You are here:Home Archives for kipling
Saturday, December 31, 2011 By Abhijit

Kipling, Calcutta and The City of Dreadful Night

Kipling

Kipling

Today is the birthday of Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865- 18 January 1936). Born in Bombay, now called Mumbai, he died in London.

Calcutta, now called Kolkata, has come to be called the “city of the dreadful night”. Even newspapers in Calcutta use that phrase as a synonym for the city. However, Kipling’s short story, The City of Dreadful Night, is set in Lahore, and not in Calcutta. It describes people sleeping in the street, inert as corpses, and ends with a description of a woman’s body being taken to the burning ghat. “So the city was of Death as well as of Night, after all,” Kipling writes in the last sentence.

Calcutta is described in newspaper sketches like A Real Live City, On the Banks of the Hughli, With the Calcutta. They were compiled in the book, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places, first published in 1891. Maybe that’s how Calcutta came to be called the City of Dreadful Night. The book was published without Kipling’s permission and so he had suppressed, according to a bibliography of Kipling’s works I found on Google.

Kipling compares Calcutta with London in A Real Live City but is then revolted by the stench and corruption.  Calcutta was the capital of India at the time and this is how Kipling begins his piece:Continue Reading

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , ,
Friday, August 13, 2010 By Abhijit

How easy to read is Jane Austen?

Sparkling with wit, Jane Austen's graceful style is even more reader-friendly than the language of newspapers.

So are the first chapters of literary classics like David Copperfield and Sons and Lovers. They are all easier to read than newspapers.

That's what I found in a readability test that looked at the number of words in a sentence and whether the words were long or short.

You can check the test results for newspapers and magazines like The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker and The Economist in my previous post.

How Easy to Read is Jane Austen?

Click on the slideshow to see the readability scores for the first chapters of:

  • Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice,
  • Thackeray's Vanity Fair,
  • Dickens' David Copperfield,
  • George Eliot's Middlemarch,
  • Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd,
  • Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim,
  • Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles,
  • Kipling's Kim,
  • EM Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, and
  • DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.

Continue Reading

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Monday, July 26, 2010 By Abhijit

Banyan, Kipling and Mandalay

The writer of the Banyan column in the Economist is bidding goodbye to Asia, cheerfully mangling Kipling: "For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say: Come you back, you British columnist; come you back to Mandalay!"

"Come you back, you British solider," is what Kipling wrote, "come you back to Mandalay!"

Banyan was having fun, echoing Kipling. For Mandalay is one of the naughtiest poems he wrote about the East. It's not about duty like The White Man's Burden or courage in battle like Gunga Din. It's far more earthy. The speaker is a British soldier who, back in London, finds the English girls unattractive after the woman he left behind in Burma:

Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and –
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

It goes on:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;

Here's the full poem:

Continue Reading

Filed Under: Books, Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Thursday, February 11, 2010 By Abhijit

Kipling, race and religion

Kipling The uproar in Singapore against Pastor Rony Tan, who was questioned by the authorities and had to apologize for mocking the religious beliefs of Buddhists and Taoists, reminds me of the controversy surrounding a famous writer.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai, in the JJ School of Art, where his father was the dean. The bungalow is being restored and will be turned into a museum, but it will feature paintings by local artists instead of showcasing Kipling memorabilia. Local officials frowned on plans to include a Kipling room because he is seen as an imperialist, reported the Telegraph. Young Indian students interviewed by the BBC World Service, however, said they were proud he was born there.

I heard it on the BBC arts programme Strand on the day the Straits Times reported the pastor had been questioned by the authorities. You can still hear it here.

Kipling also glorified Christianity at the expense of other religions. He wrote the poem, The White Man's Burden, and about "lesser breeds without the law". Racism is blatant in that line from his poem, Recessional.

