Kipling’s Children’s Literature Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood

Sue Walsh KIPLING’S CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Despite Kipling’s popularity as an author and his standing as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained relatively unexamined due to its characterization as ‘children’s literature’. Sue Walsh challenges the apparently clear division between ‘children’s’ and ‘adult’ literature, and poses important questions about how these strict categories have influenced critical work on Kipling and on literature in general. For example, why are some of Kipling’s books viewed as children’s literature, and what critical assumptions does this label produce? Why is it that Kim is viewed by critics as transcending attempts at categorization? Using Kipling as a case study, Walsh discusses texts such as Kim, The Jungle Books, the Just-So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, re-evaluating earlier critical approaches and offering fresh readings of these relatively neglected works. In the process, she suggests new directions for postcolonial and childhood studies and interrogates the way biographical criticism on children’s literature in particular has tended to supersede and obstruct other kinds of readings. Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present

Series Editor: Claudia Nelson, Texas A&M University, USA

This series recognizes and supports innovative work on the child and on literature for children and adolescents that informs teaching and engages with current and emerging debates in the field. Proposals are welcome for interdisciplinary and comparative studies by humanities scholars working in a variety of fields, including literature; book history, periodicals history, and print culture and the sociology of texts; theater, film, musicology, and performance studies; history, including the history of education; gender studies; art history and visual culture; cultural studies; and religion. Topics might include, among other possibilities, how concepts and representations of the child have changed in response to adult concerns; postcolonial and transnational perspectives; “domestic imperialism” and the acculturation of the young within and across class and ethnic lines; the commercialization of childhood and children’s bodies; views of young people as consumers and/or originators of culture; the child and religious discourse; children’s and adolescents’ self-representations; and adults’ recollections of childhood.

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The Writings of Hesba Stretton Reclaiming the Outcast Elaine Lomax

Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence Jenny Holt

The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture Dennis Denisoff

Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC Monica Flegel Kipling’s Children’s Literature Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood

SUE WALSH University of Reading, UK First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Walsh, Sue. Kipling’s children’s literature: language, identity, and constructions of childhood. – (Ashgate studies in childhood, 1700 to the present) 1. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Children’s stories, English – History and criticism. 3. Children’s literature – History and criticism – Theory, etc. I. Title II. Series 823.8-dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walsh, Sue. Kipling’s children’s literature: language, identity, and constructions of childhood / by Sue Walsh. p. cm.—(Ashgate studies in childhood, 1700 to the present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5596-1 (alk. paper) 1. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Children’s stories, English—History and criticism. 3. Children in literature. 4. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865– 1936—Language. I. Title. PR4858.C49W35 2010 828’.809—dc22 2009042380 ISBN: 9780754655961 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315591124 (ebk) For my Mum and Dad, who have always supported me, and for Karín and Ric. This page has been left blank intentionally Contents

List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: On Children’s Booksand ‘Mature’ Stories 1 1 The Child as Colonized orthe Colonized as Child? 31 2 Translating ‘Animal’, or Reading the‘Other’ in Kipling’s ‘Mowgli’ Stories 51 3 A Child Speaking to Children?Biographical Readings 71 4 The Oral and the Writtenin the ‘Taffy’ Stories 95 5 Becoming ‘Civilized’:The Child and the Primitive 117 6 ‘And it was so – just so – a long time ago’?:Kipling and History 139

Bibliography 157 Index 167 This page has been left blank intentionally List of Figures

3.1 The opening ‘illuminated T’ of ‘The Tabu Tale’. Illustration to ‘The Tabu Tale’ by Rudyard Kipling, in Just So Stories for Little Children, Oxford World’s Classics edn, ed. Lisa Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 189. 89

4.1 The ‘Letter’. Illustration from Just So Stories for Little Children by Rudyard Kipling, Oxford World’s Classics edn, ed. Lisa Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 98. 101

4.2 The Alphabet Necklace. Illustration from Just So Stories for Little Children by Rudyard Kipling, 1st edn (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1902), p. 167. 111

