Kipling’s Indian Fiction

169 Pages·1989·17.137 MB·English

by  Mark Paffard (auth.)

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 narrow
mindedness. 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.h is 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