And yet it is a surprisingly poignant poem. Written in 1897, during Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, it reflects on the decline and fall of empires and is a prayer to God to spare the British and forgive any sins of vainglory:

Continue Reading

Filed Under: Books, Singapore Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 By Abhijit

Sea of Poppies: Riveting history

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh

Englishwomen in the early 19th century bathed only twice or thrice a week in India – and mocked the Indians for bathing every day. The memsahibs – Englishwomen – were bathed in their bathtubs by their maids who soaped and scrubbed them, asking what to them sounded like “Cushy?” “Cushy?” — if they were satisfied. So the maids were called “cushy-girls”. In Bengali and Hindi, “khushi” – which to the English sounded like “cushy” – means “happy” or “pleased”.

Little nuggets like this fill the pages of Sea of Poppies. The author, Amitav Ghosh, shows how Indian languages and culture and cuisine made inroads into Anglo-Indian society – the Britons in India. They had their own code. They were expected to speak only “bazar Hindustani”, a pidgin language, and inter-racial sex was frowned upon. Yet, there’s one scene where a rich Indian’s mistress observing the guests at dinner from behind a screen (because Indian women at the time were not allowed to be seen by strangers) is startled to see an elderly Englishman. He had sex with her when she was a courtesan, she tells her female companies, describing in Bengali the things he did to her. The Englishman, who overhears her, flies into a rage and has to be restrained by others from beating her up with his walking stick. It turns out he knows Bengali. “There’s not a word of your black babble I don’t understand,” he says.

It’s a comic scene, but it underlines the racism of the British rulers in India.

Sea of Poppies shows the suffering they caused. Peasants were forced to cultivate poppies instead of food crops and sell the harvest to the English India Company, which ruled the country and held a monopoly in the opium trade. There’s a harrowing description of an opium factory where the poppies were converted into balls of opium, which were then shipped to China. The novel is set in the 1830s when the Chinese rulers banned the opium trade, provoking the British to go to war to lift the ban by force.

The opium trade had far-reaching consequences, leading not only to the Opium War and the British conquest of Hong Kong but also contributing to the Indian diaspora. Indian peasants who got into debt and lost their land were sent off to remote British colonies to work as indentured labourers.

Sea of Poppies tells their story.

Continue Reading

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
Saturday, March 18, 2006 By Abhijit

Carrying the white man’s burden

Economist_logo_1 Writers don’t get bylines in The Economist magazine. But one does not need to know their names to guess the colour of their skin, which is clear enough from their views. They do not speak for the Dark Continent or anywhere east of Suez.

I was reminded of that once more by the British magazine’s cover last week. It was a cartoon of Bush riding a nuclear missile in a parody of a famous movie poster with the headline: "George W Bush in Dr Strangelove, Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love my friend’s bomb". The leading article trotted out the usual reasons why the US Congress should reject the nuclear energy deal Bush had struck with India on his visit to Delhi. It went against the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, reminded the writer, who warned this might encourage others to develop nuclear weapons too — countries such as Iran and North Korea.

One’s a communist, the other Islamist, but both share one key trait with India which The Economist was too polite to spell out. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is really a gentlemanly way of defending white power.

And the defenders cannot even be accused of racism, for haven’t they accepted China as a nuclear power? It’s just that they want to protect the world — and by sheer coincidence the countries wanting the infernal weapons happen to be non-white. If that makes them look like white supremacists, it’s unfortunate, but someone has to stop the nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands.

I am reminded of Kipling’s poem. Here are the relevant verses from The White Man’s Burden:

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward–
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

The poem is considered offensive. But all that it’s saying is that the whites should do their duty even if they don’t earn the gratitude of the "heathen", "silent sullen peoples". Kipling is appealing to the spirit of public service in his opening lines:

"Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;"

It may seem absurd now but that’s how the imperialists saw themselves: they were improving the lives of the people they ruled.

I am sure similar high ideals lie behind The Economist’s concern about nuclear weapons falling into the wrong, non-white hands.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: , , , , ,
%d bloggers like this: