Rudyard Kipling

HareBrain said:
So the fact that there's no evidence that he did mean it ironically I find deeply odd, since if he had done, he would surely have made it clear that he did, given the evidence that people took it at face value.
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Well, there is, I understand, a certain deliciously guilty, not to say cruel, pleasure to be had from being praised for producing a work in which those praising one are characterised as being thieving dupes (or just thieves, or just dupes). I have no idea (let alone proof) whether Kipling was someone who indulged in such appalling behaviour.
 
I think (though I accept that others don't) that the balance of the evidence is that Kipling passionately believed in the responsibility of white men to civilise the rest of the world. I even think it's one of the things that makes his writing so seductive and exciting (although problematic, to say the least, in modern terms). It makes no real sense to me to separate him from his context.

To link to a post from another thread (which obviously indicates nothing about that poster's attitude to Kipling): Conan
 
I read Kim repeatedly in my teens and after, but not for a few years now, and have a few observations from memory.

1. Kipling comes across as very knowledgeable about Indian customs - for example the scenes where Kim is dressing in Indian clothes as part of his agent training - and gets a couple of details wrong.

2. The majority of the main characters (that I remember) are Indian - Mabubali (guessed the spelling) the horse trader, the shop owner where Kim is trained, another agent and friend of the shop owner who critiques Kim's outfit and Kim's holy man. They are all interesting, memorable and likeable characters who are competent at what they do. Many of the British minor characters I remember as less likeable - schoolmasters, army sergeants and a vicar/missionary.

3. Kim's devotion to his holy man is a key part of the book.

To me, this doesn't seem racist.
 
I love KIM, and used to read it all the time as well (I think I need to read it again soon), and I wouldn't like to accuse it of being racist. There's a lot of love for India in it (which doesn't mean it isn't -- I can't remember).

However, from what I remember, isn't "the Great Game" that Kim gets involved in, actually spying to maintain British colonial control of India?

I don't think Kipling was simple or one-sided, but I do think he was a product of his time.
 
Yes, the plot of Kim was that. I would just argue that there are a very large number of books (including SF) with that kind of adventure plot. I would infer more of Kipling's attitudes from the way he handles the details and the characters than from the plot being a spy/adventure story in support of British rule.
 
Montero said:
Yes, the plot of Kim was that. I would just argue that there are a very large number of books (including SF) with that kind of adventure plot. I would infer more of Kipling's attitudes from the way he handles the details and the characters than from the plot being a spy/adventure story in support of British rule.
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Agreed. And I've just finished The Man Who Would be King, and it portrays the British adventures (Dravit anyway) as blinded by fatal hubris, greed, and arrogance.
 
For an antidote to the flag waving Great Game stories, and a surprisingly accurate historic background, it is worth reading Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser.
 
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In The Man Who Would Be King, though, you do have little asides early on, like the stuff about it's nasty to have to travel with natives for a long journey in a train carriage, and the chaos of the 'Native States'.

The later bits are all told by Peachy about what Dravot said, and so much of what Dravot says is mad, but all that stuff about the people in 'Kafiristan' being white-skinned and so much better than the Indians, indeed, basically Englishmen (if you wash them well) could certainly be read with an eye to race. He doesn't just mean physically white skin, either, it has all sorts of connotations of trustworthiness as well (indeed, the noblest character in the whole story is "Billy Fish"). It reminds me of Prester John by Buchan, which I recall (possibly inaccurately) as having comments about how noble and intelligent Laputa was, and how much he could have achieved if he'd only been white.

I don't really want to trail through Kipling like this, but there was a challenge up-thread(!) and it seems weird to ignore the stuff we don't now approve of, just because he was a great story teller (I'm resisting the urge to quote Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats for the verses on how time 'pardons language, and forgives anyone by whom it lives', including Kipling).

Yes, he was a lot more than a supporter of imperialism/ believer in the inherent superiority of white English men, but he was that too.
 
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Hex said:
I think (though I accept that others don't) that the balance of the evidence is that Kipling passionately believed in the responsibility of white men to civilise the rest of the world. I even think it's one of the things that makes his writing so seductive and exciting (although problematic, to say the least, in modern terms). It makes no real sense to me to separate him from his context.
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Exactly. Kipling was writing about the members of the Indian Civil Service, police and military- the District Administrators, local officials, railroad builders, the Survey Corps, judges and police officers who would never take bribes- not the 'box-wallahs', the businessmen who went out to make money.

from Orwell, above:
It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. 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.
....
His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.
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(Joke from Parkinson's Law:On the Civil Service Exam, those who did the best were sent out to govern India. Those who did less well were sent to govern lesser colonies. Those who failed completely were kept home to govern Britain.)

His message to America to take over the Philippines was also a dig at the Spanish, as well as the Portuguese, Belgians (the Congo), Germans (Tanganyika, South-West Africa) and Dutch who he felt were simply exploiting the locals, not helping them advance like the British were, and their fellow Anglo-Saxons could and should.

It's an opinion also expressed in the opening of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" where he says of the 'red'; areas on the world map, conventionally used for the British Empire, that as opposed to the other colours of the other European powers "at least something was getting done there". Kurtz himself sets out to emulate this, but turns out not so well.

