“Fiction is Truth's elder sister.”

December 26, 2015 6:29 AM

An unexpected revival for the ‘bard of empire’. [The Guardian] ‘Vulgar rabble-rouser’, ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, ‘mouthpiece of the empire’ Rudyard Kipling has had his share of detractors. But, 150 years after his birth, interest in India’s greatest English-language writer is growing.

They are not alone. Kipling, the “bard of empire”, has always been difficult to place in the cultural pantheon. Britain, too, has done remarkably little to officially mark the sesquicentenary of its first winner (in 1907) of the Nobel prize for literature (and still the youngest ever from anywhere). Indian-born, yet British? We are already entering the muddy field of contradictions that sometimes bog down the reputation of this mild-mannered man. Yet it is these that make him uniquely appealing and that, belying top-level institutional indifference, are sparking an unexpected revival of interest in him, and in particular in his role as a commentator on the origins of an integrated global culture.

Related:

- Rudyard Kipling: the misfit poet. by Christopher Howse [The Telegraph]

Kipling is not at all like his image, which is a good thing, since he is widely regarded as jingoistic, narrow and racist. It is a pity if, for this reason, some never read him. Kipling was always an outsider, and never a member of the Establishment. He received the Nobel Prize, but refused any honour, including the Order of Merit, that would identify him with a single country.

- Why does Rudyard Kipling get no respect? by Jaime Weinman [Maclean's Magazine]

If Kipling is still controversial, though, that at least means he still matters. And one reason Kipling matters is that he’s one of the most-quoted writers in the English language, often by people who have never read his work. “The only comparable writer for quotability is Shakespeare,” says Mary Hamer, author of Kipling & Trix, a novel based on his life. “Not a day passes without some echo of Kipling appearing in the media.” Many lines from Kipling’s poems have taken on the status of proverbs, like “East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet,” or “The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” or entire poems like If and Gunga Din.

- Kipling’s ghost in the land of Mowgli by Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar [The Hindu]

On December 30, 2015, Rudyard Kipling would have turned 150 years. He has been dead for over 80 years but here, in Kipling Court, Pench, Madhya Pradesh, I can almost see his ghost, glaring through myopic eyes. I hear his whisper in the wind that rustles through the trees of the jungle. Today during a morning safari I sighted a tiger and thought of Sher Khan. I saw the monkeys sitting near the chital deer, and was reminded of the bandar log swinging above the jungle and living in the ruined city of Cold Lairs. They speak of splendid things they will achieve but it is empty chatter. It seems as if Kipling is voicing his indictment of ineffectual intellectuals who contribute nothing, achieve nothing, despite their endless babble.

- When Rudyard Kipling’s Son Went Missing by Nina Martyris [The New Yorker]

Kipling is often derided as an imperialist zealot who prostituted his prodigious genius for propaganda and politics. Even during the war, he received letters saying that he deserved to lose his son for cheering it on. But that was a misreading of his repeated warnings about a German invasion, against which he said that Britain ought to prepare itself. He certainly indulged in empire-worship, but this was only one aspect of a paradoxical and contentious man. In his poetry, Kipling dramatizes war as a primitive affliction, one that unleashes exhilaration as well as rage and terror.

- Rudyard Kipling's India by Stephen McClarence [The Daily Telegraph]

Sadly there are no pictures of the most famous person to tread the Gaiety’s boards: Rudyard Kipling, the writer who perhaps more than anyone moulded British perceptions of India, in all its imperialism and exoticism, for half a century. December 30 marks the 150th anniversary of his birth – in Bombay (now Mumbai) – and I am on the trail of the man and his books. For several years, as a young newspaper reporter, he covered “the season” in Shimla – or Simla as this eyrie of the Empire was called in the days when the British fled the scorching summer plains and ruled one-fifth of humanity from it for half the year. Kipling’s brief involved, he said, “as much riding, waltzing, dining out and concerts in a week as I should get at home in a lifetime”. It gave him plenty of material for Plain Tales from the Hills, his sometimes wry, sometimes tragic, stories about the idiosyncrasies of British India and the uneasy relationship between rulers and ruled.

- How to Adapt The Jungle Book (and Not Make It Racist) by Debra Cash[The Atlantic]

Staging Kipling in 2013 [2015] isn't the same task as it was in 1962 when Disney first tackled it, or in 1942 when the Korda brothers filmed their resonant version. Joseph Rudyard Kipling, an Englishman born in 1865 in Mumbai, was an unrepentant defender of empire who coined the ignominious phrase "the white man's burden" in an 1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine where he urged the United States to colonize the Philippines. (Memorably, George Orwell condemned him as a "prophet of British imperialism".) The Walt Disney studio of the mid-1960s seemed to have been oblivious to the idea that anyone would take offense at the character of King Louie, a jive-talking orangutan who sang to Mowgli about "want[ing] to be like you." New Jungle Book adapters can't claim the same obliviousness; they must contend with the legacy of British colonialism, American racism, and contemporary identity politics against the backdrop of a multimillion dollar brand.

- Rudyard Kipling without ‘White Man’s Burden’: A Sesquicentenary Appreciation by Laksiri Fernando [Sri Lanka Guardian]

More than a century has passed since the main writings of Rudyard Kipling. Colonialism is no more, at least in that form, any longer. Instead, a process of ‘globalization’ is looming or unleashed not without dissimilar economic motives, one would argue. What might be counterweighing are the spread of democracy and power of the people, and also the tangible economic rise of the ‘Orient.’ People in India or in the ‘Orient’ are not the people that Kipling encountered at the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century. Kipling’s writings for the colonial have now become part of the universal literature. There is no point in rejecting or denouncing them. Whatever the foibles of Kipling, his literature should enrich our understanding of the past during the colonial period or our own foibles in that context. His ‘prejudices’ or ‘slights’ may be considered with a sense of humour. Kipling without ‘White Man’s Burden’ undoubtedly is part of our common heritage.

- Rudyard Kipling and the century-old WWI mystery. by Oakland Ross [The Toronto Star]

The death of John Kipling on Sept. 27, 1915, was to wound his father in a way that no other event in his life ever had or ever would, and not only because his child was dead, for death is a harsh yet definite fate that is eventually shared by us all. What was worse, both for Kipling and for his wife, Carrie, was the nebulous nature of their son’s passing. He did not simply die. He disappeared. Even his disappearance was murky. He did not fade into absence along a certain, verifiable route, however horrible it might have been. Instead, his disappearance was refracted — shattered — by a multitude of versions, some offering hope, some denying it, and all of them more agonizing to bear than even the cruelest news of an irrefutable death. Instead, Rudyard and Carrie had only a riddle of possibilities, when what they really wanted was a living son. In such bleak circumstances, even an identifiable corpse would have been a comfort, but they were obliged to forgo even that.

- Rudyard Kipling Was a Great American by Christopher Benfey [New Republic]

And yet—this is not widely known, even in New England—Kipling wrote The Jungle Books, Captains Courageous, and many of his most familiar poems on the crest of a hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, with a view across the river valley of Mount Monadnock “like a gigantic thumbnail,” Kipling wrote, “pointing heavenward.” It is startling to learn that Kipling, who was born in Bombay and married a young woman from Brattleboro, hoped to remain in the United States. Over the years, he would presumably have become more and more of an American writer—English friends marveled at his American accent—just as the Polish writer Joseph Conrad and the American writer Henry James (who gave the bride away at Kipling’s wedding) became increasingly English in their own adopted country.

