The Hindus (104 page)

Horses are deeply implicated in espionage in Kipling’s
Kim,
right from the start. Napier’s code message, in the anecdote, was about a war; the very first chapter of
Kim
introduces a message about a war, coded not in Latin but in horses: “[T]he pedigree of the white stallion is fully established.” Again, it is a triple code, of which the first two levels are easy enough to crack: Ostensibly, on the first level, it means that the Muslim horse trader Mahbub Ali is able to vouch for a valuable horse that the colonel may buy. The coded message on the second level is that a provocation has occurred that will justify a British attack in Northwest India (much like Napier’s).

The third level of signification is more complex. The idea of a pedigree implies that you know the horse when you know its father and mother (or dam and sire); the ideas underlying the breeding of horses, ideas about “bloodlines” and “bloodstock” and Thoroughbreds, also marked the racist theory of the breeding of humans. Kim is said to have “white blood,” an oxymoron. The question that haunts the book is, Who are Kim’s sire and dam? I need not point out the significance of the color of the stallion in a book by Kipling (who coined the phrase “the white man’s burden”). But we might recall that the Vedic stallion of the ancient Hindus, the symbol of expansionist political power, was also white, in contrast with the Dasyus or Dasas, who were said to come from “dark wombs” (RV 2.20.7). British racist ideas, supported by a complex pseudoscientific ideology, rode piggyback on already existing Hindu ideas about dark and light skin conceived without the support of a racist theory like that of the British; one might say that the Indians imagined racism for themselves before the British imagined it against them. The white stallion also implicitly represents Kim’s Irish father in the metaphor that Creighton and Mahbub Ali apply to Kim, behind his back: Kim is a colt that must be gentled into British harness.
¹²²
On the other hand, to Kim’s face, Mahbub Ali uses horses as a paradigm for the multiculturalism of Kim’s world, which includes not only his English, Indian, and Tibetan Buddhist father figures, but both a good Catholic chaplain and an evil Anglican chaplain, the Bengali Hindu babu named Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and the Jainas of the temple where the lama resides. Kim feels that he is a sahib among sahibs, but he questions his own identity “among the folk of Hind” in terms of religion: “What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist?” Mahbub Ali’s response (in the passage cited at the start of this chapter) is: “This matter of creeds is like horseflesh . . . the Faiths are like the horses. Each has merit in its own country.”
¹²³

Kim’s multireligious identity crisis (“What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist?”) is stripped of its multicultural details in the simple question that he asks himself over and over again—“Who is Kim?”—and then, in the final chapter: “I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?”
^kj
Kipling bequeathed this individual quandary of multicultural identity to other novelists too, including Salman Rushdie, who, I think, modeled the hero of
Midnight’s Children
on Kim, a boy with English blood who appears to be both Hindu and Muslim. But Rushdie reverses the point about race: The English blood doesn’t matter at all, or the Hindu blood; the boy is a Muslim because he is raised as a Muslim. Hari Kunzru too is indebted to Kipling for some elements of the multicultural hero of his novel
The Impressionist,
though he takes the theme in very different directions: Kunzru’s hero has an English father and an Indian mother, and he passes for white but loses the white girl he loves, loses her because (final irony) she prefers men of color.

How are we to evaluate the legacy of Kipling, doing justice both to his racism and to his deeply perceptive portrayal of India?

In his surprisingly appreciative essay on
Kim,
Edward Said wrestles with his conflicted feelings about Kipling. On the one hand, Said demonstrates how deeply embedded, indeed coded, in
Kim
is the racist and imperialist view for which Kipling became notorious. On the other hand, Said speaks of
Kim
as “profoundly embarrassing”
¹²⁴
—for Said, and for us, for any readers caught between their warm response to the artistry of the book and their revulsion at the racist terminology and ideology. Said speaks of Kipling as “a great artist blinded in a sense by his own insights about India,” who sets out to advance an obfuscating vision of imperial India, but “not only does he not truly succeed in this obfuscation, but his very attempt to use the novel for this purpose reaffirms the quality of his aesthetic integrity.” Said’s ambivalence was matched by that of the poet W. H. Auden, who argued (in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 1939) that history would pardon “Kipling and his views,” though he later excised those lines from subsequent editions.

