The Wish House and Other Stories (2 page)

Who could possibly forget this?

Well, anyone who has read the whole of Kipling. Certainly Andrew Lycett and Harry Ricketts.

This is Andrew Lycett getting it wrong: “When he picked himself up from the floor, Rudyard found that everyone had fled the room.”

This is Harry Ricketts getting it wrong: “A sortie to a gambling den in Chinatown produced a dead Mexican, shot before his eyes over a poker game.”

And these are uncontroversial facts. Think of the scope for misreading and inaccurate transcription when interpretation is involved—interpretation of controversial questions.

I propose to sift the evidence for and against Kipling—taking in sequence his attitude to Indians, Blacks, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, and Germans. I do not expect to exonerate Kipling in every instance, but the evidence is more intricate than our initial inclinations might suggest. Our contemporary condemnations are blanket—like our terminology. Our terminology has evolved. Though “African American,” like “Asian American,” is precise enough, ethical purity has, on the whole, entailed terminological vagueness. The Negro was first “colored,” briefly “Nation,” and then “black” in an apparently courageous embrace of racial insult—except that “black” now applies to any “person of color.” Some Asians prefer to be called “black,” though Salman Rushdie recently described himself as “brown.” Arabs are usually called Arabs. “Person of color” is the currently favored overall term—an ethical strategy to neutralize all those petty distinctions of color so prized by racists of all complexions. But it is a strategy not particularly helpful in this context.

Kipling’s story “The Head of the District” is sometimes read as racist and patronizing. It was written in 1890, seven years after the Ilbert Bill, which is its ultimate subject. The bill was liberal in orientation and supported by the viceroy, Lord Ripon. One of its revisions to the Criminal Procedure Code was to invest native magistrates with jurisdiction over British subjects—including, most controversially, the power to try white women. Kipling was hissed in his club when the seventeen-year-old’s paper,
The Civil and Military Gazette
, “ratted on the bill,” supporting it after initial opposition. “The Head of the
District” is usually read as Kipling’s mordant comment on native Indian inability to govern and administer state affairs competently.

When Yardley-Orde, the white head of the district, dies, the government in its liberal wisdom appoints a Bengali as his replacement, one Grish Chunder Dé, M.A. The new Deputy Commissioner’s Afghan subjects are unimpressed, indeed insulted, by the appointment. They revolt and the Bengali panics. “I have not yet assumed charge of the district” is his cowardly response to the crisis. His brother, Debendra Nath Dé, is beheaded in the rebellion.

So far, this reads like a narrative of higher administrative incompetence told by the complacent voice of Anglo-India, chortling with racist condescension. No backbone, these natives. In fact, the story can only be read in this way if the reader is as prejudiced against Kipling as he believes Kipling to be prejudiced against Indians.

The rebellion is really put down by Khoda Dad Khan, an Afghan warrior loyal to the Bengali’s white predecessor, Yardley-Orde, and to Orde’s second in command, Tallantire. It is Khoda Dad Khan who kills the mullah behind the uprising. In other words, it is
he
, Khoda Dad Khan, who is effectively the head of the district. It is he who realizes that revolt against the British is futile—a drain on human resources—and it is Kipling who realizes that the British can govern only with the consent of the indigenous population. Without consent, there can be only conquest—not the same thing as government by any means. Kipling knows that the Afghans rule themselves. What is more, they know it too, and it is marked in the story by a single subtle shift. When Orde dies, he speaks affectionately to the Afghans as children. “For though ye be strong men, ye are children” is his almost final word.
“Children”
—the great, standard, patronizing imperialist epithet, designed to demean the dignity of another race.

Kipling is careful, though, in his coda, to mark and salve this sensitivity. Tallantire and Khoda Dad Khan are discussing the Bengali’s successor. Fully aware of where power really lies, both men connive at the myth of British rule. Tallantire “thunders” at Khoda Dad Khan that his people are “children and fools,” that “the Government will send you a
man”
to rule the district. To which Khoda Dad Khan, momentarily lapsing from his part in the imperialist charade, lets slip the truth: “Ay,”…“for we also be men.”

