He was born in Bombay, which another generation would rename Mumbai, on December 30th, 1865. It's unlikely he would have been amused by the name change. He said of his birth place:
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.
The "world-end steams" still wait at Bombay, the subcontinent's greatest city and port. Less than a month ago that city was ripped by a massive terror attack. Kipling too had glimpsed jihad in his day. Muhammad Ahmad - the Mad Mahdi - proclaimed holy war against the Egyptian (and ultimately British backed) government of the Sudan. Storming Khartoum in 1885 he beheaded General (Pasha) Charles Gordon. Gordon's death helped end Gladstone's second government - till the end of his days Gladstone never shook the call of "Gordon's Murderer" for not having dispatched a relief force quickly enough. Another great British general, Herbert Kitchener, exacted revenged on the Mahdi's followers at the Battle of Omdurman. After the victory Kitchener returned to England asking for donations for a school to be built for local children. Kipling marked this generosity with the poem "Kitchener's School:"
OH, HUBSHEE, carry your shoes in your hand and bow your head on your breast!
This is the message of Kitchener who did not break you in jest.
It was permitted to him to fulfil the long-appointed years;
Reaching the end ordained of old over your dead Emirs.He stamped only before your walls, and the Tomb ye knew was dust:
He gathered up under his armpits all the swords of your trust:
He set a guard on your granaries, securing the weak from the strong:
He said: -- " Go work the waterwheels that were abolished so long."He said: -- "Go safely, being abased. I have accomplished my vow."
That was the mercy of Kitchener. Cometh his madness now!
He does not desire as ye desire, nor devise as ye devise:
He is preparing a second host -- an army to make you wise.Not at the mouth of his clean-lipped guns shall ye learn his name again,
But letter by letter, from Kaf to Kaf, at the mouths of his chosen men.
He has gone back to his own city, not seeking presents or bribes,
But openly asking the English for money to buy you Hakims and scribes.Knowing that ye are forfeit by battle and have no right to live,
He begs for money to bring you learning -- and all the English give.
It is their treasure -- it is their pleasure -- thus are their hearts inclined:
For Allah created the English mad -- the maddest of all mankind!
So He did. The British efforts in Sudan - as evidenced by Darfur - were largely a failure. Yet the madness of the English still lives, as Kitchener fought for and Kipling preached, in India. The country's bewildering chaos, half frightening and half magical, its appalling poverty, unwieldy democracy and massive corruption make it an unlikely giant. Yet so much of the fate of the Western world over the next century will rest with the Indians. Kipling could not have imagined an India free of British rule. What a mixture of amusement and incredulity he probably would have greeted the news that Ratan Tata, one of India's greatest industrialists, had purchased Jaguar and Land Rover earlier this year.
The imperialism he defended died in body six decades ago, its spirit lives on. Kitchener's missionary efforts failed in the Sudan because, in part, the British stayed there for only a short while - about sixty years. The Raj lasted for nearly two centuries, that preposterous yet highly successful project by which a hundred thousand Britishers ruled three hundred million Indians. In truth the British never ruled India, they ruled those who in turn ruled the subcontinent. The Empire lacked the resources to modernize so vast a population, some ten times its own, the modern day equivalent of Canada trying to rule an impoverished United States. They succeeded in modernizing - and Anglicizing- only a tiny minority. Those who lead India to independence in the 1940s were in many ways more Edwardian than the country's last viceroy, Louis Mountbatten.
One of the cruelties of history is timing. Had India achieved its independence forty years sooner or later it would have faired far better. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's brilliant and charismatic founder, picked up more than impeccable manners from his years at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a Fabian socialist. The result was central planning of the Indian economy, the Permit Raj and a legacy of economic stagnation and corruption. At the time, when Britain itself had voted in a socialist government with a majority, few thought Nehru anything but forward minded. He even imposed affirmative action programs for lower caste Indians. The failure of socialism was also something Kipling foretold. In the Gods of the Copybook Headings he noted:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
The hungry of India bear testament to those lines truth. Even the nominally communist Chinese have no problem feeding their equally large population. Yet the liberalization, and its consequent rapid growth, of the Indian economy has revived Kipling's Empire, not the one of the Raj but of the imagination. The ideals of liberty and rule of law. In his lyrical autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling recalls his childhood:
LOOKING back from this my seventieth year, it seems to me that every card in my working life has been dealt me in such a manner that I had but to play it as it came. Therefore, ascribing all good fortune to Allah the Dispenser of Events, I begin:—
My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with my ayah and later with my sister in her perambulator, and of our returns with our purchases piled high on the bows of it. Our ayah was a Portuguese Roman Catholic who would pray—I beside her—at a wayside Cross. Meeta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.Our evening walks were by the sea in the shadow of palm-groves which, I think, were called the Mahim Woods. When the wind blew the great nuts would tumble, and we fled—my ayah, and my sister in her perambulator—to the safety of the open. I have always felt the menacing darkness of tropical eventides, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through palm or banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs.