- Books by Rudyard Kipling [Project Gutenberg]
- Kipling reads 7 lines from his poem France (audio) [Poetry Archive Org]
- The Rudyard Kipling Collections From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division [Library of Congress]
- The Kipling Society [The Kipling Society]
- Rudyard Kipling at Naulakha, by Charles Warren Stoddard, June 1905 [National Magazine]
- Time Magazine Cover [Time]
- "If" by Rudyard Kipling [Poetry Foundation]
- Rudyard Kipling Collection [Bartleby]

posted by Fizz (90 comments total)

Previously.
posted by Fizz at 6:30 AM on December 26, 2015

I'm not really sure if I like Kipling (I've never kippled much), but I do think this quite an impressive post.
posted by LeLiLo at 6:47 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

I can recall reading The Jungle Books as a child and feeling conflicted. While the stories presented are entertaining and filled with all kinds of interesting characters/stories, as an Indian I struggled with the dichotomy between how I lived and experienced my culture, with Kipling's version as presented in his books. It was one of my earliest experiences with being "othered". I recall thinking to myself, “Is this how my other non-Asian friends view me?”
posted by Fizz at 7:14 AM on December 26, 2015 [28 favorites]

I've never been able to quite wrap my mind around the fact that the guy who wrote Kim and Arithmetic on the Frontier was the same guy who wrote Thy Servant A Dog, which is written from the dog's point-of-view.
posted by um at 7:16 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Orwell's essay on Kipling is still worth reading.
posted by zompist at 7:23 AM on December 26, 2015 [11 favorites]

For anyone who has interest in a good biography about Rudyard Kipling, David GIlmour's The Long Recessional might be worth finding.
posted by Fizz at 7:45 AM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, Kipling is a remarkably deft writer but because of things like "white man's burden," it is difficult to praise him without sounding like your drunk racist uncle who says, "Hitler was right about a lot of things."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:46 AM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads are terrific. A particular favourite of mine is "Tommy" which gives voice to the ordinary British soldier describing the hypocrisy he faces from peacetime civilians. In an American context, it makes me think both of the poor treatment Vietnam vets got when returning home and of Jack Nicholson's speech in A Few Good Men.

["Tommy" (or sometimes "Tommy Atkins") is the slang term used for any British soldier of the lower ranks.]
posted by Paul Slade at 7:57 AM on December 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

Kipling's poem "If" has pride of place on the walls of many Indian/Pakistani owner-operated restaurants in Hong Kong.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:58 AM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Orwell's take on Kipling is fascinating. You couldn't really call it a positive view, but if there's such a thing as praising with faint damnation, that might be it. I suppose that if you have to be a bad poet, you might at least prefer to be remembered as a "good bad poet" and put in the same category as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Tennyson.
posted by Zonker at 7:59 AM on December 26, 2015

it is difficult to praise him without sounding like your drunk racist uncle who says, "Hitler was right about a lot of things."

I don't know many people who still espouse Kipling's 'Empire' world view (though that doesn't mean that those people aren't out there). That being said, even if his politics are despicable, much can be learned by reading his works and analyzing them critically. As is the case with all things Hitler, it's good to not forget about the horrors that were committed in his name/cause. We should always engage with these kinds of subjects thoughtfully, to ignore them would be dangerous.
posted by Fizz at 8:01 AM on December 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

There's an attempt here by Austin Allen to (partially) rehabilitate Kipling's "If-" by reading its repeated conditional refrain as a self-undermining current of doubt about whether the poem's ideal of manhood can ultimately be lived up to. It's interesting in the context of Kipling's biography but I don't find it totally convincing. Revival or not, Kipling is a figure whose works I can only handle by removing them to an intellectual and moral quarantine zone reserved for the cold scrutiny of distasteful things.
posted by informavore at 8:14 AM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

I read a fair amount of Kipling's poetry at one time on the recommendation that it was as close as an English language poet had come to the rolling flood of eloquence and uncontrollable momentum of Pindar. Translations certainly failed to capture it. I suppose from that narrow perspective his stuff is rather good...
posted by jim in austin at 8:16 AM on December 26, 2015

I defy anyone to begin reading "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" or "The While Seal" and not finish the stories. Say whatever you will about the man, but Lord! he was a writer!
posted by SPrintF at 8:32 AM on December 26, 2015 [12 favorites]

If people would like a bit of Kipling by way of Nicholson, the AskMe answer I posted almost a year ago might tickle you.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:38 AM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

The New Yorker piece is interesting, but I'm not sure I buy the assertion that Kipling was the unrivalled "soldiers' poet" of the First World War. I mean, sure, a lot of cultural authorities assumed this was the case, and (as Jane Potter has pointed out) Kipling-reading soldiers certainly crop up in war novels of the period, but I don't tend to come across him that much in letters and diaries written by actual soldiers. Sure, he's there, but as a "soldiers' writer," he's a lot less popular than, say, Marie Corelli or Gene Stratton Porter or Ian Hay or Mrs Braddon.
posted by Sonny Jim at 8:43 AM on December 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

Not sure if Indians claim him as India's greatest English language writer. There's so many more qualified people for this title, even Rushdie is more "Indian".
posted by infini at 9:02 AM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

LeLiLo: "I'm not really sure if I like Kipling (I've never kippled much)"

One of the bestselling postcards of all time, apparently.
posted by chavenet at 9:16 AM on December 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

My father served in the navy. As he told it, at the age of 16 he forged a birth certificate saying he was 18 and then ran off to enlist — he didn't think he could take two extra years stuck on his family's Appalachian farm.

His lifelong love of the sea gradually extended into a love for all things British Empire. Kipling was part of that, and now his copy of the collected works of Kipling (volume 1) is the last thing of his that I have that still smells like his apartment did — pipe smoke, so much pipe smoke. it's been many years now, so to get what's left of the smell you have to open the book and basically huff it.

And so anyway that's why I've got a copy of the collected works of Kipling (volume 1) in a sealed container on the top shelf of the cabinet above the refrigerator, the one that's hardest to reach.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:41 AM on December 26, 2015 [29 favorites]

I read a lot of Kipling as a child, and for a child he is a very vivid writer. The animals! The Boots, boots boots! I was especially haunted by "Baa baa black sheep", which was so filled with rage that even as a child I could tell it was based on Kipling's own life.
posted by acrasis at 9:55 AM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I read and reread my grandparents' compete Kipling uncritically as a child, and didn't think he was gungho about empire - what I caught was a kids view that empire and monarchy and family pride and trade have enormous momentum and we should notice the humanity of everyone being bent or used up by it. I was primed to notice this by my experience of my two sets of grandparents; one who hadn't traveled much and were sweet talking but deeply racist, and the others who had been oil expats and were racy storytellers and whose stories almost always started out sounding "white mans burden" but ended with a punchline that the Company and its credentialed men barely knew what they were doing and ran on the competence of, and the destruction of, locals. And those grandparents, while not formally activists, did enough in the direct interests of justice to offend some of their neighbors.

