In an article for Encounter magazine, written in 1957, Niradh Chaudhuri admitted that 'Kim' is the finest story about India in the English language. What he did not say is that it is an unusual story as far as English literature is concerned since its main focus is the tender mutual devotion of Guru and chela- spiritual preceptor and acolyte. Indeed, Niradh had nothing to say about the story itself. His article is merely a string of unconnected ipse dixit assertions indicative of an impartial stupidity and ignorance of both English and Indian history and literature.
Why did nobody, at that time, point out that the dude had shit for brains and was incapable of appreciating any type of literature? I suppose it was because of the Cold War. Encounter was financed by the CIA. It didn't matter that Niradh was as stupid as fuck. What mattered was that he wasn't a Communist.
... (Kipling's) politics was the characteristic politics of the epigoni, when the epic age of British world politics was already past,
Nonsense! The Empire was growing in size and wealth and strength. The 'epic age' of West European expansion would have been that of Camoens and Walter Raleigh. Kipling and his politics belonged to the Industrial Age. In particular, Kipling was part and parcel of the Democratic era of British politics. In 1867, the franchise had been greatly extended. Forster's Education Act of 1870 was motivated by the imperative 'to educate the' new 'masters' of the country. Writers changed the manner in which they wrote because they understood that the apprentice boy and the shop girl might want to read their work.
The politics of the epigoni is revanchist. The sons of the 'seven against Thebes' seek to avenge their father's deaths. We might say Kipling's political views were similar to that of Joseph Chamberlain, a Radical who moved in the direction of Imperialism and of the 'Tory Democrat' Lord Randolph Churchill and represented a reaction to the liberalism of Gladstone in Ireland and Ripon in India. Interestingly, both Kipling's Aunt and Chesterton's mother were Radical in their views. It is tempting to see both as 'anti-woke' and against the elites. I may mention the first Indian MP- Dadabhai Naoroji was a Radical who moved towards Socialism. The second was a Tory Imperialist who supported restrictions on Jewish immigration. The third was a Communist. In other words, Indian politics and English politics weren't so very different.
and the British people had ceased to bring about great mutations in the history of the world.
Their role in Africa and the MENA was expanding. Meanwhile, the settler colonies had become self-governing and self-administering and, in India, the attempt was being made to increase the role of representative institutions as a step towards the natives taking more and more responsibility for the administration.
It is curious to note that when Clive was in India and Wolfe in Canada,
neither greatly mattered. The question was whether the Royal Navy and Merchant Marine would maintain their supremacy. But this required commercial success rather than command of territory. If the former was lost, the latter too would be lost as had happened to Spain and Portugal.
with the Elder Pitt at their back in Whitehall, English literary men were engaged in writing Tom Jones or A Sentimental Journey.
But Hume was publishing his History of England and Adam Smith was publishing his Theory of Moral Sentiment at that time. I suppose it would be fair to say that the English, at that time, were more licentious in their literary taste. Pedantry could be safely left to the poorer, or more prudish, Scot.
More to the point, Aristophanes was writing at the same time as Aeschylus. Warriors too relish a bit of slapstick variegated with smut. Niradh, shithead that he was, hadn't noticed.
When England was saving herself by her exertions and Europe by her example,
England expended much blood and treasure on the Continent. France could achieve more by way of example but it too had to exert itself.
English literature got Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
Because its women were advancing in both sense and sensibility. Interestingly, Austen was a favourite of the British naval officer.
At a later epoch when Englishmen were still capable of perishing on the road to Jellalabad,
a foolish and inglorious episode.
bivouacking on the field of Ferozeshah while the fate of British India trembled in the balance, or winning battles and dying of cholera around Delhi and Lucknow, they wrote The Pickwick Papers.
That was 20 years before the Mutiny. Niradh was truly shit at history. Incidentally, one of the biggest best-sellers of the Nineteenth Century was 'Confessions of a Thug' which came out in 1839.
After the settling down of British domestic politics, the Roundhead
turned into the 'Whig'
and the Cavalier,
turned into the 'Tory'
the Covenanter
is merely a member of the Church of Scotland. The monarch worships as a Presbyterian when north of the Border
and Jacobite
disappeared altogether in the mid eighteenth century.
had gone abroad, where they were doing what they were expected to do.
Presbyterian missionaries existed in India. Niradh attended the Scottish Church College in Calcutta. No doubt, he was recruited by Bonny Prince Charlie while a student there.
In those times English politics had no need to invade literature.
Fuck off! In the eighteenth century, writers were recruited and munificently rewarded by political parties. Addison was a Whig. Swift, a Tory. Previously, religion had greater salience. Writers either supported the Divine Right of Kings or argued for liberty of conscience or the theory of the Social Contract. However, it was only subsequently, in the second half of the Nineteenth Century that a professional novelist could become Prime Minister.
The age of Imperialism, Conservative and Liberal, had to arrive to make that necessary.
Spain and Portugal had Imperialism before England. But politics hadn't invaded literature. The two were wholly unconnected. Swift's or Dryden's readers might be able to identify which politician or faction represented which character in the text, but by the end of the eighteenth century nobody cared about such things. What mattered was whether a book was entertaining or instructive.
The result was an adulteration of each by the other.
Disraeli didn't adulterate his books or his politics. He got to be Prime Minister. His pal, Bulwer-Lytton started off as a Whig before crossing over and joining him in Derby's Cabinet.
