More racist than Thou

I have frequently defended Kipling on this blog. Unlike me, he was born in India and, truth be told, a lot of productive people from the subcontinent, or those tasked with important work there- e.g. Famine Relief work- or elsewhere, find him very useful, very sane, very suggestive. The man was the 'poet of work' and India, according to us Hindus, is 'karmabhumi'. Indeed, Kipling himself endorsed the view that only by spending years doing arduous good in the Punjab could you earn the right to return to your Arcadian Manse in the Home Counties. Saki, born not in Bombay, but rural Bihar, took the opposite view. Only great Edwardian Wealth allowed you to wander far among the sort of folk with whom Kipling seemed most at home.

Consider the following. Who wrote it? Kipling? Saki? Both were dead. The year was 1941 and this is a broadcast from New College Oxford.  Sound it out for yourself-

In India you will find children, and they are as lovable as those in Wilts or Bucks. It is true that they have a code of conduct for sons, defining their duties to their parents. It is uncomfortably rigid, but you will have no difficulty in finding prodigals. Sons are supposed to sacrifice their lives in service of their fathers. But here and there you will find a young man more devoted to a game of dice than to his father. If his game is interrupted by an excited announcement of his father's impending death, and the call that he should attend to the ceremony of the last rites at once, he is supposed to reply, "No matter. Let me finish this game. Sooner or later the pyre will pass this way, and I'll surely join the procession." This, by the by, is a fair specimen of Indian humor.

Is this humor? Surely, this is an anecdote- exaggerated no doubt- whose aim is to show that gambling is addictive. It destroys a man's intelligence and his character. We can imagine this story being told about Charles James Fox or some other such Regency swell. Indeed, it is likely that aristocrats of that stamp did simply step out of Brooks or Boodles in order to join the cortege of their fathers. 

I asked who wrote the above and tried to suggest it might have been some 'old India hand'. Obviously, this is impossible. An Englishman would not speak of a pyre, as opposed to a bier, passing by. 

The answer, in case you are wondering, is G.V Desani who was born in Nairobi. He ran away from India when he was 17. He gained acclaim in England- but for an obvious reason. Being more racist than thou was a paying proposition back then. Is the reverse now really the case? Not for Indglish writers.