Rereading Kipling as an adult, it's half about adultery, and a quarter scansion. Oh that scansion! (Also, the 19-teens printing has a swastika on it.)
posted by clew at 10:05 AM on December 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

(Also, the 19-teens printing has a swastika on it.)

You can read more about that here: Kipling and the Swastika.
posted by Fizz at 10:18 AM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

When muddy and humping an ALICE Pack in the fuckin' jungle, I preferred Service to Kipling, but as a vet, Rudyard is like a drinking buddy. Dealing with the VA was always Tommy this and Tommy that, and Madonna of the Trenches echoed through out the place.

If you change Mesopotamia to Hue or Battle of Waynesboro it works for Nixon's crew or Southern Planters. I was really depressed when Sargent Whatisname got detailed to Afghanistan under Bush the Younger and was afraid he would have to save his last bullet in the Khyber Pass.

Ruddy can be a gung-ho dick about the natives and sarcastic about the grunts, but it pretty hard to say he doesn't know what he's talking about. If you want to bitch about his imperialism, you might oughta not use a device made in a Foxconn factory.

Edit: I should state my bias, when I was a kid, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi ranked up there with Trigger And Tonto.
posted by ridgerunner at 11:20 AM on December 26, 2015 [14 favorites]

> Yeah, Kipling is a remarkably deft writer but because of things like "white man's burden," it is difficult to praise him without sounding like your drunk racist uncle who says, "Hitler was right about a lot of things."

What a ridiculous and offensive comparison. This is why it's so difficult to have any nuanced discussions about the past these days; someone is sure to point out that X, a once-respected figure who lived before we all became so enlightened, held racist/sexist/imperialist views and is therefore just like Hitler and you'd better not even try to defend them. Kipling was a fantastic writer who held some dubious views and values, in which he differs not at all from virtually any writer you can name. To dismiss him for that reason is absurd.
posted by languagehat at 11:38 AM on December 26, 2015 [38 favorites]

I've read a book of his letters, and those, along with the Just So Stories, have convinced me that whatever his faults - which are many - he was a deeply kind, generous and loving man. As you'd expect from an aristocratic colonial with an enormous amount of privilege, he was also sexist, racist and classist. It's a hard circle to square, but he's one of the authors who I have an enormous amount of respect for beyond the political problems.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:41 AM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

To dismiss him for that reason is absurd.

Yes, this is my point. I suspect that to the extent he is still widely recognized, his views -- pretty much mainstream for his time -- cloud any assessment of his prose looking back from this century. Lovecraft's currency has fallen a lot in the last few decades for the same reasons.

Previous generations had different sensibilities; this is not a secret to anyone who had grandparents. Obviously it is possible to separate the politics of his time from his writing, but if you are explaining you are losing.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:00 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

acrasis: I was especially haunted by "Baa baa black sheep", which was so filled with rage that even as a child I could tell it was based on Kipling's own life.

Indeed; there's a brutal little quote from _Something of Myself_, when asked by his aunt why he had never mentioned the cruel treatment: "badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it."
posted by tavella at 1:22 PM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's always so funny how it's the white men who want to be all "aside from being racist & sexist, he was great!" I can see the talent, sure, but the older I get the less tolerance I have for people who think I am shit. I'm sorry that your old heroes are losing their shine when the people they thought so little of gain power, but -- wait, nope, I'm not sorry at all. There's enough great writing out there, I don't have to spend my energy on jerks. Even if they were ~ * historically accurate * ~ jerks.

(And I would note there is at least some difference between people who were probably racist but don't people their books with their gross assumptions and, like, Kipling.)
posted by dame at 1:24 PM on December 26, 2015 [12 favorites]

Well and also being a warmonger makes you super gross. I don't think it takes any special "enlightenment" to not advocate for the "spiritual values" of others' deaths. Just ask Wilfried Owens.
posted by dame at 1:33 PM on December 26, 2015

It's great that you've found writers who you're not only sure are free of jerkiness but you're sure that future generations will also admire just as you do! It sure would be awful to get caught admiring someone who at any point in human history will be seen as less than admirable!
posted by languagehat at 1:34 PM on December 26, 2015 [15 favorites]

It's not his views it's that he's rather inextricably associated with the imperialist project. His actual views I think were a little bit - though probably only a little bit - more complex than the caricature.
posted by atoxyl at 1:35 PM on December 26, 2015

If you want to bitch about his imperialism, you might oughta not use a device made in a Foxconn factory.

Orwell says in his essay:

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases.

But Orwell did at least have the balls to fight the Fascists alongside the Communists.
posted by pwnguin at 1:39 PM on December 26, 2015 [18 favorites]

I am not a fan of authorial intent. Indeed I'll go so far as to argue that artists can create great works of art without actually understanding why it is a great work. Essentially, they are so close to the tree that they cannot see its place in the forest. I have encountered few descriptions and scathing condemnations of the kind of contradictory and impossible standards that are demanded of those trying to adhere to traditional masculinity than Kipling's poem If. Is this how Kipling intended it to be read? No, absolutely not. But that reading is there, and I treasure it.
posted by Meeks Ormand at 1:51 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

Dame,
All of my heroes have feet of clay. Seriously, all of them.
posted by ridgerunner at 2:05 PM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

It sure would be awful to get caught admiring someone who at any point in human history will be seen as less than admirable!

Who are you defending exactly? The time-traveller who has popped up here today like Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life? It's not a secret that Kipling is the grossest of imperialists; it wasn't even a secret to his contemporary audience.

If you want to say "I think his stories & poems are great and since they don't hurt my feelings, I am going to stand up for their greatness," then sure, knock yourself out. But it's really an unbecoming attitude (and frankly surprising from you, old fiend). And it's even worse to try to make me feel bad for being uninterested in venerating someone who thinks so little of people like me, much less ascribing it to to some ridiculous hypocrisy.

It's not about moral purity; it is about repudiating people who claim I am lesser in a really blatant way and hoping others will as well. People in the future will have their own battles and I may even come down on the wrong side of them, much less people I admire artistically. That doesn't mean I have to eat Kipling's shit now as some sort of pre-penance.
posted by dame at 2:14 PM on December 26, 2015 [12 favorites]

I run into people who adore Kipling in India much more often than I do in the UK - especially If, which hangs up on the drawing-room wall of three separate uncles of mine. I don't think any of them are in favour of the imperialism or racism - they like the metre and the sentimentality of the poem, and they enjoy quoting it for their own benefit and I kind of like that fact. I don't actually care for Kipling's poetry myself but I like the fact that, in the twenty-first century, Indians in independent India can cheerfully appreciate or reject Kipling as they please without having to care about his racism and imperialism, which is not something they consider to be their problem.

