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

Kiplings Notions of Race in intelligible Tales from the HillsNo other Western writer has ever known India as Kipling knew it nobody send word teach you British India better than Rudyard Kipling There lead always be plenty in Kipling that I will find difficult to forgive exactly 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 pathetic 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 sententious story Lispeth is a particularl y rich field from which to examine notions of alterity. Kiplings narrator points out that It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out merciless Eastern instincts(4). It would be tempting, given the authors reputation as a right 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 proud and duplicitous. Witness the Chaplains wifes description of Lispeths love as a barbarous and indelicate folly, while maintaining that the deceitful Englishman, was of a superior clay. Similarly, after the Chaplains wife says that There is no law w... ...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 st ereotypes, 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 uncriticalUseful LinksImperial Archive Website http//www.qub.ac.uk/english/imperial/imperial.htmKipling Society Webpage http//www.kipling.org.uk/The Victorian Web http//landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/kipling/kiplingov.htmlBibliographyKipling, Rudyard. Plain Tales from the Hills. London Penguin, 1994.