Rudyard Kipling without White

Mans Burden: A Sesquicentenary

Appreciation

by Laksiri Fernando
( December 22, 2015, Sydney, Sri Lanka Guardian) Born on 30 December 1865 in
Bombay, this year is Rudyard Kiplings sesquicentenary birth anniversary. Kipling is
famous for his many literary works verse, prose or plain writing but for a Sri
Lankan audience, he is rather loathed because of his controversial poem, The White
Mans Burden. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, among many other
international awards. Throughout a greater part of these hundred-and-fifty years, the
critiques have been debating on how to evaluate his contributions, for humanity I
would say, and the controversies are still abundant and inconclusive as they were at
the beginning of the 20thcentury.
Was Kipling a singer for imperialism as Edward Said used to claim, or a humanist of
cosmopolitan values of course with biases and ambiguities as Andrew Lycett has
portrayed? Perhaps he was both, as the now popular term in Sri Lanka, hybridity,

would fittingly indicate.

He dropped in at Colombo, in December 1891, on his way from Australia, and then
travelled to Tuticorin by steamer, and then to Lahore by train. There is nothing in
particular that Kipling has written on Ceylon, except of Buddhism. His knowledge of
Buddhism, however, largely came from the Tibetan or the Japanese variety. When he
wrote Kim in 1902, he nevertheless didnt forget to mention the Island as a place that
one of his main characters, the Tibetan Lama, visited whence the wonderful fire-boats
go to Ceylon from Tuticorin, and where are priests who know Pali.
Anglo-Indian?
Rudyard was born in Bombay, to Alice and John, seven months after they arrived in
the new country from England in May 1865. His father, better known as Lockwood
Kipling, had assumed duties as a teacher in architectural sculpture at the newly
founded Art School in Bombay. Referring to his very early days in his autobiography,
Something of Myself, Kipling wrote My first impression is of daybreak, light and
colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. Perhaps he inherited
his artistic sensibilities from his father as much as from the lights, colours or sounds
of exquisite India.
Once, when he was walking alone to his fathers gallery, as he said, a winged
monster as big as myself attacked me, and I fled and wept. Then the father drew a
picture of the tragedy for him with the following rhyme beneath.
There was a small boy in Bombay
Who once from a hen ran away
When they said: Youre a baby
He replied: Well, I may be
But I dont like these hens of Bombay.
May be he didnt like the hens of Bombay but he was fond of his ayah and Meeta,
the Hindu bearer. So much so, he couldnt even speak proper English at the
beginning! In the afternoon heat before we took our sleep, she [ayah] or Meeta would
tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the
dinning-room after we had been dressed, with the caution Speak English now to Papa
and Mama. Kipling further said, So one spoke English, haltingly translated out of
vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in. Then how come that Kipling
became an Imperialist?
Hybridity of Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism
Of course at the age of six (1871) he was sent back to England to a boarding house
meant for children whose parents were serving in India. It was as if to gain back his
English roots. He called it the House of Desolation, where he instead experienced
sorrow and darkness, a later attraction to Buddhist philosophy of impermanence.
Only at the age of thirteen (1878) that he was sent to a proper school, the United

Services College, where he quickly learned all the tricks and skills to become a
journalist at a young age of sixteen (1882) in colonial India. He was also a master of
English literature by this time. It is on record that The Light of Asia, by Sir Edwin
Arnold, now a little bit forgotten, was one of the books admired by Gigger, and he
possessed a copy. That is how he learned about Buddhism first. The revelation came
from his old classmate, C. G. Beresford, writing on Schooldays with Kipling, and
Gigger was Kiplings nickname.
His reverence to Buddhism came in his popular poem, Buddha of Kamakura (1892),
which was written after visiting Japan and to see that iconic statue near Tokyo. It
started with the following verse which was in fact a caution to other believers.
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Trophet-flare to Judgement Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!
There are no studies so far conducted on the possible influence of Immanuel Kant or
cosmopolitanism on Rudyard Kipling. Even without any direct influence, the
circumstances prevailed in that century or the following, and his upbringing also
promoted Kipling to look in that direction. The basic tenet of cosmopolitanism is the
understanding and tolerance of different cultures. He told Brander Matthews, the
famous American author, Well, Im not an Englishman, you know; Im a colonial!
There he was wrong. The downside of his belief in the colonial was the cultural
superiority of the Europeans and thus the advocacy of imperialism. This was a plain
contradiction, but that prevailed in him to the end. Kipling often talked about two sides
to my head and genuinely attempted to see the world from both the Occidental and
Oriental perspectives. This is largely clear in his much acclaimed novel, Kim, and it
was like his own story in a poetic manner.
It was the imperial side which came out openly in his poem, The White Mans
Burden in 1899 however. There cannot be any doubt about it. Particularly addressing
to the American authorities during their conquest of the Philippines, the first verse went
like the following.
Take up the White Mans burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
There was no ambiguity about what he meant by half-devil and half-child or lesser
breeds without the Law, in another verse. He even sent a copy to Theodore (not