But Kipling’s politics,
he was a writer, not a politician.
which even now is something of a hurdle in the way of giving him a secure place in English literature, and which certainly brought him under a cloud during the last years of his life, is no essential ingredient of his writings.
But the same could be said of the novels of Bulwer Lytton or Disraeli. Writing was merely a profession. It didn't matter what bilge a chap wrote to make money so as to retain his seat in Parliament. Incidentally, Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
Kipling the writer is always able to rise about Kipling the political man.
There was no 'Kipling, the political man'. Churchill was a politician who, like Nehru, took up his pen so as to make himself financially independent. Their politics is germane to what they wrote because their subject was itself political.
His imagination soared above his political opinions as Tolstoy’s presentation of human character transcended his pet military and historical theories in War and Peace.
Both were artists, not politicians or ideologues.
Of course, quite a large number of his themes are drawn from what might legitimately be called political life, but these have been personalised and transformed into equally legitimate artistic themes. It is the easiest thing to wash out the free acid of Kiplingian politics from his finished goods.
His books are finished products. You don't have to wash or scrub them.
Coming to particulars, Kim would never have been a great book if it had to depend for its validity and appeal on the spy story, and we really are not called to judge it as an exposition in fiction of the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia.
No one has suggested otherwise. The novel is a 'bildungsroman' a boy grows into a man while learning much and having a lot of interesting adventures along the way. What makes Kim unique is the Guru/Chela relationship.
Kipling’s attitude to war and diplomacy had a streak of naïveté and even claptrap in it, which made Lord Cromer, in whom high politics ran in the blood,
Nonsense! Money ran in his blood. He and a brother of his were the first politicians in a Merchant Banking family.
once call him, if I remember rightly, a cheeky beggar.
Kipling spoke disparagingly of some aspects of the 'Veiled Protectorate'- e.g. the employment of English women for the upliftment of their Muslim sisters.
The spy story in Kim is nothing more than the diplomatic conceit of an age of peace,
No. It refers to ongoing military intelligence operations of a cartographic nature. Kim's Colonel Creighton was based on real-life Military officers like T.G Montgomerie. Kim learns esoteric techniques from Spy-masters which may appear like the 'siddhas' or super-natural powers claimed by Yogis. But Kim's spiritual Guru displays nothing of the kind.
in which people enjoyed all kinds of scares, including war scares, and even invented them, in order to have an excuse for letting off some jingoistic steam, to ring a change in the boredom of living in piping times of peace.
Niradh is thinking of 'Riddle of the sands' or '39 steps'. But they came later and involved an invasion of the home islands. Sadly, it turned out, there were no piping times of peace. The Edwardians had been living in a fool's paradise.
India in the last decade of the 19th century was full of all sorts of fanciful misgivings about Russian intrigues and the machinations of the Rajas and Maharajas, which the clever darkly hinted at and the simple credulously believed in.
No. Save in the North West, the place was as boring as fuck.
There is an echo of this even in one of Tagore’s stories in Bengali.
No there isn't. Revolutionary cells appeared later.
But in Kim this political mode, which Kipling seems to have taken more seriously than it deserved to be, is only a peg to hang a wholly different story, the real story of the book.
There is no peg. There may be Russian surveyors in places where they oughtn't to be just as the Brits might have surveyors in places which they said they had no interest in.
I wonder if, in spite of their great love for it, Englishmen have quite understood what Kim is about.
They have some dim awareness that Kim is about the search for the Self which Hindus consider identical with God or the Universe. I suppose the Theosophically inclined would have said 'Kim is the Sanskrit word for 'who' or 'what' or 'how'. The Veda declares it itself to be a God- RgVeda X, 121 "kasmai devaya havisa vidhema'- but this 'ka', the Chandogya tells us, is related to Kha which is space, eternity, but also the bliss of erotic union. I suppose, under the latter interpretation, it is part of the undergirding of 'antarabhava' or Tibetan 'bardo' or Islamic 'barzakh'.
Back then, a lot of people were deeply versed in such matters because Theosophical Societies and Publications were mushrooming all over the place. Still, for ordinary people, Kim is emotionally satisfying. The orphan becomes 'the beloved disciple' and gains a surrogate family.
It has often been read piecemeal, as every great story can be, for its details, evocative of the Himalayas or of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
That is how the cretin Niradh read everything.
These are so interesting and gripping that the reader hardly feels the need for a larger unifying theme, and does not take the trouble to look for it.
Kim is equated to Vishvamitra (friend of all the world) who, in the Veda, has a special power over rivers. Thus, the chela is able to help the Guru find the river he seeks for. The artistic touch is that it is an irrigation channel in Saharanpur.
No very great harm is done if Tom Jones or The Pickwick Papers are read in this fashion,
they are episodic. Kim is unified though it may have been written is parts.
because the larger unity can be supplied by the English reader from his inward consciousness of the world in which the episodes are happening.
Sadly, Niradh is so fucking anti-Hindu that he can't supply shit from his 'inward consciousness' to unify a simple enough book depicting the Guru/Chela relationship.
Kipling's boss was a Theosophist. He didn't have any great taste for the thing himself but he had skimmed articles of that sort. Lots of people all over the world did so back then.
The setting is all-pervasive, like the sea in which the waves are rolling,
The sea is distinguishable from the sky and the deck chair on which we are sitting.
or the atmosphere in which separate features are seen in a landscape.