I understand that it's too optimistic to say that Kipling's racism and imperialism are absolutely dead and buried and no longer any living person's problem, but I think there's still something important here about being on the winning side of this history. When I read and enjoy Vanity Fair, with all its racist and also sexist bullshit, I feel a certain pleasure in feeling that Thackeray doesn't get to define the terms of my engagement with his book, as a person of Indian origin and a woman who can vote and own property and see other options in life besides being Amelia or Becky. I can enjoy the comic side of Jos Sedley, while understanding his appalling job in India in a way that Thackeray couldn't have meant. What Thackeray meant - his racist and pro-imperialist positions - have gone into the dustbin of worthless political ideas, but one aspect of racism being a lie is that my brown skin doesn't disqualify me from enjoying the better aspects of Thackeray's fiction if I want to. I imagine it's the same with Kipling for some people, though not for me.
posted by Aravis76 at 2:55 PM on December 26, 2015 [11 favorites]

“Fiction is Truth's elder sister.”

Is that meant in the old testament biblical sense?
posted by twidget at 3:28 PM on December 26, 2015

We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies,

Thanks, I haven't read Orwell for decades, don't even remember why I quit. Shortly after spending a few weeks in a fishing camp way down in Mexico when Pesos were dirt cheap, I read Gen. Butler's War is a Racket. It made thinking about being working class in a great empire a lot more complicated. But it made it easy to turn down the money offered to train anti-Sandinistas in the '80s.

To be all humble and shit. The other time somebody famous agreed with me, Jim Webb and I were both wrong about the Vietnam Memorial and women in the military.
posted by ridgerunner at 3:45 PM on December 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's always so funny how it's the white men who want to be all "aside from being racist & sexist, he was great!"

This rhetoric has got to stop. It's absurd. Do you really, honestly believe only white men admire the work of Rudyard Kipling? I promise you that that is not the case.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 4:01 PM on December 26, 2015 [12 favorites]

Rudyard Kipling pulled strings to get his medically unfit son into the Army to go to France and be slaughtered in 1915. He made his own living hell and there really is nothing that anybody can say to make that any worse. In the Yale modern French history youtube class one of the lectures was given by the Professor's assistant and he had an interesting theory that imperialism was doomed after 1914 because before then the natives largely believed the Euros were smarter, but after the trenches they knew the Euros were far dumber than they pretended to be.
posted by bukvich at 4:26 PM on December 26, 2015 [9 favorites]

This rhetoric has got to stop. It's absurd. Do you really, honestly believe only white men admire the work of Rudyard Kipling?

Indeed. I can appreciate a work of literature/text/artefact and still find it troublesome. I often enjoy works that are troublesome to be interesting. They elicit an emotional/intellectual/psychological response. I want to dig at what is underneath the surface, to pick at the scabs. I like to think that I can have two different ideas in my head at the same time. To be critical of something, to recognize its faults, and yet still see its significance in culture, society, etc.
posted by Fizz at 4:53 PM on December 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

Blaming white men for liking the kinds of things that, you know, white men like is not a rhetoric I find compelling.

The tragedy of John Kipling is that he, his father, and his mother all knew his chances of survival were slim. The evidence is that he was personally keen to go, duty being the now-seldom-mentioned counterpoint to the privilege enjoyed by the English upper classes. They sent him, and he went, with clear understanding of what he was going to.

The "sensible" thing to do, easy to accomplish given John's poor eyesight, would have been to find him some worthwhile task in England or in the rear, thus freeing some more able-bodied person to go to the front (and die). If the Kiplings had chosen to go that route, accusations of cowardice and hypocrisy would have followed them forever.

To blame Kipling for manufacturing his own living hell is like blaming a fire for burning. As is blaming him for holding attitudes that were, in his time and for his class, seen as natural.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 5:03 PM on December 26, 2015 [11 favorites]

As is blaming him for holding attitudes that were, in his time and for his class, seen as natural.

Again, he's not just an English guy who lived in the British Empire, or even just an English guy who grew up in in British India - he's the foremost poet and writer of British Empire. I don't get the point of talking about him like he's your racist grandfather. But at the same time it's also way off to compare him to, say, Lovecraft, because the way Lovecraft is racist and the way Kipling is racist are very different. Lovecraft wouldn't have written something like Gunga Din, you know? I don't mean to defend or to attack the man. The man has been dead for a very long time. What's worth considering is whether there's something more to his work than one might assume from his reputation.
posted by atoxyl at 6:30 PM on December 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

thus freeing some more able-bodied person to go to the front (and die). If the Kiplings had chosen to go that route, accusations of cowardice and hypocrisy would have followed them forever.

It is highly unlikely that his going to war prevented another from dying. All able bodied men went.
posted by futz at 7:24 PM on December 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Lovecraft wouldn't have written something like Gunga Din, you know?

To say nothing of Kim.

I think part of the problem is that we are simply too far removed from the sort of racial ideas that people had then. Read this story before scrolling down.
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Now, how long did it take you to realise that M'Leod is Jewish? But in English terms of the time, it's signalled quite clearly - he has a Scottish name, is proudly in trade, and - the clincher - deals in furs. And M'Leod knows that the protagonist is aware of it, too, because M'Leod coldly rebukes him for implying that he will find it easy to haggle. But these signals aren't the sort we should be used to, nor the social implications they convey. And this is from a story set in a society parent to (most of) our own, one that's perhaps only a generation removed from living memory.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:41 PM on December 26, 2015 [10 favorites]

" So he went home, very angry indeed and horribly scratchy; and from that day to this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, all on account of the crumb-cakes inside."

-From, "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin"

I love the edition pictured by Rojankovsky.
posted by clavdivs at 7:55 PM on December 26, 2015

> But at the same time it's also way off to compare him to, say, Lovecraft, because the way Lovecraft is racist and the way Kipling is racist are very different. Lovecraft wouldn't have written something like Gunga Din, you know?

Yeah, I find the comparison a little unfruitful on several axes: there's what you pointed out, and there's the fact of their differing statuses while alive and differing relationships to society on the whole. Kipling was respected, high-status, and in the thick of things; Lovecraft was ignored, low-status, and like seemingly completely isolated from anything resembling social reality in any way. There's also also the problem that Lovecraft, personally, didn't make a lick of sense — he wasn't in any way a consistent man. Most notably, for better or for worse (typically for better), Lovecraft had no idea whatsoever how to live his values. Kipling as far as I can tell lived his values, and was worse off as a person for it.

Lovecraft was a racist idiot. I mean "idiot" here both in the regular sense and in the as-etymologically-derived-from-Greek sense; "idios" means "private"¹, and so an idiot is someone who has lost contact with the common world ("koinos kosmos") and retreated into a private one ("idios kosmos"). I still think Lovecraft is valuable for having properly introduced the idea of cosmic horror — the idea that the universe is nothing like what we conventionally think it is, and that it is so deeply inimical to anything like sane life and sane thought that even looking too closely at it will destroy your mind.² I don't think anyone before him had the idea that the truth of reality, if discovered, completely destroys the discoverer's mind. But because he wasn't a particularly bright person, or even a very good writer, he got this idea of cosmic horror mixed up in his mind with white supremacist ideas of disgust for miscegenation, and disgust for non-white people on the whole.

Kipling was, on the other hand, a man who fit very well into a koinos kosmos, a shared social world, which just happened to be idiotic (and still remains idiotic), but is only idiotic in the conventional, non-etymological sense.

