Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1288 page)

The principle was sound; but the consequences were such as usually follow when ideas which are simple in one continent are applied in another. Any man on the frontier could have told what would come of asking the Khusru Kheyel to respect and obey Mr Grish Chunder Dé. It was not a matter of religion or ability, but of history. The Khusru Kheyel had had relations with the countrymen of their new Head for generations and they were not relations of respect and obedience. How there was riot and some rapid blood-letting on the border, and how the new Head resigned his office before he had taken it over, is told as a warning that there is a wrong kind of simplicity in dealing with India. It is fatal to have invented simple and embracing phrases about a country which holds more races than all Europe; has had a long and private history of its own; has been more often conquered than Great Britain; and has had every sort of experience except that of being governed according to constitutional law.

This chapter being mainly devoted to rescuing Mr Kipling from his political admirers and censors, it may be well to conclude upon his vision of the devoted civilian Scott, the hero of a tale already quoted, the man who fed the Indian babies from a herd of goats fattened on the food which the starving people of the Deccan distrusted and refused. Scott appears in that story at sunset, delectable and humane, sneezing in the dust of a hundred little feet, “a god in a halo of gold dust, walking slowly at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran small naked cupids.”

Clearly there is something wrong with the popular habit of regarding Mr Kipling as essentially concerned with the carving of men to the “nasty noise of beef-cutting on the block.” His “god in a halo of gold dust” seriously discourages any attempt to brand him with the mark of the reverting carnivor.

IV

NATIVE INDIA

From Simla we have come down to the plains and the work of the English in Imperial India. Thence we pass to India herself. Concerning native India Mr Kipling’s principle thesis — a thesis illustrated with point and competency in many excellent tales — is that for the people of the West there can be no such thing as the real India — only here and there an understanding that wavers and frequently expires. Mr Kipling does not insolently explain that India is thus and thus. He allows the impression to grow upon us, as once it grew upon himself, that in India all the settled ways of the West are insecure, that at any moment we may be looking into the House of Suddhu.

        ”A stone’s throw out on either hand
        From that well-ordered road we tread,
        And all the world is wild and strange:
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
        Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.”

It is not for an Englishman to speak of the real India. Let him stand with Mr Kipling between East and West, and allow each thing he sees to add to his dark and intricate impression. India will then assume her own uneasy and vast form, will press upon the nerves, and be declared mysterious.

There are a few pages in
Life’s Handicap
describing the City of Lahore by night. There is great heat in these pages; there is distance also, and the breathless air of streets where the formic swarming of India, her callous fecundity, the tyranny of her skies, and her old faith, prepare us for the House of Suddhu and the return of Imray:

“The roof-tops are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air is full of undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of Dreadful Night; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued. Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch sleepers turning to and fro, shifting their beds and again resettling them. In the pit-like courtyards of the houses there is the same movement.

“The pitiless Moon shows it all. Shows, too, the plains outside the city, and here and there a hand’s-breadth of the Ravee without the walls. Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a house-top almost directly below the mosque Minar. Some poor soul has risen to throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes like heliographic signals.… Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest. It is only the lower-class women who sleep on the house-tops. What must the torment be in the latticed zenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling? There are footfalls in the court below. It is the
Muezzin
— faithful minister; but he ought to have been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that prayer is better than sleep — the sleep that will not come to the city.

“The
Muezzin
fumbles for a moment with the door of one of the Minars, disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar — a magnificent bass thunder — tells that he has reached the top of the Minar. They must hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself! Even across the courtyard it is almost overpowering. The cloud drifts by and shows him outlined black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad chest heaving with the play of his lungs — ’Allah ho Akbar’; then a pause while another
Muezzin
somewhere in the direction of the Golden Temple takes up the call — ’Allah ho Akbar.’ Again and again; four times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up already. — ’I bear witness that there is no God by God.’”

“Several weeks of darkness pass after this. For the Moon has gone out. The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawn before making my way homeward. Again the noise of shuffling feet. The morning call is about to begin, and my nightwatch is over. ‘Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!’ The east grows grey, and presently saffron; the dawn wind comes up as though the
Muezzin
had summoned it; and, as one man, the City of Dreadful Night rises from its bed and turns its face towards the dawning day.…

“‘Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?’ What is it? Something borne on men’s shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I stand back. A woman’s corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a bystander says, ‘She died at midnight from the heat.’”

This passage may stand as a fair example of Mr Kipling’s method of dealing with India. It is an able piece of descriptive writing. It is marked by a conscious and deliberate resolve that the “effect” shall be made. It shows us the Indian city from a high distance, as it appeared to an observer with a knack for vividly delivering his impressions. It is in no sense an inspired wrestle with the reality of India; and in that it is typical. Mr Kipling has never claimed to grasp or interpret his Indian theme. He has stood away almost ostentatiously from the material he was exploiting.

