoveries, 1904: 9), and in Something of Myself (1977: 123). 3. See White and Harper (1915: 213). The reference here may be to a raid by British naval aviators on Friedrichshafen where a pilot who was shot down was protected from angry citizens, taken to hospital, and treated honorably by the German officer to whom he surrendered. 4. See Gross (1972: illustration no. 66). 5. The original version of the story included an epigraph: ‘How does your garden grow?’ 6. In this she recalls the accountant in Heart of Darkness. 7. Even if Kipling was not conscious of this connection, many readers today might make it, thus establishing an equivalency between the actions of the Nazis and the actions of European colonialists. Césaire indicates that before the European bourgeoisie was the victim of Nazism it was an accomplice, legitimising it because it had been applied only to non-European peoples. For an account of the atrocities of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo, see Hochschild (1998). 8. Another story in this collection, ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’, suggests the fascist potential inherent in democracy as the rule of the majority. 9. The contestation of Jameson’s use of the term ‘third-world’ by Aijaz Ahmad and others is not relevant to the point being made here.

Works cited ‘Afghanistan– (With apologies To Kipling), by an anonymous British soldier’ (2009) The Sun, 4 August. Amis, Kingsley (1975) Rudyard Kipling and his World. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Carrington, C. E. (1955) The Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Doubleday & Co. Césaire, Aimé (1972) Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. (1972) ‘The Finest Story About India – In English’, in The Age of Kipling, ed. John Gross. New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 27–35. Forster, E. M. (2008) ‘Some Books: Kipling, Edward Thompson, and Indian Writers’, in The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929–1960, ed. Mary Lago et al. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, pp. 184–8. Genette, Gérard (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilmour, David (2002) The Long Recessional: the Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.



experience of our private existences (69) but allowing an allegorical quality, Kipling encourages us to read these stories in primarily political and social terms and evades an apparently benign but ultimately colonising humanistic universalism.

Gross, John (ed.) (1972) The Age of Kipling. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hochschild, Adam (1998) King Leopold’s Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hoh, Matthew (2009) ‘Letter of Resignation’, The Washington Post, 10 September. James, Lawrence (1994) The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Jameson, Fredric (1986) ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (Autumn): 65–88. Kipling, Rudyard (1899) ‘Naboth’, in Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People. New York: Doubleday and McClure Co., pp. 71–5. —— (1904) ‘The Captive’, in Traffics and Discoveries. London: Macmillan and Co., pp. 1–36. —— (1917a) ‘The Beginnings’, in A Diversity of Creatures. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., p. 443. —— (1917b) ‘Mary Postgate’, in A Diversity of Creatures. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., pp. 421–42. —— (1917c) ‘“Swept and Garnished”’, in A Diversity of Creatures. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., pp. 409–20. —— (1917d) ‘The Vortex’, in A Diversity of Creatures. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., pp. 383–404. —— (1926) ‘Sea Constables: A Tale of ’15’, in Debits and Credits. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., pp. 20–40. —— (1977) Something of Myself. London: Penguin Books. —— (1996a) Rudyard Kipling: the Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Limited. —— (1996b) ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, in Rudyard Kipling: the Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Limited, pp. 36–7. —— (1996c) ‘The Young British Soldier’, in Rudyard Kipling: the Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Limited, pp. 335–7. Nandy, Ashis (2005) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Exiled at Home: Omnibus Collection. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Orwell, George (1964) ‘Rudyard Kipling’, in Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Rutherford. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 70–84. Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1994) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Post–Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 66–111. —— (1995) Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi. New York: Routledge. —— (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trilling, Lionel (1964) ‘Kipling’, in Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Rutherford. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 85–94. White, Claude Grahame and Harry Harper (1915) Aircraft in the Great War: a Record and Study. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co. Wilson, Angus (1977) The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking. Wilson, Edmund (1964) ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’, in Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Rutherford. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 17–69.




‘Arguing with the Himalayas’? Edward Said on Rudyard Kipling Harish Trivedi

Rudyard Kipling has not exactly lacked for eminent commentators on his works: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, to name only a half-dozen. But when Penguin asked Edward Said to write an introduction and notes to their edition of Kipling’s masterpiece Kim (1901; Penguin Classics edition 1987), it was as if they had sponsored and won exclusive broadcasting rights to a world heavyweight boxing championship match between the arch-colonial of all times and the arch-postcolonial of our times. In the contemporary critical climate, the frisson could not have been more palpable, and it turned out to be quite a bout, with a highly unpredictable outcome. In this essay, I seek to revisit that grand encounter with a view mainly to figuring out what happens to our current theoretical formulations and categorical discriminations, such as the colonial and the postcolonial, when two strong men stand face to face though they come, ideologically speaking, from the ends of the earth. Edward Said (1935–2003) was, of course, the foundational figure of postcolonial critical discourse on the strength primarily of his seminal work Orientalism (1978), though the term ‘postcolonial’ does not occur in that text. Even more than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, who with Said are commonly regarded as the trinity of postcolonialism (and with whom he really turns out to share academic eminence more than any close commonality of concerns), Said was seen as the flag-bearer of a new discourse which would at last allow the postcolonials, or the formerly colonised, to have their fifteen minutes of representation and fame under the liberal-guilty postcolonising Western sun. He retains that well deserved pre-eminence, and all postcolonial discourse is agreed to have come out of his Orientalism, much as all modern Russian fiction did out of Gogol’s overcoat (according 120



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to Dostoevsky) or all modern American fiction out of Huckleberry Finn (according to Hemingway). His influence on not only literary studies but also cultural studies and the social sciences has been both pervasive and profound, and it is in this wider context that his essay on Kipling needs to be viewed. Said in this essay appears to be at his magisterial best and in full flow, with his ‘Introduction’ running to forty pages (whereas Alan Sandison’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, also published in 1987, was at eighteen pages less than half the length while Trevor Boyle’s introduction to the Everyman edition (1994) was, at seven pages, less than half of that). All of Said’s characteristic critical qualities are fully in evidence here: the vast intellectual scope, awareness of the wider literary and cultural context, engagement with the history of ideas, astuteness of interpretation and formulation, and an urgent political and moral concern and authority of tone, all of which served to make Orientalism a highly radical and seminal work. At the same time, he is here writing about a text which is situated in a place and context, colonial India, that he never visited before or after in his writings, and about a text and an author, moreover, whom he early pronounces to be widely misunderstood, so that his own treatment of them is self-consciously an act of arbitration and even rescue. This results, somewhat uncharacteristically, in an unresolved complexity of interpretation, some uncertainty underlying repeated attempts at formulating the central issues, a few palpable misapprehensions and errors, and an exploration of the text from some startlingly unusual perspectives, all of which make for the special interest of this piece.

Two texts – in two minds? To begin with a preliminary consideration, Said’s discussion of Kim is available in two versions. After publication in the Penguin edition, it was reprinted six years later under the title ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’ in his major book Culture and Imperialism (1993: 159–96). (The title would appear to echo the title of Irving Howe’s essay, ‘The Pleasures of Kim’ (1977), though Said nowhere mentions Howe in his own essay.) The two versions of Said’s essay are recognisably the same piece and yet, curiously, there are hundreds of little revisions of words and phrases in the latter version as well as some more extensive deletions and additions. Most of these seem to be the result of the kind of fussy and fidgety alterations which some perfectionist authors are rather more prone to making than others whenever a piece of writing by them is reprinted



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even after a short gap, reflecting perhaps a compulsive urge to have a second bite of the stylistic cherry. Just for that reason and especially in the case of an exceptionally felicitous and cogent writer like Said, even such stylistic changes would have some significance. But there are some bigger and more substantial changes too, signalling a modification of emphasis or nuance, deletions of several passages of several lines each, and the insertion of some new or extensively rewritten passages. The stylistic changes begin almost as soon as the Introduction begins. (In the parenthetical citations that follow, P stands for the Penguin version and C for the version in Culture and Imperialism.) In the first paragraph, ‘More interestingly than that, however, is that Kim was Kipling’s only successfully sustained and mature piece of long fiction’ (P 7) is cleaned up and trimmed down to ‘More interestingly, Kim was Kipling’s only successfully sustained and mature piece of long fiction’ (C 159); ‘both by the general reader and the critic alike’ (P 7) is corrected to ‘by the general reader and the critic alike’ (C 159); ‘failures of coherence, of vision, or of judgement’ (P 7) becomes ‘failures of coherence, vision or judgement’ (C 159); ‘the experience of empire’ (P 7) is amplified to become ‘the experience of empire as the main subject of his work’ (C 160); ‘the colour, the glamour and the romance’ (P 7) becomes ‘the colour, glamour and romance’ (C 160); this ‘colour’ etc. is in an addition specified to be ‘well-known to specialized sectors of the home society’ (C 160); ‘relatively early in life’ (P 7) becomes ‘early on’ (C 160); ‘readers’ and ‘scholars’ (P 7) is cut to ‘scholars’ (C 160); ‘the two men’ (P 7) (i.e. Conrad and Kipling) becomes ‘them’ (C 160); ‘troubling figures’ (P 7) becomes just ‘troubling’ (C160); and ‘absorbed and domesticated’ (P 7) is expanded to become ‘absorbed into the canon and domesticated along with peers like Dickens and Hardy’ (C 160). And all these eleven changes occur within the first paragraph running to 27 lines in the Penguin version. Nor does this obsessive-seeming urge not to leave the Penguin text alone for a moment flag over the 39 pages that follow, so that no single page or paragraph is left clean and untouched, and altogether, there are probably fewer sentences left unrevised than those showing some kind of change or the other. As already apparent, most of the changes here and later involve syntactic or idiomatic straightening or simple pruning and tightening while some are little additions which clarify or reinforce a point already made. However, some others correct palpable grammatical errors that had crept into the published Penguin version. For example, ‘the packet of incriminating papers … are …’ (P 17–18) is corrected to ‘is’ (C 170); ‘Compared to James or Conrad’ (P 40) becomes ‘Compared with …’ (C 190); and ‘his



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creativity rivals Dickens and Shakespeare’ (P 40) is emended to ‘… rivals that of Dickens and Shakespeare’ (C 190). Some obvious infelicities are corrected too: in ‘Kipling carefully differentiates the different religions’ (P 41), ‘different’ is deleted (C 191). Some passive constructions are turned into active: ‘as it is rendered by every novelist of importance’ (P 42) is turned into ‘as every novelist of importance renders it’ (C 192), for example, and in the very next sentence, ‘the antithesis offered by Kipling’s fiction’ (P 42) becomes ‘Kipling’s fiction offers an antithesis’ (C 192). More pervasively, many of what seem to be Said’s stylistic characteristics are now systematically eliminated as if they were mere tics, such as the little connectives with which he liked to link one sentence to the next in a chain, thus underlining the logical progression of his argument. For example, sentences beginning ‘Yet …’, ‘For …’, ‘But …’, ‘Even though …’, and ‘Or …’, all in the same paragraph (P 14), now begin with each of these words chopped off (C 166–7). Such ritual beheading and the bringing down of an editorial sword on one’s own head must have been especially hard to accomplish for a critic so sensitive to beginnings as to have already published a book titled Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). (Said’s last book, titled On Late Style and published posthumously [2006], is concerned with how some literary and musical masters move away in their last phase from their familiar mode to adopt a strange and disturbing style.) It must have been no less of an affliction to decide to delete a number of phrases of the kind which are the markers of one’s idiolect and characteristic personal style and according to which, in the old mot, the style was the man. To cite again a mere sample, ‘This is an extremely complex and interesting question and, I believe, it can only be answered slowly and deliberately’ (P 17) is cut to the brisker ‘This extremely complex and interesting question can only be answered slowly and deliberately’ (C 169), and in the next sentence, ‘We cannot overlook the fact that because he has spent so much time with them, Kipling will not abandon Kim and the old monk …’ (P 17) is slimmed down to ‘Kipling will not abandon Kim and the old monk …’ (C 169). Elsewhere, ‘But we should also remark, however, that other writers before Kipling …’ (P 20) becomes ‘Other writers before Kipling …’ (C 173). But the unkindest of such cuts perhaps comes when Said says at the beginning of a new paragraph: ‘This is a very important point. Kim is a work of great aesthetic merit …’ (P 30), where what is cut is: ‘This is a very important point’ (C 182)! The cumulative effect of numerous such changes is to make (the Penguin) Said sound rather like the flabby Hurree Babu with what Said himself here called his ‘orotund verbosity’ (P 41).




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As there are hundreds of examples in the two versions of Said’s essay of the kind of changes briefly illustrated above, one begins to wonder what is going on. Did Said undergo such a radical transformation in not only how he wrote but the grooves along which he apparently thought within a matter of the six years which separate the two versions? Did he have a mid-life stylistic crisis, or a thoroughgoing change of stylistic heart? Why would a writer at the peak of his career chop and change a major piece of his writing so drastically and extensively in full public view, for the Penguin text was already in print and circulation – and indeed continues to be, quite unchanged? Many of the changes are so basic and persistent as to suggest that a punctilious professor is here correcting an incompetent freshman composition so thoroughly as to make an example of it before the whole class. Alternatively, all these changes may look like the handiwork of a super-confident and super-efficient copy-editor with fixed notions of just how critical prose should be written, and only too ready to impose those standards clinically on all writers regardless of reputation. (Incidentally, in his ‘Introduction’ to Culture and Imperialism, among the numerous persons whose help Said acknowledges, he records his ‘deep gratitude and almost thunderstruck admiration for Elisabeth Sifton: friend of many years, superb editor’ etc.; Said, 1993: xxxii.) The fact remains that a complete catalogue of all the changes made in Said’s essay will be enough to make any writer freeze in his stylistic tracks. (But, dear Reader, I shall myself carry on undaunted, following the example of the earlier rather than the later Said.) With one’s reverence for Said one may not wish to believe that all these lacerations and mutilations were self-inflicted but there can be no doubt that he willingly subjected himself to them, just as he made elsewhere in the essay several bigger alterations which mark a change not of style but of mind. These seem painless by comparison and the reasons for them are far easier to surmise and comprehend. To list the major deletions first, Said cut out the following: • A passage of fourteen lines containing references to the debate in 1984 between Conor Cruise O’Brien and Salman Rushdie and to the British TV adaptations of The Far Pavilions, the Raj Quartet and the film Gandhi (in the paragraph beginning ‘Nor should we forget that even though’ (P 11) or ‘Even though’ (C 163)). • Four lines referring to Michael Rosenthal’s work (P 13–14). • Eight lines discussing a quotation from Edmund Wilson just cited (P 23).



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• A sentence of three lines on racial theory (P 30). • Eleven lines recapitulating an argument from his Orientalism (P 30). • Ten lines over two successive paragraphs from his extended comparison between Kim and Jude (P 38). • Small passages adding up to approximately eight lines on how Kim is different from some European fictional heroes (P 39). • One sentence of three lines on how Kim will always outsmart his opponents (P 40). • One sentence of three lines on how Kim is ‘a master work of imperialism’ though also ‘profoundly embarrassing’ (P 45). The last deletion, of an eminently quotable dictum from near the end of the essay, goes together with a number of significant additions and revisions which Said incorporated towards his conclusion. The following list shows the major additions (excluding phrases and short sentences which are only elaborations): • Six lines on the ‘“White” colonies’ (C 162). • A paragraph of 31 lines giving a ‘brief summary of the novel’s plot’ (C 164–5). • A paragraph of twenty-five lines on Victor Turner’s concept of the ‘liminal’ including an eight-line indented quotation from Turner (C 170). • Two passages of five and six lines respectively in successive paragraphs discussing a book by Michael Edwardes (C 183). • Five lines bringing in Thomas Munro and Mountstuart Elphinstone (C 185). • Six lines on Bentinck and the Utilitarians (C 186). • Two successive paragraphs of fifteen and eleven lines respectively on Kipling’s ‘own recollected sense of being at home in India’ and a comparison with Camus’s similar ‘appropriation’ of Algeria in this respect (C 193–4). Besides these longer deletions and additions, there are numerous others involving just a phrase or a short sentence some of which too may be thought significant. A negatively worded approbation of Kipling’s depiction of the lama is deleted: ‘He is no charlatan, no beggarly impostor, no confidence man’ (P 16), as is the assertion ‘An entire system of thought clustered around these [racist] conceptions’ (P 31). Among the smaller additions is a sentence pithily clinching a larger formulation, ‘Kim is central to the quasi-official age of empire and in a way represents




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it’ (C 163). Altogether, the extensive changes show the latter version to be a more considered and somewhat more moderately formulated plea by Said in favour of what he calls ‘the aesthetic and psychological pleasure’ (C 195) afforded by the novel despite its imperialist and racial thrust. In general, the earlier version is now seen to be distinctly more emphatic, rhetorical and over-written.

Aesthetics and politics As may have already been partially glimpsed through the extensive lattice of Said’s revisions cited above, his major endeavour in his palimpsestic text is a delicate balancing out of the aesthetic against the political in Kim, the tricky tension that he sought to capture in the title he now gave to his discussion, ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’. In addition, he provides a number of new contexts and perspectives in which this novel is to be understood. After acclaiming Kim ‘as unique in Rudyard Kipling’s life and career as it is in English literature’ and giving a brief account of Kipling’s life and career (P 7–9), Said opens his discussion by immediately pointing to ‘a radical misreading’ of Kipling by his ‘admirers and acolytes’ (P 9). By such readers, Kipling’s India is taken to be ‘a timeless, unchanging, and “essential” locale’, whereas Said argues: ‘If Kipling’s India has qualities of the essential and unchanging, it was because, for various reasons, he deliberately saw India that way’ (P 9). But this sounds a little too sophisticated, for if Kipling ‘deliberately’ saw and represented India in a particular way, how are his admirers to blame for reading his India in just that way? Said seems to elide the fact that the reading by Kipling’s admirers that he castigates clearly follows and arises from the way Kipling himself represented India, and if one is blameworthy, so must be the other, and the responsibility for the ‘misreading’, if that is what it is, must lie with Kipling. The discrimination that Said advocates here seems thus to be a distinction without a difference. This is borne out by the two considerations that he insists ‘must be kept in mind as we read Kim’ (P 10). The first is that Kipling was not just ‘a white man’ describing a colony but that he was writing from the perspective of ‘a massive colonial system … [which] had acquired the status almost of a fact of nature’, and the second, that ‘no less than India itself of course, Kipling was a historical being, albeit a major artist’ (P 10) and that he ‘was not a neutral figure in the AngloIndian situation, but a prominent actor in it’ (P 11). The argument seems to be that given the historical circumstances, Kipling was what he



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was and could not have been otherwise, even though he was an artist. Therefore, Said says in a rhetorical flourish to clinch the point: ‘Kipling could no more have questioned that difference, and the right of the white European to rule, than he would have argued with the Himalayas’ (P 10; changed to ‘Kipling would …’ in C 162–3). Well, the rhetorical answer to that would be that while the Himalayas still stand where they did in Kipling’s time, the ‘massive colonial system’ which seemed no less immovable and non-negotiable to Kipling (or so says Said) was completely swept away within a matter of half a century of the publication of Kim. It turns out that the Raj was not, after all, ‘a fact of nature’ but an only too human construction and super-imposition. And India was far from ‘unchanging’, for outside Kipling’s fictional world (and unnoticed by Said as well), even some white men living in India had already been interrogating British rule. They included W. D. Arnold, who had served as an army officer in India and wrote a contemplative liberal novel based on his experiences, Oakfield, or Fellowship in the East (1853) and, more importantly, several early British sympathisers with Indian nationalist aspirations including A. O. Hume, often described as the founder of the Indian National Congress, and William Wedderburn, one of its early presidents. But Said’s argument here at the beginning of his essay, to the effect that Kipling’s view of an unchanging India was the only possible view available to him, is the keynote of his interpretation of the novel and is reiterated by him several times in different ways. Said’s formulation can be said to be stronger even than perhaps anything to be found in the novel itself. For example, Kipling does say that the Himalayas are ‘changeless’ and ‘eternal’ – not because of the earthly reason that they are in any way like the British Raj but rather for the divine circumstance that, as Kim acknowledges, ‘Surely the Gods live here!’ (Kipling, 2000: 284). This echoes the still widely current nomenclature in India for the Himalayas, devabhumi, the land of the gods, a belief that goes at least as far back as the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa (4th century AD) who in the opening line of his epic Raghuvamsha described the Himalayas as ‘devatatma’, i.e. divine in soul. A little later in the novel, Kipling describes ‘an immortal cliff’ (300) that Kim and the lama negotiate and then adds, in a passage which is as poetic and sublime in tone as anything in the novel and is rendered from the lama’s lofty view of the world: From the enormous pit before him white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight. The rest was as the darkness of interstellar space.




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Though Kim immediately punctures the lama’s spiritual rhapsody with a characteristically mundane remark, the point remains that the Himalayas are shown to be ‘above the world’ (including the Raj) and belonging to another, higher domain and plane. Incidentally, in Said’s reading of the novel, though Kipling shows ‘respect’ (P 16) for this ‘lovable old cleric’ (P 17), there is never any conflict in the novel between the divergent and even opposed quests of the lama and Kim because ‘even the lama see[s] India as Kipling saw it, as a part of the Empire’ (P 22), though Said does not specify just how and where. This, Said says, is because ‘for Kipling there was no conflict’ (P 23; original emphasis), as if that settled the issue, and because ‘Clearly, the lama regards Kim as his own saviour’ (P 15) – though again it is not clear how, especially when a loaded word such as ‘saviour’ is involved. Said also describes the lama’s vision of liberation at the end of the novel as containing ‘some mumbo-jumbo’ (P 19), which is a harsher judgement than any passed by either Kim or the narrator, and then diminishes it further by suggesting that the lama’s ‘encyclopedic vision of freedom strikingly resembles Colonel Creighton’s Indian Survey, in which every camp and village is duly noted’ (P 19) – as if the lama’s transcendence and ‘freedom’ were the same as imperial cartography as a means of colonial control. Said’s discussion of the politics of Kim thus has a two-pronged thrust: that Kipling is not to be blamed for his colonial, Orientalist or racist views because he was no worse than his contemporaries, and that the aesthetic satisfaction that the novel offers as a work of great literature compensates for its politics if it does not also exonerate it. This is the kind of argument one would expect from an inveterate admirer or acolyte of Kipling, but coming as it does from the great scourge of nineteenthcentury Orientalism and the most politically radical of postcolonial critics, it remains a position that is hard to puzzle out. In fact, Said seems to be puzzling it out for himself too, for several formulations of his in this regard seem to backtrack instantly and to be almost circular.

Orientalism and imperialism Thus, Said acknowledges that ‘Kim is a major contribution to … orientalized India’ (P 28) and then proceeds assiduously to cite over a



‘These,’ he said slowly, ‘are indeed my Hills. Thus should a man abide, perched above the world, separated from delights, considering vast matters.’ (301)

whole paragraph more than ten examples of this proclivity of Kipling’s, including statements such as ‘Kim could lie like an Oriental’, ‘the huckster instinct of the East’, and ‘the Oriental’s indifference to mere noise’ (P 28–9). But rather than unremittingly excoriating Kipling for making such statements as he had done innumerable other writers in his Orientalism on lesser evidence, Said now tries to find excuses for Kipling. ‘Nothing of this is unique to Kipling’ (P 29), he pleads, and after making the ‘very important point’ (as seen above) that ‘Kim is a work of great aesthetic merit; it cannot be dismissed simply as the racist imagining of one fairly disturbed and ultra-reactionary imperialist’ (P 30), he keeps enumerating examples of other similarly bigoted imperialists until he plays his trump card: ‘Even Karl Marx succumbed to thoughts of the changeless Asiatic village, or agriculture, or despotism’ (P 31). Further, he adduces Ronnie Heaslop from A Passage to India, quite implausibly, as a latter-day example of an Englishman ‘whose national dominance over each and every Indian … was absolute’ (P 31). On the contrary, Ronnie is, as would be recalled, a callow, uncertain and apparently wronged figure whose fiancée has been allegedly sexually assaulted by an Indian, and he cannot control even the conduct of his own immediate official subordinate, Mr Das (Forster, 1983: 199–211, passim). On the other question of Kim being great literature and therefore exempt from political stigma, Said’s repeated formulations show him to be caught in a cleft, as for example in the exculpatory preliminary remark: ‘Some things about Kim will strike every reader, regardless of politics and history’ (P 12). The first of these is that it is ‘an overwhelmingly male novel’ (P 12), as if that had nothing to do with politics and history. In the previous paragraph, Said has already alerted us that ‘the book is, after all, a novel’, and that ‘the imperial experience, while often regarded as exclusively political, was also an experience that entered into cultural and aesthetic life as well’ (P 12), again underlining the supposition that politics is separate from culture and aesthetics, and that novels are mere fictions. One of the major strengths of Said’s Orientalism, and its shock value, was precisely that it treated all kinds of materials as political including those that had earlier been regarded as literary and aesthetic and therefore exempt from vulgar political scrutiny. But here is Said apparently arguing the opposite case. ‘We are naturally [?] entitled to read Kim as a novel belonging to the world’s great literature, free to some degree of its encumbering history and political circumstances’ (P 22), he says, and as if instantly wishing to cover up this startling regression from his acknowledged public position, he adds: ‘Yet by the same [?] token,




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we must not unilaterally [?] abrogate the connections in it … to its contemporary actuality’ (P 22). It has already been noted that in Said’s view, there is no conflict between Kim’s Western imperialist trajectory and the lama’s Eastern spiritual quest – a conflict which might have made the novel come thematically alive – because of the simple and emphatic reason that ‘for Kipling there was no conflict’ (P 23). Towards the end of the essay, Said reads the conclusion of the novel as a markedly optimistic one, in which Kim ‘graduates from one brilliant success to the other’ (though it is not quite clear which, especially as Kim goes into prolonged sleep towards the end), ‘the British … foil a serious plot’ (or is it Hurree Babu who helps accomplish that end more than either Kim or the absent Creighton?), and ‘the Indians … continue enjoying prosperity under Britain’ (P 38). So far as can be made out, Said here is not being ironical. Developing further the interpretation that Kim is ‘so remarkably optimistic a novelistic character’, Said asserts grandiloquently if again somewhat vaguely that he ‘restores India to health’ while part of his strength is his ‘deep knowledge, almost instinctive in its wellspring, of his difference from the Indians around him’ (p 39), a difference that must be basically racial and imperialist. This is notwithstanding an ‘especially fascinating’ quality of Kim’s which is his ‘remarkable gift for disguise’ (P 41), a ‘chameleon-like’ gift and capacity (P 42) which Said celebrates at the same time as emphasising his difference from the Indians, as if disguise could dissolve difference rather than underlining it. Said’s ambivalences regarding the priority of either aesthetics or politics over the other come to a culmination near the end of his essay where, summing up, he still seems to be looking both ways: ‘Thus, as I have been saying, Kim is a master work of imperialism: I mean this as an interpretation of a rich and absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless profoundly embarrassingly novel’ (P 45). Said may have been deeply embarrassed by this novel which he could not stop praising especially in some situations where it is forthrightly imperialistic, but he seems eventually to have been no less embarrassed by his own admission of perplexity, so that (as noted above), he cut out this Janus-faced statement altogether when this essay was reprinted.