5.1 ‘The picture that the Head Chief made’. Illustration to ‘The Tabu Tale’ by Rudyard Kipling, in Just So Stories for Little Children, Oxford World’s Classics edn, ed. Lisa Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 211. 137 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements

For special help with the scanning of images, and so helping me over the final hurdle, I would like to thank John Walker and David Page from the Kipling Society. I acknowledge that parts of the Introduction and Chapter 4 are based on an article that was published in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly in 2003. Chapter 3 is reproduced with a few changes with the kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan from Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children’s Literature: New Approaches, 2004, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Versions of the Introduction and Chapter 5 were given as papers to conferences organised by the Kipling Society at the University of Kent at Canterbury and Magdalene College, Cambridge. A version of Chapter 4 was given as a paper to a research seminar held at the University of Lancaster (I would particularly like to thank Professor Simon Bainbridge, Tess Cosslett and Catherine Spooner for this invitation), and versions of Chapter 2 were given as a talk to the Kiping Society, and as a paper to a research seminar held at Middlesex University (special thanks are due to Jeffery Lewins and Erica Fudge respectively). I am grateful to everyone concerned for their informed and helpful feedback. A version of Chapter 2 was also given as a paper at a conference held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. In connection with this last, I am grateful to Jadavpur University, and in particular to Professors Sukanta and Supriya Chaudhuri, for the offer of a Visiting Fellowship in December 2003, and also to the University of Reading, and in particular to Dr Geoff Harvey, for making it possible for me to take up the offer. I am especially grateful to Ann Donahue at Ashgate for both her encouragement and her patience, and also to Claudia Nelson. Thanks are also due to the many friends and colleagues who have read drafts and various versions of chapters, and provided intellectual stimulus and enthusiasm: I am particularly grateful to Stephen Thomson and Professor Peter Stoneley for their feedback in the very early stages of this project, and also to Dani Caselli, Josie Dolan, Sarah Spooner, Neil Cocks, Simon Flynn and all the staff and students who form part of CIRCL. My friends Karen Clegg and Jane Nielsen gave invaluable moral support along the way, and for giving me the space in which to finish the job, and encouraging me in the final furlong I would like to extend my thanks to John Holmes and Professor Bryan Cheyette respectively. I count myself extremely lucky in always having behind me the unstinting support of my parents, Brenda and Frank Walsh, and my sister and brother, Cath Kiernan and Danny Walsh, I hope it never seems that I take it for granted – I don’t. Finally, this book would not have been completed without the particular encouragement and support of Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Ric Harwood, to both of whom I owe more than I can say. This page has been left blank intentionally Introduction On Children’s Books and ‘Mature’ Stories

Despite Kipling’s fame as both a much-read and well-loved author, and as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained un-discussed in any detail, largely because it has been assigned to a category labelled ‘children’s literature’, and this category, as I will show, carries with it critical assumptions about simplicity, transparency, and child reader-responses. This study will argue instead that these Kipling texts are complex and multi-dimensional, and that they actually constitute a challenge to the critical assumptions and practices that operate around children’s literature. As such, this book aims to trouble the apparently clear division between ‘children’s’ and ‘adult’ literature, not only with respect to Kipling’s work, but also in more general terms. It also then offers readings of certain of Kipling’s children’s texts as part of a process of reconsidering extant critical assumptions and practices around ideas of childhood, identity, and language. It is notable that where there has been focus on Kipling’s children’s literature, it has tended to be on those texts, like The Jungle Books (1894 and 1895), that are seen as open to being read in relation to recent critical and theoretical interests in post-colonialism. In comparison, texts like the Just So Stories (1902), and even Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) have received scant attention. For example, because Don Randall focuses on the ‘boy’ in Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Hybridity (2000), we can see why he does not discuss the Just So Stories. Likewise, John McBratney’s concern with Kipling’s figure of ‘the native born’ inImperial Subjects, Imperial Space (2002) means that he does not engage with these stories either. More curiously, given his claim to be re-historicizing Kipling’s output ‘from 1886 – the year of his first serious literary enterprise – to around 1906’, neither does Andrew Hagiioannu in The Man Who Would be Kipling (2003). Similarly, though Jan Montefiore’s recent book Rudyard Kipling (2007), which aims to explore the contradictions of a writer who was a ‘disciplinarian imperialist who sympathized with children and outlaws’,