It is indeed the chief merit of his Indian tales that he admits himself to be no more, so far as India is concerned, than an adventurer making the literary most of his adventure. He has at any rate the sensibility to be conscious that often he is in the position of a tripper before the Sphinx. His tales are thrilled with respect and a sense of India’s power. She it is who wipes the lips of Aurelian McGoggin, who flouts the Greatest of All the Viceroys, humbles the Legal Member of the Supreme Legislative Council, and drives the lonely white intruder to illusion and death. She is indifferent to every conqueror. She feeds her multitudes like a mother; and then suddenly her bounty dries and there is famine and pestilence. Always she is a confronting Presence dwarfing to one height masters and slaves. Mr Kipling has followed this Presence as Browning’s poet followed a more familiar quest:

“Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune —
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! She goes out as I enter.”

It is a lawful adventure, and for some it is an absolute duty, to follow and challenge the Presence in word and deed. Englishmen who live in her shadow have sometimes for their honour to grasp and defy her; to assume that they are bound to question her authority. India for all her unknown terror has to be wrestled with for the blessing that England requires upon the labour of the English. Though the Gods of India are sacred, the devils of India, filthy and lawless, must be driven out. When India put the mark of the beast upon Fleete the powers of darkness had of necessity to be brought to heel, and this story may be read as a parable. The mark of the beast, wherever it may appear, is the Imperial concern of the English in India.

But a warning enters here. Mr Kipling, celebrating Imperial India, has shown us the English at close war with the India of black magic and secret murder, of cruelty and fear. But he has balanced the account. There is another set of stories, showing us how the white man comes to disaster, who, not content with his exact and simple duty, insolently overleaps the breach between East and West — the breach which Mr Kipling himself so scrupulously observes. There was Trajego:

“He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again.”

His story is entitled
Beyond the Pale
, and is to be found among
Plain Tales from the Hills
. There is also
The Man Who Would Be King
. He, too, neglected the barriers. India may be ruled by the resolute and challenged by the brave; but India may never be embraced.

India, who strikes out of a brazen sky; who poisons with her infected breath and is served to the death without reward; who physically cows her people with dust and fever and heat, and is possessed with devils who must be pacified; where successive civilisations have left their bones upon the soil and a hundred religions have decayed, leaving the old air heavy with exhalations — this India slowly takes shape in Mr Kipling’s native stories. Her physical immensity and pressure is felt in stories like
The End of the Passage
and
William the Conqueror
. Her sleepless tyranny, which has made men intricate and incalculable, driving them to subterranean ways of thought and fancy, rules in every page of a tale like
The Return of Imray
. Imray was an amiable Englishman who incautiously patted the head of his servant’s child. Bahadur Khan speaks of it thus to Strickland of the Police:

“‘Walking among us, his servants, he cast his eyes upon my child who was four years old. Him he bewitched, and in ten days he died of the fever, my child!’

“‘What said Imray Sahib?’

“‘He said he was a handsome child and patted him on the head; wherefore my child died. Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he had come, and was sleeping. Wherefore I dragged him up into the roof-beams and made all fast behind him — the Heaven-born knows all things. I am the servant of the Heaven-born.… Be it remembered that the Sahib’s shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an extra piece of soap in his wash-basin. My child was bewitched and I slew the wizard.’”

There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness found in all Mr Kipling’s native tales. If the premises of life in India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naïvely innocent as a problem in geometry.

It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East. The white side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in
Kim
, and in all the hints and small studies for
Kim
that preceded Mr Kipling’s best of all Indian tales.

But
Kim
is something of a paradox. It is the best of all Indian tales by virtue of qualities which have little to do with India. It is an Indian book only upon its least important side. It is true that Kim himself is upon one side the most cunning of Mr Kipling’s studies of the meeting of East and West; but that, for us, is not his final merit. It is the final merit of Kim to be first cousin of Mowgli, the child of the Jungle. His first claim to our delight in him is that he is the quickest of young creatures, his senses sharp and clean, of a conscience untroubled, of a spirit that rejoices in nimble work, of a will in which loyalty and courage and the peace of self-confidence are firmly rooted. In a word, he is Mowgli among men.

Here, however, we approach
Kim
merely as a tale of India — as a link artfully used by Mr Kipling to connect and pass in review the whole pageant of Imperial India as it is revealed to Western eyes — priests, peasants, soldiers, civilians, people of the plains and hills, women of the latticed palanquin and the bazaar, Hindu and Mohammedan, Afghan and Bengali. The picture of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim is an almost unsurpassed piece of descriptive writing. The diversity of the picture dazzles and bewilders us at first. Then out of all this diversity there gradually comes a conviction that fundamentally India is unimaginably simple at heart in spite of her medley of religions and conquests and races; that it is precisely this simplicity which baffles the intruder. There is the simplicity of Bahadur Khan, whose child was bewitched:
therefore
he killed Imray Sahib and hid his body behind the ceiling cloth. There is the simplicity of the hunter of Daoud Shah, whose house was dishonoured:
therefore
he killed his wife and went upon the trail of her seducer. There is the simplicity of men who starve and are burnt with the sun:
therefore
they deprecate the wrath of devils and put food in the beggar’s bowl. There is, above all, the simplicity of clean hunger, thirst, adventure, piety, friendliness and love that threads the whole story of the Lama and his
Chela
.