1: I learned this from Philip K. Dick!
2: This is why I don't have truck with the Epicureans, specifically for (as I see it) conflating the absence of experience within existence (as in unconsciousness) with the absence of existence itself (as in death). Death isn't like sleep in any way; instead, it's an incomprehensible naked singularity that causes madness if pondered.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:53 PM on December 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

also — just read Gunga Din for the first time since I was a child, and have read basically no scholarship on Kipling. is it a standard reading to say that Gunga Din hates the narrator's guts, but that the narrator is too dim to pick up on his bitter irony?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:06 PM on December 26, 2015

imperialism was doomed after 1914 because before then the natives largely believed the Euros were smarter, but after the trenches they knew the Euros were far dumber than they pretended to be.

That's really just an adaption of the idea that WWI spelt the end of class deference in Britain for the same reason. The other ranks could no longer respect the officer class after seeing the slaughter of the trenches.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:26 AM on December 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I can hold different ideas in my head at the same time (Tolstoy and Hawthorne are two of my favorites, and both have weirdly frustrated views on womankind), but still, the sting of knowing your heroes would have thought you were categorically useless or valuable primarily for your cultural use as object is an experience usually much more common among the non-white and non-man. It's personal and it can sting, even in the sophisticated reader or scholar.

I'm also not a fan of condemning talented people of the past based on their political attitudes (oh god, where would you begin?) but lots of non-white and non-man style people have the frequent experience of having any negative feelings or attempt at a complex look shot out of the air by white men who presume their feelings are much much more sophisticated because they aren't emotional and they read everything abstractly and symbolically and responsibly, unlike those who were much more recently allowed to vote. I just read a piece on men lecturing a female writer about taking Lolita "too personally," as if there have not been decades of misreadings and glibness about the text, centuries of cultural grooming preparing us for that glibness, a deeply misogynist culture which hides it's prurience under images of classical and intellectual and artistic erudition, etc.

So I'm honestly sympathetic to people who want nothing to do with Kipling or who generalize about who is bound to be the most strident defender of his type (white men!), because most of the time even those non-white and non-male defenders are either 1) from another cultural context entirely or 2) not nearly as unequivocal in their defense of the problematic past. It's fun to stand up for truth and beauty when the challenge is from those who are weakened by an inheritance of pain and violence which lives in our culture even now. Right?

Sometimes you'd rather watch anything than a slasher film; there is an equivalence between that sort of preemptive disgust and the kind you feel when looking back into a hostile past. I would never say appreciators of Kipling are irresponsible or disgusting or that Kipling was not talented, but I'm very inclined to look askance at people who delight in putting those who resist a racist/sexist legacy in their place.
posted by easter queen at 12:40 AM on December 27, 2015 [8 favorites]

is it a standard reading to say that Gunga Din hates the narrator's guts, but that the narrator is too dim to pick up on his bitter irony?

I don't think that really fits into the poem; after all, Gunga Din saves the narrators life, which wasn't necessarily his job. Also, that reading would be inconsistent with the poem's end, in which the narrator imagines Din bringing relief to the damned souls in hell. He's depicting Din as a sort of Jesus-figure: water is a very potent symbol of relief and salvation, and Jesus both instituted baptism for the remission of sins and in apocryphal texts is supposed to have descended to Hell to bring relief to the souls there.

Honestly, I can't imagine that anyone who has read much Kipling could think that he was a racist in our terms - possibly a bit of an Orientalist, but I'm not even too sure of that. Have you read Kim? There are racists in that book, but they're not treated kindly. Kim's particular virtue is that he's "the little friend of all the world" and will mix with anyone.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:59 AM on December 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

He was a racist in the sense that his conception of the Empire - Britain as a civilising force, bringing both the benefits and the griefs of civilised humanity to savages without a culture worth the name - was inherently racist. Gunga Din is a noble savage, not a human being who is himself the product of a developed civilisation.
posted by Aravis76 at 2:45 AM on December 27, 2015

I don't care to judge people's personal reasons for rejecting art at all, but I also can't stand the implication of "it's always the white men"-type statements -- as if POC all have the same moral/aesthetic values, as if you'd have to be a white man to disagree. It's funny, I actually don't care for Rudyard Kipling much as a writer, and his reputation has always put me off deep exploration of his work. But, that's just me! The British colonial legacy is so vast that there have surely been hundreds of thousands of POC at least who have been exposed to his work and to whom that work has really meant something, who have carried it with them through their lives, who have reconciled it with their status in the world in all kinds of personal ways. It just strikes me as disrespectful to lay claim to all those voices to shore up some other position.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 2:56 AM on December 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Gunga Din is a noble savage, not a human being who is himself the product of a developed civilisation.

We don't see much of Gunga Din in that short poem, and what we do see is filtered through the superficial eyes of a common soldier. None the less, the whole point of the poem is that Din (despite his lack of trousers) is more civilised than the narrator.

Honestly, if you haven't read much Kipling you might try giving Kim a go. It's probably his best book; one of the best English books ever written; and it will give the lie to any suggestion that he disregarded native culture.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:21 AM on December 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've read Kim, although that was a long time ago, but I don't especially recall its treatment of India and Indian culture as being nuanced or respectful. If I remember rightly, it shares the same rational-but-heartless civilisation vs irrational/superstitious-but-noble-savage dynamic of Gunga Din. India is a brilliant and colourful background for the articulation of essentially European and British anxieties and longings (about war and politics and transcendence). Politics and rationality and power-struggle are the domain of the British. Colour and superstition and spiritual quest are the domain of the Indians.

Perhaps "racist" is a strong word for these texts, but I don't think either supplies evidence that, despite his celebration of the inherently racist imperial project, Kipling definitely wasn't racist. Both are consistent with the essentially imperial attitude to India and Indian culture: full of detail and pleasure and some admiration, but ultimately reductive and possessive. There's no conception of the inner lives of the Indian characters as members of a free-standing and dynamic political and cultural tradition, with an inheritance quite as mixed and complex as the British inheritance -- what matters about them is what they can give to or receive from the British (spiritual adventures, law, railways, corruption). It tells us about as much about India and Buddhism / Hinduism as Charlotte Brontë's Villette tells us anything about Belgium and Catholicism - that is, not much beyond some passionately drawn stereotypes. The fact that Brontë has some clumsy French dialogue and lots of "local colour"and draws one Catholic character as attractive, despite his benighted superstitions, doesn't alter the fact that her book is based on deeply anti-Catholic ideas. I think the same is true for Kim. That doesn't mean "it's racist, we should throw it out of the window", it only means "racism is at work here, together with many other things, and dealing with that is part of dealing with this author."
posted by Aravis76 at 5:22 AM on December 27, 2015 [6 favorites]

" India’s greatest English-language writer" ?!

Gimme a break!
posted by TheLittlePrince at 6:50 AM on December 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Gimme a break!

Hyperbolic, certainly, but if England can claim Conrad and America Nabokov, I'd let it stand for the sake of argument. For the curious, here are some more other contenders,
posted by BWA at 7:15 AM on December 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

> But it's really an unbecoming attitude (and frankly surprising from you, old fiend).