 Don Randall, Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Hybridity (Basingstoke and New York, 2000).  John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native Born (Columbus, 2002).  Andrew Hagiioannu, The Man Who Would be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile (Basingstoke and New York, 2003), p. vi.  Jan Montefiore,Rudyard Kipling (Tavistock, 2007); see jacket.  Kipling’s Children’s Literature mentions in passing ‘the fantasy and sheer verbal pleasure of the Just-So Stories’, they are not then discussed in any further detail. The argument of this book is that the reason for this is that Kipling’s children’s literature, and the Just So Stories most of all, have largely been subject to the kind of critical assumptions mentioned above where a certain idea of childhood is united with a notion of a ‘transparent’ language, which therefore means that those Kipling texts that are categorized as being for children are seen as not needing to be analyzed in any detail. Indeed such analysis is almost seen as damaging or over-burdening a ‘simple’ and ‘obvious’ narrative. In this introduction then, I want to explore some of the consequences of the categorization of Kipling’s work into fiction for children on the one hand and fiction for adults on the other. I want to address how arguments are made with respect to a text’s belonging in a particular category and I want to investigate the implications this has for the type of critical questions that are then asked of it. In pursuing these questions I want to use Kipling’s Kim (1901) as a case-study or example of what are now called ‘cross-over’ texts, since Kim is generally seen by critics as transcending the categories. I therefore intend to address the grounds on which Kim is thus privileged, returning finally to the question of the connection between ideas about childhood and ideas about language that will run throughout this study. Perhaps the way in which critics have allocated certain of Kipling’s texts to adults and others to the category of children’s literature can best be seen in the critical debate about the relation of one ‘Mowgli’ story, designated by some critics as ‘adult’, to the rest contained in the Jungle Books. This is the story ‘In the Rukh’, which was first published in Kipling’sMany Inventions in 1893. The story concerns a grown-up Mowgli, employed by the Department of Woods and Forests and intending to marry. Potentially, it is also the story referred to as ‘a story for grown-ups’ at the end of ‘“Tiger! Tiger!”’. What the critical debate around this story tends to show, I would argue, is that appeals to an idea of ‘the child reader’ are often used to foreclose on certain kinds of readings which are thereby produced as ‘adult’ and thus as having no validity in the context of children’s literature. There is a range of critical opinion on the place of ‘In the Rukh’. Daniel Karlin in particular is vociferous in his objection to the tale, the ‘creeping legitimization’ of which he deplores; John McBratney, on the other hand, argues for its inclusion

