Literature can be used by the historian as valuable evidence, and it is in this context that we will evaluate and analyse amongst other works, Plain Tales from the Hills, Kim and Passage to India.

Since authors are perceptive and vocal members of the public rather than simply indifferent onlookers they provide clues about how people were thinking at a given time.

From opposite perspectives and in different periods both Kipling's and Forster's works are studies of British attitudes towards India and Indians.

They provide an important, if different, insight into the mind of the Anglo-Indian, European community as it went about the business of governing India at a time when the empire was both ostensibly at its greatest and later on the verge of irreversible decline.

Given the limitations that Kipling and Forster were novelists not historians, do their novels and short stories contain historical material?

Synoptic Lecture Notes

LECTURE 8:

                KIPLING

'The Englishman as brute' From: Soldier Tales 1896

Literature as History!

To what extent can literature divulge material or evidence that an historian might use?

i. Authors reflect public opinion

ii. They create images that are believed and which inspire.

iii. They can mould opinion

Examples: Hayward refers to Kipling's creation of the 'cult of the strong, silent man'

[But did K create this image or was he simply an observer]

Leonard Woolf - muses over whether he modelled himself on a Kipling hero.

Kipling in Historical Perspective

Born in India. Perhaps his own experience the model for Kim.

Schooling in England 1870s.

Sent to school which produced military types

United Services Proprietary Colleges.

Became friendly with Cornell Price - the headmaster

(who was a 'crammer', but no imperialist).

1882 - K returns to India as a journalist, working for the Civil and Military Gazette.

No sign of K's imperialism

1889 - K leaves India for good. He ostensibly leaves as a thorough advocate of Empire.

Possibility - 7 years in India convinced Kipling that Empire was a good thing.

This begins to show in his writings.

'Stalky and Co'

The Stalky ethos is unsentimental - Defines education strictly as 'making men able to make and keep Empires'.

- Defines attributes of the ideal Imperialist = feasibility, resourcefulness, courage.

'Kim' and 'Stalky' the exemplars

Limitations in Treating Kipling as an Historian:

K is product of his Age

Not uniform in outlook or views

Several Kiplings: (a) 1882-1900 : An optimistic K.

(b) 1900- : Pessimistic and chauvinist

Primarily a novelist and short-story writer.

Novelists possess missionary quality.

Nature of Kiplings Empire:

1. Purpose - Law of duty

2. White Man's Burden: a) Capacity to rule

Features - b) Racial purity

c) Empire in perpetuation

d) Westernisation inappropriate

[No enthusiasm for remaking Indian Society.]

e) Empire of Protection

Protect Indians from themselves

Protect India from enemies

[Kim & 'The Great Game']

Ideal Empire

Ideal Anglo-Indian - (Subalterns and officials in the Public Works Dept.)

K highly critical of well-meaning but ignorant administrators - ['Tod's Amendment']

Stereotypical Indian - Bengalee 'Babu'.

Apartheid is the Law of the Jungle

I. NEWBOLT

The sand of the desert is golden Red
Red with the wreck of the square that broke
The gatlings jammed and the colonel dead
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke
The river of dead has brimmed his banks
And England's far, and Honour a name
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
Play up! Play up! and play the game.

[Glorious but fatal duty - heroism]

II. KIPLING

Take up the White-Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half-child

[Duty far from glorious = hard slog]

III. KIPLING IN JUNGLE BOOK - Description of the Monkey Folk [or 'westernised elite?']

Monkey folk who have no law. They are outcasts. Bandalog. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words while they listen, and peep and wait up in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders.

Bhadralok. They have no remembrances. They boast and chatter and pretend they are a great people . . . but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten.

Tutorial Questions to be Addressed

1. The Law of the Jungle:
Analyse Kiplings portrayal of Imperial society. What principles underlay the order it upheld?

2. The Theme of Alienation:
To Forster what was wrong with that order was not only that it was alienating, it went against the law of the jungle. Discuss.

Core Reading

Passage to India

Kim

Plain Tales from the Hill

The Hill of Devi

Additional Reading

John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian

R. Carstairs, The Little World of an Indian District Officer

A. Greenberger, The British Image of India : a Study in the Literature of Imperialism, 1880-1960

F. King, E.M. Forster and His World, London, 1978

P. Mason, Kipling. The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire

B. Parry, Delusions and Discoveries : Studies on India in the British Imagination

Articles

M. Edwardes, 'Rudyard Kipling and the Imperial Imagination' Twentieth Century, June 1953

J. C. Simmons, 'The Novelist as Historian', Victorian Studies, 1971