It is your attitude I find unbecoming and frankly surprising, but I guess we'll have to live with our mutual astonishment. Don't worry, I won't force you to enjoy Kipling, but I would appreciate it if you would try not to be so condescending/insulting to those who do.
posted by languagehat at 8:54 AM on December 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Great post Fizz. Thank you. I come from a family that served Empire on both my parent's sides; father was military, his father and grandfather too, as was my mothers father but in the administration and her uncle a circuit judge, all in India. I was raised on Kipling. One of my christening presents was a complete set; all with the Sanskrit swastika on the binding, given to me by the family doctor who had served in the Indian Army and later helped survivors in the newly liberated deathcamps at the end of WWII and was one of my fathers oldest and dearest military buddies.
Reading the wonderful Just So stories is one of my first reading memories. Reading and re reading Kim got me interested in Buddhism and thought processes outside the confines of English anglo saxon protestantism.
Here is an article in the New English Review by Ibn Warraq refuting Edward Said's argument that Kipling was rascist.
posted by adamvasco at 9:37 AM on December 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

There's a truly horrible short story called "The Mark of the Beast" that shows me that whatever else Kipling was and knew, he was not unaware of the atrocities and moral damage that people in the Empire committed on the colonial other and inflicted on themselves in order to protect a class that generally deserved everything it had coming to it. It's not an easy story to read or teach, but it's really quite a complicated meditation on what it is, really, to be beastly.
posted by LucretiusJones at 12:14 PM on December 27, 2015

The reason Kipling has been dropped like a stone from the canon of western literature, despite being one of the most admired writers of his time, is much the same reason that this conversation is at times strained: we really haven't resolved our issues with race and colonial history, yet. To the point where taking a nuanced look at someone like Kipling throws up large amounts of cognitive dissonance, which most would happily avoid. In this sense the "racist granddad" analogy is apt. Actually dealing with his attitudes, what they represented at the time, why and how they were promoted, as well as his genuine skill as a writer and ability to draw on a wealth of mythology and imagery from the Indian subcontinent, feels like a losing battle from the get go, in a culture still in denial about much of this stuff. Better to forget him and all those complexities.
posted by iotic at 12:30 PM on December 27, 2015 [8 favorites]

Thank you for linking the Ibn Warraq article, adamvasco. I found it a fascinating read, partly because Warraq's definition of racism is so bewilderingly different from my own. I'm particularly amazed by the claim that the White Man's Burden isn't racist because Kipling envisages the possibility that one day the natives will transcend their own barbaric and lawless (though beautiful and spiritual) traditions and become peers of the British - as Lord Macauley says, will gain white souls through the kindness of the sahibs, despite their brown skins. In my world, it is not only racist but also insultingly inaccurate to claim that law and order and justice are only possible to Indians as gifts of the British, because nothing in the native culture could have allowed them to autonomously arrive at these gains - the narrative that the British needed to make Indians "fit for freedom" is precisely what I would call a racist narrative. I'm amazed that anyone could argue that Kipling isn't racist because he intended to make that argument in The White Man's Burden. That's like saying Plessy v Ferguson has been widely misunderstood as being racist, but actually the decision only established the principle that "separate but equal" treatment for the different races was a good thing. Separate but equal is an inherently racist doctrine. The belief Warraq is attributing to Kipling - one day, by the mercy of the British, Indians will be fit for self-government - is, in itself, racist to my mind. I'm astonished to hear that anyone still alive - and particularly an Indian - believes that this set of beliefs is actually in no way racially prejudiced.
posted by Aravis76 at 1:32 PM on December 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Actually dealing with his attitudes, what they represented at the time, why and how they were promoted, as well as his genuine skill as a writer and ability to draw on a wealth of mythology and imagery from the Indian subcontinent, feels like a losing battle from the get go, in a culture still in denial about much of this stuff. Better to forget him and all those complexities.

I understand this sentiment but I think it's foolish to forget this kind of history. Even if it does often feel like a losing battle, it's important to recognize that history allowed this to happen. It feels dangerous to ignore these kinds of writers and issues. In ignoring an author or a piece of literary history, it feels like we give a pass to the people who helped perpetuate these gross ideologies and politics.

Also, much can be learned by examining our past, it helps shape our present and our future. It is such a wonderful teaching moment, to point at these authors or this time-period and say: "Yes, this happened, yes it is unpleasant. It is also complex and we need to untangle these ideas and discuss them. It makes all of us better humans."
posted by Fizz at 3:02 PM on December 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

By the way. I am loving all the different perspectives, ideas, and links that are being shared in this post. Good job MetaFilter.
posted by Fizz at 3:39 PM on December 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Perhaps "racist" is a strong word for these texts, but I don't think either supplies evidence that, despite his celebration of the inherently racist imperial project, Kipling definitely wasn't racist.

That would be proving a negative, which is never easy, and doing so within a cultural context that may now be impossible to access. Kipling was Indian, albeit of the colonialist class; as a child he had greater access to Indian English than to the dialect his parents spoke; as an adult he worked within and among other Indians and he clearly never lost his love for the country and its people.

There's no conception of the inner lives of the Indian characters as members of a free-standing and dynamic political and cultural tradition, with an inheritance quite as mixed and complex as the British inheritance [...]

Come on. Read Kim again. The first chapter alone will shake that belief. The rest of it, set as it is in the period when there were many independent and semi-independent Indian states, shows India-as-it-was (and largely is) in its mind-blowing complexity, far more politically and culturally diverse than the UK. I mean, there's one episode where Kim is helping a native agent of the British to escape arrest by British police because operatives working for Russia and/or other States are manipulating the British administration to their advantage:

'I come from the South, where my work lay. One of us they slew by the roadside. Hast thou heard?' Kim shook his head. He, of course, knew nothing of E's predecessor, slain down South in the habit of an Arab trader. 'Having found a certain letter which I was sent to seek, I came away. I escaped from the city and ran to Mhow. So sure was I that none knew, I did not change my face. At Mhow a woman brought charge against me of theft of jewellery in that city which I had left. Then I saw the cry was out against me. I ran from Mhow by night, bribing the police, who had been bribed to hand me over without question to my enemies in the South. Then I lay in old Chitor city a week, a penitent in a temple, but I could not get rid of the letter which was my charge. I buried it under the Queen's Stone, at Chitor, in the place known to us all.'

Kim did not know, but not for worlds would he have broken the thread.

'At Chitor, look you, I was all in Kings' country; for Kotah to the east is beyond the Queen's law, and east again lie Jaipur and Gwalior. Neither love spies, and there is no justice. I was hunted like a wet jackal; but I broke through at Bandakui, where I heard there was a charge against me of murder in the city I had left—of the murder of a boy. They have both the corpse and the witnesses waiting.'

'But cannot the Government protect?'

'We of the Game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book. That is all. At Bandakui, where lives one of Us, I thought to slip the scent by changing my face, and so made me a Mahratta. Then I came to Agra, and would have turned back to Chitor to recover the letter. So sure I was I had slipped them. Therefore I did not send a tar [telegram] to any one saying where the letter lay. I wished the credit of it all.'

Kim nodded. He understood that feeling well.

'But at Agra, walking in the streets, a man cried a debt against me, and approaching with many witnesses, would hale me to the courts then and there. Oh, they are clever in the South! He recognized me as his agent for cotton. May he burn in Hell for it!'

