Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction: Two Separate Sides to His Head – Kipling's Ambivalent India
- 1 Paradise Lost: Kipling's Southsea Years
- 2 Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co.
- 3 Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother India in Kim
- 4 The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling's Adults in India
- 5 The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day's Work
- Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction: Two Separate Sides to His Head – Kipling's Ambivalent India
- 1 Paradise Lost: Kipling's Southsea Years
- 2 Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co.
- 3 Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother India in Kim
- 4 The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling's Adults in India
- 5 The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day's Work
- Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch […]
Lay that earth upon thy heart,
And thy sickness shall depart!
It shall sweeten and make whole
Fevered breath and festered soul.
We shall go back by the boltless doors,
To the life unaltered our childhood knew –
To the naked feet on the cool, dark floors,
And the high-ceiled rooms that the Trade blows through:
And what should they know of England who only England know?
The cultural dichotomy that Kipling faced as a consequence of spending his earliest years in India – brought up predominantly by his native servants – and his formative years in England at Downe Lodge and USC meant that his sense of self was inextricably linked to the Anglo-Indian community, where English was the dominant language and its culture the assumed superior, and native India, where Kipling's early linguistic and social frames of reference lay. For the bicultural children of his Indian fiction, the search for subjectivity stems not from the geographical location that they are born into, but rather from making sense of and understanding the collective experiences of themselves as willing or unwilling travellers between two disparate worlds. Characters such as the appropriately named Adam, son of Kipling's Kim-like master of disguise, Strickland, in ‘The Son of His Father’ (in Land and Sea Tales) attest to Kipling's knowledge of the language and everyday life of native India that becomes fused in Adam's sense of identity operating within what was considered appropriate in the Anglo-Indian community. This blurring of the division between the Indian and the Anglo-Indian frames of reference both frighten and upset Adam's mother, but not, it seems, Kipling's narrator, who sees the enriching experience a cross-cultural upbringing can be:
Mrs. Strickland tried to teach him a few facts, but he revolted at the story of Genesis as untrue. A turtle, he said, upheld the world […] ‘it's awful,’ said Mrs. Strickland, half-crying, ‘to think of his growing up like a little heathen.’ Mrs. Strickland had been born and brought up in England, and did not quite understand eastern things. (LST, pp. 224–5)
Punch's bitter despair is a direct consequence of the nineteenth-century practice of expatriating Anglo-Indian children to England. Similarly, in Kipling's case, his exile separated him from his ‘best-beloved’ India.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rudyard Kipling's FictionMapping Psychic Spaces, pp. 196 - 226Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015