The landscape is seen through sunlight or moonlight. The atmosphere only matters if it is very foggy.
But in the very nature of things, English readers cannot feel the underlying bond of Kim, because the story belongs to a far-away and unfamiliar world.
This is also the reason they can't understand Aladdin or Odysseus or Spiderman not to mention the Holy Bible.
So, unless told about it, most of them are likely to be left with a sense of having been tantalised by a half-told story.
If some kindly Brahmin sat down and explained Kim to a Kayastha, the fellow will start screaming blue murder about Narendra Modi.
I doubt, however, even if Kipling himself was conscious of the design I am going to attribute to him.
That's bad, Babu, English.
He was an intuitionist,
He was an artist.
and I do not think he ever felt the need for intellectualising his artistic motivation.
Because he was an artist not an intellectual.
His imagination worked at white heat and it worked without analytic reasoning at many levels and on many diverse themes.
He had a daemon- a tutelary genius and thus was able to 'show' more than he could 'know'. However, his theme was 'Guru vatsalya' which is reciprocal. The preceptor and the acolyte show a maternal concern for each other. The lama, at a certain point depends on the youth and energy of the disciple. Then he gains enlightenment and the roles can be reversed.
There was, for example, the life lived by his countrymen and countrywomen in India, in which work on the plains was counterbalanced by love on the hills.
There was work and love both in the plains and the hills. The Government shifted from the summer to the winter capital.
Dealing with the latter, Kipling had an outlet for his ambition to write like Maupassant, and he partly fulfilled it.
No. He is realistic and 'knowing' but stops short of indecency.
But this aspect of Anglo-Indian life was so small in scale and so trivial in quality, and the impact on Kipling of other and starker themes was so strong, that his treatment of sex with a P. & O. luggage label on it never passed from comedy to tragedy.
There is no treatment of sex.
So he escaped the madhouse, and remained in a sense a Maupassant manqué.
He accepted that men would be men and women would be women. Thoughts turn to adultery when the climate is sultry. But there is nothing improper in his stories.
Soldiering and administration in India raised him to a higher and more humane level.
A soldier, like Gadsby, may pay attentions to a Mem Sahib but end up marrying her daughter. Then the child bride is herself with child. Gadsby bottles it. He is terrified some illness or accident might befall his bride or his 'butcha'. He sends in his papers and takes his little family back to Blighty. The most harrowing scene in Anglo-Indian fiction is one where a Captain of the Pink Hussars reveals he has been 'watering up his charger before parade like the blasted boozing Colonel of a Black Regiment'.
No one else has brought home more powerfully the grandeur and misery of the dual role of the British people in India.
There was no dual role. Either you were a Civilian or you were in the Army. There was a small volunteer force or territorial army but it had lost any importance in Kipling's day. By contrast, in France, at the time of the Levée en masse, there was the notion that the citizen must also be a soldier. Alfred de Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaires reflects on a period unique to France.
But even here Kipling’s importance is likely to be more historical than artistic, in spite of the fact that in many stories he achieved the timeless within the framework of what now appears to be time-barred.
Kipling knew that the Indian Army wasn't participating in any important battles. He'd have looked a fool if he had pretended otherwise. On the other hand, 'the Janeities' ranks with the most harrowing works thrown up by the Great War. But no fighting is depicted. Some officers in the trenches discuss Jane Austen and some private soldiers pretend to be interested in her novels so as to get lighter duties. But, taken as a whole, this is the story most likely to make a grown man bawl like a baby.
His greatness in this field lies rather in the creation of individualized national and historical types than true individuals.
Nonsense! He deals only with individuals even when speaking of wolves or polo ponies.
In this Kipling plays the Racine to Wodehouse’s Molière.
Fuck off! Consider Kipling's favourite Wodehouse story in which a little girl from the slums gives a belted Earl the courage to confront his dragon of a sister. The thing has sentiment but there is no slackness to it. What's more, in neither author do we find fatalism or determinism of any sort.
There is also a Kipling who is not above dealing in literary bric-à brac from the East, under the influence of the romanticism which I believe is a product of the impact of the Arabian Nights, bowdlerised of course,
The bowdlerised version of the Thousand and One Nights is the Arabian Nights. But Kipling lived in India, not an Arab land.
on the youthful imagination of Occidentals. This Kipling, as indeed all Western fanciers of things oriental, is prone to falsify the theme of Eastern love.
Which is just Love.
The story Without Benefit of Clergy is a typical instance of this falsification.
It is a tender love story. A man loves his mistress. She has a baby. Then the baby dies and shortly thereafter so too does the mother. The man is left desolate. None can comfort him because none know his secret. Its parallel is 'the Gardener'. A sensible English woman has an affair and gives birth to a baby on the Continent. Then she returns home alone and tells everybody about a brother of hers- the black sheep of the family- who had married beneath himself and is now a remittance man. A little later, she reveals the profligate has kicked the bucket. There is a baby. Should she pay the mother a little money and bring her nephew back with her to England so the little fellow can be raised as an Anglican rather some unclean Romish brat? Yes. It is the right thing to do. The woman raises this 'nephew' of hers with great love and care. Then the Great War takes him and lays him to rest in a vast cemetery in France. None know her secret and so none can comfort her- save the Gardener. This a Biblical reference. Mary Magdalene- the Scarlet woman- mistook the risen Christ for a gardener.