Franklin) Roosevelt. Then Roosevelt commented: rather poor poetry, but good sense
from expansionist point of view. There were circumstances under which he became a
conservative or a defender of imperialism. In India, Kipling was a journalist in
the Civil and Military Gazette where he had a particular role to play in defending the
Empire. He was now living in England, with one foot in the United States. The British
conservative politician, Stanley Baldwin, was his cousin from mothers side. Kipling
helped Baldwin in his conservative politics, defending the Empire. He was also a friend
King George V, closely attached to the establishment. Therefore, The White Mans
Burden was not a surprise, although Kim was markedly different. For a person like G.
K. Chesterton (1905), Kipling however was not patriotic enough.
What is Kim?
By birth, Kim (Kimball OHara) in Lahore was a white Irish boy, whose father was a
soldier, and mother, a poor white woman who died of poverty. By the time of the story,
Kim was orphaned looked after by a half-caste woman, probably a prostitute. Although
white by birth, Kim was like any low-caste Hindu street urchin, his skin burned black
as any native, unable to read and write or speak good English. His attire was the
same as any street kid. Kim found easier to slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb
when engaged in certain business. But his outlook was cosmopolitan from the very
beginning and he was called Little Friend of all the World, reminiscent of what
Diogenes said: Im a citizen of the world when asked who are you. India or Lahore
was cosmopolitan by that time or always. There were different religions, races,
castes, classes and different peoples. As Kipling said:
Then there were holy men, ash-smeared fakirs by their brick shrines under the trees
at the riverside, with whom he was quite familiar greeting them as they returned from
begging-hours, and, when one was by, eating from the same dish.
Kim became a chela (disciple) of the Tibetan Lama who came to India in search of
Buddhas river of the arrow to free himself from the wheel of things. Kim also had a
mission in life, determined by his father, to find the Red Bull on a green field probably
symbolized as the empire or the cause of the white mans burden itself. By the end
of the story, both missions are fulfilled, Lamas and Kims.
It is because of this symbolism and clues that the character of Kim becomes similar to
the life story of Kipling himself. The period of life of Kim, as chela of Lama, is the
period of Kiplings search and admiration of Oriental philosophy, culture and religions,
like Buddhism. What he disliked was the taking over of the green field by the
Russians or later the Germans. When Kipling first published Kim serially in 19001901, he had already asked the US to Take up the White Mans Burden (1899). He
also strongly supported the British in South Africas Boer War (1899-1901), and knew
Ceylon as a place where war prisoners could safely be sent. He in fact asked for it in
his poem Piet.
It is not that Kipling had all admiration for Indian or Asian way of life in Kim. But it was
rather balanced unlike other writings. Kim followed like a shadow. What he had
overheard excited him widely. This man [Lama] was entirely new to all his experience,

and he meant to investigate further, Kipling said. Kim did investigate further. So much
so, there were many descriptions of Buddhist teachings, the Buddhas life and the way
the teachings were followed in the lands of Tibet, Japan or Ceylon, although not
completely accurate. Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar is one who has admired Kim and
had noted that it is full of the Buddhist concept of metta or loving-kindness.
Nevertheless, there were apparent prejudices expressed about the Orientals, unless
you take them in a sense of humour. He often used the terms Orientals or Asiatics to
describe the other. For example, in his opinion, the British-introduced railway system
could not work properly given the cultural backwardness of the people. All hours of
the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger traffic is regulated
accordingly, he said in Kim. Most humorous was when he said, Ticket-collecting is a
slow business in the East, where people secrete their tickets in all sorts of curious
places. He failed to understand the different levels of economic development, and
thus the social development, between the peoples of the Occident and the Orient
which was further reinforced by colonialism.
To be fair by Kipling, it should also be said that he had similar humour for the whites.
Quoting a known proverb of that time, he said Never speak to a white man till he is
fed. He often quipped about the white mans impatience and said only the devils
and the English walk to and fro without reason in Kim.
An Assessment
There is no question that Rudyard Kipling was one of the most, or the most, brilliant
story teller during the British Empire. He was addressing a particular audience, and
that audience however was perennially conservative and colonial. Kipling was different
to Leonard Woolf in that sense who wrote a more compassionate novel, Village in the
Jungle, through his experience in Ceylon during a similar period. Obviously, Woolf
could not be popular with such an empathy for the colonial people amongst the
colonialists or the colonial minded people. As George Orwell has pertinently
commented, Kipling could not understand the economic forces underlying the imperial
expansion and to him it was largely a sort of forcible evangelising.
Kiplings perceptions as well as descriptions of Buddhism, however, were respectful
and admirable, whatever the inadvertent inaccuracies that he has committed in the
process of doing so. Along with Edwin Arnold, and later Hermann Hesse, Kipling did a
yeoman service to popularize Buddhism in the West and his reverence for the Buddha
is indisputable. Among his famous poems was, Buddha of Kamakura (1892). It is not
a mere speculation to consider that Kipling had an inclination for interfaith dialogue of
religions as reflected in his many writings.
More than a century has passed since the main writings of Rudyard Kipling.
Colonialism is no more, at least in that form, any longer. Instead, a process of
globalization is looming or unleashed not without dissimilar economic motives, one
would argue. What might be counterweighing are the spread of democracy and power
of the people, and also the tangible economic rise of the Orient. People in India or in
the Orient are not the people that Kipling encountered at the end of the 19th or the

beginning of the 20th century. Kiplings writings for the colonial have now become part
of the universal literature. There is no point in rejecting or denouncing them. Whatever
the foibles of Kipling, his literature should enrich our understanding of the past during
the colonial period or our own foibles in that context. His prejudices or slights may be
considered with a sense of humour. Kipling without White Mans Burden undoubtedly
is part of our common heritage.
Posted by Thavam