Yet Auden’s verses are powerful in precisely the way that, George Orwell pointed out, Kipling’s own verse is powerful. Auden argued that Kipling would be pardoned “for writing well.” Orwell argued that Kipling is a “good bad poet,” who wrote the kind of poetry that you would like to forget but that you remember, almost against your will, more easily, and longer, than good poetry.
¹²⁵
Kipling is “good bad” not merely in his literary qualities but also in his ethical qualities; he is both a racist and not a racist. Mowgli, for instance, the Indian hero of
The Jungle Book,
is portrayed in positive terms to which race is irrelevant. And Kipling, always aware that the “captains and the kings” would depart from India, could have had Charles Napier in mind when he prayed for divine guidance, “lest we forget”—forget, perhaps, the harm that the British had done in India? Rushdie, writing of his ambivalence toward the good and evil Kipling, remarks, “There will always be plenty in Kipling that I find difficult to
forgive
” (as Auden decided not, ultimately, to pardon Kipling), but then he adds: “but there is also enough truth in these stories to make them impossible to ignore.”
¹²⁶

That truth grew out of a deep knowledge and love of India, where Kipling was born and which he described (in “Mandalay”) as “a cleaner, greener land” (than England). Some of his stories can be read as variants on some of the classical texts of Hinduism. “On Greenhow Hill” (1891) is a translation, in the broadest sense, of the story of Yudhishthira and the dog who accompanies him into heaven; in the Kipling story, some Methodists are trying to convert an Irish Catholic to Methodism. They don’t like his dog, and tell him that he must give up the dog because he is “worldly and low,” and would he let himself “be shut out of heaven for the sake of a dog?” He insists that if the door isn’t wide enough for the pair of them, they’ll stay outside rather than be parted. And so they let him bring the dog to chapel. In “The Miracle of Puran Bhagat” (1894), a Hindu who becomes a high-ranking civil servant under the British and is even knighted gives it all up to become a renouncer; wild animals befriend him, as he shuns all human life. But he reenters the world when, warned by the animals, he saves a village from a flash flood, giving up his own life in the process. By translating dharma and the householder life into civil service for the Raj, Kipling gives a new twist to the old problem of the tension between renunciation and service to the world.
Kim
is as much about the search for Release from the wheel of samsara as it is about the intensely political and material world of espionage. In the final chapter, the lama’s vision of the universe, including himself (“I saw all Hind, from Ceylon in the sea to the Hills. . . . Also I saw the stupid body of Teshoo Lama lying down . . .”), replicates the vision of the universe, and themselves, that Yashoda and Arjuna saw in the mouth of Krishna.

Kim
is a novel written about, and out of, the British love of India. In part, of course, that love was like the love of one Englishman, Shakespeare’s Henry V, for France: “I love France so well, that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine.”
¹²⁷
But that is not the only kind of love there is, even in the hearts of other dead white males who “loved” the civilizations of people they colonized;
¹²⁸
Gandhi referred to the British as “those who loved me.”
¹²⁹
The British also loved India for the right reasons, reasons that jump off every page of
Kim:
the beauty of the land, the richness and intensity of human interactions, the infinite variety of religious forms.

CHAPTER 22

[Version A] After they had performed their superstitious ceremonies,
they placed the woman on the pile with the corpse, and set fire to the
wood. As soon as the flames touched her, she jumped off the pile. Immediately
the brahmuns seized her, in order to put her again into the
flames: she exclaimed—“Do not murder me! I do not wish to be burnt!”
The Company’s officers being present, she was brought home safely.