Mr. Somerset Maugham has praised this story highly, but I am afraid I do not share his enthusiasm.
Girl was Muslim- chee! chee!
In its intention the story seems to me to be a wholly undeserved idealization of an Anglo-Muhammadan liaison, and in its execution a piece of decided sentimentality, which if it does not ring wholly false does not ring true either.
It is as true as mother-love. Captain Gadsby had 'benefit of clergy' but his anxiety for his 'butcha' and bride is such he takes to watering his horse and finally puts in his papers. He is lucky. He has a large estate and a title waiting for him back in Blighty.
This weakness makes Kipling romanticise even the bazaar prostitute of India, against whom the military authorities used to warn Thomas Atkins with the utmost realism.
The girl was not a prostitute. No doubt, money changed hands as part of the 'mahr' or bride-price, and, if the Engineer returned to England, it would be understood that there had been 'talaq'. The girl could marry again. The 'butcha' would be sent to a Christian missionary school up in the hills. He might join the Railway service or something of that sort.
We orientals who know oriental love for what it is,
this cunt knew shit
are partly amused and partly scandalised by Western attempts to sugar it.
No we aren't. The story is perfectly Indian. My great-grandfather could have written it. Plenty of high caste men of that period had a 'cinna veeda' with a lower caste wife. Indeed, some of our politicians still do.
This is a case where the 'Sahib' acted with propriety. He behaved as an upper class Indian would have done. If the thing became known, no great scandal would have ensued. Edward Thompson says that so long as you don't give the 'butcha' your own surname- or so long as that surname is not distinctive- the thing attracts no censure.
Lastly, Kipling was not also completely immune to the abracadabra of Hindu necromancy.
Which involves 'vetalas'. Kipling has no stories of that type. This suggests he was indeed immune to such things.
But it is none of these things which constitute the greatness of Kim, although even these are suggested here and there in the book.
Niradh does not know what makes Kim- or any other book- great.
It is the product of Kipling’s vision of a much bigger India,
than what? Borges would say 'India is larger than the world' but so is that cemetery of the Great War, Kipling describes, whose Gardener is from Gethsemane.
a vision whose profundity we Indians would be hard put to it to match even in an Indian language, not to speak of English.
Niradh has a point. Tagore and Kipling both wrote a book about a White boy growing up in India believing himself to be Indian. Kim is profoundly Hindu. Gora is worthless anti-Sanatani propaganda.
He had arrived at a true and moving sense of that India which is almost timeless,
His Jungle Book stands next only to Aesop or the Panchatantra.
and had come to love it. This India pervades all his books in greater or lesser degree and constitutes the foundation on which he weaves his contrapuntal patterns.
No. India is there in his Indian books. It isn't there in Stalky or 'the Light that failed' or 'Puck'.
In certain books this foundation is virtually the real theme, and so it is in Kim.
Theme of a book set in India is India. What a great discovery! Give this Babu a Doctorate in honoris causa.
But the book is specially important in this, that through it Kipling projects not only his vision of the basic India he knew so well, but also his feeling for the core and the most significant part of this basic India.
No. Like Pascal's sphere, everything and everybody in India is that core or centre. It is the circumference which is nowhere.
In order to see what it is, some a priori consideration of the Indian scene and Indian life as material for imaginative writing is called for.
Niradh's a priori considerations are nothing but bigotry.
On account of its vastness and variety India is treacherous ground for all foreign writers.
Bad ones, sure. Niradh was a shitty writer.
The English novelist who feels that the material at home has been worn more or less threadbare and comes to India in search of the new and the exotic sees apparently promising subjects everywhere.
E.M Forster did very well out of his India book. But he had talent. Bengalis may do so but their own bigotry gets in their way.
He meets the odd and the amusing, the pitiful and the pathetic at every turn.
as he does in England
There is not a single mile-long stretch, if he walks all the way from Apollo Bunder to Mount Everest,
or down Oxford Street
which will not yield enough material to fill many notebooks. The unwary writer is usually caught by the first gin-trap in his path, and writes with awful seriousness or self-conscious art about things on which those who know India will not waste a tear or throw away a smile.
Who is this 'unwary writer'? The fact is, if you have mastered a particular genre, you can easily set a novel in India after a brief visit.
English writers of today are misled even by the conditions of imaginative writing at home.
Nope. They were and are flourishing. Unlike Bengalis, English people are prepared to put aside their bigotry in order to be entertaining or informative.
The big themes of English life have apparently been exhausted, and the grand style worked to the full.
Fuck the grand style. The English writer seeks to amuse or instruct. You can safely leave bombast to Babus.
So what remains for the author out for originality is to skim the odd and the accidental in subject matter, and try the clever or the over-sophisticated manner in treatment.
What has this to do with Kipling? You will find that in this essay Niradh has nothing at all to say about that author. He just keeps calling him a foreigner and pretending he knows India better than some White dude.
Their example seduces even Indian writers dealing with their own country.
Niradh's Muse is Circe and he is himself his own continent of swinishness.
Some of them indulge in grotesque Joycean antics when they might have been Homeric.
G.V Desani? He returned to India and made a thorough study of Hinduism.
In stark contrast to the literary situation in England, in India it is the big theme and the simple treatment which have remained unexploited — if Kipling is excepted.