Creighton and the Great Game Of the other significant aspects of Said’s introduction to Kim (which is perhaps less of an introduction to a text for readers coming to it for the first time and more of an original interpretation such as regular



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academic articles are and thus oriented rather more towards a peergroup of academics), there is room here briefly to notice only three. These are, firstly, his exceptionally detailed and approbatory treatment of the character of Colonel Creighton; secondly, the many authors with whom he compares Kipling throughout the essay (including some with whom Kipling has not been compared by any other critic of his either before or after Said), and finally, the extensive Notes that Said provided to Kim in the Penguin edition. Said here devotes five pages to Creighton (P 31–6), which is more space than he gets in many book-length studies of Kipling and not much less than Kipling gives him in Kim. Creighton is usually regarded as a minor character whom the novel presents as more of an off-stage figure than an on-stage actor; he does not do much in the novel beyond filling his official role of a Colonel without a regiment but with a desk, and the one question asked about him by other critics (such as Brigadier A. Mason) has been whether he was based on an actual army officer who had served in India. His sketchy and shadowy presence is in keeping with Kipling’s avowed intention not to have any major British characters in Kim (barring of course the ambiguous case of the hybridised hero), and in the Oxford introduction he is mentioned only once in passing, together with Mahbub Ali (Sandison, 1987: xxvi) – a far more active and colourful character who seems hardly to catch Said’s attention. Nor does Said show himself much interested in Hurree Babu, who is far the most effective player of the Great Game of which Creighton is the sedentary and largely unseen manager, and clearly more so than Kim whose ‘native and secular mentor he is’ in this regard (P 17) as Said himself acknowledges. Besides, Hurree Babu is considerably more effective than Kim at assuming disguises, a quality of Kim which Said especially admires; he is more truly hybridised than Kim and more of a liminal figure, even with his much ridiculed high-flown English which appears to be more competent anyhow than Kim’s street Hindustani; and he has a credible claim to fulfilling his ambition to become an F.R.S., as Creighton, who as a fellow ethnologist shares the same ultimate aspiration, concedes. Said himself acknowledges that Creighton’s character is ‘seen infrequently’ and is not ‘as fully drawn’ as of these two others (P 32) before beginning his extended discussion of his role. What then are his reasons for taking such an inordinate interest in Creighton? As an amateur ethnographer and anthropologist, Creighton gives Kipling the privilege, Said says, of being one of the first novelists ‘to portray a logical alliance’ (P 33) between a Western knowledge system and colonial power,




Kipling and Beyond

of the kind that Said had made the major plank of his book Orientalism. Creighton is also, Said says, in the line of the ‘great scholar figures’ (P 34) beginning with Sir William Jones and Sir Charles Wilkins (none of whom, incidentally, Said had a good word for in Orientalism), and he is such an ‘affectionate’ and benign ruler that he is, for Said, Kipling’s idea of ‘an ideal Indian official’ (P 35) in his unchanging ‘ideal India’ (P34), and thus a much improved ‘personification of British power in India’ compared with his adventurist predecessors Clive and Hastings (P 33). For all these reasons, Said says, Creighton ‘is most interestingly interpreted … as someone whose role answered to Kipling’s own needs’ (P 31). This may be putting the cart before the horse, for how can we know what Kipling’s ‘needs’ were before he created the role? On the other hand, it may rather be the case that Said’s ‘most interesting’ interpretation of Creighton answers some needs of his own as a postcolonial critic. Said apparently requires some character or the other in the novel officially to represent the ‘massive colonial system’ that he had offered as the best defence for Kipling entertaining the reactionary political views that he did. In reading Creighton as he does, Said feels able to illustrate once again the Foucauldian axiom he had adopted only too sweepingly in his Orientalism to the effect that knowledge is power – except that in Creighton’s case, power is seen to flow directly from his military rank while his anthropology is more of a private hobby. Said is also able to deploy here extended discussions and genealogies of racist dominance, of the nexus between anthropology and colonialism, and of Indological Orientalism in much the same way as in Orientalism – except that poor little blithe Creighton seems too small and light a peg on which to hang such heavy historical and ideological baggage. As if this were not enough, Said further inflates the marginal Creighton’s importance by saying that he ‘not only presides over the Great Game … he also works hand-in-hand with the novelist himself. If there is any consistent point of view to be ascribed to Kipling, it is in Creighton, more than anyone else, that it can be found’ (P 35). This is an original suggestion but one difficult to substantiate on the basis of the novel we have. As against this, the received wisdom on the subject is well summed up by Trevor Royle: ‘the all-seeing, omniscient and omnipresent boyhero is very much Kipling’s exaggerated view of himself … Perhaps Kim is the boy Kipling would have liked to be’ (Royle, 1994: xx). Another reason why Said so overrates Creighton may be that he simply misunderstands what precisely ‘the Great Game’ was that Creighton ran. Said speaks here of ‘the Great Game (British intelligence in India)’ as



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being ‘a sort of political economy of control’ (P13), of ‘the all-enclosing realities of the Great Game’ (P 15), of ‘the Great Game (whose ultimate beneficiary is of course the Kaisar-i-Hind, or Queen Empress, and her British people)’ (P 35), and later, similarly, of ‘British control over India (the Great Game)’ (P 45) – as if British rule in India and the Great Game were all but synonymous. Another layer of misunderstanding is evident in the detailed explanatory note Said provides in this edition to the term ‘the Great Game’ where he refers to the ‘manoeuvres followed by [British] India and Russia in their struggle for political ascendancy in western Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century’ (P 353), but not at all to the rather more urgent connotations of the Great Game as widely understood in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and as depicted by Kipling in his novel set in the latter period. The Great Game was, of course, neither as big as to be the whole British control over India nor as remote in time and place as to be located in West Asia in a period well before Kim begins. It was, in fact, no less and no more than the activity of strategic surveillance and intelligencegathering on the Northwest Frontier where India bordered Afghanistan as well as later in Tibet, so as to prepare the British better to meet the threat of Russian imperialist incursion into India which was, in the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century, perceived to be imminent, a threat which was not allayed, finally without any battle, until the AngloRussian Convention of 1907. (For a comprehensive account of the Great Game, see Hopkirk, 1990; for another book-length discussion focusing on Kim including a discussion of Said’s views on Kipling, see Hopkirk, 1996; see also Meyer and Brysac, 1999.) Creighton is just a big cog in this small and secret wheel of intelligence-gathering. He is not a ruler or even a high official in India, for they belonged to the Civil Service, and he is thus not at all worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Clive or Hastings. Similarly, his ethnographic notes are not a patch on the pioneering scholarly knowledge of the Sanskrit classics and Indian culture acquired by Sir William Jones and other eminent Orientalists. He is not ‘a colonial official and scholar’ rolled into one and cannot represent a ‘union of power and knowledge’ (P 32) as Said would have dearly liked him to do, for the simple reason that as depicted by Kipling, he has neither enough power nor enough knowledge. While one can see why Said should have been programmatically attracted to him and wished to build him up as a surrogate-figure for Kipling, he is not a character sufficiently substantial or significant to answer to Said’s intellectual predilections and ideological needs, though he is by Said grossly inflated and made to fit the bill anyhow.




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Kipling and Beyond

Together with a proclivity to situate a subject in a wide historical context, another characteristic procedure of Said as a literary critic is to evoke many comparisons, and this too is prominently in evidence in his discussion of Kim. Just to name the names first, among the (mainly literary) authors, texts and characters Said brings into his discussion here (and some more than once, as noted below) are Conrad (P 7, 34, 37, 39, 40), William Jones, Burke, Thackeray, Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Macaulay, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Harriet Martineau, E. M. Forster (P 8; with Blunt and Forster later deleted), Proust, like whom Kipling ‘for the rest of life … lived in his art on the memories of his early Indian years’ (P 9; palpably wrong and therefore later deleted), Salman Rushdie, M. M. Kaye, Paul Scott, A Passage to India (P 11; all later deleted), Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick and The Deerslayer, Jason and Odysseus, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (the last two pairs as a comparison with the male bonding between Kim and the lama (P 14)) as also the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Holmes and Watson, Batman and Robin, and Chaucer, Bunyan (P 15), George Eliot and Henry James (P 20–1), Macaulay, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, J. A. Froude, J. R. Seeley, John Stuart Mill ‘plus every major novelist, essayist, philosopher, and historian of note’ of that period or ilk (P 30; later deleted), E. M. Forster (P 31), Robert Stone (P 33), Sir William Jones, Sir Charles Wilkins etc. (P 34), T. E. Lawrence, Malraux, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Charles Reade, Vernon Fielding, G. A. Henty ‘and dozens of lesser writers’, John Buchan, Hardy, James, Meredith, Gissing, George Eliot, George Moore, Samuel Butler, Flaubert, Zola, ‘even Proust and the early Gide’ (P 38), Flaubert, James, Butler (P 38), Hardy (P 38–40), Don Quixote, Haggard (P 39), Joyce, Dickens, Shakespeare, Stendhal (P 40), T. E. Lawrence (P 44), and Gide and Camus (P 44). This is not an exhaustive list but it is surely dazzling enough and even giddying in its size and range. It is quite in conformity with Said’s typical procedure in Orientalism, for example, of naming en masse nine authors whose ‘imaginative perspectives were provided principally by … Rudyard Kipling’ (1985: 224), and where Chaucer, Mandeville, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope and Byron are named together in the same breath for their ‘canonical’ use of the term ‘Oriental’ (31) without regard to specific context or chronology. With his great intellectual range, Said was inclined to paint (or tar) in broad and sweeping brush-strokes, and this contributed in no small measure to his daunting persuasiveness and imposing influence among his readers, few of whom possessed anything like his vast and commanding perspective.



Comparisons and ‘contrapuntal’ reading

But not all the names Said evokes are used by him for specific comparisons. He was a comparatist by training and temperament but in most of the cases where he habitually piled on one name after another, he was in fact more of a collectivist, making a common case for or (usually) against without finer discrimination, for that was the strategy that best suited his polemical purpose. In the case of Kipling, of the well over fifty authors whose names he invokes in just forty pages, several have been mentioned by hardly anyone else in even the remotest correlation with Kipling, such as Proust, Flaubert, Gide, Camus or even Cervantes, Chaucer, Bunyan, George Eliot, Meredith, Gissing and Hardy. One can only wish Said had stopped in some of these cases to indicate in even a phrase a line of specific comparison for others to explore. As it is, he paused in just two cases to attempt a proper comparison between Kipling and another author, and each of these comparisons turns out to be more striking than the other. Together, they also serve to illustrate a larger project that Said undertook here, of locating Kipling in the context not only of India or colonialism but of the contemporary European novel. The first of these comparisons unfolds when Said is discussing the end of the novel where Kim rejects the kind of transcendent liberation the lama can facilitate for him, and in fact moves exactly in the opposite direction through reaffirming the reality of this earthly world: ‘Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled …’ (P 18). Said proceeds to compare this much-cited passage with ‘this type of “regrasping of life” scene’ that has earlier occurred in both Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady, where the respective heroines, Dorothea and Isabel, after betrayal by their lovers and a long night of anguish, decide to pick up their lives again. ‘Much the same movement occurs in Kim’ (P 20), says Said, with the ‘capital’ difference that in this case, India ‘would pass into chaos or insurrection unless roads were walked upon properly, houses lived in the right way’ etc. (P 21). But this is fanciful, for firstly, Kim has not been betrayed here but is instead rejecting and betraying the lama, and secondly, even Kipling does not suggest such a crudely and indeed mistakenly imperialist interpretation of Kim’s choice. In Kipling’s world, all that might happen if Kim were not to grasp his other life of adventure again (which he has in fact never let go of) but to follow the lama instead to liberation would probably be that Creighton would be left with one callow agent less. Said here seems more anxiously protective of the British imperialist interest in India than even Kipling, and hardly aware that the consequences of the choice before Kim will have no perceptible bearing on the maintenance of colonial law and order.




Kipling and Beyond

The other detailed comparison, again attempted by no other critic but Said, is between Kim and Jude the Obscure. In Hardy’s novel, Jude Fawley is a bright and earnest autodidact whose ambition to study at Christminster (modelled on Oxford) is frustrated by a series of unhappy domestic events and constraining circumstances. Said argues that there is a similarity between Kim and Jude as both being ‘eccentric orphans’, between Kim as ‘an Irishman in India’ and Jude as ‘a rural English boy’, and between Kim being ‘a chela to the abbot-lama’ and Jude being ‘a supplicant student at the university’ (P 38). And then he seems to run dry: ‘But there the comparisons stop, and the contrasts begin’ (P 38, later changed to ‘But there the comparisons stop’ (C 189), presumably upon realising that a comparison encompasses both similarities and contrasts). A close textual comparison between Kim and Jude the Obscure is thus soon aborted but Said carries on to broaden it to a contrast between the European novel of that period in general and Kim in particular. Said cites here Georg Lukács as saying that in ‘the late nineteenthcentury novel of disillusionment’, every fictional hero ‘is shown to be doomed everlastingly to wish unsuccessfully for an unrealized dream’ (P 39; Said’s paraphrase of Lukács). Said then adds: ‘Clearly Jude, like Frederic Moreau, like Dorothea Brooke, like Isabel Archer, Ernest Pontifex and all the others, is condemned to such a fate’ (P 39). Kim, on the other hand, gets beyond this ‘paralysing, dispiriting impasse’ mainly because of ‘his awareness of being a sahib, a white man’ among Indians, while the ‘curious sense of enjoyment and confidence’ in the novel derives also from Kipling’s ‘ease and fluency’ as a writer and ‘the sheer variousness of his creativity’ (P 40). Said is perhaps saying too many things at the same time here but his central formulation is clear, that nineteenth-century European fictional heroes are doomed to be unhappy while a white boy in contemporary imperial India has no problem being happy. Such are ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’, though the question is not asked whether such white pleasures are in any way a justification for imperialism. One may wonder just how illuminating these comparisons are between Kim on the one hand and Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady and Jude the Obscure on the other, and whether comparisons with other kinds of texts would not have been more apt. Though he does here mention A Passage to India in passing, Said does not actually compare it with Kim – the two novels which are in common judgement perhaps the greatest British novels ever written about India. (In Culture and Imperialism, Said does spend about ten pages on A Passage to India (Said, 1993: 241–50), but that is about fifty pages after he has finished with



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Kim.) In his introduction to Kim, Said cites a book on the ‘mutiny’, The Other Side of the Medal by Edward Thompson, calling it a ‘powerful little tract’ and an ‘impassioned statement against British rule and for Indian independence’ (P 25) – though this work stops short of being quite that – and in Culture and Imperialism he cites the book again (though now misdating it) and again praises Thompson as ‘the crusading opponent of British policy in India’ (Said, 1993: 24). He does not show any awareness, however, that Thompson was also the author of eight novels set in India including one rather pointedly titled A Farewell to India (1931). Said had noted the lack of an oppositional Indian nationalist voice in both Kim (P 26) and A Passage to India (Said, 1993: 248) but he needed to go no further afield than Thompson’s fiction to find a sustained depiction of an explicitly political engagement between British and Indian characters (see Trivedi, 1995) which could have been usefully compared with Kim. Incidentally, Said does not so much as mention, even by way of contrast, Kipling’s other novel set in India, The Naulahka (1892), which he had written in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier about a decade before he published Kim, and in which the hero and heroine, both modern young Americans, arrive in an orientalistically depicted Indian princely state to enact their mutually different plans against a background of fabulous wealth, decadent palace intrigue, and poor hygiene and sickness. Nor does he refer to the short story ‘The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.’ (1890) in which Kipling narrated the visit to India of a Member of the British Parliament who arrives with liberal ideas of democracy and self-rule and with sympathy for the aims of the Indian National Congress but is soon disabused of his radical notions by a seasoned civil servant and other interlocutors who are considerably more sceptical and cynical. Said in his ‘Introduction’ acknowledges that nationalist feelings and aspirations were being articulated in India in Kipling’s time but still argues that Kipling could have remained quite aloof and immune from them. As a matter of biographical fact, Kipling did not, for his departure from India in March 1889 was hastened by a report he had published in The Pioneer on the recent annual session of the Indian National Congress, ‘A Study of the Congress by an Eyewitness’ (1 January 1889), which a (non-Indian) delegate found so personally scurrilous that he promptly visited the Pioneer office and administered a horse-whipping to the hapless editor (Allen, 2008: 287). Such contemporary ground reality provides perhaps a richer context of understanding for Kipling’s artistic choices and political attitudes in Kim than a comparison with any European novel.




Kipling and Beyond

At the beginning of Culture and Imperialism, Said explains his critical method in that work as ‘what might be called a comparative literature of imperialism’ through which he sought to map ‘the overlapping community between metropolitan and formerly colonized societies. By looking at the different experiences contrapuntally’, he says, he will ‘try to formulate an alternative to both a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility’ (1993: 19). But his contrapuntal method, as evidenced in his discussion of Kim and in Culture and Imperialism generally, is perhaps not contrapuntal enough, for he confines himself here, as also in Orientalism, only to Western texts and archives. For a truly contrapuntal postcolonial critical practice, one perhaps needs to go to texts produced by the colonised, such as the novel Gora (originally published 1910; English translation 1924) by the Nobel-winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, a work which was allegedly begun (though not sustained) as a rejoinder to Kim, or to an Indian novel of Gandhian resistance to British rule, Kanthapura (1938) written in English by Raja Rao.

Notes and errors There remains to consider another significant part of Said’s editorial work on Kim, the ‘Notes’ that he provided to the text. These are on the same extensive scale as his ‘Introduction’, running to twenty-seven pages (P 339–66) while the notes in the Oxford edition run to seventeen pages (Sandison, 1987: 290–316) and the Everyman edition provides no notes at all but instead a ‘Glossary’ running to three pages and a list of place-names of two pages (Royle, 1994: 269–71, 273–4). A discussion in any detail would perhaps require an article to itself but two features of Said’s notes may be briefly underlined. Firstly, they sound not only quaint, antiquated and distinctly Orientalist on the whole but are at several places clearly incorrect. Secondly, they turn out to be not Said’s work really but almost entirely (i.e. up to 90 per cent or more) copied and pasted from a single source, The Readers’ Guide to Kipling’s Work, vol. I (Green, 1961). It is true that new editors and annotators of all literary classics stand necessarily on the shoulders of their predecessors, and that at the beginning of his notes, Said does acknowledge that in ‘compiling’ his notes, ‘I have drawn upon’ The Readers’ Guide named above (which was published in eight volumes in only one hundred copies, each signed by an official of the Kipling Society, ‘For Private Circulation Only’ – with two of the copies ending up at the library of the Columbia University where



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Said taught). But ‘drawn upon’ seems a distinct euphemism when many of the notes are reproduced verbatim by Said and numerous others are only, and necessarily, edited for length, for the ample notes to Kim in The Readers’ Guide run to 140 pages. These notes were authored by Brigadier A. Mason (1891–1965), who went to India in 1911 as an army officer (following his illustrious uncle, who was also an army officer in India and whom the younger Mason later argued for as the model for Colonel Creighton). This annotator of Kim thus saw India first not much altered from how Kipling himself may have seen it, and in his knowledge of India as well as his attitude and tone he is considerably closer to Kipling himself than to us. To use his materials unaltered in 1987 would have exposed any other editor of Kim to ridicule for his editorial misjudgement. Professor Benita Parry’s suggestion (offered during the discussion of an earlier version of this essay which I presented at the 2007 Kipling Conference at Canterbury) that the notes were perhaps compiled not by Said himself but by some teaching or research assistant of his, is quite plausible, except that it might have more clearly mitigated Said’s own responsibility if he had acknowledged any such assistance and used not the active voice (‘I have drawn upon …’) but his habitual passive in his acknowledgement of his debt to Mason (e.g. ‘These notes draw upon …’), or if the title page of the Penguin edition had not said unequivocally: ‘Edited / With an Introduction and Notes / by Edward W. Said’. In contrast, Sandison who also used this indispensable resource in his Oxford edition thanks the Kipling Society for permission to quote from the notes in The Readers’ Guide, says he is ‘indebted to Brigadier Mason’s commentary on Kim’, and further specifies that where he has quoted Mason directly, he has ‘supplied a page-reference’ (1987: 290). The impression generated by these almost entirely derivative notes, that Said’s knowledge of colonial India was seriously limited and inadequate to his editorial task, is reinforced by a number of factual errors in his ‘Introduction’ for which he may be held more clearly and singly responsible. For example, to look at the dates alone, Said appears to believe that the British ruled India ‘[f]rom the time the first British expedition arrived there in 1608, until the last British Viceroy departed in 1947’ (P 8) and describes India as ‘a territory dominated by Britain for 300 years’ (P 10). On the contrary, Sir Thomas Roe, the first ambassador of the East India Company to the Mughal emperor Jahangir from 1615 to 1619, was a mere supplicant for permission for the British to set up a small trading post at distant Surat and certainly led no military ‘expedition’, it was in 1757 that the British under Clive first won




Kipling and Beyond

a major battle in India, and it was not until they had signed several treaties with the Rajput kings in 1818–19 that they became the dominant and paramount power in India. Indeed, if one were to go back 300 years from 1947, one would find oneself in an India in which the Mughal Empire was at its high noon, with Shah Jahan (r. 1627–58) on the throne, the Taj Mahal under construction for fifteen years but still some five years away from completion, and no Englishmen in sight except at isolated outposts such as Surat or the yet unbuilt Calcutta, both a thousand miles away from the Mughal throne. On a smaller scale of error, the Indian National Congress was founded not in 1880 (P 10) but in 1885 (as corrected on C 163), and one wonders what precisely ‘a great cumulative process’ was which Said says ‘in the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment before Indian independence’ (P 45), for independence was still half a century and many major moments away, with Gandhi not appearing on the Indian scene until 1915. As for the notes themselves, suffice it to say that at a one-day conference at the Banaras Hindu University held on 5 December 2006 to mark the publication of a special issue of the Hindi critical quarterly Saakhi dedicated entirely to Edward Said and his work, the audience of well over one hundred faculty members and students from several departments brought the roof down with hooting laughter when I read out a small sample of the notes in Said’s edition of Kim without offering a single word of commentary; there was no need for it (Trivedi, 2007: 11–25). They relished in particular some local references, such as Said’s note on ‘Benares’: ‘a very old city on the Ganges. It is said to have 1700 temples and mosques but is the most sacred Hindu centre, a seat of Hindu learning and the object of pilgrimage for millions. The Hindus call it Kashi’ (P 343). It is difficult to convey just how waffly and misguided this sounds to an Indian reader, but to try and spell out some of its errors and misrepresentations, of the 1,700 temples and mosques in Benares, about 1,600 must be temples so that the mosques are a red herring and the ‘but’ that follows is inapt, and the names Benares and Kashi are both Sanskritic and used by Hindus and Muslims alike (cf. the more focused and precise: ‘Benares: a city on the Ganges 700 miles from Lahore. To Hindus it is a sacred city and a centre of Hindu learning’ (Sandison, 1987: 293)). The description of ‘Punjabi’ as ‘a softer dialect of Hindustani spoken particularly by Sikhs and hillmen’ (P 341) is rather like saying that German is a softer dialect of Italian and forgetting that the vast majority of the speakers of Panjabi are Hindus or Muslims and live on the plains. To say that an ‘Akali’ is ‘a Sikh fanatic of a turbulent,



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militant sect’ (P 348) is so imperialistically slanderous as possibly to be actionable; a dictionary defines the term more sensibly as ‘a member of a Sikh political group’ (Concise Oxford, 2004: 29), while the Akali Dal as a political party has won democratic elections and formed the government in Panjab. In the rare instances where Said departs from Mason, he gets it, so to say, even wronger, as when he describes ‘Kapilavastu’ as ‘the birthplace of the Buddha’ (P 343) – which is actually Lumbini. At one or two places, Said does update a note as when he refers to a book on the Mutiny published in 1980 (P 347) – which, however, quite contradicts the old imperialist view of that episode given by Mason which Said also reproduces in the same note without any awareness of the discrepancy. He does systematically emend Mason’s ‘Mohammedan’ to ‘Muslim’ and ‘Thibet’ to ‘Tibet’ – though not the redolently Orientalist ‘Sanscrit’ (P 366) to ‘Sanskrit’. As for the rest, he mechanically reproduces Mason’s many errors, as in misspelling Zeenat Mahal as ‘Zeemit Maihl’ (P 349), and even Mason’s blatant colonial prejudices as in describing Calcutta as ‘an unpopular city which produced lawyers’ (P 361), by which Mason probably meant that the city was unpopular with the British because many of the lawyers educated there were vocal opponents of British rule.