The moral of “The Head of the District” for literary critics is that there is no such thing as “the Indian” or “the native.” In this story there is the Afghan (or the Pathan) and there is the Bengali. Kipling distinguishes between them.

Two crucial letters maintain this distinction and complicate it.
They were written to Margaret Burne-Jones when Kipling was still working at
The Civil and Military Gazette.
They are dated September 27, 1885, and November 28, 1885, to January 11, 1886. I want to discuss the second letter in detail because I think it is seriously misrepresented in Andrew Lycett’s account (p. 119 ff).

Kipling’s second letter first of all attacks the concept of “the native”: “When you write ‘native’ who do you mean? The Mahommedan who hates the Hindu; the Hindu who hates the Mahommedan; the Sikh who loathes both; or the semi-anglicised product of our Indian colleges who is hated and despised by Sikh, Hindu and Mahommedan….”

Kipling recorded these distinctions. He didn’t invent them. And they still exist. In the aftermath of the 2001 race riots in Oldham, the
Today
radio program had an interview in which a Hindu woman complained about the blanket label “Asians”—and blamed the riots on sections of the Moslem community.

You might maintain that, nevertheless, Kipling despises the Bengali babu, whom he makes his target in “The Head of the District.” It is true that, on the whole, Bengalis get poor press from Kipling. The panic of Grish Chunder Dé is reproduced in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, “The Giridih Coal-Fields”) where Kipling sketches an
imagined
mining accident in which the Bengali babu panics and blames everything on the gang-Sidar. Kipling’s verdict is “The best of accountants, but the poorest of coroners is he.”

“The best of accountants.” Kipling does pay tribute to this specific quality, this aptitude, in the Bengali babu. In “Among the Railway Folk” (vol. 2, p. 281), he closes with this paean: “The Babus make beautiful accountants, and if we could only see it, a merciful providence has made the Babu for figures and detail. Without him, the dividends of any company would be eaten up by the expenses of English or city-bred clerks. The Babu is a great man, and, to respect him, you must see five score or so of him in a room a hundred yards long, bending over ledgers, ledgers, and yet more ledgers—silent as the Sphinx and busy as a bee.”

Of course, there is an ironic tinge in that Sphinx-like silence, given the Bengali babu’s legendary loquacity—“celebrated” in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, p. 219), where Sir Steuart Bayley endures Bengali bombast by the hour—but nevertheless Kipling’s final, judiciously particular verdict is clear.
“The Babu is a great man”
—when he is a clerk.

A verdict that is, of course, sufficient reason now to convict Kipling of racism. He is well disposed to the Indian, the indictment goes, only so long as the Indian knows his place. So the babu is a great
man if he sticks to clerical work. The Indian, though, isn’t interested in Kipling’s benevolent disposition. It is irrelevant. The Indian rather wants justice. Ergo, Kipling is essentially racist.

I want to argue strongly against this. For several reasons. First, compared to the worst imperialist racists, Kipling is indeed benevolent and enlightened. There are degrees of racism. Hitler’s anti-Semitism is clearly far worse than that of T. S. Eliot, supposing you happen to believe Eliot
was
anti-Semitic. Which I incline to disbelieve. Second, there is an injustice inherent in the retrospective application of the standards of 2002. No one at the time would have recognized them as valid. In fact, the application of racial and class categories was universal until the end of the Second World War. The war completely broke down accepted ways of categorization. Up to that date, working-class men and women would have described themselves as working-class, the middle class as middle-class. And so on. Categorization, however deplorable, was then a matter of fact and a fact of life.

In his second letter to Margaret Burne-Jones, Kipling addresses her central question. She had asked if the English and the natives had interests in common: “d-d few,” Kipling replies—adding, “faith if you knew in what inconceivable filth of mind the peoples of India were brought up from their cradle; if you realised the views—or one tenth of the views—they hold about women and their absolute incapacity for speaking the truth as we understand it—the immeasurable gulf that lies between the two races in all things, you would see how it comes to pass that the Englishman is prone to despise the natives—(I must use that misleading term for brevity’s sake)—and how, except in the matter of trade, to have little or nothing in common with him.”

