Kipling’s Notions of Race in Plain Tales from the Hills

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Recommended: Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden imperialism

Kipling’s Notions of Race in Plain Tales from the Hills

"No other Western writer has ever known India as Kipling knew it"

"nobody can teach you British India better than Rudyard Kipling"

"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".

Salman Rushdie, "Kipling", from Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta Books, 1991, 74-80.

It may be discerned from the quotes displayed above that Rushdie, a writer not renowned for suffering fools gladly, accords Kipling some epistemological superiority. Yet when examining images of race and blood in Kipling, the critic turns most frequently to Kim, and I contend that the short stories of Plain Tales from the Hills have been undeservedly neglected in favour of the longer novel. This brief essay examines issues of alterity, going native, empire and blood in Plain Tales from the Hills.

The short story "Lispeth" is a particularly rich field from which to examine notions of alterity. Kipling’s narrator points out that "It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts"(4). It would be tempting, given the author’s reputation as a right-wing apologist for empire, to take this comment at face value. However, I believe that "Lispeth", as a text, is centrally critical of the British in India. The missionaries and the young Briton that Lispeth idolises are repeatedly shown as being racially arrogant and duplicitous. Witness the Chaplain’s wife’s description of Lispeth’s love as a "barbarous and indelicate folly", while maintaining that the deceitful "Englishman,… was of a superior clay". Similarly, after the Chaplain’s wife says that "There is no law w...

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...ived from England, he was uneasy about many of the central pillars of the British will to power in India, such as the police, government, and missionary church. Kipling is guilty of a middle-class tendency to romanticise private soldiers and racial stereotypes, such as Mulvaney, or the "woild" and "dissolute" Pathan. Yet he should not be dismissed as unworthy of further study, and the common critical tendency that consigns him, along with Edmund Burke, to the dustbin of right-wing writers is intellectually weak, unquestioning and manifestly uncritical

Useful Links:

Imperial Archive Website: http://www.qub.ac.uk/english/imperial/imperial.htm

Kipling Society Webpage http://www.kipling.org.uk/

The Victorian Web: http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/kipling/kiplingov.html

Bibliography:

Kipling, Rudyard. Plain Tales from the Hills. London: Penguin, 1994.

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