A
Case for Rudyard Kipling as a Pro-Indian rather than an Anti-Indian
Abstract
Mihir
Dave
Marwadi Education Foundation –
Rajkot
Rudyard Kipling has been
one of the few British writers born in India whose writing exhibits a range of
sentiments, strength and struggle of the British, the Anglo-Indians and the
native Indians alike. His 39 stories published in Civil and Military Gazette under the title of Plain Tales from the Hills between November 1886 and January 1887
and later edited versions of the tales, 29 from Civil Military Gazette and 11
new tales, exhibit the said range. Most of these stories are concerned with Anglo-Indian
life, civilian and military, that include Kipling’s soldier trio, Mulvaney, Learoyd and Ortheris. The
present paper aims at exploring this range and the shifts that Kipling is seen
undergoing in the later editions of the Plain
Tales, from stories of ‘out hear’ to stories of ‘out there’, in order to be
accessible to the English reader. It will also be interesting to observe how
Kipling chooses to discern these references of the world he belonged and his
reader didn’t. The study is made with the special reference to 5 selected and
representative tales from Plain Tales
viz: Lispeth, Thrown Away, Beyond the
Pale, In the House of Suddhoo, and
The Story of Muhammad Din.
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