INDIAN VERNACULARS: FAMILIARIZING THE FOREIGN

Difference of language marks off colonizer from colonized far more profoundly than skin colour. In Kipling's work, consistently with the word's etymology, ‘vernacular’ invariably denotes the native languages (usually Urdu or Hindustani) of colonized Indians, as opposed to English, the language of government and colonial authority. Recalling his early childhood in Victorian Bombay, he tells how ‘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.’(SM, 3). Because that ‘vernacular idiom’ (presumably Hindustani) which must have been Kipling's mother tongue, the first language he ever spoke, was the language of a subject race, his training as a ‘Sahib’ meant that he had to lose it. The reason why Kipling's loving parents sent him and his sister to suffer exile in England at the ages of five and three was the cultural imperative for children of their class and race to grow up speaking, thinking and dreaming in English – and not the halting English of Indian servants with their ‘sing-song, chi-chi accents’, nor yet the fluent but accented English of educated Bengalis or Eurasians like Hurree Babu or Kim himself (‘Oah yess,’ K, 128), but the assured upper-class English tone and idiom of public schools, Pall Mall clubs and drawing rooms. Thanks partly to the harsh training that included learning much of the King James Bible by heart (a frequent punishment inflicted by his Southsea foster mother), Kipling's mastery of English would enable him to cross the linguistic divisions between the alien rulers and native ruled with seemingly effortless ease.