This paper is an attempt to reopen the Kipling question in the context of the vexed idiom of cultural hybridity. Its aim is to make out a case for a contrapuntal reading of some of the early stories of Kipling. A clandestine childhood memory of enjoying The Jungle Books, clamouring for place in the contested discourse of postcoloniality also reinforced the impulse to relocate Kipling of the Indian and Vermont years outside the exclusionary poles of binarism and within the discursive space of hybridity.
Time that with this strange excuse -
That reprieve of Kipling by Auden, inspired mainly by exculpatory remarks by Eliot and Orwell sounds premature in the wake of deconstructive readings which can ferret out hegemonic tendencies lurking within such seemingly apolitical discourses as Jane Austen's. Kipling with his lopsided 'views' on The White Man's Burden is a sitting duck for theoretical snipers who would consider the tendency to gloss over binary dichotomies a Eurocentric dodge. Besides any attempt to 'pardon' Kipling by highlighting his love for the India of his childhood and by playing down the role of deeply entrenched imperial ideology in his work leads to the dissolution of the paradox of 'Ruddy Baba as well as Kipling Sahib'as Rushdie characterizes it and renders him vulnerable to charges ranging from racism to unadulterated jingoism. Similarly a symptomatic reading that focuses on ideology alone, ignores the 'part bazaar-boy, part sahib' duality of Kipling that as Rushdie maintains has 'the power simultaneously to infuriate and to entrance."2
Eliot characterizes Kipling's religious attitude as one "of comprehensive tolerence".3 After calling him a 'jingo-imperialist,' who 'is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting,"4 Orwell lauds Kipling's ability to capture the sights and sounds of 19th century Anglo-India. "... the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings the hangings, the bugal-calls the smell of oats and horse-piss. .." 5
While its true that Kipling parodies the smug Christian missionaries in Kim and invests the Lama with some sort of rustic charm and dignity, he can be casually irreverant to non-christian icons in a way he would never be to Christ. Consider the following lines from 'Mandalay'. An' I seed her first a-smoking of a whackin' white cheroot An' a wastin' Christian kisses on an 'heathen idol's foot: Bloomin' idol made o' mud-- Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd-- Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ' er where she stud! On the road to Mandalay.... 6 And in On the City Wall, Lalun who entertains Hindus, Muslims Sikhs and Europeans admits no Jews into her chambers. One doesn't have to be an acolyte of Reader Response theory alert to every ethnic slur camouflaged as dramatic context to feel resentment at such barely concealed condescension. Like Eliot's own well documented anti- semiticism, Kipling's racial arrogance continues to be a thorn in the flesh of his most astute but conflicted admirers. In many ways the Kipling paradox resonates not only to the recent debate over Eliot's unflattering portrait of 'the Jew ' in 'Gerontian', but also his alledged moral blindness to the fate of the Holocaust victims reflected in his editorial strategies at The Criterion. The question, how a highly trained intelligence and refined artistic sensibility that fathomed, The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility7 be housed in someone so completely dead to the pain of the ethnic 'other' must remain one of the imponderables of literary criticism. In his recent study Anthony Julius claims that far from being an aberration, anti-semiticism was not only integral to Eliot's work but energized it. "Anti-Semiticism did not disfigure Eliot's work, it animated it. It was, on occasion, both his refuge and his inspiration, and his exploitation of its literary potential was virtuoso." 8 Some such impulse may have been at work in Shakespeare's treatment of Shylock according to John Gross who then adds that "Shakespeare would not have been Shakespeare if he had not moved on, if he had remained content with the stereotypes he inherited; but it was with stereotypes that he undoubtedly began."9 Eliot's plea for the tangentiality of prejudice in Kipling suggests a recoil from the notion that art, even great art does not redeem. Similarly by segregating distasteful ideology from his unique gifts as chronicler of a lost world Orwell robs Kipling's art of its internal dynamic. And yet who can deny that the history of English Studies in India is one of such protective fence building around writers from Shakespeare to Eliot. Cultural amnesia, economic necessity and heavy investment in the Enlightenment project thicken ones skin to a point where "It is the easiest thing to wash out the free acid of Kiplingian politics from finished goods,"10 Edward Said says that, "To read these major works of the period retrospectively and heterophonically with other histories and traditions counterpointed against them, to read them in the light of decolonization, is neither to sleight their great aesthetic force, nor to treat them reductively as imperialist propaganda. Still," he cautions, " it is a much graver mistake to read them stripped of their affiliations with the facts of power which informed and enabled them."11 Those who let Eliot and Kipling off the hook by bracketing their prejudice from its base in history and culture fail to realize that all expressive acts, as the New Historicists claim are embeded in a network of material practices and far from being passing fads or aberrations are constitutive of the work. Any plea for the supplementarity of prejudice leads to the