Vijay Sheshadri on Kipling

I haven't read any of Vijay Sheshadri's poetry though it has won a Pulitzer. Yet, like most ordinary people, I am not ignorant of his oeuvre- so frequently is this master wordsmith's apothegms on the lips of characters in the many American movies and films I watch during the course of the day.

I'm kidding. No one quotes Sheshadri in ordinary conversation. Kipling on the other hand rises unbidden to our lips. Why? Sheshadri has a theory. It is that Kipling's poetry is like journalism. It conveys 'explicit' meaning. This seems strange. Surely gnomic utterances, more especially those expressed in rhythmic or lapidary form, have an element of amphiboly? They allude to a folk wisdom which is at once mantic and apophatic. The spirit of prophesy descends but its expression is Delphic. Yet, there is a sort of grim comfort in speaking as though all conclusions are foregone and all that remains is to grittily display a knowing type of stoicism.

Genuine poetry has this quality. It unites its readership with respect to an 'unthought known' while leaving open every avenue of experiment or metanoia. Rhetoric- and Sheshadri is not a poet but a particular type of Rhetor- not a paraclete, perhaps, though maybe a 'sykophantes'- Rhetoric, in seeking for the precision of akrebia, divides its Reception so as to multiply holes in its own argument so all Reason drains away.

This can be a good thing. A multi-dimensional decision space is, by the McKelvey Chaos theorem, subject to a 'rent-dissipative' struggle for Agenda Control. It may be that Sheshadri's role, relative to his milieu, is positive in some way.

But his milieu is not ours. We require of our poets an expanded 'avakasha' or Kairotic menu of choice. Kipling, strangely enough, still gives us this- no matter what our nationality or place of domicile.

Consider what Sheshadri says (in conversation with Runku Vardarajan in Open Magazine)

I deplored Eliot’s partiality for Kipling’s poems like ‘Recessional’, where the ‘lesser breeds without the Law’ make their appearance. Eliot had made his own selection of Kipling’s verse, with a long introductory essay, and Faber & Faber published it in 1941. It was a controversial essay, because that was a time when not many people in the literary world of London were defending Kipling.

'Recessional' had entered the Hymnal of the American Lutheran Church. Eliot, like Sheshadri was American. Unlike Kipling, Eliot was an explicitly Christian poet. It would have been odd if Eliot had omitted a poem familiar to his Church-going readers when making his selection of Kipling's verse.

I must admit, on first reading the poem as an adolescent, I was put off by its pastiche of Biblical language. But then, I was equally put off by the Old Testament- for the same reason. I thought of the Hebrews as an upstart hill tribe which- briefly attaining Empery of a limited and regional a sort- thought it worthwhile to tart up its inglorious history in the sublime language of the urbane Syriac poets while paying doxological lip service to displaced Aramaean prophets.

Kipling, of course, had put this notion in my head. I read him as a kid, but read him in that indiscriminate manner in which, on aught that is green, goats graze and, in Paideia's shade, children laze such that every memorious Eden is at last rendered a Sahara.

In 1968, the year I first learned to read, I recall our car stopping at the supposed site of the Biblical Eden. Dad wanted to look around because he liked visiting battlefields and this was the topos of  the unholy 'vishodhana' of Kut-al Amara - which ended in a hunger march and the avoidable death of thousands of British and Indian soldiers brought about by a toxic combination of pitiless starvation and insensate sodomy. This was the locus of the greatest humiliation ever experienced by the undivided Indian Army. The father of an older friend of mine- a Pakistani General- has written a poem on the subject. I suppose, few Indic people from Army or 'Diplomatic' backgrounds who visited the spot, as it then was, could have failed to register similar sentiments.

The truth is the seeds of Partition- but also the Rowlatt Act- were sown there. It is disagreeable to admit that the 'British' did better in the Middle Eastern theater than the 'Indians'. This showed us our Imperial system was a sham. Our institutions bred complacency and careerism. Macaulay's Indian sojourn had been wholly inconsequential. Simla Society could not produce a Mrs. Hawksbee capable of keeping, the very first 'Indian Army' GoC,  Sir Beauchamp Duff, from so fucking up that after being sacked, he turned to drink and committed suicide in short order. The future commanders of the Indian and Pakistan Army learned this lesson even before arriving at Sandhurst.  National Armies succeed. 'Imperial' Armies fail.

In this context, Kipling's admonition not to ' loose/ Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,/ Such boastings as the Gentiles use/ Or lesser breeds without the Law' had a historical instantiation- an  'objective correlative' in the behavior of the Indian Army Generals most concerned with the Kut-al-Amara disaster.

 Brigadier Dyer, an untainted officer, took a different but even more calamitous path. Clearly, the future belonged to the chastened doxology of Amba Prasad Sufi- described in Wikipedia as a 'Pan Islamist'!- because Kipling's beloved Imperial Indian Army- its 'Soldiers Three' as much as 'Gunga Deen'- had indeed seen all its pomp and circumstance reduced to gall and ashes on that post Kut-al Amara death march while its Battle Commander, the Frenchified fop, General Townshend's, luxurious, Euphratean, barge blithely sailed past the less dishonorable desolation of 'Nineveh & Tyre'.

This, of course, is a parochially 'Babu' view. Sheshadri is American. He is sympathetic to the message of Christ and, I imagine, all the more at home in that Great Nation which has never felt it infra dig to dissemble this homely aspect of its constitutive synoecism. But Sheshadri is a scholar. He knows the precise Dollar exchange rate of his Nation's Sterling Eliot with respect to my poor paranoid Pound.