Missionary Register,
March 1820
¹

[Version B] What most surprised me, at this horrid and barbarous rite, was the tranquility of the woman, and the joy expressed by her relations, and the spectators. . . . She underwent everything with the greatest intrepidity, and her countenance seemed, at times, to be animated with pleasure, even at the moment when she was ascending the fatal pile.

J. S. Stavorinus (a Dutch admiral who visited Bengal in 1769 and 1770), 1770
²

How can the same act, performed by two different women fifty years apart, elicit such contrasting descriptions and responses? Since the first European accounts, both Europeans and Indians have expressed widely differing opinions about the practice that Anglo-Indian English called suttee, the action of certain women in India who were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. (Sanskrit and Hindi texts call the woman who commits the act a sati, “good woman.”) Suttee had been around for quite a while before the Raj, as we have seen. Several queens commit suttee in the
Mahabharata,
and the first-century BCE Greek author Diodorus Siculus mentions suttee in his account of the Punjab. In the Buddhist
Vessantara Jataka,
based on a story shared by Hindus and Buddhists, when Vessantara is about to leave his queen and go into exile without her, she protests: “Burning on a fire, uniting in a single flame—such a death is better for me than life without you.”
³
This imagery of wives so faithful that (to paraphrase St. Paul) they’d rather burn than unmarry (by being parted from their husbands in the next life) is part of the discourse of marital love even before it becomes a practice or is associated with funeral pyres. Such stories take to the extreme the sort of self-sacrifice normally expressed by relatively milder habits such as following husbands into exile, as both Sita and Draupadi do. On the other hand, a late chapter of the
Padma Purana
(perhaps c. 1000 CE) says that Kshatriya women are noble if they immolate themselves but that Brahmin women may not and that anyone who helps a Brahmin woman do it is committing Brahminicide.
⁴

In the Muslim period, the Rajputs practiced
jauhar
(a kind of prophylactic suttee, the wife immolating herself before the husband’s expected death in battle), most famously at Chitorgarh, to save women from a fate worse than death at the hands of conquering enemies. Numerous sati stones, memorials to the widows who died in this way, are found all over India; one of the earliest definitively dated records is a 510 CE inscription from Eran, in Madhya Pradesh. Most of the suttees seem to occur at first in royal Kshatriya families and later among Brahmins in Bengal, but women of all castes could do it. In 1823, for example, 234 Brahmin women, 25 Kshatriyas, 14 Vaishyas, and 292 Shudras were recorded as satis.
⁵

To a Euro-American, such women are widows, though from the Hindu standpoint, a sati is the opposite of a widow. A widow is a bad woman; since it is a wife’s duty to keep her husband alive, it is ultimately her fault if he dies and dishonorable for her to outlive him; to the degree to which she internalizes these traditional beliefs, she suffers both shame and guilt in her widowhood. A sati, by contrast, is a good woman, who remains a wife always and never a widow, since her husband is not regarded as dead until he is cremated (or, occasionally, buried), and she goes with him to heaven.
⁶

Different scholars confronting suttee, like the blind men who encountered the elephant in the middle of the room, see a different beast depending on what part they grasp.
⁷
One
^kk
calls it a sacrifice and asks: What were the ancient and persistent traditions that drove some widows to do it voluntarily and other men and women to force other widows to do it involuntarily? Another
^kl
calls it murder and asks: Can suttee be explained by the more general mistreatment of women by men in India, particularly female infanticide and dowry murders of daughters-in-law (killing one wife so that the man can marry another and get another dowry)? Another
^km
calls it widow burning and asks: Why did the British first loudly denounce suttee, then covertly sanction it, and then officially ban it? This chapter will be concerned primarily with this third question, though we cannot ignore the other two and will begin with them. We will then consider similar complexities that dog the Raj record on issues such as cow protection, (non)violence, addiction to opium and alcohol, and the treatment of the lowest castes.