Conclusion In conclusion, Said’s edition of Kim represents a curiously uneven and uncharacteristic performance in relation to the rest of his oeuvre. Here is a foundationally radical critic who in Culture and Imperialism made a postcolonial political mountain out of a molehill in the case of Jane Austen, an iconic ‘artist’ among British novelists, by focusing exclusively on a couple of passing references in Mansfield Park to sugar-cane plantations in far away Antigua (Said, 1993: 95–116). But when it came to Kipling and his novel set entirely in colonial India, he deployed the highest mountains in the world to provide an apolitical and artistic shield for the most famously imperialist of all British novelists, and abdicated altogether his responsibilities as an annotator of Kipling’s contextually rich novel steeped in local colour. It is not known when and in what circumstances Said first read Kim but in an autobiographical account, he has recounted how he and his mother together had ‘read about Mowgli, Kaa, Akela, and even Rikki-tikki-tavi’, and how he was at age nine, in an exclusive white school where he was the only non-white boy, ‘bellowing’ with other Scout Cubs ‘Ak-e-la will do our best [sic]’ and feeling ‘particularly proud of this ritual of loyalty’ (1999: 48). This may




Kipling and Beyond

be a partial explanation for Said, in his ‘Introduction’ to Kim, devoting space to the Boy Scouts movement, specifying several ‘important points’ on which ‘B.P. [Baden-Powell, the founder of the movement] and Kipling’ concurred (P 13–14). The lameness of Said’s later engagement with Kipling almost as an apologist for him can be explained on a number of other grounds as well, including the suggestion, by a colleague of his from Columbia University, that even Homer nods. But more symptomatically, Said’s ‘Introduction’ to Kim shows up a general and serious lacuna in postcolonial discourse. Because the historical experience of all the postcolonies is subsumed under a common and theoretically homogenised ‘postcolonial discourse’, the kind of textual and contextual attention we need to pay specifically to the literature relating to each postcolony is often lacking, and the potential of a scrupulous postcolonial reading thus compromised. The fact needs to be acknowledged that not all postcolonial critics can write with equal competence on all kinds of postcolonial texts, though in the literature departments of the Western academy any person of colour is only too readily assumed by his noncolour colleagues and by the students to be an expert on the literatures and cultures of all the postcolonies alike. In all probability, Said would never have treated a Palestinian or more generally an Arab text with such specious knowledge or extenuating politics as he does Kim. To look at it realistically (or even charitably), Said is here somewhat out of his depth and, considering his outré comparative/contrapuntal procedures, even out on a limb, while he is also a prisoner of his own declared intellectual position so that he cannot even come clean out and say unequivocally that an overtly political postcolonial reading of Kim would be inadequate and inappropriate. But there is of course poetic justice in this world. Since presenting a shorter draft of this essay as a paper at a conference, I have been commissioned to introduce and annotate Kim afresh for a new Penguin edition, and soon enough I may find myself at the receiving end of the kind of attention I have paid Said in this discussion – so help me God! Works cited Allen, Charles (2008 [2007]) Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. London: Abacus. Arnold, W. D. (1973 [1853]) Oakfield, or Fellowship in the East. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2004) 11th edition, ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forster, E. M. (1983 [1924]) A Passage to India. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.



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Green, Roger Lancelyn (ed.) (1961) The Readers’ Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Work, vol. I. London: Kipling Society. Hopkirk, Peter (1990) The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia. London: John Murray. —— (1996) Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling’s Great Game. London: John Murray. Howe, Irving (1977) ‘The Pleasures of Kim’, in Art, Politics, and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling, ed. Quentin Anderson, Stephen Donadio and Steven Marcus. New York: Basic Books, pp. 145–58. Kipling, Rudyard (2000 [1987]) Kim. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Edward W. Said. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books. Meyer, Karl E. and Shareen Blair Brysac (1999) Tournament of Shadows: the Race for Empire in Central Asia. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Royle, Trevor (1994) ‘Introduction’ to Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Everyman Library. London: J. M. Dent, pp. xvii–xxiii. Said, Edward W. (1975) Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books. —— ([1978] 1985) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —— ([1987] 2000) ‘Introduction’ and ‘Notes’ to Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books, pp. 7–46 and 339–66. —— (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. —— (1999) Out of Place: a Memoir. New Delhi: Viking/Penguin Books. —— (2006) On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon. Sandison, Alan (1987) ‘Introduction’ and ‘Explanatory Notes’ to Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. xiii–xxx and 290–306. Shahi, Sadanand (ed.) (2006) Special issue ‘Centred on Edward Said’, Saakhi [Hindi quarterly] 381 (July–December): 13–14. Trivedi, Harish (1995) ‘Passage or Farewell? Politics of the Raj in E. M. Forster and Edward Thompson’, in Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India, ed. Harish Trivedi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 139–73. —— (2007) ‘Edward Said ka Prachyavad aur Bharat’ [In Hindi: Edward Said’s Orientalism and India] Saakhi 15–16 (January–June): 11–25.




‘Blindness’ and the Idea of the Artist in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘“They”’ and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Shirley Chew This essay in three parts is concerned with the idea of the artist as figured forth in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘“They”’ (1904) and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000). Borrowing from Derrida’s disquisition on ‘blindness’, it discusses the texts as sites of struggle in which to attempt to write of personal loss and grief amid life’s transience and the conflicts of history is to come up continually against the impossibility of a just rendering. While cognisant of Ondaatje’s rewritings of Kipling as well as their common interest in, for example, work, assorted kinds of knowhow, strange tales, obsessive states of the mind and history, it aims at staking out a shared rather than contestatory ground between the colonial and postcolonial writer through an exploration of the ‘human element’ (Ondaatje, 2000: 306) at the centre of both the short story and the novel, in particular the questions and aporias concerning suffering that have to be grappled with, understood and undergone in the process of living. Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: the Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1993)1 explores representations of blindness in a selection of visual texts which belong to the department of prints and drawings at the Louvre, and which take their subjects from fictional, historical and biblical sources. From this complex work, rich in ideas and textual analyses, I borrow for my purposes here, first, the notion that ‘the theme of the drawings of the blind is, before all else, the hand’ (Derrida, 1993: 4). Derrida’s meticulous reading of the drawings attends to how the hand or hands of the blind men are positioned in each case and thereby made to speak. Examples are the ‘groping, wandering hands’ (5) of the figure in Antoine Coypel’s Study of the Blind which ‘draw in’ space ‘in a way that is at once cautious and bold’; the hand of the supplicant in 144



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Théodule Ribot’s Christ Healing a Blind Man which is lifted up before the hand of the other who promises with his touch to restore sight; and in Lucas Van Leyde’s version of the same subject, the hand which, self-consciously motioning, tells of its owner ‘as blind’ (12) and in need of Christ’s help. In all these examples, it is always a matter of manoeuvring and manipulating (from Latin manus, ‘hand’), of touching or making contact: ‘They all hold their hands out in front of them, their gesture oscillating in the void prehending, apprehending’ (5). Separated by only the twitch of a comma, the contiguity of the two terms – ‘prehending, apprehending’ (5) – calls attention to their common Latin root (prehendere, ‘to take hold’), their echoic properties, and the play of meanings they keep up between them. For, distinct in sense, they also shade into each other, so that to ‘prehend’ (grasp) an object physically is also to ‘apprehend’ (know, grasp) what it is that one has taken in hand; and while to ‘prehend’ like to ‘apprehend’ is to know, it is the latter which carries the additional notion of knowing through intimation of, say, fear, that is, knowing ahead of understanding. Inhering in the phrase, ‘the drawings of the blind’ (my emphasis), are the dual senses of drawings about the blind and drawings by the blind, and the second idea which I borrow from Derrida’s Memoirs is that the act of drawing figures forth the partiality of the artist’s own vision, that is, his/her own ‘blindness’. This is because Derrida attributes ‘the origin of drawing to memory rather than to perception’ (49).2 In this, he recalls Baudelaire (1964) whom he cites: [A]ll good and true draftsmen draw from the image imprinted on their brains, and not from nature … When a true artist has come to the point of the final execution of his work, the model would be more of an embarrassment than a help to him. (47) Finally, with reference to a group of drawings on the subject of Tobias curing his father’s blindness with the aid of the angel Raphael,3 Derrida reminds us that, after the cure, the debt must be repaid. For, in the Deuterocanonical Book of Tobit (12:20–2), Raphael tells the people who have witnessed the miracle: ‘[W]hat you saw was a vision. So now get up from the ground, and acknowledge God. See, I am ascending to him who sent me. Write down all these things that have happened to you.’ In short, ‘the debt must be repaid with words on parchment, which is to say, with visible signs of the invisible’ (Derrida, 1993: 29). The reference to Raphael’s command is also one of the means by which Derrida



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links the act of drawing with that of writing – ‘the graphic point, the quill, pencil’ (other means include wordplay so that ‘graphisme’ in French is ‘graphic arts’ and ‘handwriting’; and, according to the OED, ‘apprehend’ carries early seventeenth-century senses of ‘to seize upon, take down, in writing’). But, while ‘Truth belongs to this movement of repayment’ (30), each attempt to draw or to write the truth occurs, as we are told in the statement from Baudelaire, in the space/time between memory and anticipation, the observing and inscribing of the subject, the experience and its representation, and each ‘tries in vain to render itself adequate to its cause or to the thing’ (30).4 The ending of ‘“They”’ has prompted much speculation among critics as to why, having understood who the elusive children are, the ‘I’ narrator must never return to House Beautiful. There was no other sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen. ‘Don’t think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but – but I’m all in the dark, you know, and you can see.’ In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time. ‘You think it is wrong, then?’ she cried sharply, though I had said nothing. ‘Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right … I am grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only …’ ‘Why?’ she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at our second meeting in the wood. ‘Oh, I see,’ she went on simply as a child. ‘For you it would be wrong.’ Then with a little indrawn laugh, ‘and, d’you remember, I called you lucky – once – at first. You who must never come here again!’ She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above. (Kipling, 1904: 334–5) According to Charles Carrington, although ‘“They”’ was written at a time when the death of Kipling’s daughter was still a source of deep pain, it affirmed his ‘vocation as craftsman’ and his relinquishment of ‘so-called psychical research’ (1955: 436–8).5 Similarly, J. M. S. Tompkins regards the story as ‘stating that the barrier between the living and the



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It may be he thinks the indulgence in the occult will become a drug and destroy his active life. It may be that he believes that psychic gifts may be indulged by women but not by men. It may be that he is Kipling and his life is to create art. It may be that he needs to face his own grief without such occult aid. (1977: 265) Recent critics, among them Harry Ricketts (1999) and Andrew Lycett (1999), concur with the idea of trespass. As, too, in passing, does Hermione Lee, before delivering the forceful insight that the narrator’s decision to leave House Beautiful pertains to ‘the deepest, most central idea in Kipling’s work’ which is that ‘for all [his] strenuous efforts to convince us and himself otherwise, he is an outsider, and recognizes solitariness as our condition’ (1992: 29). Clearly an end-directed approach is common to these readings of ‘“They”’ as is the tendency to relate the ‘I’ character to the author, and it is an approach which the narrative can be said to invite. Take, for example, the statement: ‘In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve.’ Coming after the blind woman’s lament that she is ‘all in the dark’, the narrator’s response may strike one as ironical, pointing as it seems to do to his earlier inability or refusal to recognise the children for what they are and hence his own ‘blindness’. At the same time, in laying claim to visitings of power and knowledge – ‘truth’, ‘vision’ – the response carries strong suggestions of completion as well as the narrator’s affinities, not only with the blind woman whose parting remarks here directly echo his own, but also with Kipling who, no stranger himself to intense psychic experiences, has as an artist striven to be fully open to their creative influence.6 Indebted as I am to the critics mentioned above, this essay approaches the story from another angle and is chiefly concerned with the idea of the artist that the narrative figures forth. Bearing in mind the Angel’s words in the Book of Tobit, it reads ‘“They”’ as enacting the narrator’s compulsion to ‘write down all these things that have happened’ (Derrida, 1993: 29). However, as we are aware, any attempt to recapture the past is ‘already, in its very present, an act of memory’ (68). Rendered visible in the textuality of the tale, therefore, is the struggle to make cohere the conflicting strands of perceiving, misconstruing, remembering and knowing. Like the landscape into which he has strayed with its ‘confusing veils of the woods’ (Kipling, 1904: 304), concealed byways



dead is not meant to be passed’ (1965: 203). Angus Wilson tries out several possibilities:

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and unexpected shifts of gradient, the linear progression of the writing is continually cut across with the intimations of a narrator conditioned by desire and retrospection to see some things and not others. The result is a cumulative burden of loss and impossible longing within what is, paradoxically, a vigorous and subtle narrative, its texture a skilful weave of unexpected twists in the action, of things said and reiterated, images turned and returned. Driving through the quickened and rich abundance of the Sussex countryside in late spring, the narrator misses his way and, after the car has sped as with a will of its own through an enclosed and sombre terrain – ‘where last year’s dead leaves whispered and scuffled about my tyres’, where ‘moss-cankered’ trees fight for breathing room, where ‘spent primrose-clumps’ and ‘sickly, white-stalked bluebells’ linger (304) – finds himself coming to rest in sunshine and on the lawn of an Elizabethan manor. Enthralled by the ‘exceeding beauty’ of ‘the ancient house’ (305), its blind owner, Miss Florence, and the fleeting figures and voices of children too shy, as it were, to reveal themselves, he is lured back in high summer and, again, in fog-thickened autumn. On each occasion Miss Florence is there to greet him with her welcoming call – ‘Is that you … from the other side of the county?’ – and her unearthly, mesmerising beauty. We are told that ‘[s]he stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay’ (310–11) yet this woman ‘could see the naked soul’ (318); that her voice, sweet and yearning, ‘would have drawn lost souls from the Pit’ (307); and that, ‘white as pearl’ (326), hers are ‘hands through which she saw’ (314). That last detail pertains to an important group of images in the narrative of hands which, to recall Derrida’s phrase, ‘draw in’ space, and accrue to themselves in their tactility and sensuousness a weave of associations. On the third and, as it turns out, the last of his visits to House Beautiful, the narrator tries yet again to seek out the elusive children. This time, however, the ‘game’ takes place not in the garden or the woods but in the house itself, in the upstairs rooms, the gallery, and finally the ‘nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire’ (325). Here, the narrator decides to trick the children out of hiding by pretending to abandon the game. Directing his attention instead to Miss Florence, he learns about the tallies upon which she relies in administering her large property. By running her thumb down the nicks on a particular tally stick, she is able to read with exactness there ‘the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons’ (329). The system of tallies is, as she admits, out of date (we are after all in the age of the motor car) and we wonder



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how long it would be before her traditional ways are superseded by modern methods of management, and by a new generation of possibly less scrupulous farmers and landowners. For the time being, they are what she relies on to administer an estate of a couple of hundred acres (she has them ‘in hand’, as she calls it), plus six hundred more which are ‘nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me’ (330). When the narrator’s attention is further distracted by a conversation between Miss Florence and a dishonest tenant, one of the children makes an approach. I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers … The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm – as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all-faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest – a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago. Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window. (332) In the emphatic phrase, ‘Then I knew’, ‘then’ has the combined senses behind it of time and of inference. Like the marks on the tally stick which are touched into meaning, the hands, once more in contact, of father and child rekindle in the narrator deep-seated memories of joy and grief, leaving him in no doubt, at that very instant, as to who ‘they’, the children of House Beautiful, are. ‘Recognition’, according to Terence Cave, ‘is a decisive moment in a class of plot structures … it carries within its etymology and its definition … the theme of knowledge’ (1990: 3). But, with the statement, ‘it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window’, the recognition scene at this point becomes, to borrow again Cave’s words, a ‘problem’ moment (489), threatening the wholeness promised. First, is the statement any more than an expression of desire on the writer’s part for narrative unity? And second, if despite the guarded ‘as though’ it is not simply an intrusion of hindsight, does it then expose in the narrator’s version of events up to this point ‘an ignorance which was never wholly innocent’ (489)? For, captivated though he is by his new surroundings and acquaintances, the narrator is never entirely free from feelings of unease. Why is so remarkable a house not to be found on the Ordnance Survey map or in the old County Gazetteer?




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Why is Miss Florence who knows the precise details of the building and its grounds unable to say exactly how many children there are? ‘I don’t quite know … Sometimes more – sometimes less. They come and stay with me because I love them, you see’ (Kipling, 1904: 315). What lies behind the opaqueness of some of her statements – ‘we are so out of the world’ (307), ‘[he] has lost his way, but – he has seen them’ (310) – and, indeed, the remarks of the cottagers who live by the crossroads? Mrs Madehurst, for example, who runs the sweetmeat shop and talks of the bereaved Jenny ‘walkin’ in de wood’ (324). When asked to explain what the phrase means, the imperturbable butler replies, ‘It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I’m from Norfolk myself’ (321). Given his own position as an outsider, is the narrator also to be accounted ‘they’, like the children, the villagers, and, indeed, Madden himself? And is Jenny the woman walking with a child whom the narrator glimpses in the fog as he drives past the wood towards House Beautiful on this third occasion, and who tells him in familiar fashion that, the weather being so bad, ‘you’ll find yours indoors, I reckon’ (325)? Mention of Jenny recalls the previous visit in summer, and the urgent activity generated by the need to seek medical help for her sick boy. Having been brought in the car, the doctor had to be driven away again in search of medicine and a nurse. It was as they were leaving that Jenny’s hand was seen desperately clinging to the doctor’s arm, ‘as though he could make treaty for her with Death’ (321); and, a moment later, the same hand appeared once more ‘clutching at my knees when we moved away’. If the narrator was nonplussed by the behaviour, this episode is not openly referred to again; its memory, however, was to return, reworked in dream that night along with other death-suffused images of the crowded afternoon – the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shady trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move. (322) Two days after the doctor’s visit, Jenny’s child was dead, so the narrator is told by Mrs Madehurst when he stops again at the shop in the autumn. Despite the desperately clinging hand, despite the grief-stricken obliviousness to social propriety, despite the new technology (Madden had been convinced that his daughter who died of the croup would have been saved had there been a car to send for the doctor at the time), there



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is plainly no treaty admissible with death. Furthermore, as the clinging, clutching hand makes clear, it is this bare truth which binds together the likes of Jenny, the ‘draggle-tailed wench’ (321), and the gentleman ‘from the other side of the county’ (313), the inmates of House Beautiful, of the cottages at the village, and all places beyond the crossroads. Behind ‘“They”’ lies Kipling’s own powerful sense of loss. As well as the ‘unforgotten pain of his child’s death’ (Carrington, 1955: 436), there was, in the period leading up to the publication of Traffics and Discoveries, the death of Cecil Rhodes in 1902 (Pinney, 1990: 87), and ‘the whole pressure of our dead of the Boer War’ (125).7 Hermione Lee has drawn attention to the prevalence of ghosts in the stories in the collection (1992: 7–9). I wish to pause here to speak to a literary haunting, that is, the informing presence of Keats in ‘“They”’. Much has been said of ‘“Wireless”’ (Kipling, 1904: 213–39),8 in particular that strand of its narrative concerning a tubercular and love-sick chemist’s assistant who is the unwitting medium of a mysterious force transmitting Keats’s poems across time and space. Mr Shaynor has not read or heard of the Romantic poet. Even so, botched though they may be apart from two instances, the fragments wrung from him, and written down in his drugged state, transcribe suggestively lines and phrases from ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, for example, ‘The sharp rain falling on the window-pane, / Rattling sleet – the wind-blown sleet’ (234), and ‘Our open casements facing desolate seas / Forlorn – forlorn—’ (235). In ‘“They”’, written two years after ‘“Wireless”’, Kipling’s own borrowings from ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – in deliberate contrast, as it were, to Shaynor’s ‘inability to reproduce “authentic” Keats’ (Ricketts, 1999: 287) – are recalled and rewritten in subtle ways into the meaning of the story. Kipling would have been familiar with Keats through Edward Burne-Jones (Uncle Ned) and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and their remaking of the traditions of medieval art.9 It is possible also that, for Kipling at this particular moment in time, Keats had special interest as a person and an artist who, despite ‘constant exposure to death since the age of eight’, had never wavered in ‘his attempts to manage this inevitable preoccupation with death’ (Bate, 1979: 507). The indebtedness is apparent in the following respects. On the immediate level, there are the Keatsian echoes in the descriptions of resurgence and decay in the Sussex landscape, and in the contrasts between the foggy, windswept scene beyond the mullioned windows of House Beautiful and the warmth and colour inside. Then there are the correspondences between ‘the characteristic Keatsian movement from




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inception through intensity to desolation’ (Vendler, 1983: 86) and the narrator’s passage from his arrival at House Beautiful to the exquisitely poignant moment of his meeting with the spirit of his dead child, and ultimately to the emptiness which attends the waning of vision. That said, the rendering of the experience of ‘entrancement and disillusion’ (94) in ‘“They”’ – the turn in what is after all termed the game – is clearly different in power and emotional impact from Keats’s ‘unseeing and unerring’ (91) visionary progress in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ towards the apprehension of the bower as both paradise and the ground of his ‘tryst with death’ (85, 92). Finally, just as one of the achievements of the odes of 1819 is the capacity of the lyric form to accommodate question and debate (Bate, 1979: 500) so the narrative tensions of the short story, as I have indicated, are sustained upon questions which in the narrator’s struggle to know can only lead to further questions. That what is asked in Kipling should echo some of the questions central to Keats is to be expected. ‘Then I knew’ (Kipling, 1904: 332) to which, after an almost imperceptible break in the narrative, there is Miss Florence’s echoic whisper, ‘Now you understand.’ Contrary to what is assumed in her response, however, the narrator’s understanding does not only embrace the identity of the children but insights also relating to the pervasiveness of death, the purblindness of desire, and the ambivalent nature of love, themes sounded in the preceding section of the narrative and reworked in a different and darker register in the final exchange between the two protagonists, in the struggle to the last to ‘write down all these things that have happened’. As anticipated in the opening verse from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Lost Bower’, part of a song the blind woman was singing as he entered the house (325–6), the narrator must now confront his losses. Firstly, his view of House Beautiful is inevitably altered. The hall, once so enticing with its ‘delicious gloom’ (329) mingling the colours of the fire, the glints of light from the dark wood panelling, and the distorting reflections of glass, is now disconsolately bleak. The playthings set out for the children – ‘a child’s cart and a doll lay on the black-and-white floor where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the children had only just hurried away’ (325) – have now the air of contrivance about them, a stage, as it were, carefully managed; the teasing shadows that, it was anticipated, would realise themselves as children of flesh and blood are now only aspects of death, ‘shadows within the shadow’ (333); and the hearth, so welcoming before, is suffused with pathos once it is observed that the fireplace has ‘no unpassable iron on or near it’ (333). If it has all



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been fancy’s feigning, then to what extent has the narrator himself collaborated in the illusion-making? At the same time, to deny the truth of the meeting with the spirit of his dead child is surely an act of betrayal that is unimaginable? Ambiguities, too, begin to surround the blind woman, once seemingly ethereal. Does she represent the artist who by her craft in making House Beautiful a place for the children draws the narrator, and the reader along with him, into a world of her creation? Is she in her seductiveness a version of ‘la belle dame sans merci’ or is she no more than an ordinary woman who, in her loneliness, is liable to be jealous, needs constant reassurance that she is right to call the ghost children to her, and loves so well that it is not dissociated from the desire for power? In this last respect, does Miss Florence look forward to a figure such as Mrs Ashcroft of a later story, ‘The Wish House’ (Kipling, 1926: 107–41)? Finally, linked to what the narrator can now see are the changes rung upon the meaning of words. I have already referred to the talk of the local people which, caught in passing, has caused the narrator some bemusement. One particular phrase, spoken by both Mrs Madehurst and Miss Florence, turns upon ‘to bear’ and ‘to lose’. At one level this refers to the plight of mothers who, having given birth, are then faced with the death of their young – only too frequent an occurrence, it would seem, within the village community. When the narrator is informed by Mrs Madehurst that Jenny, her child being dead, is ‘walkin’ in de wood’, that this ‘opens de ’eart’, and ‘dat’s where losin’ and bearin’ comes so alike in the long run’, the riddling in ‘this wisdom of old wives’ is enough to set him thinking ‘extendedly’ (Kipling, 1904: 324–5). With the words repeated in the blind woman’s cry towards the end of the narrative, ‘you must bear or lose’ (334), and despite the self-reflexive nature of her remark, ‘to bear’ takes on here its other senses of ‘to suffer’, ‘to endure’. To choose to suffer the loss of his child means to resolve never to return to House Beautiful, though that is ‘like the very parting of spirit and flesh’ (334). It means, crucially, to borrow Keats’s words here, refusing to allow death ‘to destroy even those pains which are better than nothing’ (Cook, 1990: 538). Speaking about Anil’s Ghost in a number of interviews, Michael Ondaatje recalls his wish to return in his writing to the subject of Sri Lanka,10 and how very difficult the task was when he got down to it. ‘Anil’s Ghost was the only thing I could have done, only I didn’t know how to do it; I had no idea how to write this book’ (Jaggi, 2000: 6). The working process involved revisiting the country, archival research, talking and listening




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to people with different kinds of expertise, such as forensic anthropologists, doctors, archaeologists, librarians, and members of human rights and civil rights organisations. The writing was likened to ‘tunnelling’ (6), a case of ‘inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond the darkness’ (Kanner, 2000), of starting with fragments and ‘constructing scenes from the fragments’ (Thompson, 2007: C02). Some of these details of work, in the light of what he has said of The English Patient, and, most recently, of Divisadero, are characteristic of this writer. The difficulties specific to Anil’s Ghost were, first, as the Author’s Note to the novel makes clear, the political situation in the country.11 From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, of the ‘three essential groups’ involved – the government, the anti-government insurgents in the south, and the separatist guerrillas in the north – ‘the insurgents and the separatists had declared war on the government. Eventually, in response, legal and illegal government squads were known to have been sent out to hunt down the separatists and the insurgents’ (Ondaatje, 2000: n.p.). Then there was Ondaatje’s own position as a migrant writer. A Canadian citizen of Sri Lankan descent, he is both native-born and stranger to his country of birth. A number of critics of the novel have been only too ready to emphasise his out-of-placeness.12 Generally speaking, Anil’s Ghost has been found wanting on account of what it has left out, for example, ‘the historical context to set the events in perspective’ (Mendis, 2000: 7); and hence its political bias, since with ‘no textual evidence whatsoever’ of the specificities of Sri Lanka’s multiethnic politics, in particular the Tamil side of the story (Ismail, 2000: 28), the novel is merely reinforcing ‘the conventional dominant story’ (24) of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. On his part, Ondaatje has stated that he was not interested in choosing sides in Anil’s Ghost (Kanaganayakam, 2003: 47). What drew him was ‘my individual take on four or five characters’ (Jaggi, 2000: 6), and a number of ideas, among them, the archaeological angle and the notion that there could be no peace for the families of the disappeared because death was ‘unfinished’ (Kanner, 2000). The form of the novel, with its discontinuities of time, location and voice, and its gaps and silences, mirrors the incompleteness of the characters’ lives and stories as well as the partial perspective of a narrator who is an outsider. At the same time, Anil’s Ghost is predominantly about the work of remembering amid the violence of war and the pervasiveness of fear. The structural images which make up the sustaining tensions of its narrative are, first, fragments, whether the work in question relates to archaeological finds, mutilated bodies at Kynsey Road Hospital, the present-day skeleton of a