There were far-going Arab dhows on the pearly waters, and gaily dressed Parsees wading out to worship the sunset. Of their creed I knew nothing, nor did I know that near our little house on the Bombay Esplanade were the Towers of Silence, where their Dead are exposed to the waiting vultures on the rim of the towers, who scuffle and spread wings when they see the bearers of the Dead below. I did not understand my Mother’s distress when she found ‘a child’s hand’ in our garden, and said I was not to ask questions about it. I wanted to see that child’s hand. But my ayah told me.
In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in. The Mother sang wonderful songs at a black piano and would go out to Big Dinners. Once she came back, very quickly, and told me, still awake, that ‘the big Lord Sahib’ had been killed and there was to be no Big Dinner. This was Lord Mayo, assassinated by a native.
It would be too much, too easy, to call Kipling an early multiculturalist. He outwardly matches the commonly sold definition. He begins his autobiography by citing Allah, he speaks lovingly of his Portuguese Catholic nanny and of the Hindu temples he visited as a small child. This is what we are told multiculturalism is about, getting to know other cultures and ideas, being at ease in the vastness and difference of the world. Kipling would have agreed, so would many of his contemporaries. Most of the Anglo-Indians - Britons living or born in India - were a tiny minority ruling over a vast and unstable majority. For survival they needed to study those they ruled. The crude and bigoted imperialism of later years, which Kipling was unjustly associated with, was not of their understanding.
Imperialism, however, not simply implies but requires inferiority. I am better than you, so I rule over you. This is the unavoidable logic and original sin of all imperial projects, yet excepting liberal democracy it is the same logic and the same sin as all governments. Had the British not ruled India, someone else would have, whatever their colour or creed. It is unlikely they would have ruled as well or as humanely. The ruthlessness with which the Company men put down the Indian Mutiny in 1857 was matched by that of their enemies. Yet the essential truth of the Mutiny, of the Raj and of Kipling's young life on the subcontinent was that of collaboration. The Mutiny would never have been put down without many Indians supporting the British. The British ruled because, tacitly, those who might have removed them knew there was no better alternative; chaos, division and falling prey to other European powers, namely the French, was the alternative.
Kitchener's School is still open, the Indians are still some way from learning all the lessons the sahibs had to teach them. The British too are learning, as Tata is demonstrating, that imperialism is a two way street. It isn't just that the pupil excels the master, it's that the pupil will reinvent the lesson. The seeming smoothness with which China has risen to prominence, guided by the wise and authoritarian - and interchangeable - figures of the Politburo belies the anger of many Chinese. China's leaders since Deng have staked their survival on keeping the country's economy growing at above 8% a year. India's leadership has no such fear. The Chinese miracle is a miracle on stilts. What happens when they get knocked away?
Development economists often speak of a "democracy tax," the burden in lower growth and per capita income that Third World countries with elective political systems bear. Poor people with votes - as the British of Kipling's childhood understood - have a tendency to vote themselves the wealth. However understandable, it cripples economic growth and hampers their own long-term well being. The problem with dictatorships is that they lack legitimacy.
An ancient hereditary monarch might be accepted by his or her people as legitimate, look at Thailand. A thug on horse back, or a Communist Party official, is just an opportunist who can be dispensed with by another just like him. The process of change is usually rather bloody. The mess of India, the mess Kipling recalled from childhood, is daunting, yet it is also life. The world, the world of globalization, is looking more like India than China.
A rigid single party state dictating how a large number of people should live, most of whom look and sound alike, is the distant past. The thousands of languages, dialects and sects of India look a lot more like the world than modern China. India has held together because it has been able to find the One in the Many, the unifying element. One hundred and forty-three years after Kipling was born, his Empire still lives. More than that, it has a far better chance of reaching two hundred than Mao's Empire just over the Himalayas.
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