'And wast thou?'

'O fool! I was the man they sought for the matter of the letter! I ran into the Fleshers' Ward and came out by the House of the Jew, who feared a riot and pushed me forth. I came afoot to Somna Road—I had only money for my tikkut to Delhi—and there, while I lay in a ditch with a fever, one sprang out of the bushes and beat me and cut me and searched me from head to foot. Within earshot of the terain it was!'

'Why did he not slay thee out of hand?'

'They are not so foolish. If I am taken in Delhi at the instance of lawyers, upon a proven charge of murder, my body is handed over to the State that desires it. I go back guarded, and then—I die slowly for an example to the rest of Us. The South is not my country.

posted by Joe in Australia at 4:11 PM on December 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

Kipling was Indian, albeit of the colonialist class; as a child he had greater access to Indian English than to the dialect his parents spoke; as an adult he worked within and among other Indians and he clearly never lost his love for the country and its people.

This comment is interesting to me when placed in context with one of the New Republic article I linked to up above.

It is startling to learn that Kipling, who was born in Bombay and married a young woman from Brattleboro, hoped to remain in the United States. Over the years, he would presumably have become more and more of an American writer—English friends marveled at his American accent—just as the Polish writer Joseph Conrad and the American writer Henry James (who gave the bride away at Kipling’s wedding) became increasingly English in their own adopted country.

According to the article, Kipling wanted to remain in America. I wonder at how that might have shaped his identity and the way we perceive him and his relationship to 'Empire' and India.

His dream of an Anglo-American alliance, mirroring his own marriage, seemed doomed. His hurried departure to England in August 1896, Kipling said, “was the hardest thing I had ever had to do.” “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” he lamented, “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.”

Something to think about.
posted by Fizz at 4:24 PM on December 27, 2015

Honestly, this may be a question of aesthetics and what we think of as Actual India. To me, India in Kim is like Middle Earth in Tolkien - a richly detailed fantasy world, populated by fantasy characters with a solid basis in lots of factual details, that makes no contact at all with my own sense of India as a normal place in the world inhabited by normal Indians. I know that my great-grandparents were growing up in South India during the period in which Kim is set and I see nothing of their lives that I could remotely connect to the book; nothing I remember of Kim makes contact with what I know from my grandfather about that generation's habits, their minds, their marriages, the poetry they memorised, the food rules they obeyed, the ideas of justice they believed in. Of course Kim is more of an adventure story than a realist novel, but still - its incidental details didn't feel to me like they capture Indian culture in the way that, for example, The Railway Children incidentally captures English culture. I think an English person of a certain class could easily find echoes of their grandparents and great-parents in the family in the The Railway Children. I can't remember finding a hint of a trace of my family anywhere in Kim when I read it. I don't think I would find a trace of them in the book now, if I reread it, though I'm willing to give it a try.

Perhaps I should just revisit the book, but the broader point is that I still think Kipling's stated beliefs about India and Empire, and the connection between the two, were based on racist premises - even if Kim doesn't, itself, demonstrate those premises, it certainly doesn't contradict them when we find them articulated in other works like The White Man's Burden. I read what you were initially arguing to mean that Kipling couldn't have held racist beliefs because of the non-racism (anti-racism?) of Kim and Gunga Din. I don't think either one is as clear-cut as all that and The White Man's Burden very much is.

Just to be clear - I'm not at all saying that Kim isn't a great novel. (I don't remember liking it much, but that's a question of taste, and I ca understand what people do admire in it.) I'm saying the author of Kim plainly did hold some racist opinions. So did a whole bunch of my favourite authors, unfortunately - even my metafilter handle is borrowed from C.S. Lewis' fairly embarrassing caricature of Arab and Islamic culture, which he mixes in with a bit of idol-worshipping Hindu savagery. I still think Narnia is pretty great and I get a lot out of it. But I'm not going to deny the cruder racial stereotypes that Lewis is drawing on in creating Narnia. I don't see what's gained by denying the fairly crude and unpleasant racial beliefs that Kipling held.
posted by Aravis76 at 4:58 PM on December 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Better to forget him and all those complexities.

I understand this sentiment but I think it's foolish to forget this kind of history.

I entirely agree. Sorry if it wasn't clear - I was seeking to present this attitude, rather than to condone it.
posted by iotic at 5:57 PM on December 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Anything I read by Kipling, I know the angle he's coming from, and brace myself against infection. That said, I read all of it a few years ago, and particularly enjoyed these two.

With The Night Mail Didja know he wrote some science fiction? Such futurism! Very steampunk. Many dirigible.

Letters of Travel Howsabout his trip around the world, including through the US and up to the very edge of Canadian expansion? "St. Paul, standing at the barn-door of the Dakota and Minnesota granaries, is all things to all men except to Minneapolis, eleven miles away, whom she hates and by whom she is patronised." His vision was flawed, but he was there, and it's some fantastic primary-source reporting.
posted by Mark Redacted at 8:39 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm going to double down on the reading of Gunga Din wherein Din's statement after getting shot — "Gosh, I hope you liked that water I fetched you!" — is deeply ironic, even sarcastic, in ways that neither Kipling nor his narrator could hear.

"But wait," you say, "Gunga Din just heroically saved this guy's life! he's not being sarky, he's just that selfless and self-sacrificing and generally Uncle Tomly." My only response is to note that the ethos of the British Empire was an ethos of total self-sacrifice in the service of fulfilling all the wants and needs of social "betters" who everyone knows to be complete garbage, self-serving moral lepers who no one should sacrifice anything for ever.

Probably the best analysis of this twisted strain in British thought and British culture that I've read isn't actually set during the Empire. It's Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a science fiction novel about English clones born and raised to be harvested for their organs, who know they've been born and raised to be harvested for their organs, who have no way out of being harvested for their organs, and who often devote their short lives to helping the system by caring for their fellow clone victims as the inside of their bodies are stolen from them piece by piece.

I can't allow myself to either read the book or watch the movie made from it ever again, because it leaves me in a hopeless ragey despair that takes weeks to shake.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:58 PM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm going to double down on the reading of Gunga Din wherein Din's statement after getting shot — "Gosh, I hope you liked that water I fetched you!" — is deeply ironic, even sarcastic, in ways that neither Kipling nor his narrator could hear.

You do realise that Din wasn't a real person, right? I suppose that the necessary meaning of the poem may not accord with its creator's intent, but characters within a poem simply don't have the capacity to be sarcastic unless the author means them to be.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:50 PM on December 28, 2015

but characters within a poem simply don't have the capacity to be sarcastic unless the author means them to be.

Heh, someone has unconsidered ideas about how language works, and how observation works, and how when you talk about things you've observed, or things based on what you've observed, you can end up saying more than you "intended," whatever that means, or saying things different from what you "intended."

To be fair, life would be much easier if language worked the way you say it does, so I can see why your ideas have an appeal to them.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:18 PM on December 28, 2015

I suppose that the necessary meaning of the poem may not accord with its creator's intent,

Considering how many people see emotional intensities in sunrises, and how abstract words and stanzas are its a wonder any art communicates any of the creators intent.