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victim exhumed near Bandarawela whom Anil and Sarath have named ‘Sailor’; and, second, hands that, seeking to piece together hidden histories, lost identities, wounded bodies, art objects, help to restore in some measure human significance.13 My reading of the novel below examines Ondaatje’s take on two characters – the epigraphist and historian, Palipana, and the eye-painter and head restorer, Ananda Udugama; their respective attempts to render work that is ‘adequate to its cause or to the thing’ (Derrida, 1993: 30) within a crisis situation where survival is often a matter of ‘how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie’ (Ondaatje, 2000: 105); and the role they play in the narrative’s problematising of the idea of the artist as maker of the truths of his own vision. He reached out and held her forearm, touching the skin, feeling the muscle underneath; she sensed he was interpreting her shape and size from this fragment of her body. (85, my emphases) Palipana is blind by the time Anil and Sarath meet up with him in the forest near Anuradhapura. But, as a leading researcher in the field, he had in similar fashion engaged with the ancient monuments of Sri Lankan history, such as the graffiti cut into the rock face at Sigiriya and the Stone Book at Polonnaruwa: ‘He spread his fingers over every discovered rune. He traced each letter … laid his bare arms and the side of his face against this plinth that collected the heat of the day’ (83). Tactile in his motions, studying ‘history as if it were a body’ (193), he was, even before his eyes succumbed fully to glaucoma, in many respects like a blind man ‘prehending, apprehending’ (Derrida, 1993: 5) his way across his texts. The story of Palipana is told in a number of different ways in Anil’s Ghost. There is the generally formal entry at the start of the section ‘The Grove of Ascetics’, in which the narrative voice maintains its distance by keeping chiefly to what would be considered the ‘facts’ of the career – Palipana’s distinction as a historian, epigraphist and archaeologist among a group of nationalistic intellectuals and his subsequent disgrace when what was to have been a feat of research leading to new truths relating to the island’s history in the sixth century turned out to be, it was claimed, without ‘real evidence’ (81), and hence a forgery. This is followed by another, more inward commentary, one which is tuned in to the particular strengths of Palipana’s work: As a historian and a scientist he approached every problem with many hands. He was more likely to work beside a stonemason or




Kipling and Beyond

listen to a dhobi woman washing clothes at a newly discovered rock pool than with a professor from the University of Peradeniya. He approached runes not with a historical text but with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills. His eyes recognized how a fault line in a rock wall might have insisted on the composure of a painted shoulder. (82) and to its originality: The point was not that he would ever be proved wrong in his theories, but that he could not prove he was right. Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. They linked hands. They allowed walking across water, they allowed a leap from treetop to treetop. The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that. And so the unprovable truth emerged. (83) The language, lyrical and imaginative, gestures to a vision of wholeness (‘coalesce’, ‘linked this shore with that’) and transcendence (‘walking across water’, ‘a leap from treetop to treetop’). It recalls Ondaatje’s image of the spider as artist in an early poem, ‘Spider Blues’. I admire the spider, his control classic, His eight legs finicky, Making lines out of the juice in his abdomen. A kind of writer I suppose. He thinks a path and travels the emptiness that was there leaves his bridge behind looking back saying Jeez did I do that? (1980: 62) The ‘leap’ of Palipana’s visionary mind, however, was to bring about his downfall. We are not told the exact details of his disquisition on the ‘political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century’ (Ondaatje, 2000: 81). And of the accusations he faced we are told only of the missing historical evidence he cited. Were the criticisms entirely disinterested or were they vengeful acts on the part of his denouncers for humiliations endured under his strict tutelage? Palipana was said to be ‘mean with praise’, and ‘not an easily liked man’ (80). In the poem, ‘Spider Blues’, it is remarked that ‘Spiders like poets are obsessed with power’ (Ondaatje, 1980: 62). Was Palipana thought to be overreaching



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himself with his seer-like theories and versions of history? The last time we hear of the controversy which surrounded the scholar is Anil’s recollection of a fragment of conversation between the Diyasena brothers. Palipana’s epiphany, according to the cautiously sympathetic Sarath, was entirely conceivable. ‘As letters and words began to disappear under his fingers and from his eyesight’ (Ondaatje, 2000: 191), helped at times by the vagaries of nature, as when, say, ‘water filled a cut alphabet’, alternative readings of the rock graffiti were liable to present themselves. Furthermore Palipana was so used to stepping into different time zones as he researched the past that it was the inevitable final step ‘to eliminate the borders and categories, to find everything in one landscape, and so discover the story he hadn’t seen before’ (191). To what extent then were the suppressed histories Palipana claimed to have come across in the half-perceived interlinear texts inconvenient to the nation-state’s official version of its past?14 To what extent was his abrogation of ‘borders and categories’ deemed dangerous to hegemonic Sinhala Buddhist nationalism? Was he mad though a great man, as Gamini seemed to think, or affected by sorrow because ‘there was tragedy in his life’ (108)? Making no attempt to defend himself before society’s condemnation, and having lost not only his brother but, more recently, his sister and her husband in the widespread violence, Palipana withdraws to the remnants of a ‘leaf hall’, once inhabited by an ascetic sect of monks. There he continues to write, ‘racing the truth out of him’, ‘truth’ that he will after all take away with him when he and his work are burnt on the funeral pyre. His only companion in his last years is his niece, Lakma, who, traumatised at the age of twelve by the murder of her parents and ‘scared of the evidence of anything human’ (104), he teaches to trust him in the only way he knows how. He weaved into her presence his conversations about wars and medieval slokas and Pali texts and language, and he spoke of how history faded too, as much as battle did, and how it could exist only with remembrance – for even the slokas on papyrus and bound ola leaves would be eaten by moths and silverfish, dissolved by rainstorms – how only stone and rock could hold one person’s loss and another’s beauty forever. (104) On his part, as blindness overtakes him, Palipana learns to rely on Lakma to rearrange ‘the paths of the day’ (106), steering him with her touch away from impediments, seeing to his ‘safety and comfort’ (106).




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In this tender narrative with its evocations of different dimensions of time, textures of the material world, states of dissolution and continuity, what remains of Palipana – disappeared, so to speak, from the Sinhala encyclopaedia – is a sentence in Sinhala, yard-long, chiselled into the rock by the side of the pokuna. It is one of his remembered phrases from historical texts that Lakma had heard him say to her while she was in her terrorised state. Now she cuts the letters ‘where the horizon of the water was, so that, depending on tide and pull of the moon, the words in the rock would submerge or hang above their reflection or be revealed in both elements’ (107).15 And the words speak, ‘Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her, the imprint of it now carried by water around the lake’ (107, my emphasis), just a story of suffering endured, reciprocal kindness, and knowledge shared as to what it means to be human. When Palipana was asked by Sarath and Anil as to who might be able to rebuild the head of Sailor,16 the man he recommended, after briefly lecturing his visitors on the tradition of Ne¯tra Mangala, ‘a ritual of the eyes’ (97), is Ananda who paints eyes on the Buddha image: ‘And until he had eyes – always the last thing painted or sculpted – he was not the Buddha’ (306). Like Palipana, Ananda has lost family in Sri Lanka’s internecine conflicts. His wife, Sirissa, was one of the disappeared in the 1989 campaign to rid villages of insurgents and their sympathisers. Since then, his life in chaos, he has toiled, half-crouched and shortsighted, in the underground warrens of gem mines during the day, drinking heavily in the evenings. What appears to sustain him are his qualified beliefs in his calling as artist and artificer – both of the terms by which Palipana had referred to him – with its roots in ritual, community and order. It was a long time since he had believed in the originality of artists … You slipped into the old bed of the art, where they had slept. There was comfort there … As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation. (303–4) In ‘Distance’, the short closing section of the novel, Ananda is called upon to undertake two tasks – to restore a centuries-old Buddha carved in stone, 120 feet high, vandalised by thieves out for hidden treasure; and to perform Ne¯tra Mangala on a new plaster replacement for the broken statue, now ‘no longer a god’ (307). In the first instance, the



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work of piecing, fusing and locking together the many fragments of the stone image turns out to be complex and laborious, stretching across many months in extreme heat and torrential rain, and involving the combined efforts of Ananda, a team of workers and engineers, and casual helpers from the village nearby. Once restored, the statue will be returned to its original location and will look again with its face in the sky towards the north. Meanwhile, attended by Ananda, it lies among the living and the mundane, a one-time Buddha, a ‘destroyed god’ (301), a liminal figure adumbrative of the paradoxes and contradictions which govern the lives of human beings. [A]ll the work he had done in organizing the rebuilding of the statue was for this. The face. Its one hundred chips and splinters of stone brought together, merged, with the shadow of bamboo lying across its cheek. All its life until now the statue had never felt a human shadow … Now sunlight hit the seams of its face, as if it were sewn roughly together. He wouldn’t hide that. He saw the lidded grey eyes someone else had cut in another century, that torn look in its great acceptance … In a few days the face would be in the sky, no longer below him as he walked on this trestle, his shadow moving across the face, the hollows holding rain so he could lean down and drink from it, as if a food, a wealth. He looked at the eyes that had once belonged to a god. (304) As artificer, it is the statue’s constructedness that Ananda is chiefly interested in; as artist, working with the image imprinted in his memory of Sirissa (see Derrida, 1993: 47, and p. 145 of this essay), the way he had done in Sailor’s case earlier on, it is the ‘composure’ of the face, that is, serenity of expression as well as composition, which he concentrates on. Ananda is only too aware that the statue’s form is rooted in the context of its remaking, and that written into its scars and wounds is the human suffering resulting from the violent political events of contemporary Sri Lankan history. The fields of Buduruvagala over which the stone Buddha used to preside are also the burial or dumping ground for victims of the death squads. Coming across the bodies, however, Ananda would seem ‘to stare past it all’ (Ondaatje, 2000: 301), leaving the job of reporting the atrocities to his workers. It is as if the pain and terror so palpably evident around him should have no part to play in the stories he continues to invent about Sirissa in ‘the vaccum of her disappearance’ (307). For Ananda, as for many others ‘slammed and stained by violence’ (55), there is generally no way of articulating the grief and fear they endure relating




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to missing friends and family members. ‘Death, loss, was “unfinished,” so you could not walk through it’ (55). How is such an impasse to be reconciled with Buddhism’s teaching concerning suffering and the way to release from suffering? What crisis undergone and passed through lies behind ‘the lidded grey eyes’ with ‘that torn look in its great acceptance’ (304), the work of the unknown craftsman of generations gone by? When the eyes of the new plaster Buddha are cut and painted by Ananda, what burden of knowledge will they in their turn convey? Perched at the top of a ladder which rests against the plaster figure and attached to its rungs by little more than a sash, facing north like the head which he sees in a mirror held by his nephew on another ladder, Ananda is gifted, after the tortuous work of chiselling, with apprehending the world as it will be seen by the new Buddha ‘forever, in rainlight and sunlight’, a world ‘without the human element’ (306), removed from a disastrous human history: And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wing, or a hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountain near Gonagola and skirting to the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green shadow created by cloud. There was a girl moving in the forest. The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him. Grasses being burned, bamboo, the smell of petrol and grenade. The crack of noise as a layer of rock on his arm exfoliated in heat. The face open-eyed in the great rainstorms of May and June. The weather formed in the temperate forests and sea, in the thorn scrub behind him in the southeast, in the deciduous hills, and moving towards the burning savanna near Badulla, and then the coast of mangroves, lagoons and river deltas. The great churning of weather above the earth. Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. There was a seduction for him here. (306–7) As Ondaatje’s prose is propelled resolutely away from the subjective ‘he’ into the impersonality of sheer natural phenomena, so human perception shades into a vision of extraordinary reach and fullness – ‘The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him’ – and the human figure into that of the Buddha – ‘The crack of noise as a layer of rock on his arm exfoliated in heat.’ But the release intimated here is no more than ‘a seduction’ for Ananda, a dissolution yearned for.17 In the event, bound as he is to the inherited tradition of his calling, the stories which



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in his uncertainty and fear he must continue to invent for Sirissa, his memories of Anil, Sarath and Sailor, the skeleton he had carried in his arms, only a timely gesture of kindness is needed to recall him from the brink: ‘He felt the boy’s concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world’ (307). With that closing sentence, we are reminded of the epigraph from the Miner’s folk song at the start of Anil’s Ghost, a song that Ananda would have known as a gem-pit miner, and that tilts, with good-humoured irony, at both the mechanical life wheel which keeps the labourer safe and tethered, and the conceptual Wheel of Life, the repetitive cycle of rebirth and suffering to which human beings are bound and from which they must seek to detach themselves. Blessed be the scaffolding deep down in the shaft Blessed be the life wheel on the mine’s pit head Blessed be the chain attached to the life wheel … (3) Furthermore, within the context of this essay, the motifs repeated here of ‘touch’ and ‘hand’ take us back to that other return in ‘“They”’, in which, given that one ‘must bear or lose’, the narrator has no alternative but to leave House Beautiful and to confront again, in the world and in the process of living, the ineluctable forces of change. Finally, the motifs call to mind the idea of the artist figured forth in the texts discussed, the struggle to inscribe ‘with visible signs of the invisible’ (Derrida, 1993: 29) all that has happened, and the understanding that, even while ‘[t]he just measure of “restoring” or “rendering” is impossible – or infinite’ (30), the work is still one of the means of making sense that we have. Notes 1. I am indebted to Alistair Stead for drawing my attention to this work, and for conversations on ‘“They”’. 2. Derrida’s exemplary narratives here are: J. B. Suvée, Butades or the Origin of Drawing (Bruges: Groeningemuseum), and Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Butades Tracing the Portrait of her Shepherd or the Origin of Painting (Palais de Versailles). See Derrida (1993: 49–50). 3. By Pietro Bianchi, by Rembrandt, and in a drawing after Peter Paul Rubens. 4. Speaking of the artist intent on making his own portrait, Derrida says: ‘As soon as the draftsman considers himself, fascinated, fixed on the image, yet disappearing before his own eyes into the abyss, the movement by which he tries to recapture himself is already, in its very present, an act of memory’ (1993: 68). 5. Josephine Kipling died in New York on 6 March 1899 at the age of seven. The news of the death of his darling elder daughter was kept from Kipling




6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

Kipling and Beyond who was himself extremely ill at the time. The not knowing would have compounded the pain of her absence upon his recovery. ‘“They”’ was begun in Cape Town in February 1904, was first published in Scribner’s Magazine, August 1904, and then in Traffics and Discoveries in September of the same year. On literary inspiration, Kipling states: ‘We are only telephone wires’ (Cohen, 1965: 100); see also Dick’s advice to Maisie in The Light that Failed (1891): ‘Good work has nothing to do with – doesn’t belong to – the person who does it. It’s put into him or her from outside’ (Kipling, 1970: 81). As well as the artist, the ‘I’, it could be argued, is a composite of different Kiplings. For although the narrator refrains from saying very much about himself directly, it is possible to glean from his narrative that, like the author, he is still new to East Sussex and keen to learn of the surrounding countryside and country ways; that he is a traveller presumptuous in his views about foreign lands and peoples; possibly an empire-builder full of dark premonitions that, heedless as it has become of its responsibilities as a civilising power, imperial Britain might soon be reduced to ‘the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates’ (Kipling, 1904: 323). Even before their first meeting in January 1898, Rhodes’s dream of an AngloSaxon empire was one which Kipling shared. The dates of the Boer War are October 1899 to May 1902. The quoted phrase is from Something of Myself. The story was first published in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1902 and then in Traffics and Discoveries. See the comments of, for example, Carrington (1955), Tompkins (1965), Wilson (1977), Lee (1992), and Ricketts (1999). See the versions of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by William Holman Hunt, 1848; Arthur Hughes, 1856; John Everett Millais, 1863. Running in the Family was published in 1982 following his first visit to Sri Lanka after an absence of twenty years. The narrative’s putative date is 1993 with the assassination of the fictional president, Katugala, by a suicide bomber on National Heroes Day (22 May), the event recalling the death of President Ranasinghe Premedasa on 1 May 1993. This is the case even though a familiar critical tenet these days is that the partial perspective of the migrant writer, its fractures and sidelongness, may, like ‘the broken mirror’, be ‘as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed’ (Rushdie, 1991: 11). See also Farrier (2005), for an interesting account of touch as facilitating a connection with the local. Ondaatje has drawn attention to some contemporary equivalents of the suppressed histories and ‘illegal’ stories Palipana was said to have discovered, such as the poems written on walls, ceilings and various corners of the University of Ceylon when it served as a prison camp during the Insurgency of 1971. Included in a book Ian Goonetilike, librarian at Peradeniya, put together on the Insurgency, and published in Switzerland, are ‘ten photographs of charcoal drawings done by an insurgent on the walls of one of the houses he hid in … While the Kelani and Mahaveli rivers moved to the sea, heavy with bodies, these drawings were destroyed so that the book is now the only record of them. The artist is anonymous’ (Ondaatje, 1984: 84, 85).



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15. This seems to be Ondaatje’s attempt to introduce into the Sri Lanka landscape an example of the petroglyphs – First Nation rock carvings – to be found on the west coast of Canada. Compare Phyllis Webb, ‘The Bowl’ and ‘She Sings’, in Wilson’s Bowl (1980), pp. 64–5. 16. On this segment of the novel see, for examples, Derrickson (2004), Farrier (2005) and Roberts (2007). 17. Ananda’s experience may be compared with the bird-nesting incident in Wordsworth’s Prelude, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

Works cited Bate, Walter Jackson (1979) John Keats. London: Chatto & Windus. Baudelaire, Charles (1964) ‘Mnemonic Art’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., pp. 15–18. Carrington, Charles (1955) Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan. Cave, Terence (1990) Recognitions: a Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cohen, Morton (ed.) (1965) Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: the Record of a Friendship. London: Hutchinson. Cook, Elizabeth (ed.) (1990) John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrickson, Teresa (2004) ‘Will the “Un-truth” Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’, Literature Interpretation Theory 15: 131–52. Derrida, Jacques (1993) Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Farrier, David (2005) ‘Gesturing towards the Local: Intimate Histories in Anil’s Ghost’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41(1): 83–93. Ismail, Qadri (2000) ‘A Flippant Gesture towards Sri Lanka: a Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’, Prava¯da 6(9): 24–30. Jaggi, Maya (2000) ‘Michael Ondaatje in Conversation with Maya Jaggi’, Wasafiri 32: 5–11. Kanaganayakam, Chelva (2003) ‘The Anxiety of being Postcolonial: Ideology and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel’, Miscelánea: a Journal of English and American Studies 28: 43–54. Kanner, Ellen (2000) ‘New Discoveries from the Author of The English Patient’, Book Page. www.bookpage.com/0005bp/michael_ondaatje.html (accessed 27 August 2009). Kipling, Rudyard (1904) Traffics and Discoveries. London: Macmillan and Co. —— (1926) Debits and Credits. London: Macmillan & Co. —— (1970 [1891]) The Light that Failed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lee, Hermione (1992) ‘Introduction’, in Rudyard Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries, ed. Hermione Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 7–29. Lycett, Andrew (1999) Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Mendis, Ranjini (2000) ‘Book Reviews’, Chimo (Fall): 7–12. Ondaatje, Michael (1980) Rat Jelly and Other Poems, 1962–1978. Boston: Marion Boyars. —— (1984 [1983]) Running in the Family. London: Picador.




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—— (1992) The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury. —— (2000) Anil’s Ghost. London: Bloomsbury. Pinney, Thomas (ed.) (1990) Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricketts, Harry (1999) The Unforgiving Minute: a Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus. Roberts, Gillian (2007) ‘Ethics and Healing: Hospitality and Anil’s Ghost’, University of Toronto Quarterly 76(3): 962–76. Rushdie, Salman (1991) Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books. Thompson, Bob (2007) ‘Michael Ondaatje, In Peak Form’, The Washington Post, 30 May: C01–C06. Tompkins, J. M. S. (1965 [1959]) The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen. Vendler, Helen (1983) The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Webb, Phyllis (1980) Wilson’s Bowl. Toronto: Coach House Press. Wilson, Angus (1977) The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London: Secker and Warburg. Yeats, W. B. (1966 [1955]) Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1966.



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What They Knew of Nation and Empire: Rudyard Kipling and C. L. R. James Claire Westall

And what should they know of England who only England know? Rudyard Kipling, ‘The English Flag’ (1891) What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963) These citations show C. L. R. James taking up Rudyard Kipling’s imperial imperative to ‘know’, as expressed in the poem ‘The English Flag’, and transforming it into a postcolonial interrogation of cricket, the sport which stood, by the logic of synecdoche, for the authority of the British Empire but became the global game of the formerly colonised. Kipling’s question has become part of common English phraseology and a number of critics have made passing comment on James’s adaptation of it. At the close of his analysis of the postcolonial rewriting of Kim, Bart Moore-Gilbert briefly highlights this relationship, noting that James won and read two collections of Kipling stories as a schoolboy (2002: 55). That a direct line of literary communication can be drawn between the British laureate of high imperialism who bestrode the two centuries of empire and the Caribbean Marxist intellectual whose life and work occupied (indeed aided) the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism may appear surprising. However, as Christian Hogsbjerg has made clear, James repeatedly referenced his encounters with Kipling’s short stories, described Kipling’s importance to the imperial (literary and popular) imaginary of England, and indicated his appreciation of Kipling as a writer at once within but not entirely restricted by the narrow bounds of English nationalism. Hogsbjerg also suggests that in the decade of the 1950s ‘Kipling’s [old] question went to the crux of the 165



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matter, the crisis of national identity now posed by decolonisation’ and that James’s response was to reinvestigate Kipling’s prompt by examining the legacy of the ‘flannelled fools’ whom Kipling had mockingly rejected but whose presence in the Caribbean had shaped James’s intellectual and political development (see Hogsbjerg, 2007: 188–9). This discussion seeks to unpack the questioning statements of Kipling and James, and probe the tensions between these two figures by illustrating each author’s engagement with the nineteenth-century imperial ethos of cricketing conduct. For both writers are speaking back to England from their own imperial perspective and understand the relationship between nation and empire as a dialectical practice predicated upon England’s ambivalent negotiations with its own imperial identity and domains. Yet their vast divergences – social, historical, political and specifically cricketing – bring into relief Kipling’s violent imperial allegiance and the potential dangers of reawakening his rhetoric without recollecting the significant alterations made by postcolonial intellectuals like James.1

The knowing imperial imperative Having returned to England in 1889, Kipling had quickly become despondent with what he saw as a lack of interest in and awareness of the British Empire and concerned at England’s dearth of healthy young men fit for imperial action; something that would become all the more apparent with the Boer War. He wanted to redress this ignorance and shed celebratory light on England’s imperial project. ‘The English Flag’ was his first poetic shot in this campaign.2 Originally published in the St James Gazette on 4 April 1891 and later collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892), ‘The English Flag’ was inspired by a newspaper report of the Cork courthouse being set on fire and the Union Jack burning during the trial of five Irish men facing riot charges. However, as Peter Keating explains, the poem is not concerned with the Irish question or the issue of anti-colonial nationalist politics (1994: 86). On the contrary, Kipling is vicious in his satirical condemnation of the ‘poor little street-bred people’ who oppose the empire and stand ‘yelping at the English Flag!’ Orwell saw such rhetoric in Ballads as evidence that Kipling was ‘almost unconscious of the class war’ around him (2000: 209). Moving away from the Irish impetus, Kipling attacks all Little Englanders whose vision and knowledge fail to extend beyond the cliffs of Dover. His assault particularly targets those who, he believes, should be venturing out to wider imperial shores or paying their respects to the



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adventurers who do.3 Writing in the year that he would sail around the world and drawing on the naval and militaristic imagery that inspires much of his early poetry, Kipling calls on the ‘Winds of the World [to] give answer’ to those ‘who only England know’ and mobilises them to hail the imperial glory, courage and triumph of the British Empire. Turning from biting satire to propagandist encouragement, Kipling attempts to educate and inspire the English nation to ‘Go forth’, to follow the flag of imperial advancement. This flag, however, is the Union Jack of the British Empire and not ‘The English Flag’ of the poem’s title. Consequently, although Kipling is arguing for England to see itself in relation to its empire he is also reducing the British Empire, and its representative flag, to its ideological centre, England, implying that all imperial strength and beauty emanates from the English nation and its people while simultaneously castigating them for a lack of imperial comprehension and gusto. In this fashion, he is offering what might be described as a literary rendering of the White Ensign, the British naval flag that presents the Union Jack in the top left hand corner of the St George’s Cross, thereby displaying the British Empire as overlapping with Englishness but also existing within a space of Englishness despite it providing England and its navy with a global context. Here, as on many other occasions, Kipling demonstrates that he ‘knows’ more than only England but that he may still prioritise and glorify her. In an otherwise positive review of Barrack-Room Ballads Lionel Johnson wrote that this poem is ‘grievously spoiled by exaggeration of tone’ and that Kipling’s bombastic enthusiasm for and vocal praise of the flag is un-English in its ‘grandiose’ manner (1971: 88–103). While recognising Johnson’s conservative call for English understatement as well as his certainty that ‘we know that England is great’, his comments register Kipling’s poetic recourse to overblown platitudes and vigorous sweeping assertions that in many ways accounted for his popularity and caused Orwell to famously describe him as a ‘jingo imperialist’ (2000: 204). Orwell delineates Kipling’s ‘indefensible’ attributes, of which there are many, but he also argues that ‘few people who have criticized England from inside have said bitterer things about her’ (207). As much criticism has noted, this is the paradox of Kipling, the Indian-born, Englisheducated, poet of imperial expansion. His life and literary voice capture the tensions and interconnections between England and empire because he occupies a position that is internal and external to both of them but he also reflects the uneven distribution of global power caused by the legacies of imperialism in his unquestioning acceptance of English dominance. His position can be read through Simon Gikandi’s sense of



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‘colonial Englishness’, his assessment of ‘Englishness as a cultural and literary phenomenon produced in the ambivalent space that separated, but also conjoined, metropole and colony’ and his view that writers situated within imperial hierarchies ‘produced narratives that seemed to exist both inside and outside the central doctrines of Englishness’ (1996: xii–xiii). According to Stephen Howe, James appreciated Kipling’s inside-outside position and believed it was the standpoint occupied by ‘all important modern “English” writers’ (2003: 158). Further, and in line with Gikandi’s spacialisation of colonial Englishness, Ian Baucom has claimed that along with authors like Forster and Naipaul, Kipling and James represent Englishness ‘as the struggle to preserve, possess, or hybridize a certain sort of place’ (1999: 39): a place or space created by imperial imposition, which works to collapse inside/England and outside/Empire into a single area of ‘imperial Englishness’ and is physically manifest in locations like cricket pitches. Baucom investigates the significance of this in his reading of James and we shall return to his argument later. In his autobiography Something of Myself (1937), Kipling described how he had been working on the rough verses of ‘The English Flag’ in 1890 when his parents were staying with him in Charing Cross. When he asked aloud ‘What am I trying to get at?’ his mother responded, ‘You’re trying to say: What do they know of England who only England know?’ With this prompt the ‘rest of the rhetoric came away easily’ and in ‘the talks that followed, [Kipling] exposed [his] notion of trying to tell to the English something of the world outside England – not directly but by implication’ (Kipling, 1987: 86–7). If we accept this story of poetic creation, Kipling altered his mother’s phrasing so that her ‘What do they know’ formulation became his ‘What should they know’ (re)arrangement, though this rewording is often missed by critics.4 By changing this construction Kipling moves the anticipated answer from a contemptuous ‘Nothing’ (known) to ‘Much’ (to be known), providing, as David Gilmour writes, ‘an injunction that they should be willing to find out’ (2002: 104, emphasis added). It is testament to Kipling’s colonial paternalism and his attempt to provide the English nation with a poetic imperative to discover, know and celebrate its empire. This shift is matched by the tonal movement of the poem as it turns from bitter attack to motivating cry. However, notably, the ‘should’ also seems to deny the public any existing sense of imperial knowledge or insight leaving them an uninformed mass beneath a flag at once English and British, national and imperial, known and unknown. In his re-reading of Kipling, James establishes a related but contrary position.