Aurobindo's Savitri? I'm kidding. Nobody can actually read that shite.
It is time to return to them. Great novels can be written about the geography of India alone, assimilating the human beings to the flora and the fauna.
Poems like Meghaduta can certainly be written.
There are, for instance, the Himalayas, or if one wants to breathe in a less rarefied air, the wooded hills of the Vindhyas, full of green and dark mystery. Kipling wrote about both, and long before him our greatest Sanskrit poets had done so. Kalidasa’s imagination was haunted by the Himalayas, and in one marmoreal phrase he compared their eternal snows to the piled up laughter of Siva.
The mountains had wings till Indra cut them off. The 1941 sonnet 'High flight' mentions 'laughter-silvered wings'
Bhavabhuti, who is only next to Kalidasa, wrote about a part of the Vindhya region: “Here are the Prasravana Hills, with their soft blue made softer still by the ever-drizzling clouds, their caverns echoing the babbling Godavari, their woods a solid mass of azure, made up of tangled foliage.” This passage, written in the 8th century, matches Kipling’s evocation of the gurgling Waingunga and the home territory of the Seeonee pack.
It certainly matches what was written in guidebooks which were available for Kipling to consult. He was writing in America and hadn't personally visited the region where the Mowgli stories are set.
There is also the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, which is green and dun by turns, conforming to
the seasons, not
the oscillations of peace and anarchy in India. In the green phases men bend over furrows and sheaves, women crowd round the wells, bullock carts creak leisurely along, fat monkeys watch the doings of their distant kinsfolk from the branches of Neem and Sisam whose tender shoots they pick and munch unhurriedly.
Niradh should have been one such monkey. Sadly, British Viceroy forced his father to send him to skool.
Hardly any form of the power that is keeping the peace is seen anywhere.
Every village had a patwari or panchayat head.
Occasionally, there is intrusion of power of another kind. A lazy tiger or a bounder of a leopard raids the village byre, but even they are too easy-going to kill more than is necessary to maintain their feline existence and prestige.
Niradh deplores the laziness of the Indian man-eater. Viceroy Sahib should order tigers to eat more of the beastly natives.
So far, cyclically, this phase has alternated with a dun phase, in which the great plain turns khaki. Cavalrymen gallop across it with sloped lances, raising clouds of dust to mark their trail.
No they don't. They stick to the cantonment.
Man’s ferocity outruns his strength.
Ferocity without strength is nothing to be feared.
The populace cower in half-ruined villages and thinning scrub, and hyenas carry off children.
They are sneaky bastards.
From their branches the monkeys no longer bear testimony to peace,
because Viceroy slyly fucked off.
they stare into the dust haze, shiver and chatter for fear of they-know-not-what hunger-fury that might be lurking in the unseen. Kipling was equally at home in our plains, hills, and mountains,
No. He was a sensible man. He made his home far far away from hyenas.
and like all great novelists he remains firmly oecological.
Very true. Doestoevsky was only banging on about the local hyenas or hydrangeas or whatever. Did you know Raskolnikov was actually a beaver? His crime was to kill an old money lender, who was actually a reindeer, and then try to build a dam using her corpse. Sonya, the prostitute, was a bunny rabbit.
There are in Kim not only entrancing descriptions of the Himalayas but a picture of the green phase on the great plain that is uncanny in its combination of romance and actuality.
The scenery is well enough described but that is incidental.
We Indians shall never cease to be grateful to Kipling for having shown the many faces of our country in all their beauty, power, and truth.
Because we Indians don't have eyes.
As regards the human material, the best choice in India is always the simplest choice, namely, the people and their religion.
India has many peoples and many religions. Kipling, to his credit casts his net quite wide.
I do not say this because they are obvious. Though ubiquitous, they can be very unobtrusive. The common people of India have through the ages become so adapted to the environment, that they have been absorbed by it. They live like badgers or prairie dogs in their earth, and their religion is as deeply entrenched.
Sadly, Niradh was let out of his hole in the ground so as to badger English Literature to death.
This religion is so sure of itself that it does not care about self-assertion, which enables the present ruling class, too Anglicised by half, not only to proclaim the secular state, but even to believe in its existence.
The East India Company created a secular administration. The Indians chose to maintain what they inherited, at least in certain respects.
But to those who have an eye for the permanent and a feeling for the elemental, the people and their religion furnish material of a tractable kind.
Niradh had no such eye or feeling.
In order to deal with it the Western writer does not need that specialised knowledge and sensibility, to acquire which he has inevitably to de-Westernise himself and turn from a creative artist to a propagandist.
A writer can acquire information just by talking to people or reading books.
Many Europeans have paid this price in trying to explore the higher reaches of Hinduism.
None have. It isn't the case, that if you learn Hindi you will unlearn English or vice versa. Niradh was as stupid as shit.
Kipling’s artistic and spiritual instincts led him to these elemental and inexhaustible themes,
No. Kipling earned his living by his pen. He had to consider what would sell and which magazine would pay most to serialize his work. His father was very helpful to him.
although he may not have been wholly original in his choice, for in this as in many other things he was controlled by the general bias of British rule in India towards the commonalty.
What controlled him was market forces. Much of his finest work was done while living in America. The American market was growing in importance.
But whether completely original or not he stands supreme among Western writers for his treatment of the biggest reality in India, which is made up of the life of people and religion in the twin setting of the mountains and the plain.