Niall Ferguson came out with something similar at the time of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, urging young Americans to abandon business school to study Arabic and Pushtu and take up their pith helmets to spread the gospel of Westernisation- a call that was met with massive indifference. Times change, Bwana.
 
MWagner said:
The great majority of people in developing countries who work in manufacturing do so willingly and deliberately. It's a step up in life from the stultifying poverty of rural life, which we in the West have naive and romanticized notions about. They're essentially making the same decision our great-grandparents made. We might think we're being noble by saying they should give it up to return to the feces-sodden fields to churn out their days with no hope of material advancement. But nearly 1 billion people in the developing world have lifted themselves out of poverty in the last 25 years due to the opportunities of global trade, and they do not want to go back to living like their grandparents did.
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Oh, absolutely - I live in Taiwan, which in my wife's lifetime has moved from a backwards dictatorship where everybody worked toiling in rice fields to making Barbie dolls 14 hours a day for a pittance to a modern democracy where people drive SUVs, travel by high-speed rail, have flat-screen TVs in their air-conditioned houses- and have National Health Insurance.

I also lived in in Africa in the 1970s, China in the mid-80s before the big changes started and have travelled and worked extensively elsewhere in Asia. I'm no fan of romantic backwardness, and I'm also aware these places face the dangers of pricing themselves out of the market if they allow wages to rise too high too quickly.

Nonetheless, there is a lot that can be done to make the transition less grimly Dickensian than it currently is.
 
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Very similar conversation in the Guardian this week. The comments section is well worth reading. Highly articulate and erudite in many cases. Recommended if you have found this thread interesting:

Why we still don't know what to make of Kipling


Is he hopelessly outdated, a standard-bearer for a discredited part of British history, or a writer with a profound understanding for all humanity?

The end of December 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of Rudyard Kipling’s birth. I suppose you might say that this fact proves just how long ago a century and half can seem – at least if you take the common view of Kipling as the bard of empire and the standard-bearer for a discredited part of British history. But, given the debates that still rage about Kipling, his message and his legacy, you might just as easily say how close he still seems. He is a writer of perennial interest, not just because of his undoubted talent and way with words, but because we still don’t quite know what to make of him.


Is this Indian-born, youngest ever winner of the Nobel prize for literature a parochial English figure? Is this exquisite stylist and literary innovator a hopelessly old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud? Is he a racist, or someone with sympathy and understanding for all humanity?


Hard questions. Kipling is a difficult, contradictory, thorny writer. That makes him all the more interesting, but it also means I approach him here with a certain amount of trepidation. Not least because, in spite of his fascination, I have to admit to not really knowing all that much about Kipling.


I suspect in common with many of my generation, I have a confused jumble of ideas and prejudices about the man. I know about The Jungle Book, of course. I’ve read a few strange war poems, and some very fine short stories. I’ve read The White Man’s Burden – and wondered whether he’s joking or not. I watched the TV movie of Kim, as a child back in the 1980s, when it seemed forever on British screens. But beyond that I’ve shied away, put off by the enmity of Edward Said and George Orwell’s famous demolition of Kipling’s “good bad poetry” (and the suggestion that every enlightened person must “despise him”).


This lack of real knowledge is vaguely embarrassing. It seems absurd to pretend to know and care about the development of English literature and to have read so little, to have understood so little, about such a major figure. I hope this month to overcome my ignorance for better or worse – and that you will join me.

I suggest reading Kim, since it’s already been vigorously promoted here on the Guardian Reading group, and seems the most obvious choice. It was the Kipling novel chosen by Robert McCrum, for instance, on his rundown of the 100 greatest novels – and it’s a regular feature on similar lists. It’s also got a cracking opening:

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Ghar – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.

How not to read on?

I’ll write a first piece next week, and in the meantime welcome all comments and suggestions for what we might discuss. You might also enjoy reading this excellent piece by Andrew Lycett on the importance of Kipling and the debates he causes. And, as a taster, treat yourself to 10 minutes or so reading Kipling’s astonishing short story With the Night Mail. Intelligent, surprising sci-fi on a world-spanning scale. So much for being a colonial stick-in-the-mud.
 
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Something that puzzles me about the article, and the debate on Kipling in general, is the way things are forced to one side or another of an absolute dichotomy. [does that sentence now make sense? I have struggled with it :( ]

This, for example: "Is he hopelessly outdated, a standard-bearer for a discredited part of British history, or a writer with a profound understanding for all humanity?"

and this: "Is he a racist, or someone with sympathy and understanding for all humanity?"

Kipling wrote a lot of stories (and poems), and he developed a lot in the years in which he was writing. And in some of them, undoubtedly, he comes over as racist -- or at least a believer in the superiority of the white man. In others, he doesn't. Some of his attitudes now seem very out-dated, but that doesn't mean other parts of his writing do not show a profound understanding of humanity.

I don't really understand the need to define him as one thing or another -- why can't he be all these things?