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James’s seminal autobiographical exploration of cricket, Beyond a Boundary (originally published in England in 1963 but not in the Caribbean until 1984) demonstrates how, in the Anglophone Caribbean, the game contained, maintained and challenged Englishness and British imperial culture through its performative reinvention, i.e. its creolisation, by local (non-white) players who made their way into the game in the face of severe and persistent racial exclusion. The text’s working title had been Who Only Cricket Know? and James retained the Kipling link by insisting in his Preface that the book ‘poses the question: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ (2000: 11, original emphasis). Tim Hector’s notion that ‘cricket is politics carried out by other means’ is another version of James’s provocative opening question (Lazarus, 1999: 170), while John Agard’s refrain ‘And is cricket is cricket in yuh ricketics / But from far it look like politics’ in ‘Prospero Caliban Cricket’ is its poetic reconstruction (2004: 137–8). Importantly, James’s (re)formulation of Kipling (re)inscribes the question of England and empire with an interrogation of cricket because for James and the English-speaking Caribbean, cricket is tied to the history, politics, economics and culture of their imperial experience, collective potentiality and national aspirations. In a critical passage, James writes: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands. English people, for example, have a conception of themselves breathed from birth. Drake and mighty Nelson, Shakespeare, Waterloo, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the few who did so much for so many, the success of parliamentary democracy, those and such as those constitute a national tradition. Underdeveloped countries have to go back centuries to rebuild one. We of the West Indies have none at all, none that we know of. To such people the three W’s, Ram and Val wrecking English batting, help to fill a huge gap in their consciousness and in their needs. (2000: 233)5 The ‘huge gap’ left by an absence of history – of myths of origin, culture and heritage which Derek Walcott called ‘an absence of ruins’ – was enforced on the New World by the violent separation of its people from their past, their land, language and self-knowledge. Without the sense of a ‘national tradition’, cricket has become the enactment of a collectivised history and culture for the region as represented by the West Indies cricket team who entered the world stage in 1928 and were a dominant force by the 1960s.6 With cricket providing the Caribbean




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and its people with identities they can build upon and heroes they can worship it carries the weight of regional history and is evidence of the region’s potentiality. James did not wish to be liberated from such a past or what he saw as the Caribbean’s postcolonial future. His sense that England and English history can be or has been equalled, even defeated, by the efforts of the West Indies indicates a postcolonial reversal of the colonial cricketing order, one which does not ignore its past but embodies and redirects it towards victory, self-confidence and independence through regional unification. Unpacking his own history of cricket, literature and life in colonial Trinidad, James establishes the interrelation of the notion of Englishness that was exported to the colonies and his own anti-colonial thinking. As Bill Schwarz states, ‘To hold together commitments to anti-colonial politics, to sport and to literature was unusual. But as James himself later indicated, their common inspiration lay in […] the codes of England in which he had been formed’ (Schwarz, 2003: 5). James emphasises his own educational encounter with British Literature, including works like Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes, and the pivotal influences of Thomas Arnold and W. G. Grace. Against this background, his intimate study brings to light the internal class and racial dimensions of the game, especially in Trinidad, and the manner in which these relations are played out, re-enacted or refracted in the local teams, players and actions of what is an intrinsically social activity. Throughout, James is taking up the codes of cricket and Englishness and talking back to them from a position that is inside and outside of their traditional domain, that is, from the periphery of empire and the centre of the English intellectual heritage. Like Kipling, it was James’s experience of England that crystallised his thinking. He writes in his Preface: ‘If the ideas [of Beyond a Boundary] originated in the West Indies it was only in England and English life and history that I was able to track them down and test them.’ James articulates and at the same time disrupts the values with which he was raised. As Walcott writes, he ‘beats tradition by joining it’ (1998: 118). Similarly, Grant Farred captures the essence of James’s position by expanding upon his postcolonial legacy as a ‘Victorian with the Rebel Seed’ (1994: 21). In an illuminating moment of self-reflection, James tells of how he began to view himself ‘strangely’ when faced with the seeming incompatibility of his identity as ‘a colonial born and bred, a Marxist, a declared enemy of British imperialism’ and a defender of the cricketing code of conduct that demanded fair play and meant he could not comprehend the match-fixing scandal he witnessed in American baseball in 1950 (2000: 45). In short, James realised that his criticism of



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British imperialism came from within it, and principally from within the ethos of cricket. In their respective questions given at the outset, Kipling and James are both concerned about other people possessing the knowledge that first-hand imperial experience has given them in order to improve their own national cause. Both appear to be addressing a ‘they’ that is external to themselves, thereby pointing out a gap in the knowledge of these others. Although they similarly separate themselves as imperial ‘knowers’ from these ‘non-knowers’ there are notable differences in the purpose and direction of their respective critical investments. Instead of using Kipling’s ‘should’ James asks ‘What do they know?’ perhaps as a misquotation or a conscious attempt at distinction. Either way, it begins to mark the historical and political transformation from colonial to postcolonial consciousness. Where Kipling is claiming that the English fail to see their world position, James is adamant that the people of the Caribbean cannot help but ‘know’ their own complex reality because they live and perform it in every cricketing action as well as in everyday life. James spends much of Beyond a Boundary charting his own arrival at a political consciousness he later saw as already formed by cricketers like Learie Constantine and the black working-class team of Shannon in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, the game ‘had plunged [him] into politics long before [he] was aware’ (2000: 65). Consequently, James’s reformulation functions in two ways. First, it implies that one cannot know cricket by only knowing cricket, as Kipling does with England. Second, it indicates that knowing only cricket is a way of knowing other socio-cultural processes. The reason for this doubling is that where Kipling’s ‘should’ is directed at the un-imperially educated masses of England, James’s question speaks to two audiences – one English, the other Caribbean – because he is the amalgamation of these influences. In this manner, James can address an English audience ‘who only cricket know’ and who refuse to link cricket (or sport more generally) to the politics, economics and cultural history of England or imperialism. They ‘only cricket know’ and consequently can never know cricket, at least not the cricket of the West Indies or other colonised regions. At the same time, his work defends the knowledge, understanding and aesthetic appreciation of Caribbean cricketers and cricket fans who may ‘only cricket know’ but see race, class, empire and nation being negotiated through the game. Importantly, he is attempting to bring this imperial cricketing knowledge to England or Britain and, thereafter, back to the Caribbean as a mode of self-reflexivity, showing how they are intimately, historically and economically linked rather than divided, held together rather than




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in opposition. What changes then from Kipling to James is not simply the replacement of ‘England’ with ‘cricket’, though cricket comes to stand for England, or the word ‘should’ with ‘do’. What changes is the ‘knowing imperative’ or ‘imperative to know’ as Kipling’s targeting of the English and their lack of imperial awareness is echoed in James’s criticism of their narrow understanding of the game but is also supplemented in James with a vital appreciation of the Caribbean people, of the common crowd as knowers and performers of cricket and through cricket, of political, economic, cultural and national transformation. In this sense, Kipling’s colonial advocacy is replaced in James with a postcolonial Marxism that inhabits the cricketing code while freely recognising the aesthetics of sport and the knowledge of the Caribbean masses.

Kipling and the imperial cricketing code First published in 1899 and extended in 1929, The Complete Stalky & Co. challenged the Victorian genre of the schoolboy story and the notion of Christian manliness that descended from Tom Brown’s School Days which had, at its heart, the ‘play up and play the game’ ethos of Henry Newbolt’s famous poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ that came to encapsulate the conflation of cricket, public school allegiance and imperial military sacrifice. Kipling’s collection of Stalky adventures, often darkly humorous and brutally sadistic in tone, reject the public school tradition of the athletic hero, obedience to authority and self-sacrifice in favour of wild cunning, manipulative violence and self-preservation. Kipling believed that these were necessary for the empire and so made them the essentials of his educational ‘parable’. While Robin Gilmour claims that ‘there are no imperial lessons’ only moral ambivalence and subversiveness in Stalky (1989: 139) and Elliot Gilbert reads Kipling’s use of colonialism as a ‘private metaphor for self discovery and self fulfillment’ rather than practical instruction (1970: 127), Isabel Quigly’s assessment of Stalky as the only school story in which the imperial front is the immediate purpose of the schoolboys seems more compelling (1982: 116). It is also supported by Robin Gilmour and Carole Scott who both read games, war and imperial adventure as central to Kipling’s project of revising and extending the ‘harsher side’ of the code of manliness (Scott, 1992: 54). Further, Kucich highlights the class dimensions of this mission, contending that it was the ‘traditionally upper-class values of the public school system’ (2003: 45) that Kipling was most explicitly targeting and which were most at odds with his own situation at Westward Ho!, or ‘The Coll.’ as it is in the text, where the majority of families were



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less wealthy than at more renowned establishments and ‘eighty per cent of the boys had been born abroad’ (Kipling, 1999: 217).7 The primary target of Kipling’s sustained attack is athleticism, and most specifically cricket, reflecting the game’s centrality to the imperialorientated public school code as studies by historian J. A. Mangan and others have shown.8 Newbolt is said to have found Kipling’s position entirely disagreeable (Chitty, 1997: 142) and, according to Mangan, Dr Hely Almond, the athletic head of Loretto, a chief school in the development of the athletic ethos, was incensed by ‘The Islanders’ with its ‘flannelled fools’ and ‘muddied oafs’ (1988: 27). Ironically, the cover illustration on the Oxford World’s Classics edition (1999) of Stalky & Co. is ‘Three Young Cricketers’ (c.1883) by George Elgar Hicks, which depicts three demure and seemingly innocent boys in cricket whites with bats. It bears more resemblance to Arthur Hughes’s 1869 illustration of ‘Tom Brown’s Last Match’ than to Kipling’s work in which the three lead characters despise this gentlemanly game of empire, avoid participating in it and only use its equipment to commit serious assault. Re-reading Kipling’s deployment of cricket in Stalky brings to the surface the sometimes violent inconsistencies of England’s mobilisation of cricket as an ‘instrument of colonial purpose’ (Mangan, 1988: 18). The opposition between the trio Stalky, M‘Turk and Beetle, and the Masters is often seen through their relation to cricket. The boys are encouraged to play the game but repeatedly refuse, and they mock and cajole the Masters who appear caught in the ‘compulsory games’ conundrum. When, in ‘“The Ambush”’, Prout and King follow the boys ‘out of bounds’ onto Colonel Dabney’s land, King, wearing ‘his flannels’, cuts a fine figure of a cricketing-fool running through bushes and open lands before being caught with Prout like a pair of ‘poachers’. The boys wait to extract the full embarrassing caché of this event: They waited through one suffocating week till Prout and King were their royal selves again; waited until there was a House-Match – their own House, too – in which Prout was taking part; waited, further, till he had buckled on his pads in the pavilion and stood ready to go forth. King was scoring at the window, and the three sat on a bench without […] M‘Turk yawned […] ‘I think these House-matches are all rot. Let’s go over to Colonel Dabney’s an’ see if he’s collared any more poachers.’ (Kipling, 1999: 53) Cricket provides the Masters with a space to perform, to be ‘their royal selves’ again, to enact their positions above the boys as representatives




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of the glorified system of athletic performance leading to imperial dominance. The Masters can do nothing to combat the humiliation caused by the young adversaries they are unable to comprehend or control. Indeed, where Mr Prout only ‘understood [boys who] attended House-matches […] he had heard M‘Turk openly deride cricket – even House-matches’ (37). On finding them inside not watching their House cricket match he berates them for their ‘taking so little interest’, most especially in the ‘honour of the House’. Beetle asserts his right to nonparticipation by explaining that he is unable to see the ball and had his ‘gig lamps smashed at the Net till [he] got excused’ (73). But this is insufficient for Prout who has himself been battered with the stick of athleticism by the other Masters:9 Left to himself, Prout would have made a sympathetic House-master; but he never was so left, and, with the devilish insight of youth, the boys knew to whom they were indebted for this zeal. ‘Must we go down, sir?’ said M‘Turk. ‘I don’t want to order you to do what a right-thinking boy should do gladly.’ (73) Here Kipling shows the irony or incompatibility of compulsory games and individual choice. Prout speaks the language of athleticism, of honour, collective will, self-discipline and team work, but does so without genuine belief and while speaking to a group who have not chosen it for themselves and therefore appear to fall outside of its gentlemanly code. The element of compulsion undermines the values that the school is trying to draw out of its members or instil in them through games. By making this gesture Kipling undercuts the imperial conceit of cricket, combating its seemingly ‘soft’ qualities with sharp, critical thinking, and, at the same time, he inadvertently alerts the reader to the very system of ‘compulsory games’ that Britain is imposing upon its empire in an aggressive yet exclusive manner. As Robin Gilmour has clearly argued, the rejection of games, and particularly the targeting of cricket, is ‘the final damning word on Hughes’s optimistic mid-Victorian ethic’ as Kipling transforms the fair play of ‘Tom Brown’s last match’ into a ‘lesson in unfairness’ (1989: 27–9). Stalky even says, ‘You’ve been here six years, and you expect fairness. Well, you are a dithering idiot’ (Kipling, 1999: 75, original emphasis). Throughout, the praise of the Headmaster is not so much for his fairness as for his ability to see the truth. Before he beats them he even acknowledges that he is ‘going to perpetrate a flagrant howling injustice’ (52). More broadly,



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the argument against cricket and its code is also an argument about its impracticality for creating leaders and defenders of empire as Kipling strikes out at the type of cricketing patriotism offered by Newbolt and ridiculed in ‘The Flag of Their Country’ when Mr Raymond Martin MP foolishly believes that the boys he sees drilling in the Cadet Corps would rather be out playing cricket despite it being the dead of winter (204). During his speech, a cliché-ridden call to patriotism, he reveals the Union Jack only to meet the ‘silence’ of the school for whom such displays were ‘a matter shut up, sacred and apart’ (219). One may find similarities between ‘The Flag of Their Country’ and ‘The English Flag’ but Kipling identifies the first as hollow and the second as imperial necessity. The boys condemn Martin as a ‘Jelly-bellied Flag-flapper’ (220) and call an end to the Cadet Corps, resenting the blasphemous articulation of a patriotic sentiment which they may hold in their hearts but which has nothing to do with empty political showmanship. The other key cricketing episode of Stalky occurs in the infamous and ironically entitled story ‘The Moral Reformer’. This well-known episode in which Stalky, M‘Turk and Beetle are encouraged by Reverend John to ‘dissuade’ Campbell and Sefton from bullying the younger and vulnerable Clewer involves a scene of continued beatings and tortuous assaults. It is Stalky who devises the plan to entrap the enemy by pretending that he and M‘Turk are beating Beetle. As another example of ‘the normalization of reciprocal beating’ (Kucich, 2003: 40), Beetle is ‘trussed up for cockfighting’ with a cricket stump between his legs and rope tied around to lure the two bullies out of hiding. Only then, after being hit, does he escape and Campbell and Sefton become the new cock-like victims: ‘Swiftly and scientifically the stumps were thrust through the natural crooks, and the wrists tied’ (Kipling, 1996: 128). Having explored numerous mysterious methods of punishment, it is Beetle who takes up a cricket stump as his weapon of attack: In his excitement Beetle used the stump unreflectingly, and Sefton was now shouting for mercy. ‘Can’t you see, you blind beast?’ Sefton fell over sideways, teartracks furrowing the dried lather. Crack came the cricket-stump on the curved end of him. ‘Blind, am I,’ said Beetle, ‘and a beast? Shut up, Stalky. I’m goin’ to jape a bit with our friend, à la “Molly” Fairburn. I think I can see. Can’t I see, Sefton?’ ‘The point is well taken,’ said M‘Turk, watching the stump at work. ‘You’d better say that he sees, Seffy.’




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There is a hypnotising rhythm to the ‘cricketing’ strokes. Perhaps the long heavy wooden stump is as suitable as any weapon but in light of Kipling’s dismissal of games and sporting attributes as preparation for imperial adventures it seems a telling choice. For in Kipling’s world cricket has become associated with Beetle’s physical distinction, his inability to see, yet he is able to take a cricket bat into his own hands to punish the athletically strong. It is notable that it is not Stalky who conducts this assault but Beetle, the fictionalised version of Kipling himself, who seems to be seeking a very personal form of retribution. His taunting of Sefton and his biting sarcasm are his way of (re)claiming control. There is also an undercurrent of sadomasochistic violence that runs throughout the scene from descriptions of the intrusion into bodily spaces, to Beetle’s sheer ‘excitement’, the striking of Sefton’s ‘curved end’, the ‘lovely eyes’ and the steady rise and fall of the stump. Kucich explains how as a collection Stalky ‘clearly articulates the sadomasochistic logic underlying Kipling’s work, while promoting an education in that logic as the best preparation for middle-class colonial leaders’ (2003: 35). He goes on to show that ‘Stalky & Co. thus exposes the sadomasochistic logic beneath those British codes of masculinity that mandated displays of one’s indifference to suffering’ (41). Here Stalky and his friends, the imperialists of the future, have finally found something ‘useful’ to do with cricketing equipment and are supposedly extracting a violent mode of justice with it. Their actions suggest a swift move from cricket to brutality, from a message of gentlemanly conduct and team work to a team violently asserting itself over its enemy where the enemy is constructed as morally inferior and unjust and thereby deserving severe punishment. There is an implied sense of cricket, moral worth and brutality being combined in a darker version of imperial preparation and justice which ignores or enjoys the suffering it imposes. While Kipling’s connection of cricket with brutality is seen as contrary to the public school code it inadvertently brings to mind the form of cultural and physical violence inflicted upon those people who fall under the flag of the British Empire and whom James later champions. In the last story of the collection, ‘Slaves of The Lamp II’, we encounter the imperial adulthood of the Old Boys and the voice of an intrepid Stalky whose loyalty to the empire, even as he struggles to



‘You do – you can! I swear you do!’ yelled Sefton, for the strong arguments were coercing him. ‘Aren’t my eyes lovely?’ The stump rose and fell steadily throughout this catechism. (134)10


James and the postcolonial-ising of cricket’s code In stark contrast to Kipling, James writes from a position within the public school code of cricketing and sporting gentlemanliness and sees this, along with literature, as the strength of his colonial education. For James, it is the adoption, performance and reinvention of the meaning of this code once it has found its way into the zone of empire that establishes its politicised potential. In Out of Place Baucom presents the nineteenth-century history of cricket and its establishment of a hegemonic idea of English masculinity and Englishness where there is an obvious and overriding disciplinary discourse at work but within which a counter-hegemonic performance is simultaneously asserting itself. Taking this forward to a reading of James’s Beyond a Boundary, Baucom shows that James’s work not only collapses the boundaries between the disciplinary and the performative but actually places the performative within the pedagogic in Caribbean cricket. Baucom reads James as someone who attests to the imperial dialectic of Englishness, arguing that James is ‘beyond’ a boundary in the sense that ‘he has dispensed with the boundary altogether’ (1996: 156) because there is no boundary between Englishness and its ‘Other’. He insists that Englishness and, in his case, Caribbeanness are interwoven, inseparable and essential parts of the very same hybrid creation caused by imperialism and seen in cricket. In this manner, he rejects Manthia Diawara’s reading of James which constructs an essentialist opposition between Englishness and Caribbeanness, or Blackness in Diawara’s terms, just as Howe rejects Helen Tiffin’s criticism of James in terms of divided consciousness.11 In Baucom’s insightful analysis, James transforms the disciplinary discourses of cricket by reworking them from within, by demonstrating that the performances of Englishness and its associated practices can be embodied and performed by cricketers in the Caribbean in ways that not only upset notions of Englishness but suggest that the very idea of Englishness was itself never stable. In fact, Baucom convincingly reveals how Beyond a Boundary shows that the performative – local, unique and disruptive – can exist within the pedagogical and thereby re-animate it (158). This is most prominently seen in James’s discussion of aesthetics where, as Baucom highlights, it is the body and movement of a



follow orders or accept confinement, never disrupts England’s imperial authority or the racial and class hierarchies that accompany it. Such modes of disruption, however, underpin James’s postcolonial adherence to the cricketing code.

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cricketer that makes cricket art and it is in the movement and actions of this body that the performative can recreate cricket. Citing the wellknown example of Matthew Bondman which opens Beyond a Boundary, Baucom suggests that Bondman’s batting and specifically the ‘particular stroke that he played by going down on one knee’ and which received a ‘long, low “Ah”’ from all who witnessed it is an ‘affective event, an interruption of the new within a settled order of practices’ (161). This sense of the performative within the pedagogic is also pertinent to the debate about the ability of former colonies to decolonise cricket which is at the crux of James’s reading of the game. Lazarus helpfully presents this debate as one articulated by the opposing views of Orlando Patterson and Mark Kingwell. In ‘The Ritual of Cricket’ Patterson claimed that cricket was and remains ‘the Englishman’s game par excellence’ (cited in Lazarus, 1999: 163) and, hence, cannot be decolonised, freed from the disciplinary discourses of Englishness, from its own code of civil conduct. In essence, for Patterson, all cricket in the Caribbean, or other regions touched with an imperial legacy, could never be more than mimicry of the old colonial masters; even cricketing acceptance and success is no more than conformity to the old disciplinary code. Yet, as Lazarus points out, Mark Kingwell has argued that the ‘civility’ of cricket in the Caribbean – the adherence to both the laws and ethics of the game – ‘should not be mistaken for ideological conformism’ (1999: 164). Kingwell argues that ‘the most effective response [to the disciplinary code] will be an ironic maintenance of just those values that the ruling classes profess to admire, a maintenance that […] will ultimately indicate how little in fact they live up to them’ (cited in Lazarus, 1999: 164). Here Kingwell aligns himself with James’s belief in the performative existing with the pedagogical disciplinary discourses of cricket. Such a reading supports the view that the performative can be, as Baucom and James contend, contained, maintained and nurtured within cricket’s own discursive tradition and that this can aid the process of decolonisation. The game can maintain its traditions, traditions not always adhered to by the centre, while also having them altered in ways it had not anticipated and that reveal its own instability. This is the creolisation of cricket and such creolisation has made cricket an important part of Caribbean life and culture. James’s own defence of cricket’s civil code has been criticised as an ‘ideological blindspot’, as the spot at which his personality contradicts his politics, the point at which his anti-colonial attack fails to attack the colonial centre. Andrew Smith has responded to such arguments by comparing James’s evocation of ‘the spirit of the game’ with



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Bourdieu’s formulation of the field of cultural production. He defends James by first illustrating the self-reflexivity James shows towards his own position, and second by examining how cricket functions as a cultural field. Smith quite rightly states that as well as a physical field cricket is ‘a field in exactly Bourdieu’s sense of being a social domain governed by its own distinctive economy of value’, with its own laws, logic and positions seen in the ‘formal autonomy of the cricketing field and the acceptance within (or, rather, on) that field, of a specific principle of behaviour, meaning and success’. Moreover, James’s assertion that cricket can contain social reality by continuing to exist as a game can be explained, in Smith’s analysis, by Bourdieu’s explanation of the autonomy of a cultural field: When James defends the integrity of the ‘spirit’ of cricketing play he does so for exactly the same reasons that Bourdieu defends the ‘intention of autonomy’ of the field of cultural production. That is to say, not because he was concerned to protect some solipsistic ideal of cricket as magically removed from the daily world, but precisely because he knew that what was at stake in defending the field’s integrity was this ability to make the forces of political and economic power pause at the boundary. To put it another way, what was at stake were cricket’s conditions of critical voice, its ability to provide, as it were, a commentary on its historical and social context. Because fundamentally this is what James’s discussion is concerned with: a reading of cricket’s meaning beyond itself. (Smith, 2006: 107) While arguing for the autonomy of the field, neither Bourdieu nor James believes that autonomy leads to equality, far from it. Bourdieu understands that ‘cultural games [...] are not “fair games”’ and that ‘those who are able to play cultural games as games, thereby adhering to a field’s principle of disinterested participation, are likely in the long run to be able to convert the subsequent symbolic rewards into economic form’ (Bourdieu cited in Smith, 2006: 105, original emphasis). This is James’s point: although there is never a level playing field, those who succeed at cricket in the Caribbean, on cricket’s own terms, do something that can affect everything around them, including the economics governing their performances. Their effect, however, comes not from offering deliberately conscious social acts but from their aesthetic performances within the game. That is, the performances of cricketers are social, and socially significant, in the autonomy of their aesthetics. To James, the anti-colonial force of adhering to the ideals of




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cricket was made manifest in the rise of West Indies cricket, its popularity among the people of the region and the arrival of Frank Worrall. For him, ‘knowing cricket’ was a way of getting close to the people, knowing their creativity and creative aspirations, and moving towards a postcolonial vision of the world. When remembering Kipling, and his imperial prompt to know more than only England, we should look through a Jamesian lens which is still alive with anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial opportunity as it guides us towards the aesthetic reanimation of formerly colonial cultural practices.