He also stands supreme among Indian writers of the period. He had genius and the market for his work was very much broader.
These four are the main and real characters in Kim.
No. They are incidental. I am a Hindu and thus get Hindu and Buddhist references in Kim. But Kim isn't about religion. It is about Kim. Who is Kim? We are all Kim and none of us is Kim. What would be cool is if we had a nice Tibetan Guru.
But there is something more as well. The people and religion, the mountains and the plain not only constitute the major features of the physical and moral entity called India, they are also related to one another very intimately.
No. People of the same religion and endogamous caste may inhabit very different terrains.
The geography of India exhibits a curious paradox.
No. It exhibits an Indian tectonic plate jamming into the Eurasian plate and thus causing the Himalayas to rise.
In northern India there is no intermingling of hill and plain, and in passing from the one to the other a man passes from one world to another.
Niradh did not notice the Aravalli hills when he lived in Delhi.
For hundreds of miles the ground does not show any rise at all,
because it is an alluvial plain
and abruptly it soars to snowy heights. At the same time there is an unbreakable articulation between the Himalayas and the Indo-Gangetic plain.
because the India plate is jamming into the Eurasian plate.
Even Kalidasa, who was ignorant of the true geography of the Himalayas, felt it.
He was not ignorant of Hindu scripture.
He described the Himalayas as a Divine Soul which, dipping in the eastern and western oceans, formed the measuring rod of the earth as known to him.
This is the opening stanza of the Kumarasambhava. Parvati is the daughter of the mountain and as such can be called the soul of Himalaya's soul. 'Manadanda' (measuring rod) takes on a specific significance in this context which I leave it to the reader to work out.
However figuratively expressed, the notion corresponded to a reality in Indian geography, for the entire Indo-Gangetic plain has a northward and snow-ward orientation, and without the Himalayas it would hang loose, to be eroded by winds until the primeval seas which it had filled up came in again.
No. What happens when a tectonic plate jams into another is that mountains are thrown up. The Himalayas are young, which is why they are so high.
This unique pattern of separateness and combination is repeated in the relationship between life in the world and religion in India.
There is no uniqueness to this. The Urals were formed when a Siberian plate collided with the East European plate.
On the one hand, a Hindu’s existence in the temporal order is isolated from his aspirations in the spiritual,
Nonsense! They are one and the same. The relevant concept is that of the jivatman.
while he is in the world he is also of the world, and if he yearns after the spiritual he has to abandon worldly life altogether, even forgetting his name and station in it.
Rubbish! You can gain the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya while working as a carter or a butcher or a housewife.
In Hinduism the two lives never mingle.
What has never mingled in Niradh's brain is intelligence and factual information.
This will be disbelieved in the West on account of the widely held notion that spirituality pervades and dominates every aspect of Indian life.
It will be disbelieved by anyone who is a Hindu or who can phone a Hindu friend and check that Niradh is talking nonsense.
This is a fundamental, though natural, mistake. For what really intermingles with worldly life in Hindu society is not religion in the Western sense, but the supernatural in the service of man.
That is the Western sense of religion. Christ performs miracles. So do numerous Saints. Those miracles are supernatural.
Nature’s relentless enmity to man in the tropics destroys his self-confidence and leads him to seek the intervention of occult powers, whom he tries to persuade, wheedle, or coerce by means of worship, offerings and spells, to override natural laws.
Man, in the tropics, had it easier than in places where he can freeze to death.
It is this ever-present spectacle of gods yoked to worldly ends which makes Western observers think that they are seeing an all-persuasive spirituality.
Italy is part of the West. You see lots of images of Saints each of whom has a particular super-natural function.
On the other hand, the world is not self-sufficient, not only because even with the supernatural interwoven with it no true spiritual satisfaction can be had out of it, but also because even with the help of the gods the greater majority of men cannot wrest out of the cruel struggle for existence anything beyond a bare survival.
This is irrelevant. Heaven may have plenty of space for people who can't get by on earth.
So pride of life cannot grow and there is an ever-present sense of mockery in living.
No. There is the sense that God has allotted some task or role to you which has not yet been completed. Once it is, you get to go the Good Place.
Thus, worldly existence hangs in the air like the Indo-Gangetic plain,
which does not hang in the air
robbed of all significance, unless it can be given anchorage in true spirituality, which the Hindu imagination has always placed in the Himalayas, the abode of beatitude and salvation.
Nonsense! Just get to Kashi and die there. You go straight to Heaven. Many of India's rivers are sacred. In Kim, the Tibetan dude has come down from the Himalayas to seek a particular river. Did Niradh not read the book at all? How fucking illiterate was he?
The result is an articulation between worldly life and religion,
You are welcome to devote yourself to worldly life and totally neglect religion. You may nevertheless attain moksha either by some effort of your own or by the gratuitous gift of God.
and the affiliation of this articulation to the geographical articulation between the mountains and the plain, and all the four are fused to make up the highest unity in India.
They are irrelevant. Indians aren't stupid. They get that anybody anywhere can attain the highest unity. The question is whether this is because 'Aham Brahmasmi'- the Self is identical with Brahma- or because all things are 'amshas'- limbs- of the Lord.
Kipling took over this unity, with its fourfold articulation, as the foundation of Kim, and superimposed the adventitious themes.
