The Wish House and Other Stories Read Free

that, on the whole, Bengalis get poor press from Kipling. The panic of Grish Chunder Dé is reproduced in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, “The Giridih Coal-Fields”) where Kipling sketches an
imagined
mining accident in which the Bengali babu panics and blames everything on the gang-Sidar. Kipling’s verdict is “The best of accountants, but the poorest of coroners is he.”
    “The best of accountants.” Kipling does pay tribute to this specific quality, this aptitude, in the Bengali babu. In “Among the Railway Folk” (vol. 2, p. 281), he closes with this paean: “The Babus make beautiful accountants, and if we could only see it, a merciful providence has made the Babu for figures and detail. Without him, the dividends of any company would be eaten up by the expenses of English or city-bred clerks. The Babu is a great man, and, to respect him, you must see five score or so of him in a room a hundred yards long, bending over ledgers, ledgers, and yet more ledgers—silent as the Sphinx and busy as a bee.”
    Of course, there is an ironic tinge in that Sphinx-like silence, given the Bengali babu’s legendary loquacity—“celebrated” in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, p. 219), where Sir Steuart Bayley endures Bengali bombast by the hour—but nevertheless Kipling’s final, judiciously particular verdict is clear.
“The Babu is a great man”
—when he is a clerk.
    A verdict that is, of course, sufficient reason now to convict Kipling of racism. He is well disposed to the Indian, the indictment goes, only so long as the Indian knows his place. So the babu is a greatman if he sticks to clerical work. The Indian, though, isn’t interested in Kipling’s benevolent disposition. It is irrelevant. The Indian rather wants justice. Ergo, Kipling is essentially racist.
    I want to argue strongly against this. For several reasons. First, compared to the worst imperialist racists, Kipling is indeed benevolent and enlightened. There are degrees of racism. Hitler’s anti-Semitism is clearly far worse than that of T. S. Eliot, supposing you happen to believe Eliot
was
anti-Semitic. Which I incline to disbelieve. Second, there is an injustice inherent in the retrospective application of the standards of 2002. No one at the time would have recognized them as valid. In fact, the application of racial and class categories was universal until the end of the Second World War. The war completely broke down accepted ways of categorization. Up to that date, working-class men and women would have described themselves as working-class, the middle class as middle-class. And so on. Categorization, however deplorable, was then a matter of fact and a fact of life.
    In his second letter to Margaret Burne-Jones, Kipling addresses her central question. She had asked if the English and the natives had interests in common: “d-d few,” Kipling replies—adding, “faith if you knew in what inconceivable filth of mind the peoples of India were brought up from their cradle; if you realised the views—or one tenth of the views—they hold about women and their absolute incapacity for speaking the truth as we understand it—the immeasurable gulf that lies between the two races in all things, you would see how it comes to pass that the Englishman is prone to despise the natives—(I must use that misleading term for brevity’s sake)—and how, except in the matter of trade, to have little or nothing in common with him.”
    And that is where Andrew Lycett leaves the quotation and the question of Kipling’s attitude to Indians.
    At which point, Kipling sounds like an authentic pukka sahib. But Andrew Lycett has reversed the order of Kipling’s paragraphs to make this
beginning
Kipling’s conclusion. Lycett writes:
“At the end of the day
, he admitted that the British in India had very little in common with their subjects” (my italics). True, but misleading. Because Kipling goes on, amazingly, to
deplore
this gulf and to show his ambition to penetrate