elision of the work's fruitful dialogism. Thus emasculated Kipling's work does not qualify for what Said calls a contrapuntal reading. ''We have been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other, and we have watched the oscillation of Kim, as he passes to and fro between them. But the parallel lines never meet; the alternating attractions felt by Kim never give rise to a genuine struggle...''12 However as Sara Suleri argues, both Edmund Wilson and Edward Said seem not to recognize the irony with which Kipling represents imperial ideology. For Suleri Kim's collaboration in the Great Game is ''emblamatic of not so much an absence of conflict as the terrifying absence of choice in the operations of colonialism.''13 Thus Kim's hybridity instead of serving as locus of conflict pragmatically becomes an instrument of the Great Game. E.M.Forster records in The Hill Of Devi that during his second visit to Dewas as the Maharaja's secretary he was unable to continue work on the unfinished manuscript that later became A Passage To India. He had got stuck in the Marabar Caves. The first part had been relatively easier to write because India remembered was less confusing than India experienced. And later on, the 'muddle' that was India could be contained only by the carnivalesque celebration of Krishna's birth. What separates some of the earlier stories like The Man Who Would Be King and The Strange Ride Of Morrowbie Jukes which were published when Kipling still lived in India from his later work is the visceral quality of life suspended over an abyss that informs them. It was possible to reduce the heterogeneity and chronology of imperial time in Kim to the heuristic of the Great Game through the mediation of memeory. Whereas in India he could at times rely on the dubious practicality of the Empire as a gigantic joke. 'You stand on the threshold of new (imperial) experiences -- most of which will distress you and a few amuse. You are at the centre of a gigantic Practical Joke." 14 There in the rough and tumble of life it was perhaps difficult to sustain a monolithic vision of Empire. "The early Kipling," Rushdie maintains, "is a writer with a storm inside him, and he creates a mirror-storm of contradictory responses in the reader, particularly, I think, if the reader is Indian"15 Paul Gilroy maintains that colonial exchange cannot be entirely onesided, foreclosing the possibility of cross-cultural ambiguities and conflicts. "The reflexive cultures and consciousness of the European settlers, and those of the Africans they enslaved the 'Indians' they slaughtered and the Asians they indentured were not even in situations of the most extreme brutality sealed off hermetically from each other."16 In Toni Morrison's Beloved the confrontation between masters and slaves also occurs on a submerged ideological level, only in this instance it is the untutored Sethe who is by instinct the torchbearer of freedom as defined by Enlightenment rationalism and it is Schoolteacher, "a slaveholder whose rational and scientific racism replaces the patrimonial and sentimental version of racial domination practiced at 'Sweet Home' by his predecessor."17 Such unconscious implication in Enlightenment epistemology can also lead to a skewed histeriography in the former colonies. Dipesh Chakrabarty explains how the subject of Indian history articulates itself through a double bind. "On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed unity called the 'Indian people' that is always split into two- a modernizing elite and a yet to be modernized peasantry. As such a split subject, however, it speaks from within a metanarrative that celebrates the nation state; and of this metanarrative the theoretical subject can only be a hyperreal "Europe," a "Europe" constructed by the tales that both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized."18 What this means is that there is no tidy transfer of power between the colonizer and the erstwhile colonized at the moment of independence but a complex pattern of anticipatory and recursive drives that spawn a hybrid consciousness. There is a persistence of cultural heterogeneity because as Derrida puts it, "A pure singularity can recognize another singularity only in abolishing itself or in abolishing the other as singularity."19 And if as Gilroy's reading of Beloved and other cultural texts suggests, ''... there can be no pure, uncontaminated or essential blackness anchored in an unsullied originary moment.", 20 could one theorize an essential whiteness? By the same token the accommodations postcolonial theory makes with hybridity should take into account the representation of the 'same' in all its historical multiplicity ? Even " ...Kim's superior whiteness," can be made, "to coexist with an unusual amalgam of Eastern mysticism, and Irish charm - both of which take on positive and negative attributes as the novel progresses. This boy hero, therefore, bears the traces of competing discourses of national identity (Irish, Indian,British)." 