This is sheer nonsense. Kim, as far as we know, has no religion. He is a chela in that he discharges the duties of a chela to his Guru. But there is no special significance attaching to any geographical location. It turns out that an irrigation ditch in Saharanpur is the 'river of the arrow'.
He had every right to do so. For, once a writer has grasped the fundamental unity, he is free to put anything on it, and it does not matter whether it is the Anglo-Russian rivalry of the 19th century or the five-year planning of today.
It does matter. The Russian threat was one against which the Pathan and the Bengali and the Britisher and the Tibetan might possibly unite.
The overpowering background will reduce everything set against it to its right proportions, and the Indian engineers will march across it as fleetingly as the Mavericks.
There is nothing overpowering about the background. In 'the bridge builders', the bridge does get built.
But to attribute such a design to Kipling is to turn the blunt AngloSaxon that he was into a mountebank of the esoteric.
Plenty of 'blunt Anglo-Saxons' of the period were Theosophists. Look at P.G Woodhouse's elder brother. He was Jeddu Krishnamurthy's tutor.
I should certainly have been guilty of this offence if I had suggested that Kipling’s larger theme, so far as it conforms to my interpretation, was a deliberate affair.
Niradh's interpretation was crazy shit. No one would deliberately conform to it.
It was not, because Kipling wrote his books by living in his subjects,
wolves? polo-ponies? little orphan boys?
steeping himself in their atmosphere until the interaction of his own being with the surroundings produced a definite quality of the imagination.
Nope. He got an idea for a story and then his imagination or his literary genius did the rest.
No great writer ever looks for a subject, collects details for it, or lays on local colour.
Plenty do. Some may not need to.
He has to experience the particular, and the local colour before he has even a feel of the subject.
Niradh thought that Tolkein spent a lot of time hanging out with Hobbits.
So he builds up his books by an elimination of all details besides those which will force their way in, and not by sprinkling them on the theme from his notebook.
Kipling spent a long time revising his work.
Kipling is not that tiresome creature, the notebook novelist of India.
He is not any sort of creature which Niradh could comprehend.
Next, there was the intrinsic quality of his personality. He hit upon the greatest themes in India through his sincere primitiveness, in which there was no archaistic pose.
He was a journalist and a poet. If he got the idea for a good story, he could do justice to it, though the thing might go through many drafts.
Many Latins have made a fetish of Hindu spirituality, but as soon as they move out of their native logic they slip into a rigmarole which is worse than a Hindu’s rigmarole about his own religion.
Niradh could only do rigmarole. He knew no logic.
Kipling’s perception of Hinduism is the product of
observation and fact checking. He was quite a good journalist.
a convincing yet mysterious primitiveness. Perhaps it is a northern mystery, to which we who live in the tropics have no key: O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, And dark and true and tender is the North.”
Niradh could understand nothing. He though this was because of geography. Fuck you geography! Fuck you very much!
Kipling had in him more than a touch of the heathenism of the German forests,
England has forests and English isn't so very distant from German as a language.
and he made his way into Hinduism through the long-forgotten common heritage of all the peoples who speak the Indo-European languages.
Why stop there? Why not say he made his way into the minds of wolves and tigers through his long forgotten common heritage with fellow mammals?
Living in India, he had also become half a butparast, idol-worshipper,
Niradh should have gone up to hefty Indian Muslims and said 'you're a fucking idolator mate. It's because you live in India. Fuck off back to Arabia if you truly want to be a Muslim'.
and it was out of his butparasti idolatry,
in poetry 'but-parast' means the lover.
that he created the amazing panchayat or conclave of the gods in the story of The Bridge-builders.
No. It was out of the mind of an English engineer who imagines the whole thing. Perhaps the Hindu Gods are like chaps on the Viceroy's Council. One says 'we can't have the bridge because it sets a bad precedent'. Another speaks of the possibility of the river changing course. Then, the Finance Member clinches matters by pointing out that the thing will pay for itself and will soon yield a surplus. 'After all, if we bankrupt the Exchequer, our own pensions won't be paid.'
But his heathenism
inherited from the German forest
was lighted up by the mysticism of northern Christianity.
which exists in the Northern German forest. It seems Heathenism, perhaps because of primitivism, arises from Mysticism which is the Christianity of the North. To a Bengali mind, this may seem a very profound insight.
Kipling was something of a denier of the world,
Very true. The world would be all like 'could you drop by to make up a fourth for bridge?' and Kipling would be all like 'fuck you, world! I deny you! Fuck the fuck off!'
who could scoff at success and failure as equal imposture.
That's not denying the world. It denies world measures of success.
But his abnegation had nothing in it of the self-mortification of the Hindu Sadhu, whom the ancient Greeks called gymnosophist,
only if they were naked.
or of the anchorites of Syria and the Thebaid.
Why stop there? Why not mention that Thomas Hardy wasn't a Carmelite nun? Henry James, on the other hand, wasn't just not a Tibetan Lama, he was also not Sirius, the dog star.
He was able to raise Hindu asceticism, as in the story of Purun Bhagat, above its bed of spikes,
Purun Bhagat doesn't have a bed of spikes. He is a high ranking official who takes Sanyas after retirement. He warns the mountain village of impending disaster and saves their lives though he dies in the process. They build a shrine to him.
and in the quest of the Lama in Kim made the negative renunciation of Buddhism the same as the positive faith of Thomas à Kempis.