And that is where Andrew Lycett leaves the quotation and the question of Kipling’s attitude to Indians.

At which point, Kipling sounds like an authentic pukka sahib. But Andrew Lycett has reversed the order of Kipling’s paragraphs to make this
beginning
Kipling’s conclusion. Lycett writes:
“At the end of the day
, he admitted that the British in India had very little in common with their subjects” (my italics). True, but misleading. Because Kipling goes on, amazingly, to
deplore
this gulf and to show his ambition to penetrate Indian society.

Kipling then describes his novel
Mother Maturin
as an attempt to penetrate the authentic native life, which is unaffected by British rule. “The result has been to interest me immensely and keenly in the people and to show me how little an Englishman can hope to understand ’em.” Of this life, Kipling avers that “our rule, so long as no one steals too flagrantly or murders too openly, affects it in no way whatever…”—which could be a gloss on “The Head of the District.” The letter continues with a remark often quoted against him—that the Indians are a cross between children and men, “touchy as children, obstinate as men.”

But Kipling goes on: “The proper way to handle ’em is not by looking on ’em ‘as excitable masses of barbarism’ (I speak for the Punjab only) or the ‘down trodden millions of Ind groaning under the heel of an alien and unsympathetic despotism,’ but as men with a language of their own
which it is your business to understand;
and proverbs which it is your business to quote (this is a land of proverbs) and byewords and allusions which it is your business to master; and feelings which it is your business to enter into
and sympathise with
” (my italics and bold).

This scarcely sounds like a racist to me.

Later in the same letter, discussing Ram Dass, his printer, Kipling again writes something frequently quoted against him: “Remember Wop in spite of what good lies in the native he is utterly unable to do anything finished or clean, or neat unless he has the Englishman at his elbow to guide and direct and put straight.”

Here, importantly, we should note that, writing to W. E. Henley (January 18–19, 1893), Kipling makes the identical criticism of white Americans. He says that, in America, “a certain defect runs through everything—workmanship, roads, bridges, contracts, barter and sale and so forth—all inaccurate, all slovenly, all out of plumb and untrue. So far the immense natural wealth of the land holds this ineptitude up; and the slovenly plenty hides their sins unless you look for them. Au fond it’s barbarism—barbarism plus telephone, electric light, rail and suffrage but all the more terrible for that very reason.”

Odd, isn’t it, that Kipling should equate native Indians and white Americans as essentially barbarous? However eccentric, the judgment begins to look impartial rather than racist. And one finds the same kind of cross-racial equation made in
Letters of Travel
(1892–1913),
where Kipling notes the slovenliness of New York’s streets and declares them “first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore, or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal….” Kipling’s comparison is intended to shock by its initial unlikeliness. The barbarity of the Zulu is taken for granted, as the barbarity of the American is not. But this could be described as racist only if one were not prepared to concede that there might be something primitive in a Zulu kraal.

Given his reputation as a racist, it is equally odd to find Kipling rebuking a clergyman for ethnic insensitivity (October 16, 1895): “It is my fortune to have been born and to a large extent brought up among those whom white men call ‘heathen’; and while I recognise the paramount duty of every white man to follow the teachings of his creed and conscience as ‘a debtor to do the whole law,’ it seems to me cruel that white men, whose governments are armed with the most murderous weapons known to science, should amaze and confound their fellow creatures with a doctrine of salvation imperfectly understood by themselves and a code of ethics foreign to the climate and instincts of those races whose most cherished customs they outrage and whose gods they insult.”

Kipling returns to this idea in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, p. 61): “Very many Americans have an offensive habit of referring to natives as ‘heathen.’ Mahometans and Hindus are heathen alike in their eyes….”