A closing note… A number of pieces in this collection have drawn attention to the place of Kipling (or catchy Kipling citations) in the contemporary discourse of ‘Terror’, particularly in news and media coverage. Alongside such observations, I wish to close by highlighting the recent redeployment of Kipling by Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Pakistan-born and raised Church of England minister, whose strict interpretation of Christianity and his views on the threat posed by Islam to Britain placed him in direct opposition to Dr Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, and eventually resulted in his resignation as Bishop of Rochester in early 2009. Writing under the title ‘Breaking Faith with Britain’ for Standpoint Magazine (a right-of-centre political magazine which aims to defend ‘Western Civilisation’) in June 2008, Nazir-Ali claimed that the decline in Christian worship seen in Britain was the result of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, sparked by students, and that the consequences of this revolution had been devastating for the country: Whilst the Christian consensus was dissolved, nothing else, except perhaps self-indulgence, was put in its place. Happily Marxism, in its various forms, has been shown to be the philosophical, historical and economic nonsense that it was. We are now, however, confronted by another equally serious ideology, that of Islamism. We witness here his dismissal of Marxism and the confusing suggestion that Islamism has taken its place as the new ideological threat to Christianity. In wishing to stake his claim to authority, his right to speak about such issues under the banner of ‘Britishness’, Nazir-Ali wrote that his ‘justification [was] … to be found in Kipling when he said, “What should they know of England who only England know?” It may be that to understand the precise relation of the Christian faith to the public life



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of this nation, a perspective is helpful which is both rooted in the life of this country and able to look at it from outside’ (Nazir-Ali, 2008).12 While we may find some sense in his call for a global perspective – he is after all a dual citizen of Britain and Pakistan – we should look closely at his conflation of Britain with England, the jingoistic manner of his inflammatory tone, the conservative, even evangelical, standpoint from which he preaches, and the slippage from Marxism to Islamism which enables him completely to dismiss ‘serious ideology’. We should also note that the ‘Christian consensus’ he mourns was one built by imperial conquest and sustained by the nineteenth century’s Three C’s of Class, Christianity and Cricket (which is one of the clergyman’s own hobbies). Finally, his reference to Kipling’s imperial knowledge must be filtered through the postcolonial revisions offered by James and similar critics if we are to avoid (re)creating a flat, stereotypical and nationalistic vision of imagined English dominance. Notes 1. This chapter derives from work undertaken as part of a larger doctoral project which was fully funded by the AHRC and I wish gratefully to acknowledge their support here. 2. According to Charles Carrington this poetic campaign was rather successful: ‘All that generation of young men who volunteered to fight in the SpanishAmerican and Anglo-Boer wars derived their notion of colonial warfare and of the soldier’s life largely from Kipling, particularly from his cockney verse’ (1955: 331). 3. We may wish to recall Kim’s Irish identity and Nagai’s contention that Kipling typically depicts Irish men, ordinarily soldiers or other imperial workers, as contented and engaged immigrants of empire in contrast to the English who wish to remain at home or return to it. For a full discussion of the parallels and overlaps between Kipling, Ireland and India, see Nagai (2006). 4. Farrukh Dhondy writes that the manuscript of James’s Beyond a Boundary was initially entitled ‘Who Only Cricket Know – from Kipling’s lines “What do they know of England, who only England know?”’ Attempting to recollect Kipling through James, however, Dhondy, like many others, misquotes ‘The English Flag’. See Dhondy (2001: 129). Also, Billy Bragg’s song ‘The Few’ from his Don’t Try This At Home Album (1996) carries the same misquotation as its refrain, offering a view of the dark side of only knowing England, of the insularity, bigotry and violence it can breed through a restrictive and dehistoricised nationalist discourse; one he sees demonstrated by English football fans. See, http://www.billybragg.co.uk/releases/albums/dont_try_this/dont8. html (accessed 15 June 2009). 5. For readers unfamiliar with Caribbean cricket it may be helpful to explain who James is drawing on. The ‘three Ws’ refers to Frank Worrall, Clyde Walcott and Everton Weekes, the trio of world-class batsman who helped the West Indies dominate the cricketing world in the 1960s, particularly after the appointment of Frank Worrall as the first permanent black captain of the




6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

Kipling and Beyond regional cricket team in 1961. Additionally, ‘Ram and Val’ refers to Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine, the two young spin bowlers who led the bowling assault on England in 1950 when, for the first time, West Indies defeated England in England. For historical studies of West Indies cricket and its importance to the region see Beckles (1998), Birbalsingh (1996) and Seecharan (2006). David Gilmour describes the main differences between USC at Westward Ho! and typical public schools as including ‘no uniforms, no cadet corps and no school chapel’ (2002: 11). See, particularly, Mangan (1981, 1988). There were some efforts to curtail or oppose the ideals of athleticism. For a discussion of these movements see Dewey (1995). A similar incident is described in Vachell’s The Hill (1925) but Vachell is warning the reader against the devilish attacker Scaife whereas Kipling appears to side with his protagonists. For the substance of this debate see Diawara (1990), Tiffin (1995) and Howe (2003). See ‘Breaking Faith with Britain’ by Nazir-Ali (2008). For newspaper commentaries on this piece see Marrin (2008) and Poulter and Firth (2008). For the ‘Profile: Michael Nazir-Ali’, see The Guardian, 23 June 2008, p. 10 or online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/23/anglicanism. religion1 (accessed 14 May 2009).

Works cited Agard, John (2004) ‘Prospero Caliban Cricket’, in ‘A Breathless Hush’: the MCC Anthology of Cricket Verse, ed. David Rayvern Allen. London: Methuen, pp. 137–8. Baucom, Ian (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Beckles, Hilary (1998) The Development of West Indies Cricket, Volume I: The Age of Nationalism and Volume II: The Age of Globalization. London: Pluto. Birbalsingh, Frank (1996) The Rise of West Indian Cricket: From Colony to Nation. Antigua: Hansib. Carrrington, Charles (1955) Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan. Chitty, Susan (1997) Playing the Game: a Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt. London: Quartet. Dewey, Clive (1995) ‘“Socratic Teachers”: the Opposition to the Cult of Athletics at Eton, 1870–1914. Part II – The Counter Attack’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 12(3): 8–47. Dhondy, Farrukh (2001) C. L. R. James: a Life. New York: Pantheon Books. Diawara, Manthia (1990) ‘Englishness and Blackness: Cricket as Discourse on Colonialism’, Callaloo 13(4): 830–44. Farred, Grant (1994) ‘“Victorian with the Rebel Seed”: C. L. R. James, Postcolonial Intellectual’, Social Text 38 (Spring): 21–83. Gikandi, Simon (1996) Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilbert, Elliot L. (1970) The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story. Ohio: Ohio University Press.



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Gilmour, David (2002) The Long Recessional: the Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: John Murray. Gilmour, Robin (1989) ‘Stalky & Co.: Revising the Code’, in Kipling Considered, ed. Philip Mallett. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 19–32. Hogsbjerg, Christian (2007) ‘Facing Post-Colonial Reality? C. L. R. James, the Black Atlantic and 1956’, in 1956 and All That, ed. Keith Flett. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 181–201. Howe, Stephen (2003) ‘C. L. R. James: Visions of History, Visions of Britain’, in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwarz. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 153–72. James, C. L. R. (2000 [1963]) Beyond a Boundary. London: Serpents Tail. Johnson, Lionel (1971) ‘Three Reviews by Lionel Johnson’, in Kipling: the Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green. London: Routledge, pp. 88–103. Keating, Peter (1994) Kipling the Poet. London: Secker & Warburg. Kipling, Rudyard (1892) Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses. London: Methuen & Co. —— (1987 [1937]) Something of Myself, ed. Robert Hampson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1996 [1891]) ‘The English Flag’, in The Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Ltd., pp. 181–3. —— (1999 [1929]) The Complete Stalky & Co. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kucich, John (2003) ‘Sadomasochism and the Magical Group: Kipling’s Middle Class Imperialism’, Victorian Studies 46(1): 33–69. Lazarus, Neil (1999) Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mangan, J. A. (1981) Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. Sussex: Falmer. —— (1988) The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. London: Frank Cass. Marrin, Minette (2008) ‘No More Retreat: the Right Finds its Moral Nerve’, Sunday Times, 1 June 2008. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ minette_marrin/article4040226.ece (accessed 14 May 2009). Moore-Gilbert, Bart (2002) ‘“I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim”: Kipling and Postcolonialism’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37: 39–58. Nagai, Kaori (2006) Empire of Analogies. Cork: Cork University Press. Nazir-Ali, Michael (2008) ‘Breaking Faith with Britain’, Standpoint Magazine, http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/85/full (accessed 1 June 2009). Orwell, George (2000) ‘Rudyard Kipling’, in George Orwell: Essays. London: Penguin, pp. 203–15. Poulter, Sean and Niall Firth (2008) ‘Bishop says Collapse of Christianity is Wrecking British Society – and Islam is Filling the Void’, Mail Online, 29 May 2008, http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1022491/Bishop-says-collapse-Christianitywrecking-British-society--Islam-filling-void.html (accessed 14 May 2009). Quigly, Isabel (1982) The Heirs of Tom Brown: the English School Story. London: Chatto & Windus. Schwarz, Bill (ed.) (2003) West Indian Intellectuals in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Scott, Carole (1992) ‘Kipling’s Combat Zones: Training Grounds in the Mowgli Stories’, Captains Courageous, and Stalky & Co.’, Children’s Literature 20: 52–68.




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Seecharan, Clem (2006) Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies at the End of the 19th Century. Jamaica: Ian Randle. Smith, Andrew (2006) ‘“Beyond a Boundary” (of a Field of Cultural Production)’, Theory Culture Society 23(4): 95–112. Tiffin, Helen (1995) ‘Cricket, Literature and the Politics of Decolonization: the Case of C. L. R. James’, in Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, ed. Hilary M. Beckles and Brian Stoddart. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 356–69. Vachell, Horace Annesley (1925) The Hill: a Romance of Friendship. London: John Murray. Walcott, Derek (1998) ‘C. L. R. James’, in What the Twilight Says: Essays. London: Faber, pp. 115–20.



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9 Ben Grant and Kaori Nagai

Patriotism: a love of one’s country; a belonging to country, a part of the patria, but also an ‘I’ apart, one who loves something other. To expatriate: a driving away, or a withdrawal from, one’s native land. An ambiguity in the subject here: expulsion, or a bid for freedom? And when will this movement outward have occurred, this movement upon which ‘patriotism’ (I love you) depends? Am I the one who leaves – thrust out or fleeing – or am I the one watching you vanish across the border? *** He travels and expatriates; as the bee From flower to flower, so he from land to land, The manners, customs, policy of all Pay contributions to the store he gleans; He seeks intelligence from every clime, And spreads the honey of his deep research At his return – a rich repast for me! (I. Burton, 2002: 1) Richard Francis Burton, the eminent Victorian explorer and translator, began his career in India, in the service of the East India Company. He arrived there in 1842, and left, due to ill health, in 1849. He did not return until 1876, when he revisited the country – ironically, to restore his health – with his wife, Isabel. ‘We utilized the voyage out’, Isabel tells us in the Foreword to her The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, ‘and also the voyage back, in the part of the following pages which refers to his early life, he dictating and I writing’ (viii). In this autobiographical account, which opens his biography, Burton begins 185



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by recalling his childhood, spent largely in France and Italy, and these recollections are coloured by the other memories evoked by this return to India. Indeed, the two spaces and the two times become so inextricably entwined in his memory that, as he dictates to his wife, Burton cannot help but describe himself as a child around whom an Anglo-Indian world begins to take shape. Burton was born in England, but moved, with his parents, to Tours in France when he was a few months old. Of the English communities in that area, he tells us, ‘a host of these little colonies were scattered over the Continent nearest England; in fact, an oasis of Anglo-Saxondom in a desert of continentalism’ (5). He goes on, ‘The English of these little colonies were intensely patriotic … intensely national’, and the shading of these memories into the colonial scene becomes manifest when we are told that ‘English girls who flirted with foreigners, were looked upon very much as white women who permit the addresses of a nigger, are looked upon by those English who have lived in black countries. White women who do these things lose caste’ (6). The references to ‘nigger’ and ‘caste’ here indicate that Burton is thinking specifically of India. In this world, Richard and his younger brother, Edward, ‘left more or less to the servants’, ‘became perfect devilets’ (9), mixing and fighting with the locals, terrorising their servants and teachers. As the boys approached their teens – ‘All Anglo-French boys generally were remarkable young ruffians, who, at ten years of age, cocked their hats and loved the ladies’ (10) – their parents decided to move back to England, where their children could receive an English education. However, the boys were far from enamoured of the country, as we see in Burton’s description of their return to the continent the following year, after they had spent a brief and unpleasant spell in a preparatory school: ‘We shrieked, we whooped, we danced for joy. We shook our fists at the white cliffs, and loudly hoped we should never see them again’ (16–17). Looking back on these early experiences, Burton reflects: In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society, nor did society understand us. And … it is a real advantage to belong to some parish. It is a great thing, when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa, to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World … In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light, without a focus. Nobody outside your own fireside cares. No man ever gets on in the world, or rises to the head of affairs, unless he is a representative of his nation. (17)



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Having been ‘brought up abroad’, Burton is unable to identify himself as a ‘representative of his nation’, and is not recognised as such by ‘English society’. Given that Burton palimpsests the Anglo-French and the Anglo-Indian in this account, this relationship to England comes to signify the colonial condition, and Burton produces himself, retrospectively, as a colonial subject, turned towards England as ‘his nation’, but one which he could never be representative of. The poem quoted above was placed, unattributed, by Isabel Burton at the beginning of the first chapter of The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton. She had previously used it as an epigraph to her travel narrative The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land (1875). It is clearly intended to illustrate Richard Burton’s relationship to her, and also to his motherland. In the context of the biography, it might be read as engaging with Burton’s own narration of his early years, not to contradict his self-representation, but to transform his lack of belonging to England into that which makes him pre-eminently an English patriot. In order to fully understand the poem, it is necessary to look closely at the word ‘expatriates’, which occurs in the opening phrase, ‘He travels and expatriates’. It is unusual, today, to find the verb form of this word, though the noun ‘expatriate’ is commonly used to describe people who, as Said puts it, ‘voluntarily live in an alien country, usually for personal or social reasons’ (2001: 181). The verb more clearly brings to light the etymology of the word – out of (ex-) a native land (patria) – and its earlier meaning: an expatriate, like an exile, was originally someone who had been banished from, or renounced the rights of citizenship of, his or her country. Moreover, to expatriate was not only to sever one’s ties with the patria, but also, by doing so, to free oneself from the ideological fetters of patriotism; as nineteenth-century dictionary definitions of the word inform us: ‘Expatriation was a heavy ransom to pay for the rights of their minds and souls.’1 It is in this sense that the young Burton, whooping for joy as he leaves behind the white cliffs of Dover, can be described as an ‘expatriate’. Read through the lens of the poem, however, this expatriation becomes the necessary precondition for his eventual return: it was only by expatriating himself completely that Richard Burton could acquire ‘the honey of his deep research’ with which to enrich those at home. By thus linking Burton, as one who ‘travels and expatriates’, to herself, the one who stays and to whom he returns, his wife makes of his movement out an act of love. Burton’s errantry, as ‘a waif, a stray’, thereby becomes the very sign of his patriotism. Between Isabel and Richard Burton, then, if we take into account the latter’s conflation of his childhood with the Anglo-Indian scene, we begin



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to see emerge a reading of colonialism in terms of ‘expatriatism’. The fact that we would now call those ‘little colonies’ where Burton grew up ‘expatriate communities’ serves to demonstrate that the latter term has, almost unnoticed, taken the place of the former. The moment of this transition can be precisely located, as the moment when the British Empire began to disintegrate and the word was immediately used to describe all those colonial functionaries left stranded by the withdrawal/expulsion of the colonising nation; Naipaul marks this for us in The Mimic Men, when the narrator, Ralph Singh, a political leader in a newly independent Caribbean nation, writes: ‘We had spoken, for instance, of the need to get rid of the English expatriates who virtually monopolized the administrative section of our civil service’ (2002: 228, emphasis added). For this shift, from ‘colonial’ to ‘expatriate’, to have occurred so seamlessly, though, a great deal of work must already have been going on, underground, to bring the two terms into proximity. We catch an early glimpse of this in The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton. One reason why it is difficult to see this today is the fact that, in its modern usage, to which Said refers, much of the range of meanings previously associated with ‘expatriatism’ have been lost. An expatriate, by expatriating himself, no longer severs his ties with the patria completely, but keeps his rights and citizenship while enjoying his new life elsewhere. The voluntary choice of cutting oneself off from one’s patria and the fetters of patriotism is replaced with the fantasy of doing so, and this is coupled with a seemingly opposing sense, of a patriotism which takes shape outside the patria, which we can characterise as a love for the one who remains behind, as someone now other. Such a reading of the word has become virtually invisible in the official definition of ‘expatriatism’, but nonetheless returns in the form of ‘ex-patriotism’, a word which, Google tells us, circulates widely and unofficially, as a revealing misspelling or visual pun. Ex-patriotism is a slip, whether of the pen, the tongue, or even memory, between the different meanings of the word ‘expatriate’, and between one home, country, or language to another, while exposing and accentuating the relationship to our patria. Kipling, the so-called ‘Bard of Empire’, who most powerfully gave voice to the Anglo-Indian community, and who sought to give to the English a picture of ‘the whole sweep and meaning of things and effort and origins throughout the Empire’ (1977: 87), is frequently referred to, today, as an ‘expatriate’ writer, though he would not have used the word himself, and to do so reveals an unthinking tendency to project into the past our contemporary context. However, this anachronism again reveals the slippage between this term and ‘colonial’, which, we would argue, Kipling’s articulation of the colonial condition did a great deal to



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facilitate. Kipling is reported to have said to an American friend in 1891, while they were discussing ‘the insularity of the British’, ‘Well, I’m not an Englishman, you know; I’m a colonial!’ (quoted in Matthews, 1917: 432), thereby alluding ironically to Englishmen’s propensity to discriminate against him, and the ‘colonial’ population as a whole, by using this word to deny him and other ‘colonials’ the status of ‘Englishman’. Apparently, there was no suitable term to do justice to those who lived in the imperial outposts, and their valuable contributions to the working of empire, and Kipling felt that it was necessary to give expression to such communities. While in Japan as part of his honeymoon trip in 1892, he made a speech to the Tokyo Club, in which he expressed his pride in belonging ‘to the outlying colonies of men whose life is severed from that of their fellows at home; the little isolated communities beyond the seas who are looked upon so curiously and sometimes so curiously misrepresented by wondering tourists’ (2008: 3). Though he himself was in Japan as a globe-trotter, it would be unkind of them to ‘count [him] as an outsider’, for he met there ‘the very same type of men as those among whom [he has] been bred and trained’ (3). A few months after this speech, he published in the Times his impressions of Japan in an article entitled ‘Our Overseas Men’, in which he hails those living abroad as ‘Outside Men’: All things considered, there are only two kinds of men in the world – those that stay at home and those that do not. The second are the most interesting. Some day a man will bethink himself and write a book about the breed in a book called ‘The Book of the Overseas Club’, for it is at the clubhouses all the way from Aden to Yokohama that the life of the Outside Men is best seen and their talk is best heard. A strong family likeness runs through both buildings and members, and a large and careless hospitality is the note. (The Times, 30 July 1892; Kipling, 1920: 47) Kipling’s ‘Outside Men’ vary in preoccupations and patoises according to the locality of the particular club; for instance, in the ‘stately Hongkong Clubhouse’, the speech of the ‘Outside Men’ becomes ‘fearfully mixed with pidgin-English and local Chinese terms, rounded with corrupt Portuguese’ (48). Or, at Melbourne, ‘the traveller moves timidly among them wondering what under the world every third word means’ (48). However, these men are nonetheless alike in their common characteristic of having moved Outside: ‘And elsewhere, and elsewhere, and elsewhere among the Outside Men it is the same – the same mixture of every trade, calling, and profession under the sun’ (49).



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These ‘Outside Men’ do not renounce citizenship, but replicate and multiply homes outside, periodically returning to recreate the national space. The same way of life is also captured in the juxtaposition of Isabel Burton’s appended poem and Richard Burton’s assertion: ‘I always acted upon the saying, Omne solum forti patria, or, as I translated it, “For every region is a strong man’s home”’ (I. Burton, 2002: 4–5). This condition, which we would call ex-patriotism, became fundamental to colonialism and to the identity of the colonising nation. Although colonialism has seemingly ended, in today’s proliferation of expatriates we perhaps find perpetuated colonial structures and fantasies which we cannot put to rest. *** Grey dusk behind the tamarisks – the parrots fly together – As the Sun is sinking slowly over Home; And his last ray seems to mock us shackled in a lifelong tether That drags us back howe’er so far we roam. Hard her service, poor her payment – she in ancient, tattered raiment – India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind. If a year of life be lent her, if her temple’s shrine we enter, The door is shut – we may not look behind. (Kipling, 1996a: 44) In one of the sections of Minima Moralia, Adorno talks about special occasions in his childhood when a lady visitor came to stay with his parents. The child awaits her arrival ‘with more fervent expectation than it ever did before Christmas’ (2005: 177), because at this magical moment the boundaries between home and outside are suspended. On such occasions, the child’s daily routine is disrupted, and he ‘feels admitted all at once to the mighty and mysterious league of the grown-ups’ (178), as the visitor talks seriously to him ‘without condescension’ (177). Her greatest magic is derived from the fact that she is a ‘guest [who] comes from afar’ (178), arriving with a suitcase full of exotic gifts, though ‘it is not presents that are the cause [of the child’s excitement], but transformed existence’ (177): ‘Her appearing promises the child a world beyond the family, reminding him that it is not the ultimate’ (178). Thanks to the lady guest, ‘[a]mong those nearest him, as their friend, appears the figure of all that is different … From the joy of greatest proximity she removes the curse by wedding it to utmost distance’ (178). The section’s mysterious title, ‘Heliotrope’, describes the boy’s expectation, his longing for the return of this guest, just as the flowers daily await the sunrise to bring



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them to life: ‘Love counts the hours until the one when the guest steps over the threshold and imperceptibly restores life’s washed-out colours: “Here I am again / returned from the endless world”.’ The figure of a heliotrope implicitly appears in Kipling’s poem ‘Christmas in India’ (1996a: 43–4), which was first published on Christmas Eve, 1886 in the Pioneer, an Allahabad newspaper of which Kipling was at the time assistant-editor. The flower in this poem is not the child awaiting a guest from afar, but an Anglo-Indian narrator who muses upon Christmas Day in his faraway Home. Each of the five stanzas captures an exotic and un-English picture of India at a different time of Christmas Day – dawn, full day, high noon, dusk and night; his eyes follow the sun’s rise and disappearance. It is telling that Adorno evokes Christmas to convey the specialness of the guest’s visit, as Christmas is the magical moment, when relatives all over the world gather together to celebrate their belonging to family, community and nation. On this day, Kipling’s narrator turns himself into a heliotrope, just like Adorno’s child in expectation of the return of the lady visitor, wishing to partake of Christmas at Home. After all, this is the only day in the year on which English people remember those who are in India: ‘They will drink our healths at dinner – those who tell us how they love us, / And forget us till another year be gone!’ (Kipling, 1996a: 44). The poem has been read as an Anglo-Indian expression of homesickness. Those who are far from ‘Home’ will feel this distance most acutely on Christmas Day; as Kipling’s Anglo-Indian narrator in his sketch published on Christmas Day, 1885 puts it: ‘Christmas eve [is] a day of all days in the year I detest because it makes me homesick, and morose and irritable’ (1986: 125). At first, the narrator seems to struggle to capture the magic of reunion: ‘at Home they’re making merry ’neath the white and scarlet berry – / What part have India’s exiles in their mirth?’ (1996a: 44). Christmas, nevertheless, becomes an occasion for the Anglo-Indian community to reflect upon its relationship to England. The Christmas Day’s sun is a guest which brings about a changed existence. As the sun’s ‘last ray’ disappears, ‘the door is shut – we may not look behind’ – for another year. By following the sun, he, as an ex-patriot, at once becomes the one who waits for England’s return and who embodies the movement of the return. Significantly, the ray which ties the Anglo-Indians to Home immediately turns into the tether which binds them to their Stepmother, India. Christmas in India has wrought its magic: the returning sun, representing the connection one has with Home, helps him to look at familiar Indian landscapes in a fresh light, making him notice, again, their brightness and colour.



