Vol. 22 No. 1 · 6 January 2000
pages 21-24 | 6287 words
A feather! A very feather upon the face!
Amit Chaudhuri
- The Unforgiving Minute by Harry Ricketts
Chatto, 434 pp, £25.00, January 1999, ISBN 0 7011 3744 4
In 1857, eight years before Kipling was born, Indian soldiers in the north of the country rebelled against the representatives of the East India Company. The uprising was known as the Sepoy Mutiny and, later, somewhat romantically, as the First War of Independence. Although its impact on the Indian and Anglo-Indian middle classes was probably not as immediate and direct as it has been made out to be in subsequent colonial and nationalist narratives, it brought to an end a period of cultural exchange between different races. The late 18th and the first half of the 19th century had seen the commercial and colonial expansion of the East India Company in Bengal and other parts of India, thanks to a series of military victories and not a few dishonourable transactions, but it was also a time of commingling, especially in Calcutta, between the new, post-feudal Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat – the solar hat and khaki uniform that Beerbohm has Kipling wear in one of his caricatures were not yet de rigueur. There are early portraits depicting Englishmen with their Indian wives, dressed in a mish-mash of Persian and Hindu styles. In the first half of the 19th century, the Fort William College, later the Hindu College, saw teacher and student, Englishman, Indian and Eurasian, engage in a colloquy at a crucial moment of modern history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally difficult for the narrator of the story ‘Beyond the Pale’ to make his seemingly unequivocal statement: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.’
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[*] Rudyard Kipling by Andrew Lycett (Weidenfeld, 659 pp., £25, 9 September 1999, 0 297 81907 0). Volume IV of Kipling’s Letters (1911-19), edited by Thomas Pinney, also came out last year (Macmillan, 609 pp., £70, 21 January 1999, 0 333 43989 9), as did The Oxford Authors: Rudyard Kipling, edited by Daniel Karlin (Oxford, 699 pp., £40, 8 April 1999, 019 254201 x).
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 2 · 20 January 2000
From C.A. Bayly
It is good to be reminded by Amit Chaudhuri that the colonial encounter between the British and Indians before 1870 involved a traffic in ideas as well as simple exploitation (LRB, 6 January). Indians were not passive victims of empire. They quickly forged their own literary and political tools with which to challenge the colonial view of modernity. Readers should not be misled into thinking, however, that there is anything very novel about Chaudhuri's exposition of Indian social and intellectual history. There is a massive body of relevant historical work dating in particular from the Eighties. It is a travesty to suggest that Indian histories of this period are still a 'blank', consisting of little more than the work of the classical Indologists and 'certain episodes in the Nationalist movement'. My colleagues in Calcutta, Delhi, Chicago and London would doubtless be happy to post him their basic undergraduate reading lists. But, in the meantime, one might point to the wide range of work which has been done on the positive as well as negative relationships between Indian literati and Western Orientalists and teachers. Beginning with the work of David Kopf and Blair Kling in the Sixties, the relationship between British Orientalism and the so-called Bengal Renaissance has been carefully explored. For instance, Sumit Sarkar's brilliant essays on these issues have deplored the way in which many Indian intellectuals responded to Western educational projects by resorting to a monolithic interpretation of Hinduism. Richard Fox Young has shown how orthodox Hindu learned men kept up a barrage of criticism in Sanskrit against British polemics on Indian cosmology and religion. Other historians and literary scholars, from S.R. Kidwai to Javed Majeed, Christopher King and David Lelyveld, have worked on the formation and standardisation of Hindi, Urdu and other regional languages. In fact every theme that Chaudhuri cites has been discussed and debated at length. Two general points are worth making. First, much of this work has been published in relatively obscure journals and biographies in English or in Bengali and other regional languages by modest scholars who have no recourse to Western literary journals or to the international conference circuit. They should not be neglected for this reason. Second, in the days when historians occupied the high ground of debate in the humanities, literature and creative writing were often condemned to a few poorly-researched paragraphs of generality towards the end of a large tome. Now that novelists and literary critics have supposedly occupied that high ground, it would be a pity if they were to display a similar hubris in regard to history.
C.A. Bayly
St Catharine’s College, Cambridge
From David Gilmour
Amit Chaudhuri writes that 'the British Empire may have showered Kipling with honours' and later refers to his 'public honours'. In fact no writer was ever more scrupulous about rejecting honours, public or imperial. Among others, he refused to become the Poet Laureate, a Companion of Honour, a knight (he was offered both the KCB and the KCMG) or a Member of the British Academy. He also twice turned down George V's offer of the Order of Merit. Second, he writes that Kipling's parents sent their son to 'a private tutorial home in Devon when he was seven, where he was tortured by his landlady and her son, until rescued by his mother and taken back to India'. In fact he was sent to a boarding-house in Hampshire when he was five, rescued by his mother when he was 11 and sent to a public school in Devon just after his 12th birthday. He returned to India by himself at the age of 16. Third, Chaudhuri argues that the defeat of the Ilbert Bill 'would have given Indian magistrates the right to try Englishmen'. In fact restrictions on senior Indian magistrates trying British subjects on criminal charges in the major cities had been removed in 1877, and the Ilbert Bill (which was modified not defeated in 1883) maintained that principle in the rest of the country, even if in practice it was largely negated by the concession that the accused could insist on trial by a jury, at least half of whose members would be British. Fourth, Chaudhuri quotes the notorious line 'Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet' to suggest that Kipling believed that peoples from different sides of the globe would never understand each other. But the concluding lines of the poem assert that men of similar courage and ability can be equals despite differences of class, race, nation and continent. Finally, Chaudhuri says that Kipling was 'a spokesman for a particularly unpleasant racial theory' and often a 'deranged racial supremacist'. During two years' research into Kipling's ideas on race, politics and empire, I have found no evidence that he formulated any such theory or that he was the spokesman for anyone else's.
David Gilmour
Edinburgh
Vol. 22 No. 3 · 3 February 2000
From Hari Kunzru
I find David Gilmour's defence of Kipling against Amit Chaudhuri's charge of racism rather disingenuous (Letters, 20 January). While it may be true that Kipling never formulated an explicit theory of racial supremacy, the usual 19th-century models of racial hierarchy inform his work, along with a set of racial theories peculiar to the British Raj. The poem 'East is East' is far from the innocent portrayal of mutual cultural respect which Gilmour opposes to Chaudhuri's gulf of misunderstanding. Its dewy-eyed narrative of blood-brotherhood between Kamal the Pathan border thief and the English colonel's son originates in ideas about the racial characteristics of the people of India that were handed down as basic lore to generations of India hands, and for which we largely have the British Army to thank. After the uprising of 1857 it was theorised that a major cause had been the 'feminine' racial predisposition to untrustworthiness of the mutinous recruits, mostly Hindus from the North Indian plains. From then on the British were careful to recruit their soldiers predominantly from such 'masculine' groups as North-Western Muslims, Sikhs and Gurkhas, all of whom were considered to be more racially suited to service, and therefore less likely to chop up the colonel's wife in a sudden fit of blood-frenzy. Kamal and the colonel's son are both representatives of stern martial races, and hence seen by Kipling as jolly good fellows. Effete Bengali babus like Amit Chaudhuri or wily scheming Kashmiris like myself were not generally accorded the same all-boys-together respect.
Hari Kunzru
London W12
