KIPLING'S INDIAN FICTION
Kipling's Indian Fiction Mark Paffard Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20274-4 ISBN 978-1-349-20272-0 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20272-0 MarkPaffard 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-46469-4 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, NewYork,N.Y.lOOlO First published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN 978-0-312-03264-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Paffard, Mark, 1955- Kipling's Indian fiction/mark Paffard. p. em. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-03264-7:$39.95(est.) 1. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936---Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR4857.P371989 823'.8---dc20 89-33426 CIP
Contents List of Plates vii Preface ix Acknowledgements xii Note on the Text xiii 1 A British View of India 1 2 Early Stages 31 3 Soldiers in India 56 4 Illustrating the Native Feature 80 5 Kipling and the Eighteen-Nineties 103 Conclusions 128 Select Bibliography 135 Appendix 136 Notes and References 139 Index 146 v
List of Plates 1 'Ready!' from Punch, 4 April 1885 2 'Mary Winchester' from Cassell's Illustrated History of India, 2, p. 389 3 'Caste' from Punch, 18 October 1890 4 'Hands Off!' from Punch, 9 February 1889 5 'The Burmese Toad' from Punch, 31 October 1885 6 Kipling's 'dream-map' from 'The Brushwood Boy', Country Magazine, December 1895 7 'Kipling' by F. Attwood, from Overheard in Arcady by Robert Bridges, p. 67. (1895) 8 'Kipling and Britannia' by Max Beerbohm, from Poet's Corner (1910) vii
Preface This study deals not so much with a homogenous body of work by Kipling as with the influence of India on his writing. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the British public already possessed their own mental image of India, and Kipling was very much part of a popular tradition as well as its greatest exponent. Of course, the Raj had to exist in the first place, and Kipling's first-hand experience is essential to his work, but the meanings that the tradition was attaching to India are the field that Kipling takes over and seeks, at times, to modify. The tradition itself continues well into the twentieth century. In the last few years it has been revived both by a renewed interest in Kipling and by the appearance on film and television of the work of E. M. Forster and Paul Scott. If the political contours of old empires, and with them much of the vocabulary of the Victorian' sahib', have changed forever, there are also continuities. The fear of rape, for example, is an extraordinarily durable theme. The sleuth-like historian who pieces together the story in Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown represents an approach to India that is indebted to Kipling and others. Its premise is that India is a land of mirages, in which only the most painstaking Westem methods have the power to uncover the facts. It is basic, or 'latent', attitudes of this sort with which I am concemed in Kipling's case, for they have much light to shed on the shape his work took and the way in which it has been received. In this respect I obviously owe a great deal to Edward Said's Orientalism, and I would be pleased to think of this book as a small contribution to the project he has outlined. The British view of India is, however, a particular application of the more general ideas and assumptions with which that society lived. Allowing for the importance of India as his subject, it is in the context of his period that I hope to have placed Kipling. The nineties are the years of his 'Indian Fiction'. After his most sustained account in Kim (1901), Kipling never tumed to India again, and although he also wrote much that was not about India in that decade, its condition and future were his deepest preoccupations. Taking the first appearance of Kipling's work in England in 1888 as my starting point, I am concemed with the development of his style ix
X Preface along with his treatment of India, and with the literary and historical context in which this took place. Kipling's choice of words has been both celebrated and criticised for its precision. Vernon Lee in The Handling of Words (1912) made a formidable attack on the lack of fluidity and grace and the sense of authorial omnipresence that this style entails; but for all her focus on language she was too close to Kipling the belligerent imperialist to see this precision as anything but a symptom of narrowmindedness. While Kipling's style obviously stems from the rigorous craftsmanship practised by his father and the Kipling family's pre-raphaelite associates its individual mouldings are, I believe, formed by pressures and anxieties that show through the apparently unequivocal and often didactic surface of his stories. To find Kipling's outlook a grim one is not at all new, and where the critics have ever differed on this it has been mostly a matter of degree. My preference for a word like 'desperation' over the more dignified 'stoicism' is not meant to deny that Kipling sometimes expressed stoical views. I wonder, however, whether the writer who tells 'The Comforters', in the poem of that name, 'I never bothered you at all,/for God's sake go away!' has quite the reserve of the out-and-out Stoic. In the nineties, as imperialism entered a more self-conscious phase, the public required just the sense of purpose that Kipling seemed to provide. Less providentially for him, it was a decade in which the whole pattern of social life was felt to be changing rapidly. His work epitomises a conflict between the artist's desire to meet the strange and unfamiliar on its own terms, and the need also to celebrate the familiar and comforting. If his choice was for the latter, he still experienced the conflict acutely both in India and in London. But however intense he may be, one can never escape from the fact that he actively believed both in the need to discriminate in all areas of life, and in having fairly simple rules by which to do so. Described against this background, Kipling may appear a less commanding figure than either the one who has provoked so much harsh criticism or the one who emerges from two biographies and from]. M.S. Tompkins' classic study The Art of Rudyard Kipling. I do not think, however, that his work can or should become a less controversial matter, or that this can be entirely separated from the pleasure it gives. Some of his prejudices are typical of his period, but. his conservatism has some sharp edges that cannot be removed by historical understanding, and I am sure many people in Britain
Preface xi today still like to think of themselves as 'British' in a way that resonates with his ideas and assumptions. It is with due emphasis on the fact that the book's faults are my own doing entirely that I most gratefully acknowledge the advice and encouragement of Ian Small at every stage of its composition. His suggestions have been invaluable from start to finish. More than they know, I have relied on the support of the family and friends who have had to put up with Kipling as well as with me. MARK PAFFARD January 1988
Acknowledgements Of the illustrations in this book, plates one, three, four and five are reproduced by permission of Punch, and the cartoon by Max Beerbohm by permission of Mrs Eva Reichmann. I am grateful to them, and also to the Kipling Journal and its editor for permission to re-use my article on 'Ortheris' from Volume 58, No. 230 (June 1984). The task of examining uncollected reviews of Kipling and other material on him was made much easier by the access granted me by John Burt to the Wimpole Hall archive at Sussex University, and to the Kipling Society's library at the Royal Commonwealth Society. My thanks to all concerned. xii
Note on the Text In quoting from Kipling's work, I have not specified a particular edition. This is not an unknown practice; the reason being that the only truly comprehensive edition, the Sussex, is a rather rare and expensive item. Story titles, and chapter numbers (in brackets, following quotations) in the case of his fe"v longer works, therefore have to suffice for identification, but readers requiring the volume in which a story is collected will find this information in the Appendix. The few abbreviations in the chapter references are self-explanatory, and the most frequent can be checked against the bibliography. Xlll