The Wish House and Other Stories Read Free Page A

Indian society.
    The letter
continues:
    Now this is a wholly wrong attitude of mind
[my italics] 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
[fall into this wrong attitude of mind] [Kipling’s italics]—goodbye to his chances of attempting to understand the people of the land.
    Kipling then describes his novel
Mother Maturin
as an attempt to penetrate the authentic native life, which is unaffected by British rule. “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…”—which could be a gloss on “The Head of the District.” 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 ” (my italics and bold).
    This scarcely sounds like a racist to me.
    Later in the same letter, discussing Ram Dass, his printer, Kipling again writes something frequently quoted against him: “Remember Wop in spite of what good lies in the native he is utterly unable to do anything finished or clean, or neat unless he has the Englishman at his elbow to guide and direct and put straight.”
    Here, importantly, we should note that, writing to W. E. Henley (January 18–19, 1893), Kipling makes the identical criticism of white Americans. He says that, in America, “a certain defect runs through everything—workmanship, roads, bridges, contracts, barter and sale and so forth—all inaccurate, all slovenly, all out of plumb and untrue. So far the immense natural wealth of the land holds this ineptitude up; and the slovenly plenty hides their sins unless you look for them. Au fond it’s barbarism—barbarism plus telephone, electric light, rail and suffrage but all the more terrible for that very reason.”
    Odd, isn’t it, that Kipling should equate native Indians and white Americans as essentially barbarous? However eccentric, the judgment begins to look impartial rather than racist. And one finds the same kind of cross-racial equation made in
Letters of Travel
(1892–1913),where Kipling notes the slovenliness of New York’s streets and declares them “first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore, or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal….” Kipling’s comparison is intended to shock by its initial unlikeliness. The barbarity of the Zulu is taken for granted, as the barbarity of the American is not. But this could be described as racist only if one were not prepared to concede that there might be something primitive in a Zulu kraal.
    Given his reputation as a racist, it is equally odd to find Kipling rebuking a clergyman for ethnic insensitivity (October 16, 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