We feel affection for the Lama. We are not greatly concerned with the theology of his religion. He is a holy man and a good one too. That is enough for us.
The Lama, however, raises a difficulty which must be put out of the way. For it may be asked : Why did Kipling, if it was his purpose to illustrate India spiritually, choose a Tibetan and a Buddhist as its exponent?
In spiritual matters we don't distinguish between a Tamil and a Tibetan.
In reply, the point might be made that Buddhism was also one form of Hindu spirituality. But I think, with Kipling, the reason for the choice was different. In the first place, like a good artist, he stood on the firm ground of personal experience. His interest in Buddhism was roused by the Gandhara sculptures in the Lahore museum, of which his father was the curator. It is fashionable now to call this Hellenistic expression of Indian art decadent and even debased.
There was never any such fashion.
But if it inspired this beautiful quest, we Indians at all events should not be ungrateful to these stones.
We like them. We are grateful for those who carved them and those who adored and cared for and preserved them.
Indians know that gaining 'Nirvana' is compared to crossing a river. The Sangha is the boat. Here, the Guru and the Chela achieve 'suhrit prapti' (the gaining of the like hearted) and can, by themselves, constitute a Sangha. The river that the Lama thus crosses is the river he seeks.
But I think there was also a second reason. Hindu spirituality, even at its most unworldly and serene, has a suggestion of power and action, a kind of super-magical motivation, which is not consistent with perfect beatitude and mystic quietism.
This is the bee in Niradh's bonnet. He thinks 'Shakta' Hinduism means 'Power-worshipping' Hinduism. Actually, it is the mother-goddess who is meant.
Although ostensibly aiming at the breaking of the cycle of Karma and rebirth, it is found to be entangled in it.
This is irrelevant. The Lama isn't a Shakta though Tibetan Buddhism is Tantric.
So a Hindu’s spirituality and his existence in the world are in a subtle way in touch with each other.
No. They are wholly apart in Samkya/Yoga as well as Tantra. It is delusion to hold otherwise.
In his spiritual activities he is like
the bird which refrains from pecking the fruit. He merely watches it being pecked by the other bird.
a dynamo, generating electricity, in his worldly life a motor that expends it.
No. Worldly life feeds and is fed by 'cittavriti' the vortex or whirlpool of psycho-mental residue. Through mantra, tantra & yantra, that whirlpool is stilled. Niradh has got everything backward.
What he is thinking off is the quack who claims he has magical powers. But you need to pay him a lot of money today so he can 'recharge his battery'. Also, if you don't mind, could you send over your teenage daughter to me. That way my battery will get even bigger.'
It is very difficult for a non-Hindu to see this latent nexus. It escaped even Kipling. In Purun Bhagat, when describing the saint Purun’s attempt to save the villagers and the animals from the landslide, he wrote: “He was no longer the holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life.”
Kipling is saying that Indian Diwans had a paternal care for their people. Seeing the villagers are in danger, the Sanyasi's spirit of noblesse oblige revives and he acts in the manner that was natural to him in his former life. One may say that his 'sanyas' was imperfect because the vasanas, or karmic imprints, of his former life have not yet been extinguished. If he dies in this state maybe it is because he is fated to be reborn. But that's fine if the bloke was a Vaishnav, because that was what he would have wanted anyway. This is equally true if he is, as his name suggests, a Gorakhpanthi.
This is wrong, for the man of action at a crisis and the holy man are the same —
Not if the dude has taken sanyas. Niradh is thinking of the karma-yogi.
the distinction is nonexistent in Hinduism,
No. It is fundamental to it. However, there can be a Raja Rishi or Karma-Yogi or, in the opinion of Aurobindo, some type of Super-Man.
for in the ultimate analysis its spirituality is the Old Guard of the cosmos, held in reserve.
Very true. Did you know, I can destroy the entire Universe just by farting? Kindly send me your teenaged daughter due to my battery needs recharging.
But although incapable of realising all this consciously, Kipling must have felt that his purpose would not be served by this kind of spiritual greatness. So he created his Lama, mixing Christianity with Buddhism.
Genuine Lama could have farted thus causing Muslims and Mlecchas to crumble to dust. Due to Kipling was White, he very meanly refused to let the Lama in his book do so. Fuck you Kipling! Fuck you very much!
Last of all, he saved the book from all suggestion of pedantry and humbug by putting it in the most English of all English forms of fiction, a serio-comic saga.
The most English form of fiction features dragons. What Kipling wrote was a bildungsroman of a picaresque sort. What makes it unique is the Guru/Chela relationship.
The English genius is unmatched in the capacity to make the commonplace significant by transforming it into a phantasy or extravaganza.
Kim has neither quality. The book it most closely resembles is Huckleberry Finn.
Kipling’s achievement is on the same lines— he has made the serious irresistible by lightening its burden.
No. He has entertained and instructed us and set our imaginations alight. We get our money's worth from Kipling. From Niradh, we get bigoted nonsense.
Kipling was the poet of work. It doesn't matter where you come from so long as you work with other people to get to some utile destination, you become part of a 'Sangha'. Niradh and other Bengalis of his ilk didn't want to achieve anything utile. They wanted to bluff the world that they were smart and educated. They formed their own citation cartels and engaged in boosterism. The rest of us laughed heartily at these coprophagous monkeys.
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