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‘Christmas in India’, then, reveals the situation of the Anglo-Indians as being caught between England and India: tethered to both, they are the hyphen between the two. Although Kipling describes this condition as one of ‘exile’, this word hardly seems appropriate today, since it is generally taken to denote a forced separation from the patria, and a proscription on return; or, as Said puts it, ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’ (2001: 173). It is this which distinguishes exiles from expatriates, whose residence abroad is ‘voluntary’. In Kipling’s characterisation of the Anglo-Indians as ‘India’s exiles’, this distinction is not so clear. These ‘exiles’ are not only free to return to England, but bound to do so. However, at the same time, their ties to India prevent them from becoming, once more, part of the patria, from which they are held apart, even as they are tethered to it. Therefore, while they are defined in terms of their relationship to England, they do not identify with it. Rather, Home comes into being for them as something both familiar and foreign, an absent presence which they can only love from afar. Were they truly to return there, the nation would, in this sense, cease to exist. Consequently, though experiencing ‘the unhealable rift’ which Said speaks of, this is the precondition of their love of country, so that to heal it would be to lose the very thing which they so wish to grasp. So it is only by expatriating themselves that these Anglo-Indian ex-patriots can truly love England, however painful that love might be. India is the ground on which this England comes into being, and this imperial patriotism, this ex-patriotism, cannot easily be reconciled with national identification (‘I’m not an Englishman, you know; I’m a colonial!’). These are, however, two sides of the same coin, neither possible without the other. Kipling himself was born, and spent the first few years of his life, in India. In his autobiography, Something of Myself, he represents himself as coming into being with the day, in the Bombay fruit market: ‘My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder’ (1977: 33). Into the scenes of Indian life enjoyed by him and his sister – in which their ayah and Meeta, their bearer, are constantly present – it is the parents, and especially the Mother, who arrive from afar: In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she [his ayah] or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma’. So one



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Nandy sees this moment as one of rupture, more violently enacted when Kipling is sent to school in England, with ‘an idyllic childhood in India’ (1983: 37). According to this reading, England arrives to take the place of India, making of Kipling ‘a tragic figure seeking to disown in self-hatred an aspect of his self identified with Indianness’ (37). However, this is to ignore the fact that ‘English’ is very much a part of Kipling’s Indian childhood, as an addition which transforms his existence, for the arrival of his mother and father, who are signs both of family and of the foreign, weds the home to the outside world. This makes of the child both guest and host in India, and it is for this reason that his childhood is so idyllic. His movement to England itself does not transform him into an Englishman, and he is unable to fit in there. He says of his arrival, ‘There was next a dark land, and a darker room full of cold’ (Kipling, 1977: 35), and of his return to India aged sixteen, ‘I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not … my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength’ (56). England is not Kipling’s home; India is. This is apparent when he visits his parents in India for the last time: ‘They were coming “Home” for good soon: so this was my last look round the only real home I had yet known’ (95). However, his Indian home is unthinkable without the presence of England as an absent Home. The parallels between Burton’s and Kipling’s childhoods – both of which we would now be tempted to call ‘expatriate’ – are obvious, and made more so by the fact that Burton palimpsests France and India in his account. Burton, in projecting Anglo-India into his French childhood, constructs around himself a colonial location, which is both part of England and apart from it, where he might have felt at home; it is, therefore, not surprising that he was, like Kipling, throughout his life a staunch advocate of British imperialism. The principal difference between the two is that Burton goes to school in England at a later age, and promptly flees back to the continent; Kipling spent all his school years at Home. This was standard practice in Anglo-India, where it was felt that children who mixed too much with the natives would lose their English identity and run wild. Burton would seem to confirm this assessment in his representation of himself and his brother as ‘perfect devilets’, and his parents also felt the need to give their children an



spoke ‘English’, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in. The Mother sang wonderful songs at a black piano and would go out to Big Dinners. (34)

Kipling and Beyond

English education. However, as the falling away of Kipling’s ‘English years’ suggests, even a prolonged period in England cannot serve to turn the Anglo-Indian child into a ‘representative of his nation’, and his return to India is characterised in terms of loss, both of a superficial Englishness, and of ‘the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not’. The return to England might have succeeded in attenuating his ties to India, but it has failed to make Kipling an Englishman. Furthermore, he has lost a great deal of the ability to ‘travel and expatriate’, which Burton, as one of the foremost linguists of his day, who was famous for travelling to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Muslim, retained. We might well say that Burton, who refused to return to England, and who spent little of his life there, more closely resembles Kipling’s creation, Kim, whom he uncannily anticipates, than Kipling himself. On the one hand, Kipling, in thinking through what his life might have been like had he not returned to England, produces a character who seems to find his real-life exemplar in Burton. We should note here that Kim is hardly the only character in Kipling’s work who is made to embody his ex-patriotic fantasy. Strickland, Kipling’s Anglo-Indian Police Officer, a master of disguise who rejoices in ‘perpetually “going Fantee” among the natives’ (Kipling, 1987: 51) has often been likened to Richard Burton. He is, like Burton, a talented linguist and anthropologist, who taught himself native languages and customs (51). The more striking similarity between Burton and Strickland in the context of this essay, however, is the fact that Strickland, in his first appearance in ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’ (1887), is forced to make a promise to give up his wandering habits in order to marry an English girl. Strickland therefore represents the pairing of Richard and Isabel Burton, or the polarity between the movement out from England and the subsequent return. After Kipling left India in 1889, the possibility of his expatriating himself became even remoter, and another kind of expatriotic fantasy took central stage: the free movement of colonial boys, born and bred abroad, who nevertheless retain their ties with England. It is this which Kim and Burton embodied. As if to trace this change, Strickland himself was soon turned into a native-born, who, just like his son Adam, was suckled by a native ayah (‘The Son of his Father’ [1893; Kipling, 1923: 221]). In terms of the Great Game, Kim and Burton (who travelled in disguise in India, in order the better to spy on the natives) are seen as valuable assets. Their repeated expatriations and returns, laden with a ‘store’ of ‘intelligence’, are, from the point of view of the ones who remain behind, patriotic acts which enrich the motherland, however little either



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may seem to love England and the English. Though valued in this way, they are, at the same time, looked upon with a considerable degree of ambivalence, as difficult to identify and to place. Baucom argues that Kipling shares this ambivalence: ‘What, Kipling wonders … has England done in ushering this wild child into the house?’ (1999: 88). McBratney, in contrast, sees Kim as ‘enacting a new kind of imperial ethnicity for Britons at home and abroad’, and therefore as a ‘new and more cosmopolitan imperial citizen’ (2002: xviii). Both these readings highlight Kim’s identity, and how it disturbs the boundaries of Englishness. Kim, however, is not a novel about English national identity or ethnicity, and Kim’s parents are not even English, but Irish. He does, nonetheless, have a relationship to England; without this, he would become one with the Indian ground and lose his supplementary status as ‘Little Friend of all the World’. This relationship is, we would argue, an ex-patriotic one and, by making Kim, for whom there is no prospect that he will ever see England as home, the hero of his novel, Kipling seeks to construct an English India which is founded upon a love of England as an absent other. According to Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, ‘an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you’ (1990: 13): Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence … Absence persists – I must endure it. Hence I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into oscillation, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the stage of language (language is born of absence: the child has made himself a doll out of a spool, throws it away and picks it up again, miming the mother’s departure and return: a paradigm is created) … This staging of language postpones the other’s death. (15–16) Ex-patriotism is such a love, which recognises the necessary absence of the patria, the impossibility of returning there once and for all, and which, in order to postpone its death, mimes its departure and return. For Kipling, this is the foundation of colonialism, as an act of love for England, and the colony is the site where this miming is staged. Kim is, therefore, a novel in which, precisely because it is in no way about a return to England itself, returns and revenants proliferate. For instance, we have Kim’s return to his father’s regiment, the Mavericks, which in turn leads to his entry into an English school, and subsequent returns to and from the Road, which are frequently expressed as a movement between the English language and ‘the vernacular’, as when we are



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told: ‘Each long, perfect day rose behind Kim for a barrier to cut him off from his race and his mother-tongue. He slipped back to thinking and dreaming in the vernacular’ (Kipling, 2002: 179). This shuttling is analogous to a movement between England and India, but it is important that all these crossings occur within India itself, as Kim’s home. Furthermore, they emerge as supplementary to the central departures and returns in the novel, which are those between the loving pair, Kim and the Lama, whose temporary separations and happy reunions generate a sense of magic in the Raj: ‘I will return to my chela, lest he miss the Way’ (239). And it is apposite that Kim should be paired with a Buddhist monk, since his training is based upon an act of expatriation, whereby, by severing his ties with the patria – home, family and nation – he is able to attain the state of enlightenment, his true destination, through endless cycles of the Wheel of Life. Kim’s endlessly deferred journey towards England, his imperial Home, therefore intersects with the Lama’s search. Seen in this way, Kim remains turned towards England, like a heliotrope towards the sun, and all his movements between identities are but the rhythm which mimes England’s departure and return. Kim is one of many of Kipling’s stories, which include The Jungle Books and his semi-autobiographical story ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, which feature a boy protagonist who is separated from his parents at a young age, and ‘that severance [is compensated for] by a proliferation of parental surrogates’ (Knoepflmacher, 1992: 28). In Kim, there are, for instance, the Lama, Mahbub Ali, Lurgan and Creighton, to name only a few, and this proliferation of fathers illustrates the ex-patriot’s capacity to accumulate alternative homes in lieu of his patria, England. Furthermore, the absence of Home overlaps with the absence of Kim’s mother: ‘“I had no mother, my mother,” said Kim. “She died, they tell me, when I was young”’ (230). It is this absence which allows Kim to become a supplementary son in India, and for the soil of India herself to become his surrogate mother: And Mother Earth was as faithful as the Sahiba. She breathed through him to restore the poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from her good currents. His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands surrendered to her strength. (235) Just as the Sahiba takes the place of Kim’s mother, whose death is thereby postponed, so India takes the place of England. Kim’s home is, therefore, a substitute for his Home. This is a source of melancholy, since the substitute will never be able truly to take the place of that which will



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always already have been lost: ‘Who is Kim – Kim – Kim?’ (156). It is also, though, a source of jouissance, because that which is absent is endlessly kept alive, and endlessly enriched, through a dazzling proliferation of supplements: ‘“And who are thy people, Friend of all the World?” “This great and beautiful land”, said Kim’ (115). This, the pain and the pleasure of the colonial as an ex-patriot, can most fully be expressed by the exceptional figure of Kim, who ‘had no mother’, and who was born in India to Irish parents. It is essential that Kim is Irish, for India and Ireland are thereby able to take turns to embody this absence of the Mother; the pairing of the two thus becomes an apparatus to create a metonymic chain of ex-patriot homes, the differences between which are occluded by their common relationship to England. As Kim makes clear, the colonial can never return Home: ‘The door is shut – we may not look behind.’ This is because it is only in the act of moving outside, of expatriation, that the patria assumes this form, which is that of the beloved who is absent. Nonetheless, by retaining England as the absent centre which founds the imperial domain, and love of which unites the Empire, it is, paradoxically, kept alive, and present. England itself, therefore, however unhomely it might be, uncannily signifies Home, and is therefore indispensable. It is this which distinguishes ex-patriots from emigrants, who are, in theory, able to completely sever their ties to become part of another patria. This double aspect of England is apparent in Kipling’s 1903 poem ‘The Return’ (1996b: 393–4), in which we are given the words of a Londoner returning to his native place after fighting in the Boer War: ‘Peace is declared an’ I return / To ‘Ackneystadt, but not the same’. The speaker’s transformation is evident in his changed view of London, which can no longer be separated from the landscape and history of South Africa, as we see when he refers to it as ‘Ackneystadt, and, later, ‘Thamesfontein’. He claims, ‘Things ’ave transpired which made me learn / The size and meanin’ of the game’, and in these renamings of the imperial metropolis, England itself becomes part of the larger (imperial) game. It is in this context that we must read the poem’s well known ‘patriotic’ refrain: If England was what England seems, An’ not the England of our dreams, But only putty, brass, an’ paint, ’Ow quick we’d drop ’er! But she ain’t! The possibility of ‘dropping’ England places the speaker, and the ‘we’ whom he represents, outside the patria, even as he is speaking, upon his



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‘return’, from within it. This failure to identify with England, once more to return to ‘the same’, is manifested in a distance from ‘what England seems’, which now assumes the aspect of a theatrical façade. However, simultaneously with this apparent separation, another England comes into being, ‘the England of our dreams’ (‘Home’), which, as a collective dream, must be absent, but which is nevertheless signified by ‘what England seems’. This poem can be read alongside Chesterton’s 1904 address to the Patriot’s Club, in which his delineation of patriotism is informed by an opposition to the Boer War, and a critique of Kipling, who was one of that war’s leading advocates. For Chesterton, patriotism is ‘a defined and declared preference for certain traditions or surroundings’ (1904: 15). One can only, therefore, love a country to which one belongs, as one’s native land. He equates imperialism with cosmopolitanism, and sees the notion of ‘Imperial patriotism’, with which he associates Kipling, as untenable, because ‘it is impossible to have towards a sprawling and indeterminate collection of peoples … precisely that sentiment which is evoked in man, rightly or wrongly, by the contemplation of the peculiar customs of his ancestors and the peculiar land of his birth’ (14). Furthermore: ‘Imperialism seeks to destroy patriotism, not by sketching a remote and unattainable fusion between different peoples, but by pointing out how and where at a particular moment such fusion may be made. Imperialism is an opportunist cosmopolitanism’ (13). This striking definition of imperialism corresponds closely with ‘The Return’, in which the speaker’s renamings of London fuse together England and South Africa at the precise moment of the Boer War. For Chesterton, this is a dangerous hybridisation, because it severs attachments to particular localities, producing a ‘sprawling’ imperial domain, for which it is impossible to have any love. Kipling certainly accepts that imperialism involves such ‘fusion’ – we see it also in the figures of Kim and the ‘Outside Men’ – and, indeed, celebrates this as an aggrandisement of England. However, if the signifiers of Englishness can be freely hybridised, this is only because ‘the England of our dreams’ is kept alive as the Home which unites all the disparate homes of empire. Kipling is an English ex-patriot, and his ‘Imperialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism)’ (37), as Chesterton puts it, is founded upon this sentiment. ‘The Return’ in Kipling’s poem is rather different from that described by Anderson, in his essay ‘Exodus’, where he claims that ‘the rise of nationalist movements and their variable culminations in successful nation-states’ is ‘a project for coming home from exile, for the resolution of hybridity’ (Anderson, 1994: 319). The imagined England of Kipling’s



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speaker is not a place to which he can ever return, in the sense of becoming part of it once more, and thereby severing his connections to other places. However, by recognising this, and yet remaining attached to England as something other, his ‘hybridity’ does not threaten his identity, which is to be understood in purely relational terms, as his love for England, and not in terms of the signs of his Englishness. He returns, then, like Adorno’s guest, not to resume his place in the family circle and become a ‘representative of his nation’, but like a relation coming from afar, to visit on Christmas Day. The presents which he bears, ‘the honey of his deep research’, are the least of what he has to offer. His greatest gift is to ‘remove the curse’ from ‘the joy of greatest proximity’, by ‘wedding it to utmost distance’. The same can be said for Kim, as a ‘wild child’ happily ushered ‘into the house’. For the ex-patriot himself, though, whose home is elsewhere, the return of England, as the dream of Home, is both a joy and a curse. Kipling expresses this most beautifully when he finds in Cairo ‘the perfect likeness of every city I had known and loved, a little farther up the road’; he writes: ‘It was a cruel double-magic. For in the very hour that my homesick soul had surrendered itself to the dream of the shadow that had turned back on the dial, I realised all the desolate days and homesickness of all the men penned in far-off places among strange sounds and smells’ (Kipling, 1920: 240). At the very moment he surrenders himself to feeling completely at home in the East, his native land, he cannot help but feel like a total stranger, penned in a far-off place, overwhelmingly homesick for England. The two feelings are inseparable, for, as an ex-patriot, as a colonial, his love for home cannot be anything but an expression of his love for a Home to which he can never return. In 1902, Kipling moved to ‘Bateman’s’, his new house in Sussex, and wrote to an American friend: ‘we discovered England which we had never done before … and went to live in it. England is a wonderful land. It is the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have ever been in’ (Kipling, 1996c: 113). This is often cited as marking the beginning of Kipling’s reconciliation with England, the healing of his severed ties with his patria. Kipling wrote stories which mirror his experience of settling in Sussex, for instance, ‘An Habitation Enforced’ (1905), ‘Friendly Brook’ (1914) and ‘“My Son’s Wife”’ (1917), in all of which an ‘outsider’, who was not born in the land but has an oblique family connection to it, comes to form a tie with the land and becomes its rightful owner; as ‘The Recall’, the companion poem to ‘An Habitation Enforced’, puts it: ‘They shall return as strangers / They shall remain as sons’ (Kipling, 1909: 51). While this can easily be construed as Kipling’s



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transformation from an ex-patriot into ‘the representative of his nation’ with a parish to belong to, we should not ignore the fact that he discovered England as another ‘foreign country’, as well as the fact that he consistently describes the return of strangers as a kind of ‘magic’ (51). Rural Sussex is made to perform the role of the ideal Home or the absent centre of empire, in which Kipling stages the never-ending return of ex-patriots. And to this foreigners’ Sussex, Puck regularly comes back to open up the true history of England to Dan and Una (Kipling, 1906): a cosmopolitan, ‘ex-patriot’ nation, created by many different races from many different homes. *** Home is the sole abode of bliss; Tourist, the exile comfortless; His heart’s the lodestone, home the pole – Thought streams, home sea to which they roll. O canting nonsense! Why the deuce Don’t they go home? What is the use Of this lip-stuff when they might prove By marching back that home they love? (R. Burton, 1865: 64) Of course, for all the patriotic insistence of its speaker, the refrain of Kipling’s poem, ‘The Return’, might lead us to a rather less than patriotic conclusion: England is just what England seems, an’ not the England of our dreams, so we should drop ’er. Quick. In 1865, Richard Burton published, in an edition of 200 copies, a rather remarkable poetic work: Stone Talk (ΛΙΘΟΦΩ NHMA): Being Some of the Marvellous Sayings of a Petral Portion of Fleet Street, London, To One Doctor Polyglott, Ph.D., by Frank Baker, D.O.N. When Isabel discovered his authorship, she sought to buy up all the copies which had already been sold, fearing the damage the work’s dissemination might do to her husband’s reputation and career (see Lovell, 1998: 463–4). The story begins with Dr Polyglott (the first-person narrator) going to dine with an elderly gentleman, Charley Wode, with whom he reminisces ‘’Bout India, Indians, and all that!’ (R. Burton, 1865: 1). In the early hours of the morning, and thoroughly inebriated, he ventures home through the foggy streets of London, during the course of which journey he encounters a beautiful young woman: ‘I bowed before the Thing Divine / As pilgrim sighting holy shrine’ (4). The vision of holy matrimony to which he quickly proceeds is, though, blighted by the entry of the woman’s fearsome



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‘Doppelgänger’: ‘The middle-aged British mother-in-law’ (5). This sight prompts a very different vision, of ‘furnished lodgings ’bout Mayfair’, upon the door of which ‘“Respectability” was writ’; into this scene steps the mother-in-law, who proclaims, ‘Wretch! thy eternal home is here’ (6). At this point, Polyglott falls upon the ground, and is addressed by one of the stones: ‘“Man! I’m a stone in London streets! …” … I felt as if a corking-pin / Were thrust my os coccygis in’ (7). Looking about him, he sees that Up and adown the lengthy street, For tardy progress called the Fleet, The pave was quick with human heads And faces, whites, blacks, browns, and reds, All, all alive – all packed and stowed Like th’umbrellas of rain-wet crowd. So travellers tell at Afric court, Where scores of men are slain for sport, On clean-cut necks pates ranged in row Out of the earth appear to grow. (7–8) The stone who addresses Polyglott turns out to be the reincarnation of a Hindu, named Ram Mohan Roy (we are told in a footnote, ‘Must not be confounded with the modern Bengali philosopher of that name’ [15]2), and the remainder of the poem is principally the speech of this character, who lambasts mankind generally, and the English in particular. As his name indicates, Polyglott is an alter ego of Burton himself, and his adventures have a great deal to say about Burton’s perception of England, and his relationship to it. It is telling that the poem begins with a conversation about India, the two men fondly recalling their time there, and thereby escaping temporarily from an England in which they feel out of place and ill at ease. Polyglott’s attraction towards the woman, and the prospect of marrying her, figures his desire to become part of ‘English society’, but this desire comes up against the claustrophobic reality of ‘respectable’ Englishness, represented by the British mother-in-law. The blighting of his vision – the transformation, we might say, of the England of his dreams into what England seems – leads to the production of Ram Mohan Roy as Polyglott’s alter ego. He, though, is only one of the many stones in Fleet Street, which together, in their great diversity, represent the peoples of the British Empire, here packed together to be trampled upon at the heart of the imperial metropolis. The reference to the barbaric ‘Afric court’ reinforces the not



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so implicit critique of imperialism. In this hallucination, England is not the absent centre of empire, but the place where all its constituent parts come together, to be stowed, classified and imprisoned. Mohan Roy’s words give voice to this entire crowd, which England represses, and upon which it is founded. In doing so, he is not sparing in his attack on the British Empire and its ideological underpinnings. Thus, he refers to the British as ‘Thieves of the world, that spoil wholesale / And plunder on the largest scale’ (34), and, to prove his point, gives many examples of peoples impoverished and decimated at their hands. In painting this picture, he pours scorn on the propensity of the British to celebrate their imperial expansion, in an image which needs must, today, be read alongside Kipling’s famous poem, ‘The English Flag’: ‘Boast that your bit of bunting brands / So many scores of stolen strands …?’ (34). It is in the context of this critique of imperialism that Mohan Roy turns his attention to the ideology of the English ‘home’, prompted by Polyglott’s remark: ‘Our boast is home, and every stranger … must e’er confess / Our hearths are rich in happiness. / Must I suppose this all a dream …?’ (63). In response, Mohan Roy asserts, ‘Your “happy hearth” is oft a hell’, about which people only ‘fuss’ when ‘self-compelled to roam’ far away (64). Furthermore, it is a home from which ‘you … Banish the hapless half-grown boy’ (69) to weaken or die in disease-ridden foreign parts. Thrust out or fleeing, the colonial Englishman’s continued attachment to Home is misguided, and can lead only to misery, as illustrated by the case of a ‘dying soldier [who] leaves / Ind’s sultry shores; dying, he cleaves / To the one hope, the only prayer, / Once more to breathe his natal air’ (70). He dies, though, on the ship home; his body, ‘covered jauntily / With Union Flag’ (72), is cast into the sea. ‘Who killed S***ll?’ Mohan Roy asks, ‘’Tis strange to tell, / ’Twas she that bare him killed S***ll’ (73). This example poignantly conveys both the reality of a maternal England who abandons her children, and the impossibility of the one who has been banished ever returning there. The ‘dream’ of a happy English home which sustains the Englishman in his ‘exile’ is, therefore, a cruel jest, and England does not deserve his ex-patriotism. Mohan Roy himself, as a stone, is dismissive of the patriotic sentiment: ‘Man, I’ve an honest petrifaction; / Little I feel for petty faction / Of patriots paid so much a day / To march with flags and run away’ (96). At the same time, he is a parody of the sense of belonging to one’s native land, having literally done so: ‘O for those days – those days of bliss / Amid the happy stones that fill / The precincts of my natal hill!’ (25). Superimposed upon his identity as a stone, however, Mohan Roy is also an Indian, who must, despite the editor’s footnote, ‘be confounded with the modern



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Bengali philosopher of that name’. This particular identity brings into focus the racial divide in India, and also, given that Mohan Roy represents all those other stones, the division between coloniser and colonised throughout the Empire, and that between English and non-English more broadly. Bringing this multiplicity of others together, and imbuing them with a ‘petral’ nature, Polyglott usurps the famous name of Ram Mohan Roy to give voice, not to any form of Indian patriotism, but to an attack on his own patriotic feelings for England, as an Englishman who feels like an outsider there. In this fantasy, the very real figure of Mohan Roy becomes the sign of Polyglott’s expatriation. The fantasy rebounds upon itself, though, for the very act of producing it, of distancing his expatriated, non-English self in the figure of the native, the immigrant, the foreigner, the stone, confirms Polyglott in his English identity. It is therefore inevitable that, at the end of the poem, after Polyglott has unsuccessfully attempted to persuade a policeman to arrest Mohan Roy on a charge of treason, the latter once more becomes part of the fabric of Fleet Street, of the English centre, and Dr Polyglott, PhD wends his way ‘To bed – sober’ (121), always and forever an English ex-patriot. Notes 1. A quote attributed to ‘Palfrey’, appearing in the entry on ‘Expatriation’ in Waller (1857); also in Whitney (1899). 2. Rammohun Roy (1772?–1833), as his name is more commonly spelt today, was a philosopher, religious thinker, politician and translator. He was a leading figure in the Bengal Renaissance, and founded the religious movement, the Brahmo Samaj. He travelled to England, as an ambassador of Akbar II, in 1830, and died there in 1833. His grave, and a monument to him, are to be found in Bristol, England.

Works cited Adorno, Theodor (2005) Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London and New York: Verso. Anderson, Benedict (1994) ‘Exodus’, Critical Inquiry 20(2): 314–27. Barthes, Roland (1990) A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Baucom, Ian (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Burton, Isabel (1875) The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land. From My Private Journal (2 vols). London: Henry S. King & Co. —— (2002 [1898]) The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, ed. W. H. Wilkins. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific. [Burton, Richard F.] (1865) Stone Talk (ΛΙΘΟΦΩ NHMA): Being Some of the Marvellous Sayings of a Petral Portion of Fleet Street, London, To One Doctor Polyglott, Ph.D., by Frank Baker, D.O.N. London: Robert Hardwicke.



