Kipling and Me
Or: How To Deal With Your Childhood Favourite Author Hating You
I am haunted by a ghost.
He arrived in the pages of a book I recently bought, a complete collection of his horror stories. He has a moustache which could probably ingest small rodents single-handedly. Sometimes he calls me Beloved and enthralls me with folktales; sometimes he dismisses me as a savage, half-devil, and half-child. In his lifetime Rudyard Kipling purported to shoulder “the White Man’s Burden”, the lofty goal of civilising… well, people like me. Today, he hovers formlessly at my shoulder, alternately inspiring and infuriating me, a font of magic and anger all at once.
Like Mr. Kipling, I am an author. I too am a writer of folktales, some of which are set in India. I too am intensely political and opinionated. I share his round glasses, his tendency toward moodiness, his strange nostalgia for lands both familiar and distant. But, as his ghost is quick to remind me, I am not his peer, and never can I be. In life, Joseph Rudyard Kipling would never have shaken my sandalwood-brown hand, nor looked me in my fluttered and wild native’s eyes. As he himself put it: East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
An author I love once referred to Kipling as a “poet of the dispossessed”, and I do see traces of that in his writing: ‘The Enlightenment of Pagett, M.P.’ subtly points out the ways in which bourgeoisie Indian freedom fighters left their working-class compatriots out of the conversation. He ridicules the Criminal Tribes Act, a British law targeting Adivasis, or Indigenous South Asians, and in the same breath, he pokes fun at Brahmins who view themselves as a superior race by virtue of caste and education level. But even in these attempts, he falls short. He calls Adivasis ‘vaguely criminal’, and when he ridicules the Brahmin character it is not for his casteism but for his broken English, ‘weakling’ sons, and futile desire to be British. Kipling does not subvert any hierarchies or advocate whole-chestedly for the dispossessed — he instead reinforces a hierarchy where white British men like him sit contentedly and naturally at the top.
His ghost first visited me when I cracked open my newly acquired horror compilation. As I read page after page about the burning, demonic qualities of India, a common thread emerged: the terror of these works, the grotesque hellishness Kipling meant to convey, is contained in our bodies — the very presence of our unforgivably dark and alien bodies, which swallow civilised European men and spit them out as something monstrously Oriental. Kipling’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, with its depictions of wailing half-starved children and death-still, negligent adults, is little more than a lyrical expansion on the phrase “shithole countries”. I was abruptly reminded of another work of his which I enjoyed years ago, as a middle-schooler sitting in my parents’ walk-in closet, shielding myself from unwelcome dinner guests with a copy of The Jungle Book. In these stories, too, the horror lies in the natural actions of Indian bodies, although, for the most part, it is cloaked in a veneer of genial animal fantasy: in my former favourite ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, the cobras Nag and Nagina (thinly veiled Indian freedom fighters) are the antagonists simply for eating a fledgling bird. Never mind that the titular mongoose eats eggs, as Nag points out: he and Nagina are still villainous merely by virtue of acting without permission from their British betters.
I put the book down and was left with a whisper from his ghost: I am the Nagina to his Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the sour and bitter and shrill side of the feminine, unfashionably willing to speak out against racism and casteism. Of course, he would never shake my hand, or meet my eye, or converse with me as an equal. I am not civilised. Doesn’t the world agree with him? Doesn’t it, too, refuse to shake my hand, doesn’t it uphold his own views on race and caste and the innate shining superiority of strong white men?
I am inclined to whisper back: Nagina may have lost her battle, but so too will you lose yours. Have we not survived, in our unfathomable Oriental glory? There are movements globally to upend the very hierarchies which you lauded as immovable. East is confronting West’s legacy of exploitation, even as we speak.
And, well, what can Kipling say to that? He is, after all, only a ghost.