21 And despite his inscription into the Great Game, Kim is instinctively Indian. Consider the way he speaks of his Eurasian classmates. His tone reflects the pride in racial purity felt by the British as well as by upper class Hindus and Muslims. " 'Their eyes are blued and their nails are blackened with low-caste blood, many of them. Sons of metheeranees and _ brothers-in-law to the bhungi(sweeper).' "22This does not mean that Kipling is not capable of descending to the most egregious form of racism in some of these early stories. In 'His Chance In Life' Kipling attributes Michael D'Cruze's 'chance' heroism to one solitary drop of European blood which goes into recession in the presence of the English Officer who appears on the scene belatedly. "What has really died out here,' says McClure, " is the narrator's saving recognition that cross-cultural understanding is extremely difficult and that simplistic formulas imposed from without are more likely to distort than to illuminate the state of things across the border."23 In the wake of such crude display of jingoism, current theoretical agonism after recognizing the differential play of colonialist ambivalence has understandably concerned itself with the functioning of its agency. Strong objections have been voiced against the economy postulated by Bhabha between hegemonic and oppositional discourses "within the pages of theory ." 24 It is obvious that the debate over hybrid agency is meant to expose the "downgrading of the anti-imperialist texts written by national libertaion movements: while the notion of epistemic violence and occluding of reverse discourses have obliterated the role of the native as historical subject and combatant, possessor of an-other knowledge and producer of alternative traditions." 25 However according to Robert Young it would be churlish to reject Bhabha's claim that a hegemonic representation, "...carries within it a hidden flaw invisible at home but increasinly apparent abroad when it is away from the safety of the West."26 Said believes that Conrad possessed an understanding of such a flaw and was able to fashion narrative forms that put themselves on display revealing an aspect of reality to which imperialism had no access. "By accentuating the discrepancy between the official 'idea' of empire and the remarkably disorienting actuality of Africa, Marlow unsettles the reader's sense not only of the very idea of empire,but of something more basic, reality itself. ... With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time."27 Kipling's text is not capable of being read contrapuntally because he was writing "from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning and history had acquired a status of a virtual fact of nature. Kipling assumes a basically uncontested empire."28 However Sara Suleri while exploring the compelling ironies of colonial exchange notes that the absence of choice in Kim, "points less to Kipling's ambivalence toward empire than to the inherent limitations that imperialism necessarily imposes on the narratives that seek to represent its chronology."29 The "storm" that Rushdie senses in the early stories of Kipling is caused because "...the act of cultural enunciation - the place of utterance - is crossed by the differance of writing,"30 as Bhabha maintains in a Derridean vein. The imperial monolith which colonizes time and makes hegemonic thematization possible also encounters its limit in the otherness disseminated by the inherent differentiability of language. It is not within the scope of this paper to attempt a critique of the current agonistic pursuit of the most unassailable theory of postcolonial discourse. My basic purpose is to shift the focus from the subaltern to the hegemonic in order to arrive at some understanding of the dynamic of hybridity as it is played out in Kipling, whose imperialism, according to even his most astute critics allegedly stalled on the brink of ambivalence. "Kipling," Said says, " not only wrote about India, but was of it.,"31 Eliot calls him the "first citizen of India," because "his relations to India determines that about him which is the most important thing about a man, his religious attitude."32 Biographers have cited his unconventional wandering at night through the bazaars of Lahore and Allahabad, his Hindu,Muslim and Jewish fellow masons and his statement that India was "the only real home I had yet known"33 as sources of his cultural hybridity. To be sure Kipling seems at home in India in a way the liberal E.M.Forster could never be. Forster's comments about the Indian landscape in The Hill Of Devi betray the same sense of stupefaction that Rochester feels in the tropical Caribbean of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. In their reaction there is a tacit assumption that the formlessness in nature mirrors the spiritual "muddle" afflicting their respective host cultures. Whereas "All those colours and sounds and smells," Kingsley Amis maintains, made an impression on the young Kipling," that was distinctive as well as deep, a child born among them would no doubt find them wonderful, but he would not find them strange, would apprehend them the more clearly for having no preconceptions."34 And finally as Rushdie says, "There will always be plenty in Kipling that I will find difficult to forgive; but there is also enough truth in these stories to make them impossible to ignore."35 Is the logic of hybridity then sustainable only outside the political? Eliot's and Amis's attempt to hybridize Kipling though well meaning seem to point in that direction. But surely the 'truth' of the Plain Tales that Rushdie refers to needs to be anchored in a diasporic discursive textuality in order to make hybridity seem more than an accident of birth. What follows is an attempt to move hybridity to the middle region of Kipling's discourse, beyond Kim's "aphasia"36, where the chiasmus between competing political discourses is not strangulated but staged. The "truth' of these tales may have something to do with Kipling having heard them at places where all the stories of the world intersect - The Chubara of Dhuni Bhagat - he vividly describes in his preface to Life's Handicap. There he was told by the one-eyed Gobind that "All the earth is full of tales to him who listens and does not drive away the poor from his door. The poor are the best of tale- tellers: