Anything But...

[poliphilo]

Judy has a side job tutoring little Korean kids and she just read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi with one of them. Now she wants to expand his knowledge of Kipling by adding Gunga Din, Recessional and The White Man's Burden.

No, no, no, no!  Look, personally I'd be prepared to defend all three, but it's no use pretending they're not problematic. If you wanted to dismiss Kipling as irrelevant and racist (as many have done and still do) these are the texts on which you'd base your argument. ("Lesser breeds without the Law" for pity's sake!) How about substituting Danny Deever, or Follow Me 'Ome (gay subtext) or Mary Pity Women (as feminist as anything you're likely to harvest from the 1890s).

Or one of the poems from the Puck books.

Or Mandalay or Ford O' Kabul River (The first rule of international politics is don't invade Afghanistan, you fools!)

I've got a long car journey ahead of me today and I can see I'm going to be spending it riffling through the Collected Kipling I keep in my head.

PS. I expect to be offline for a couple of days, so if I don't reply to comments it's not (just) because I'm rude and ignorant.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You see, I completely disagree. Kipling was an imperialist, but neither a racist nor a cultural chauvinist. He was the first British author (possibly the first European author) to write with sympathy, empathy and real knowledge about the world "East of Suez".

Nor was he an Orientalist. He was born in India. He knew the East. Mandalay isn't Orientalist, it's about Orientalism- a significant difference.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Are you seriously suggesting that "The White Man's Burden" isn't racist? I'll grant that Kipling may not have been a racist personally, but I think it's extremely difficult to argue that there aren't racist elements in his work.

I shiver every time I think of the phrase, "Great Gawd Budd".

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Kipling believed in the superiority of Western Civilization. I'm not sure that's quite the same as being racist. "The White Man's Burden" makes me squirm but it's one of the few things in his oeuvre that does.

As for "the great Gawd Budd", don't forget the poem is a dramatic monologue. This isn't Kipling speaking, but an ignorant ex-soldier. Elsewhere- in Kim for example- Kipling wrote sympathetically and knowledgeably about Buddhism.