Yet he does not see that Kipling's allusion to 'Captains & Kings' is not, as conventionally supposed, rooted in the Book of Job, but rather the story of Ahab, who engages in warfare upon the plains- not the Mountains sacred to Yahweh- dispensing 'Kings' for 'Captains', to prove the universality of Israel's deity. For Eliot's generation, this paralleled the 'eternal return' of that grim trench-warfare which so disfigured their Nation's Civil univocity.

Kipling, in 'the Recessional' was, of course, referring only to a 'Thucydidean trap'- i.e. Imperial overstretch- but Eliot's higher education was that of Henry Adams. Both knew that the true scandal of their beloved Republic lay in Christian America's ability to industrialize the Socratic practice of death and wring ever increasing affluence from a war of attrition which, not Capital, not Labour, not Enterprise, not even the Land, was bound to lose. Rather it was Thymos, Tradition, Theology- the Triune God of the Tragic Muse- which would be worn away into empty air by what Heidegger would call Planetary Technology.

Sheshadri is a Madhwa Brahman- i.e. a Dualist who requires an Occassionalist theory of Space as 'avakasha' such that, by the operation of Grace, stasis, or concurrency deadlock, is overcome. He must know that 'Lord God of Hosts' translates into Indic as 'Ganapati'- who, for Dualists, creates or constricts kairotic Space-Time such that Soteriology either operates or gets stalemated. I recall the episode of the Simpsons where Homer impersonates the elephant headed Lord so as to simultaneously become 'creator of obstacles' as well as 'remover of obstacles' such that Apu and Manjula can have both a 'Love' as well as an 'Arranged' Marriage in a super-quick fashion so this immigrant couple can converge the more rapidly to the 'American dream'.

But that dream, at least in their case, was based on love for work.

The most heterogeneous of Kipling's characters are characterized by a similar unquestioned, univocal, love for the sort of variegated work which establishes a Freemasonry without a Soteriology.  This enables Kipling to continue to be the 'poet of work' as opposed to the elegist of a but archaic form of alienated labor long lost to self-regarding lucubration.

It is no wonder that he is hated.

Do you hate Kipling?Kipling is a poet where the ratio of implicit to explicit meaning is almost one-to-one. And there was always a controversy, independent of his politics, about whether his verse was just verse or poetry. I think Eliot makes a credible claim that it was poetry, even though we know exactly what Kipling means when we read ‘Recessional’ and ‘Danny Deever’.

We can guess at what 'Recessional' means because we have read the Bible and know a little about the British Empire's military history. Danny Deever is more alien to us because we haven't served in a type of regiment which has long ceased to exist. Yet, since Kipling always 'shows more than he knows', that ballad speaks to us of things remote from Kipling's own experience.

You can't paraphrase Kipling because the work of literature is not the work it seeks to chronicle. Thus the Bible speaks of the works of the risen Christ, which lasted a mere forty days, as requiring a book larger than the world to be fully transcribed.

But there are other elements to poetry than the ratio of explicit to implicit meaning and he certainly possesses all of those—although you can paraphrase Kipling.
Isn’t that the case with all popular poets? Is there a popular poet whom you cannot paraphrase?Robert Frost. Unlike Kipling, you can’t really paraphrase Frost because there is a vast cloud of implicit meanings that surrounds his poems. Kipling isn’t like that—unconnected to any antipathy I feel toward his politics and all of those complexities that involve an Indian reading Kipling.
So you do hate Kipling’s politics…Well, yeah. The imperialism was appalling. And if you look at his very clearly delineated and particular antagonism towards Bengalis, you can see it’s because Bengal is where the independence movement started. And the Bengali Babu was a figure of caricature in Kipling.

Kipling has a comedic poem about a corpulent and cowardly Bengali Babu who manages to kill a dreaded Burmese dacoit but he also has a Bengali hero in Kim. The fact is Kipling was 'the poet of work'. He pays tribute to able Bengalis who achieved extraordinary things and he mocks the shirkers and talkers. But he does this to posh White people as well.

To be fair, the Bengali Babu- initially the most loyal subject of the Raj- was first caricatured by Bengali writers. Kipling did not caricature or otherwise describe Bengali revolutionaries. He did limn elderly rebels against the Raj whose valor had outlasted their political relevance. But that relevance returned with a vengeance after Kipling himself had left India.

But there’s always a problem with Kipling because the work is so good. From the point of view of literature, it is really tremendous. So, you’re always dealing with that contradiction about him. I take great offence from those Kipling stories where he has a political axe to grind; but then there are others that are just beautiful, like ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, which is about a relationship between a British man and an Indian woman. And you ask yourself, ‘Oh my God, what do I do with a figure that complex, with those elements of vitality to him?’

What we should do with Kipling is recognize that the brown woman in 'Clergy' is exactly the same as the white woman in 'Gadsby' or in 'William the Conqueror'. Why? There is only work while yet there are days. Literature is a Masonic 'Mother Lodge'- like that of 'The Janeites'- but it is only for those who have labored and battled in such unspeakable conditions that comradeship loses every individuating mark becoming maternal and univocal simply. Hemingway could prose on about 'men without women', but Kipling- kept out of the soldier's profession by his poor eyesight- had seen all, pre-visioned all, fore-suffered all and, as the Tiresias of pain, declared that Man's sorrows are but a shadow of the Mother's.