Who was Kipling's target demographic, anyway?
posted by ridgerunner at 5:32 PM on December 28, 2015

yeah I mean basically all of us end up speaking the society around us more than we speak our own thoughts, however we define what "our own thoughts" mean. As someone who's only marketable skill is stringing together words real pretty (sometimes in English, sometimes in JavaScript), I can with confidence say that the material in which we work — language and culture — does most of the actual talking. My ideas, such as they are, are a small part of it, but the material of the language itself (as used by the people around me) is much more influential over the final product than whatever it is I'm trying to get that material to do.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:39 PM on December 28, 2015

heh, also, may the grammatical error I committed just now strike down everyone on metafilter who makes the mistake of bragging about being good with words.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:55 PM on December 28, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think Kipling got a bad rep. Nowadays he gets dissed as a proponent of Colonialism, but one hundred years ago English citizens swam in the fishbowl of the Empire, and the entire concept of colonialism was mostly invisible from within. Kipling was one of the first people to recognize how Colonial power was sustained only by mere force, and destined not to last forever.
posted by ovvl at 9:41 PM on December 29, 2015

one hundred years ago English citizens swam in the fishbowl of the Empire, and the entire concept of colonialism was mostly invisible from within.

It was very sharply visible in India, however; Kipling is a contemporary of Gandhi, he lived through the foundation of the Indian National Congress and the increasing calls for self-governance in India. I think we can either say that Kipling is a hapless Englishman who can't help his cultural conditioning or that he is basically a great Indian writer, like Tagore or Sarojini Naidu. He can't be both culturally Indian and completely unaware of the actual conversations happening around him in India at the same time. Even Chesterton, who knew very little about India, wrote about the Indian Nationalist movement in the early 1900s. I can't believe Kipling was more culturally insular and unaware of Indian politics than Chesterton.
posted by Aravis76 at 3:26 AM on December 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

The first war of independence was in 1857
posted by infini at 4:20 AM on December 30, 2015

Was it going on around Kipling, though? He left India in 1889; the Indian National Congress had only been formed a few years earlier, and (from what I can tell) was more of a think tank than a political party at the time.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:21 AM on December 30, 2015

I meant it was going on during a big chunk of his writing career, when he was writing about India. It may be that he wasn't paying attention to anything educated Indians were saying or doing at the time, but then that's a choice he decided to make, not an inevitable result of his cultural context. My sense is that he actively disliked the INC and the whole narrative of independent India because he thought that the Nehru and Gandhi types weren't really Indian enough, being too Anglicised and not authentically exotic (unlike eg his ayahs and servants who were proper Indians). I think this really goes to his status as an "Indian writer". Who was he writing for? Was it really the same audience as Tagore's?
posted by Aravis76 at 5:36 AM on December 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, and I just discovered that he donated a big chunk of money to General Dyer after the Amritsar massacre - the same event that led Tagore to renounce his knighthood. So it isn't as if Kipling became sweetly oblivious to events in India after he left the country. He was paying attention, and chose to support colonialism in its most aggressive manifestations.
posted by Aravis76 at 5:57 AM on December 30, 2015

I personally find Kipling's work not unlike Uncle Tom's Cabin - quaint, very much the product of its time, and rarely do we come across critiques by those written about, rather than the intended target audience.
posted by infini at 7:34 AM on December 30, 2015

> I personally find Kipling's work not unlike Uncle Tom's Cabin

As long as you ignore the actual writing. I can't help you if you think Kipling's is "quaint," but all writing is "the product of its time."
posted by languagehat at 8:42 AM on December 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I don't want to speak for infini, but I think the point of the comparison isn't the quality of the writing but the difference between the people-written-about and the intended audience of the work. Uncle Tom's Cabin is about black people but is written to be read primarily by white people. Kipling's work about Indians, similarly, seems to have been written to be read primarily by the English. That doesn't mean many Indians can't and don't enjoy those works now - in the same way that they enjoy other works written for English audiences - but it complicates the argument that he is primarily an Indian writer. Harriet Beecher Stowe isn't a black writer, even though she wrote about black experience.
posted by Aravis76 at 9:38 AM on December 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yes, that's an excellent point, and I didn't object to it. It is also only one clause in the comment I was responding to.
posted by languagehat at 10:57 AM on December 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would say the concepts are quaint and also perhaps I was struggling to find the right words to explain what Aravis did better.
posted by infini at 6:03 PM on December 30, 2015

I'll give you an example, you can help me find the words.

Ruskin Bond is an author I grew up. His world is over and long past. So is Saki's, Wodehouse and RK Narayan...
posted by infini at 6:04 PM on December 30, 2015

(maybe I am digging myself deeper ;p)
posted by infini at 6:08 PM on December 30, 2015

Kedgeree and Kipling at 150

Every 150 years, but perhaps more frequently than that, we need to remind ourselves about whose descendants we are. We are all, as everyone who reads and writes English knows, descendants of Rudyard Kipling. Not because we carry the white man’s burden, for that is a burden only a pucca white man carries, but because we use his language, which is sometimes English but mostly not while still being English.

[...]

Pristinly, he sthrols up, his arrums full av thruck, an’ he sez in a consiquinshal way, shticking out his little belly, “Me good men,” sez he, ‘have ye seen the Kernel’s b’roosh!”—“B’roosh?” says Learoyd. “There’s no b’roosh here—nobbut a ekka.” – “Fwhat’s that?” sez Thrigg. Learoyd shows him wan down the street, an’ he sez, “How thruly Orientil! I will ride on ekka.” I saw thin that our Rigimental Saint was for givin’ Thrigg over to us neck an’ brisket. I purshued a ekka, an’ I sez to the dhriver-divil, I sez, “Ye black limb, there’s a Sahib comin’ for this ekka. He wants to go jildi to the Padshahi Jhil” –’twas about tu moiles away—“to shoot snipe—chirria. You dhrive Jehannum ke marfik, mallum—like Hell? ’Tis no manner av use bukkin’ to the Sahib, bekaze he doesn’t samjao your talk. Av he bolos anything, you just choop and chel. Dekker? Go arsty for the first arder mile from contonmints. Thin chel, Shaitan ke marfik, an’ the chooper you choops an’ the jildier you chels the better kooshy will that Sahib be; an’ here’s a rupee for ye!”

The ekka-man knew there was somethin’ out av the common in the air. He grinned an’ sez, “Bote achee! I goin’ damn fast.”

What does this strange language tell us about ourselves? It tells us that we live in a linguistic soup and always have, just as much as we belong to a genetic one and always have. As for the soup itself, you only have to travel from Allahabad (where Kipling once lived and worked for The Civil and Military Gazette) to Varanasi, stopping for tea and snacks at Handia. Ask for Shri Ramu Sweet & Dosa Chow Mein Corner. It’s near the bus stand. You can also Google it.
posted by infini at 6:46 AM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Nice to know:
Solving the mystery of Rudyard Kipling’s son

It is 80 years since the death of Rudyard Kipling. The author of The Jungle Book and If died without finding out what had happened to his son, who disappeared during World War One. Now researchers think they have definitively solved the mystery that transformed Kipling, writes Hannah Sander.

posted by Joe in Australia at 1:38 AM on January 18, 2016