Rudyard Kipling, India and Edward Said

by Ibn Warraq (March 2010)

Was Kipling a racist, as Edward Said claims? Consider this poem:
WE AND THEY

All good people agree,

And all good people say,

All nice people, like Us, are We

And every one else is They:

But if you cross over the sea,

Instead of over the way,

You may end by (think of it!) looking on We


“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…”.

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“Now this is a wholly wrong attitude of mind but it’s one that a Briton who washes, and don’t take bribes, and who thinks of other things besides intrigue and seduction most naturally falls into. When he does, goodbye to his chances of attempting to understand the people of the land.”


“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…” 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.”
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“[16 October 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.” 


“The poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ has been widely misread. In effect, critics have stopped, affronted, at the first stanza: “Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half child.” It is the imputation of childishness that lodges in the throat—and, alas, in the brain. Has anyone, I wonder, read to the end of the poem and understood it? The reward for taking up the White Man’s Burden is stated in the last line: “The judgment of your peers!” Who are those ‘peers,’ those equals? Since the poem is addressed to the USA, you might think that “peers” refers to British imperialists. But you would be wrong. The “peers” in question are the “new-caught, sullen peoples”—raised to equality. As the previous three stanzas make clear.

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The cry of hosts ye humour

Nor call too loud on Freedom

By all ye cry or whisper,

By all ye leave or do,

The silent, sullen peoples

Shall weigh your Gods and you.

The lightly proffered laurel,

The easy, ungrudged praise.

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

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“I was made wise by thee, Holy One,” said Kim…forgetting St. Xavier’s; forgetting his white blood; forgetting even the Great Game as he stooped, Mohammedan fashion, to touch his master’s feet in the dust of the Jain temple. “My teaching I owe to thee. I have eaten thy bread three years. My time is finished. I am loosed from the schools. I come to thee.”


‘A holy man—a holy man indeed. His Gods are not the Gods, but his feet are upon the way,’ was the answer. ‘And his methods of nativities, though that is beyond thee, are wise and sure.'”


Kipling admires the way Hindus and Muslims share wayside shrines, and points to the pessimistic view of the Reverend Arthur Bennett, who believed that “[b]etween himself and the Roman Catholic Chaplain of the Irish contingent lay…an unbridgeable gulf….”




http://www.kipling.org.uk/bookmart_fra.htm .


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