(one of the things I found interesting about the initial article cited, is the way in which it recognises that much of what Kipling wrote was not desirable by modern standards, e.g. "Kipling’s capacity for sober scutiny has also helped revive his reputation among Indian critics. As the exploitative nature of Britain’s colonial rule has come more into the historical frame, his often condescending attitude to their political aspirations is not condoned..." and "You can’t ignore his doggerel and propaganda." -- to argue that Kipling is more than these things doesn't seem like a very dramatic thing to suggest, but to argue that he is also these things, doesn't seem very dramatic either).
 
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OK, but why don't we get into parallel discussions when it comes to left-wing authors who sympathized with communist tyranny (e.g. H. G. Wells)? At least it doesn't seem that that issue always comes up, while the familiar issues with a more conservative writer, such as Kipling, always do seem to come up -- almost always, be it severely noted, kept on a general level rather than actually tackling specific stories and poems. It reminds me of the curious way in which people rage about Israel while seeming not to be much fazed by conduct in other Middle Eastern countries where human rights are far, far less protected. Maybe this curious phenomenon is more pronounced in the US than elsewhere and some of you won't know what I'm talking about. On American campuses, people will turn out for apparently (perhaps not genuinely) passionate demonstrations crying for the university to divest in any business that does interest with Israel while being ignorant of, or unconcerned about, entanglements with far nastier countries, such as China. Anybody able to help me with this? I've been an American voter since 1976 and I am still puzzled by this kind of thing, and it is my impression that this sort of thing is common in Europe and Britain also. I'd like my comment to stay here in the Kipling place, though perhaps anyone who wants to respond to it should carry the discussion to the World Affairs forum.
 
@Hex
The dichotomy is presented as a contention(s) just to get the juices of the debate flowing. If you read down the comments (especially going on to the second page) they start to tackle these issues in a very sophisticated and interesting way.

I quite like this one (regarding Orwell on Kipling):

We're probably going to hear a lot about Kipling's racism, a word that has proven itself elastic enough to embrace just about the whole English 19th century, thereby blotting out almost all distinctions between the racial attitudes of English people. It's a word that when applied in retrospect does little but soak up complexities. But, as you and Orwell point out, we know of many of those complexities only because Kipling recorded them for us. A creature of his era, he recorded them in his historically racist way, but nothing could be more false than the implication that a modern racist could possibly see India as he did - modern racism being mostly a simpleminded rejection of complexity.
 
@Extollager -- I'm quite happy to, only I haven't read a great deal of Wells and I haven't read him recently so I'm in a weaker position to criticise his work. Also, perhaps because I haven't seen a thread along the lines of: HG Wells -- not even slightly a Communist sympathiser!

I don't want to get involved in a discussion of Israel, because it would end with me lying on the floor weeping, but I will say: I don't understand the implication that just because other countries are also oppressing people, it's somehow less bad for Israel to.

@hitmouse -- I like that comment, and I liked many of the others I read too. I agree that the term "racist" with all its modern associations feels inappropriate for Kipling, though I would take some convincing that he was a consistent believer in racial or social equality.
 
Can't let a Kipling thread go without this

Kamal is out with twenty men to raise the Border side,
And he has lifted the Colonel’s mare that is the Colonel’s pride:
He has lifted her out of the stable-door between the dawn and the day,
And turned the calkins upon her feet, and ridden her far away.
Then up and spoke the Colonel’s son that led a troop of the Guides:
“Is there never a man of all my men can say where Kamal hides?”
Then up and spoke Mahommed Khan, the son of the Ressaldar,
“If ye know the track of the morning-mist, ye know where his pickets are.
At dusk he harries the Abazai—at dawn he is into Bonair,
But he must go by Fort Bukloh to his own place to fare,
So if ye gallop to Fort Bukloh as fast as a bird can fly,
By the favor of God ye may cut him off ere he win to the Tongue of Jagai,
But if he be passed the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then,
For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal’s men.
There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between,
And ye may hear a breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen.”

......
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.
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Loved this poem as a kid- that and Flecker's "War Song of the Saracens":

We are they who come faster than fate: we are they who ride early or late:
We storm at your ivory gate: Pale Kings of the Sunset, beware!
Not on silk nor in samet we lie, not in curtained solemnity die
Among women who chatter and cry, and children who mumble a prayer.
But we sleep by the ropes of the camp, and we rise with a shout, and we tramp
With the sun or the moon for a lamp, and the spray of the wind in our hair.

From the lands, where the elephants are, to the forts of Merou and Balghar,
Our steel we have brought and our star to shine on the ruins of Rum.
We have marched from the Indus to Spain, and by God we will go there again;
We have stood on the shore of the plain where the Waters of Destiny boom.
.....
A mart of destruction we made at Jalula where men were afraid,
For death was a difficult trade, and the sword was a broker of doom;
And the Spear was a Desert Physician who cured not a few of ambition,
And drave not a few to perdition with medicine bitter and strong:
And the shield was a grief to the fool and as bright as a desolate pool,
And as straight as the rock of Stamboul when their cavalry thundered along:
For the coward was drowned with the brave when our battle sheered up like a wave,
And the dead to the desert we gave, and the glory to God in our song.
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And this cheerful bit of advice from Kipling to "The Young British Soldier"

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.
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