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Chesterton, G. K. (1904) ‘The Patriotic Idea’, in England: a Nation. Being the Papers of the Patriots’ Club, ed. Lucian Oldershaw. London and Edinburgh: R. Brimley Johnson, pp. 1–43. Kipling, Rudyard (1906) Puck of Pook’s Hill. London: Macmillan. —— (1909) ‘An Habitation Enforced’, in Actions and Reactions. London: Macmillan, pp. 1–51. —— (1920) Letters of Travel (1892–1913). London: Macmillan and Co. —— (1923) ‘The Son of his Father’, in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, pp. 217–51. London: Macmillan and Co. —— (1977) Something of Myself. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1986) ‘My Christmas Caller, or the Prescription of Sieur Asmodeus, 25 December 1885’, in Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88, ed. Thomas Pinney. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, pp. 125–35. —— (1987) ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’, in Plain Tales from the Hills. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 51–6. —— (1996a) ‘Christmas in India’, in The Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Ltd., pp. 43–4. —— (1996b) ‘The Return’, in The Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Ltd., pp. 393–4. —— (1996c) The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume III: 1900–10, ed. Thomas Pinney. Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— (2002) Kim: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. —— (2008) ‘To the Tokyo Club, 7 May 1892’, in Rudyard Kipling’s Uncollected Speeches: a Second Book of Words, ed. Thomas Pinney. Greensboro: ELT Press, pp. 2–3. Knoepflmacher, U. C. (1992) ‘Female Power and Male Self-Assertion: Kipling and the Maternal’, Children’s Literature 20: 15–35. Lovell, Mary S. (1998) A Rage to Live: a Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co. Matthews, Brander (1917) These Many Years: Recollections of a New Yorker. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. McBratney, John (2002) Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Naipaul, V. S. (2002) The Mimic Men: a Novel. London: Picador. Nandy, Ashis (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward W. (2001) ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta Books, pp. 173–86. Waller, J. F. (ed.) (1857) The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography. London: Mackenzie. Whitney, W. D. (ed.) (1899) The Century Dictionary: an Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language. London: The Times.



204

Primary texts (i) Kipling Wee Willie Winkie. Ed. Hugh Haughton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Soldiers Three and In Black and White. With an introduction by Salman Rushdie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Plain Tales from the Hills. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1888; 3rd edition, London: Macmillan, 1890. Life’s Handicap. London: Macmillan, 1891. The Light that Failed. London: Macmillan, 1891. The Naulahka. London: Macmillan, 1892. Many Inventions. London: Macmillan, 1893. The Jungle Book. London: Macmillan, 1894. The Second Jungle Book. London: Macmillan, 1895. ‘Captains Courageous’. London: Macmillan, 1897. The Day’s Work. London: Macmillan, 1898. Kim. London: Macmillan, 1901. Just So Stories. London: Macmillan, 1902. Traffics and Discoveries. London: Macmillan, 1904. Puck of Pook’s Hill. London: Macmillan, 1906. Actions and Reactions. London: Macmillan, 1909. Reward and Fairies. London: Macmillan, 1910. A Diversity of Creatures. London: Macmillan, 1917. Letters of Travel (1892–1913). London: Macmillan, 1920. Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. London: Macmillan, 1923. Debits and Credits. London: Macmillan, 1926. The Complete Stalky & Co. London: Macmillan, 1929. Limits and Renewals. London: Macmillan, 1932. Something of Myself. London: Macmillan, 1937. Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches, 1884–88. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. 6 vols. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990–2004. Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie Ltd., 1996. Rudyard Kipling’s Uncollected Speeches: a Second Book of Words. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Greensboro: ELT Press, 2008.

(ii) Other primary texts Barghouti, Mourid, I Saw Ramallah. Trans. Ahdaf Souief. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Burton, Isabel, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (1898). Ed. W. H. Wilkins. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2002. 205



Select Bibliography

Select Bibliography

[Burton, Richard F. ], Stone Talk (ΛΙΘΟΦΩ NHMA): Being Some of the Marvellous Sayings of a Petral Portion of Fleet Street, London, To One Doctor Polyglott, Ph.D., by Frank Baker, D.O.N. London: Robert Hardwicke, 1865. Hamid, Mohsin, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin Books, 2007. James, C. L. R., Beyond a Boundary [1963]. London: Serpents Tail, 2000. Ondaatje, Michael, Anil’s Ghost. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Pamuk, Orhan, Istanbul: Memories and the City. Trans. Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Wells, H. G., Tono-Bungay [1909]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Secondary texts (i) Kipling Amis, Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and his World. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1975. Brantlinger, Patrick, ‘Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and Its Afterlives’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 50(2) (2007): 172–91. Carrington, Charles, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan, 1955. Dillingham, W. B., Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Dobrée, Bonamy, Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Gilbert, Elliot L., The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1970. —— (ed.), Kipling and the Critics. London: Peter Owen, 1965. Gilmour, David, The Long Recessional: the Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: John Murray, 2002. Green, Roger Lancelyn (ed.), Kipling: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971. Gross, John (ed.), The Age of Kipling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Hagiioannu, Andrew, The Man who would be Kipling: the Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Keating, Peter, Kipling the Poet. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994. Kemp, Sandra, Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Kucich, John, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Lycett, Andrew, Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999. Mallett, Philip, Rudyard Kipling: a Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. —— (ed.), Kipling Considered. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. McBratney, John, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Montefiore, Jan, Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2007. Morey, Peter, Fictions of India: Narrative and Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Kipling and ‘Orientalism’. London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986. —— Writing India, 1757–1990. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.



206

—— ‘“I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim”: Kipling and Postcolonialism’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37 (2002): 39–58. Nagai, Kaori (2006), Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press. Pafford, Mark, Kipling’s Indian Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Randall, Don, Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Ricketts, Harry, The Unforgiving Minute: a Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Rutherford, Andrew (ed.), Kipling’s Mind and Art. London: Oliver and Boyd Ltd., 1965. Sullivan, Zohreh T., Narratives of Empire: the Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. —— (ed.), Kim: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. Tompkins, J. M. S., The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen, 1959. Wilson, Angus, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.

(ii) Postcolonial and other criticisms Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Anderson, Benedict, ‘Exodus’, Critical Inquiry 20(2) (1994): 314–27. Barthes, Roland, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Baucom, Ian, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Cohen, Jared, Children of Jihad: a Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East. New York: Gotham Books, 2007. Collins, Jo and John Jervis (eds), Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Derrida, Jacques, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Esty, Jed, Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Gikandi, Simon, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. Grant, Ben, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2009. Hobson, J. A., Imperialism [1902]. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988. Howe, Stephen, Anticolonialism in British Politics: the Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.



Select Bibliography 207

Select Bibliography

Lazarus, Neil, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Loomba, Ania, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Mannoni, Octave, Prospero and Caliban: the Psychology of Colonization. Trans. Pamela Powesland. London: Methuen, 1956. Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Parry, Benita, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1972. Rooney, Caroline, Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books, 1991. Said, Edward W., Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975. —— Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. —— Orientalism [1978]. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995. —— Out of Place: A Memoir. New Delhi: Viking/Penguin Books, 1999. —— Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta Books, 2001. —— On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. —— Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi. New York: Routledge, 1995. —— The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. —— A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. —— ‘Resident Alien’ in Relocating Postcolonialism. Ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002, pp. 47–65. Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Trivedi, Harish (ed.), Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Walcott, Derek, What the Twilight Says: Essays. London: Faber, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd., 2008.



208

Abu Ghraib 93, 94–5 Adams, Jad 25 adolescence see childhood Adorno, Theodor 23, 27, 34, 190–91, 199 aesthetics 3, 25–6, 27, 63, 87, 96, 123, 126–30, 171–2, 177, 179–80 Afghanistan 6, 7, 12, 68, 76, 80–1, 95, 96, 97, 98, 104–6, 133 Agard, John 169 Aguinaldo, Emilio 38 Ahmad, Aijaz 118 Algeria 9, 125 Allen, Charles 137 alterity 10, 11, 23, 74, 79–98 passim, 114 America (the United States of) see also Empire, American 3–7, 14, 20, 30, 37–57, 58–9, 72, 74–6, 93, 94–6, 98, 116, 121, 137, 170, 181, 189, 199 Amis, Kingsley 107, 108, 112 Anderson, Benedict 198 anti-Semitism 13, 18–25, 32, 33 A Passage to India (Forster) 129, 134, 136, 137 Arnold, Matthew 51, 55, 134 Arnold, Thomas 170 Arnold, W. D. 127 artist, the figure of the 13, 26–7, 30–1, 60, 126–7, 141, 144–63 passim Auden, W. H. 6–7 Austen, Jane 141 Baldwin, Oliver 107 Barghouti, Mourid 15 Barthes, Roland 195 Baucom, Ian 177–8, 195 Baudelaire, Charles 145–6 Behad, Ali 14 Bergson, Deirdre Levinson 32–3

Bhabha, Homi 1–2, 25, 117, 120 Bible 58–9 Bin Laden, Osama 58, 76, 80 Bivona, Daniel 92 Blair, Tony 12, 80 Blake, William 60 blindness 13, 83, 88, 144–5, 147–8, 152–3, 155, 157, 175, 178 Boehmer, Elleke 2, 97 Boer War 116, 162, 166, 181, 197–8 Book of Tobit 145, 147 border see also frontier 9, 15, 21–2, 23, 50–1, 53, 62, 64, 68–9, 76, 95, 96, 133, 157, 185 Bourdieu, Pierre 179 Boyle, Trevor 121 Boy Scouts Movement 142 Brailsford, H. N. 18 Brantlinger, Patrick 3, 38, 53 Brecht, Bertolt 31, 34 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 152 Buddhism 12, 69–72, 141, 154, 157–60, 196 Burne-Jones, Edward 151 Burne-Jones, Margaret 83 Burton, Isabel 185, 187, 190, 194, 200 Burton, Richard Francis 11, 185–8, 190, 193–4, 200–3 Bush, George W. 12, 39, 58–9, 76, 94, 95, 98 Calvino, Italo 51 Camus, Albert 125, 134, 135 Caribbean, the 9, 165–6, 169–72, 177–9, 181, 182, 188 Carnegie, Andrew 39 Carrington, Charles 102, 104, 146, 151, 162, 181 Césaire, Aimé 102, 110, 112, 118 Chaudhuri, Nirad 102 Cheney, Dick 40 Chesterton, G. K. 198

209



Index

Index

Chew, Shirley 13 childhood 1, 3, 12, 25, 32, 43–7, 59–78, 108–14, 146–53, 186–7, 190–5, 199 Christmas 15, 40, 190–2, 199 Coetzee, J. M. 52 Cohen, Jared 74–6 Collins, Jo 11, 97 Conrad, Joseph 50, 107, 112, 115, 116, 118n6, 122, 134 cosmopolitanism 10, 14, 15, 32, 198 cricket 9, 165–6, 168–82 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 34 democracy 6, 12, 19, 39, 41, 42, 47, 48–9, 53, 58, 95, 118, 137, 169 Derrida, Jacques 13, 144–8, 155, 159, 161 de Souza, Dinesh 40 Diawara, Manthia 177, 182 Dillingham, William 50 Dobrée, Bonamy 28, 29 Donnelly, Thomas 40 du Maurier, George 18 East India Company 82, 139, 185 Edmond, Rod 89 Edwardes, Michael 125 Einstein, Albert 21, 24 Eliot, George 134, 135, 136 Eliot, T. S. 7, 19, 24, 25, 27, 28–9, 32, 34, 116, 120 Empire American 3–7, 14, 37–57, 58–9, 72, 74–6, 93, 94–6, 98, 116 counter-narratives 11, 103, 106 education 42–7, 62, 69, 92, 104–5, 111, 170, 172–7, 186, 193 glamour 3, 4, 40, 51–3, 67 nostalgia 3–7, 13 pathology 49–50, 53, 54n13, 64, 114 violence 11–12, 49–50, 51, 69, 77, 81, 86–94, 95, 103, 117 Englishness 9, 11, 13, 19, 89–90, 116–17, 167–70, 177–8, 185, 194, 195, 198–9, 201 Esty, Jed 28, 29 ex-patriotism 11, 187–203

Fanon, Frantz 50 Far Pavilions, The 124 Ferguson, Niall 40, 41–2, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55 fetish 15, 24, 33, 63 Forster, E. M. 29, 101, 116, 129, 134, 168 Foucault, Michel 89, 132 Freud, Sigmund 8, 21, 23, 60, 69, 97 friendship 12, 62, 65, 66, 74–7, 195 frontier see also border 6–7, 12, 50–2, 59, 62, 64, 76, 98, 104–6, 133 Gandhi 138, 140 Gandhi (film) 124 Genette, Gérard 112 Germany/German 7, 8, 21, 42, 44, 107, 109–13, 117, 118, 140 Gikandi, Simon 167–8 Gilbert, Elliot 172 Gilmour, David 32, 102, 107, 168, 182 Gilmour, Robin 172, 174 Gilroy, Paul 7–9, 10, 14 globalisation 2, 11, 14, 75, 103 Grace, W. G. 170 Gramsci, Antonio 34, 67 Grant, Ben 8, 11 Great Game 10, 59, 61, 74, 88, 130–3, 194, 197 Great War, see World War One Haggard, Rider 20, 134 Hagiioannu, Andrew 47 Hamid, Mohsin 3–6 Hardy, Thomas 122, 134, 135, 136 Henty, G. A. 111, 134 Hezbollah 75 Hicks, George Elgar 173 Himalayas 127–8 Hobson, J. A. 18 Hoh, Matthew 104 Horkheimer, Max 22, 23 Hughes, Arthur 162, 173 Hughes, Thomas 170, 174 Hume, A. O. 127 hybridity 2, 10, 25, 61, 74, 109, 131, 168, 177, 198–9



210

Ignatieff, Michael 39, 40, 41, 55 India 1, 6, 7, 11, 15, 20, 41, 46, 49, 53–4, 59, 61–8, 81–91, 96, 97, 102, 104, 107, 116, 121–42, 185–97, 200–3 1857 uprising 81 independence 63, 137, 140 Indian National Congress 97, 127, 137, 140 Kipling 6, 98n19, 137, 190–3 Iraq War 7, 12, 39, 48, 53, 95, 98, 106 Ireland and Irishness 34, 68, 77, 136, 166, 181, 197 Islam 5, 13, 15, 62, 75, 76, 180–1 Israel 13, 18, 32, 33, 75 Isaacs, Rufus 20 James, C. L. R. 9, 165–6, 168–72, 176, 177–80 James, Henry 120, 122, 134, 135, 136 James, Lawrence 106 Jameson, Fredric 33, 117, 118 JanMohamed, Abdul R. 2 Japan 42, 189 Jarrell, Randall 2, 120 John, Gwen 30 Jones, William 132, 133, Johnson, Lionel 167 Judaeophobia, see anti-Semitism Kalidasa 127 Kant, Immanuel 69, 71, 77 Kaplan, Robert 40 Karlin, Daniel 45 Keats, John 151–3, 163 Kemp, Sandra 26, 81, 82 Kingwell, Mark 178 Kipling, John (Kipling’s son) 8, 103 Kipling, Josephine 44, 161–2 Kipling, Rudyard books: A Diversity of Creatures 102–3, 106 Barrack-Room Ballads 104–6, 166–7 Captains Courageous 43, 45–6 Departmental Ditties 104

The Eyes of Asia 102 The Jungle Books 43–4, 141, 196 Just So Stories 43–4, 54 Kim 1–2, 3, 12, 13, 50, 59–65, 67–9, 71–7, 80, 115, 117, 120–43, 165, 181, 194–7 Life’s Handicap 19 The Light That Failed 30–1, 162 Limits and Renewals 32 The Naulahka 137 Plain Tales from the Hills 97 Puck of Pook’s Hill 19–20, 28, 51–2, 55n15, 200 Rewards and Fairies 28, 52, 55n15 Something of Myself 18, 20, 98, 116, 118, 162, 168, 192–3 Stalky & Co. 48, 92, 172–7 Traffics and Discoveries 118, 151, 162 poems: ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ 104–5, 106 ‘The Ballad of East and West’ 2, 46–7 ‘The Beginnings’ 112 ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’ 20–1, 32–3 ‘Christmas in India’ 190–2 ‘The English Flag’ 165–8, 175, 181n4, 202, ‘For All We Have and Are’ 113 ‘Gehazi’ 20 ‘If’ 12, 38, 49 ‘The Islanders’ 173 ‘Pagett, MP’ 49 ‘The Recall’ 199–200 ‘Recessional’ 42–3, 46, 47, 101, 116 ‘The Return’ 197–8, 200 ‘The White Man’s Burden’ 3, 38, 39–42, 46, 48, 53, 54, 58, 72, 76, 101 ‘The Young British Soldier’ 104, 105–6 stories: ‘.007’ 47 ‘A Centurion of the Thirtieth’ 52



Index 211

Index

Kipling, Rudyard – continued ‘“The Ambush”’ 173 ‘An Habitation Enforced’ 28, 30, 199 ‘The Amir’s Homily’ 98 ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ 8 ‘At the End of the Passage’ 50, 97 ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ 32–3, 43, 46, 196 ‘The Bold ’Prentice’ 46 ‘The Captive’ 118 ‘The Church That Was at Antioch’ 32 ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’ 50, 84–5, 87 ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ 51, 96, 98 ‘The Elephant’s Child’ 43–4, 54 ‘The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.’ 137 ‘The Flag of Their Country’ 175 ‘Friendly Brook’ 199 ‘The Gardener’ 31 ‘The Head of the District’ 49 ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ 83 ‘In the Matter of a Private’ 50 ‘Jews in Shushan’ 19 ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ 43, 44 ‘The Lost Legion’ 51, 98 ‘The Maltese Cat’ 9–10 ‘The Man Who Was’ 51 ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ 51, 64, 67–9, 98 ‘The Mark of the Beast’ 88, 89–94 ‘Mary Postgate’ 103, 107, 108–13, 114, 117 ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’ 194 ‘Mrs Bathurst’ 26 ‘The Moral Reformer’ 175–6 ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ 43, 44 ‘The Mutiny of the Mavericks’ 98 ‘“My Son’s Wife”’ 28, 29, 199 ‘Naboth’ 101 ‘One View of the Question’ 97 ‘Only a Subaltern’ 64–7 ‘On the City Wall’ 49, 51

‘On the Great Wall’ 51–2 ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ 97 ‘Regulus’ 47, 48–9, 50 ‘The Return of Imray’ 83, 85, 87 ‘Sea Constables’ 108 ‘The Ship that Found Herself’ 43, 45 ‘Slaves of The Lamp II’ 176–7 ‘The Son of his Father’ 194 ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’ 43, 46 ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ 50, 83, 85, 87 ‘“Swept and Garnished”’ 103, 113–14, 117 ‘The Taking of Lungtungpen’ 88–9, 92, 93 ‘“They”’ 144, 146–53, 161, 162 ‘Thrown Away’ 88 ‘The Vortex’ 103, 114–16, 117 ‘The Waster’ 32 ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ 43, 51 ‘“Wireless”’ 151 ‘The Wish House’ 153 ‘With the Main Guard’ 50, 51 others: ‘A Study of the Congress by an Eyewitness’ 137 ‘The City of Evil Countenances’ 98 ‘Our Overseas Men’ 189–90 Kipling Society 53, 138, 139 Knoepflmacher, U. C. 196 knowledge 2–3, 9, 67, 79–96 passim, 105, 111, 130, 131–3, 139, 142, 145, 146–52 passim, 158, 160, 162, 165–72, 180–1 Krauthammer, Charles 40 Kucich, John 25, 172, 175, 176 Landry, Donna 12, 15, 77 Lang, Andrew 104 Lazare, Bernard 22–3 Lazarus, Neil 169, 178 Lee, Hermione 147, 151, 162 Le Gallienne, Richard 107 Leopold, King 114, 118 Lewis, Wyndham 23, 33, 34



212

Index 213

McBratney, John 2, 195 McKinley, William 39 Mahdi rebellion 30, 34 Mannoni, Octave 60–1, 64, 72 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 34 Marx, Karl 21, 33, 129 Marxism 24, 27, 165, 170, 172, 180–1 masculinity 25, 46, 59, 129, 176, 177 Mason, Brigadier A. 131, 139, 141 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 34 melancholia/melancholy 5–9, 11, 13, 31, 51, 53, 104, 196 modernity 13, 21–32, 33, 72, 80 Montefiore, Jan 8, 26 Moore-Gilbert, Bart 1, 2, 15, 77, 84, 165 Morey, Peter 83, 89, 91 motherhood 29, 63, 153, 187, 190–7, 201 mourning see also loss 13 Mufti, Aamir 14–15, 16 Mughal Empire 139–40 Nagai, Kaori 11, 77, 181 Na¯ga¯rjuna 69–71 Naik, M. K. 84, 97 Naipaul, V. S. 168, 188 Nandy, Ashis 107, 110, 193 Nazir-Ali, Michael 180–1, 182 Nazism 7, 113, 118 Newbolt, Henry 172, 173, 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich 52 9/11 3, 5, 6, 39–40, 79–80 Obama, Barack 58–9, 72, 76, 104 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 124 Ondaatje, Michael 13, 144, 153–61, 162, 163 Orientalism 1, 8, 13, 80, 120–43

Orwell, George 86–8, 97, 101–2, 115, 116, 120, 166–7 otherness see alterity Owen, Wilfred 104 Pakistan 3–6, 9, 81, 180–1 Palestine 13, 15, 32, 142 Pamuk, Orhan 4, 5 Parry, Ann 81, 97 Parry, Benita 13, 97, 139 patriotism see also ex-patriotism 10, 11, 14, 31, 103, 106, 175, 185–8, 192, 194, 197–8, 200–3 Patterson, Orlando 178 Philippines see Spanish-American War Plotz, Judith 3, 6, 11, 15 postcolonialism 1–3, 5, 8–9, 13–14, 15, 81, 94–6, 103, 120, 128, 132, 138, 141–2, 165–6, 170–2, 177, 180, 181 Pound, Ezra 24, 34 Project for the New American Century 40, 47, 54, 57 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 20 Proust, Marcel 24, 134, 135 Quigly, Isabel 172 Raj Quartet, The 107, 124 Randall, Don 2, 15, 25 Rao, Raja 138 Readers’ Guide to Kipling’s Work, The 138–9 return 4, 6, 7, 52, 71, 73, 95, 148, 185–203 passim Rhodes, Cecil 46, 54, 103, 151, 162 Ricketts, Harry 20–1, 26, 32, 147, 151, 162 Ricks, Christopher 19, 31, 32 Roberts, Lord 103 Rooney, Caroline 12, 77 Rosenthal, Michael 124 Roy, Arundhati 96 Roy, Rammohun 201, 203 Royle, Trevor 132, 138 Rushdie, Salman 63, 124, 134, 162 Rutherford, Andrew 43



Lord Salisbury, Robert Cecil 48 loss 4–5, 60–1, 66, 76, 79, 84, 144, 148, 151–3, 157, 161, 194 Lukács, Georg 136 Luxemburg, Rosa 21 Lu Xun 117 Lycett, Andrew 147

Index

sacrifice 72–3, 172 Said, Edward W. 1, 2, 12, 13, 14, 31–2, 63, 77, 80, 116, 120–43, 187, 188, 192 Sandison, Alan 121, 131, 138, 139, 140 Scott, Carole 172 Scott, Paul 107, 134 Sepamla, Sipho 12 Shakespeare, William 123, 134, 169 Silone, Ignazio 34 Singh, Rashna B. 3, 11 Soviet Union, the 31, 33, 34 Spanish-American War 38–41, 181 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 2, 58–9, 61, 64, 67, 76, 77, 102, 111, 114, 118, 120 Sri Lanka 153–5, 158–9, 162, 163 Streicher, Julius 21 Suleri, Sara 1 Surtees, R. S. 29 Swift, Jonathan 65 Sullivan, Zohreh T. 82 Tagore, Rabindranath 61, 138 technology 24, 26, 45–7, 79, 150 terror/terrorism 6, 11, 12, 53, 58, 79–98, 107, 159, 180 thingification 5, 71, 110, 112 Thompson, Edward 137 Tom Brown’s School Days 170, 172, 173, 174

Tompkins, J. M. S. 29, 146, 162 torture 39, 88–95, 97 Trilling, Lionel 32, 116, 120 Trivedi, Harish 13, 63, 137, 140 Trollope, Anthony 19 Trotsky, Leon 21, 26–7 Turner, Victor 125 Twain, Mark 39, 121 uncanny 11, 82–4, 89, 97 Virgil 49–50 Walcott, Derek 169, 170 Wedderburn, William 127 Wells, H. G. 18 Westall, Claire 9 Whiffenpoof Society, The 37–8, 53 Wilde, Oscar 120 Wilkins, Charles 132, 134 Williams, Patrick 1 Williams, Raymond 27, 33, 48 Wilson, Angus 101, 103, 110, 111, 113, 114, 147, 162 Wilson, Edmund 101, 103, 112, 116, 124 World War One 8, 12, 47, 102–4, 108, 113 World War Two 3, 8, 10 Yeats, W. B. 34, 163 Ziegler, Ron 49 Žižek, Slavoj 94, 95



214

Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism

Kipling

Postcolonialism and Development

Patriotism

Patriotism

Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism

Patriotism and Other Mistakes

Science, patriotism and Mother Veda

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Globalisation and Labour MarketAdjustment

Globalisation and Equality

Institutions, Globalisation And Empowerment

China's Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation

Globalisation, Transport and the Environment

Globalisation, regionalism and economic interdependence

Globalisation and the Third World

Globalisation, Regionalism and Economic Interdependence

Chomsky and Globalisation (Postmodern Encounters)

Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism

Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City

Rudyard Kipling, A Life

Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination

Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism

Sport and Postcolonialism (Global Sport Cultures)

Globalisation and the Rule of Law (Challenges of Globalisation)

Constitutional Patriotism

Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination

A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience

Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

Mein Rudyard-Kipling-Buch

Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism

Kipling

Postcolonialism and Development

Patriotism

Patriotism

Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism

Patriotism and Other Mistakes

Science, patriotism and Mother Veda

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

Globalisation and Labour MarketAdjustment

Globalisation and Equality

Institutions, Globalisation And Empowerment

China's Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation

Globalisation, Transport and the Environment

Globalisation, regionalism and economic interdependence

Globalisation and the Third World

Globalisation, Regionalism and Economic Interdependence

Chomsky and Globalisation (Postmodern Encounters)

Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism

Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City

Rudyard Kipling, A Life

Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination

Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism

Sport and Postcolonialism (Global Sport Cultures)

Globalisation and the Rule of Law (Challenges of Globalisation)

Constitutional Patriotism

Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination

A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience

Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

Mein Rudyard-Kipling-Buch

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