for they must lay their ear to the ground every night."37 Kipling collected these tales from "all places, and all sorts of people, from priests in the Chubara, from Ala Yar the carver Jiwun Singh the carpenter, nameless men on steamers and trains ..."38 Among those 'nameless' men on "trains" were the prototypes of Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehen of Loaferdom whom he had met during his sojourn into the desert cities of Rajputana. These men maintained that the country, " ... had not been one tithe exploited,"39 a sentiment vigorously shared by Carnehan on the train to Ajmer from Mhow, in The Man Who Would Be King.40. These folk, Kipling records in his travelogue From Sea To Sea subtitled 'Letters of Marque', lie in the Dak-bungalow "in long chairs in the verandah and tell each other interminable stories..."41 Most of them are "Bummers, land sharks, skirmishers for their bread....And their ends are as curiously brutal as their lives."42 One of them who might have served as model for Peachey was on the train when Kipling was "...on his way to Nasirabad," and explained to him "...the real reason of(sic) of the decadence of the Empire" and why " the best men goes somewhere else."43 In The Man Who Would Be King Peachey and Dravot go to Kafiristan and in the process expose the fissures in the monolith of empire. Although at one level Kipling's project is the self-fashioning of the Platonic form in as much as the two loafers establish themselves as King and Viceroy, his text also deranges the codes of empire through a parenthetic intervention of the tropology of performance. It is a story of actors not characters. Their intervention is elaborately staged. Unlike in Kim the text here does not rebound from empire as it is written through the articulation of difference in language. The story subverts the monolith by shifting focus from empire to empire building. In a manner reminiscent of Marshall Sahlins's representation of Captain Cook's death at Hawaiian hands "as the ritual sequel: the historical metaphor of a mythical reality,"44 Dravot is killed by the tribe when he inadvertently reveals his mortality by bleeding. Kipling almost anticipates Sahlins's thesis that in cultural encounters a 'structural crisis' is reached "... when all social relations begin to change their signs." 45 Like Cook Dravot is "...metamorphosed from a being of veneration to an object of hostility."46 Just as Cook is mistaken for the incarnation of the Hawaiin god Lono, Dravot is assumed to be the son of Alexander the Great . Kipling's story unfolds on two different levels; as personal history of a pair of loafers and its representation as a collective enactment of the establishment of the British Empire in India. Kafiristan is the tropological space for India just as Peachey's forays into the Indian Kingdom of Digumber for putting a squeeze on the Raja is a rehearsal for the Kafiristan expedition. To an informed Indian reader it should also resonate to Clive's underhand tactics and Dalhousie's policy of annexation of territory. But it is not simple iteration of a historical pattern. Through a quasi-fantastic web of interconnections, signs and omens the same theme reincarnates itself within the text without a radical break with its past. There is no transgression of narrative logic during the overlap between the historical and mythical. Yet each level is characterized by a distinctive flavour. The world of Kipling the narrator is radically different from that of Kafiristan. "Then I became respectable and returned to an office where there were no Kings outside the daily manufacture of a newspaper."47 Redoubling apart, the story works by disassembling empire and by reordering it through the interpolation of history. When a King "...is going to die ...on the otherside of the world," meaning imperial Europe, " the paper is to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram."48 This freezing of chronology in the colonized world on account of a distant death results in the dissolution of cultural heterogeneity. Empire acquires a metaphoric unity as the whole world stands still "in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event."49 But Peachey and Dravot appear suddenly amidst "the roar and rattle of wheels.... I was not pleased, " says the narrator, because I wished to go to sleep, not to squabble with loafers."50 The scene is repeated with a similar slide from temporal suspension to resurgence of chronology when Peachey alone staggers into the office two years later. "The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again. Summer passed and winter thereafter, and came and passed again. The daily paper continued and I with it, and upon the third summer there fell a hot night, a night issue, and a strained waiting for something to be telegraphed from the other side of the world, exactly as had happened before."51 However this abnegation of chronology is soon rescinded when there creeps in, "...what was left of a man ... this rag-wrapped whining cripple." 52 Peachey's halting chronicle reconstructs the story of Dravot who would be king. Both interruptions are noisily staged. History interrogates empire and produces a disruptive sequence of chronology that pushes the narrative toward apocalypse. "The mountains they danced at night, and the mountains they tried to fall on Peachey's head..." 53 The 'dried withered head of Daniel Dravot",54 that Peachey shakes out of his horsehair bag symbolizes the terrible isolation of the would be empire builder and his infernal end. Surely this imbrication of damnation and notional imperialism makes The Man Who Would Be A King a more than likely candidate for a contrapuntal reading! Notes