 Ibid., p. 1.  Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London, 1972), p. 76.  Part of the argument here regarding ‘In the Rukh’ can be found in my 2003 article published in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly: Sue Walsh, ‘“Irony? – But Children Don’t Get It, Do They?” The Idea of Appropriate Language in Narratives for Children’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 28/1 (2003): pp. 27–8.  Daniel Karlin, ‘Notes’, in Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books, Penguin Classics edn, ed. Daniel Karlin (Harmondsworth, 1989), p. 347. Introduction  on the grounds of aesthetic closure; and Don Randall reads it as a ‘resolution [to the “drama” of the Jungle Books] in advance of its elaboration’.10 So whilst Karlin creates a frame around the ‘Mowgli canon’11 by relegating ‘In the Rukh’ to the position of extra-text, McBratney’s and Randall’s arguments suggest a lack in the ‘standard’ version and propose ‘In the Rukh’ as explanatory supplement to the ‘Mowgli series’.12 The importance of ‘In the Rukh’ for McBratney derives from the presupposition that it is less controlled by its author than the other Mowgli stories, and thus betrays a meaning that Kipling did not intend to become explicit. For McBratney, ‘In the Rukh’ potentially subverts hierarchies of race, because of its discontinuity with the rest of the Mowgli stories. This is because, for him, according to the logic of the Jungle Book sequence up to this point, Mowgli should appear as an heroic figure, but in ‘In the Rukh’ he is prevented from fulfilling such a role because as an Indian he cannot step outside of the racial confines set by British Imperialism and must submit to the authority of Gisborne ‘the foolish young Sahib’:13 ‘As much as “In the Rukh” would have us believe that [Mowgli] can escape the straight-jacket of a unitary adult selfhood to enjoy the liberty of juvenile castelessness, imperial ideology, with its need for clear distinctions between colonizer and colonized, forbids such murkiness of identity’.14 Thus, for McBratney, ‘childhood’ here functions as that which is ‘innocent of all the contradictions which flaw our interaction with the world’.15 Nevertheless, taking their cue from Kipling’s Something of Myself,16 the critics do seem to agree that ‘In the Rukh’ may safely be regarded as the ‘original’ Mowgli story.17 Indeed part of Karlin’s objection to the tale derives precisely from this aspect of its relationship to the rest of the Mowgli stories:

 John McBratney, ‘Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling’s Jungle Books’, Victorian Studies, 35/3 (1992): p. 292. 10 Randall, p. 67. 11 Karlin, ‘Notes’, p. 346. 12 McBratney, ‘Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space’, p. 292, footnote 6. 13 Rudyard Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’ [1893], The Jungle Books, Oxford World’s Classics edn, ed. W.W. Robson (Oxford, 1992), p. 347. 14 McBratney, ‘Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space’, p. 290. 15 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London, 1994), pp. 8–9. For his part, Don Randall reads the Jungle Books as a post- ‘Indian Mutiny’ allegory of empire (Randall, pp. 62–88), and the implications of this kind of historicism will be addressed in Chapter 6. 16 Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (London, 1937), pp. 113–14. 17 See for example, Daniel Karlin, ‘Introduction’, in Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books, Penguin Classics edn, ed. Daniel Karlin (Harmondsworth, 1989), p. 12; and W.W. Robson, ‘Introduction’, in Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books, Oxford World’s Classics edn, ed. W.W. Robson (Oxford, 1992), p. xxxii. Kipling’s official biographer Charles Carrington is not party to this consensus; however Roger Lancelyn Green explains the likely genesis of Carrington’s apparent error in Kipling and the Children (London, 1965), pp. 110–11.  Kipling’s Children’s Literature

To go from ‘Red Dog’ to a story where Mowgli’s wolves have lost dignity and pathos, and dance for him to the music of his flute in order to assist his courtship, or to go from ‘The Spring Running’ to a story where Mowgli ends up in the Indian Civil Service, married and looking forward to his pension, is almost unbearable. Is there a lover of Kipling who never blushes for him? But we must remember that, as he makes clear, ‘In the Rukh’ was not a betrayal of Mowgli but a half-baked anticipation of him.18

What this quotation expressing Karlin’s objection to ‘In the Rukh’ brings into focus, is the tale’s perceived difference from the rest of the Mowgli stories on the grounds of its treatment of what are said to be ‘adult’ concerns of courtship, marriage, employment, and the especially pedestrian concern with pension. Karlin is not alone in regarding ‘In the Rukh’ as an adult text, J.I.M. Stewart writes of ‘In the Rukh’ that it was ‘quite certainly not written for younger readers’,19 and Philip Mason asserts that the Mowgli stories ‘appeal to people of all ages’ apart, that is, ‘from “In the Rukh”, which although it shows Mowgli as a grown man, was written before the others and had nothing to do with children’.20 On the whole however, excepting Karlin’s enumeration of ‘adult’ themes, the critics give little in the way of reason for this assessment. J.M.S. Tompkins does, however, tellingly observe as a significant inconsistency, that in ‘In the Rukh’ ‘Mowgli speaks to Grey Brother as to a dog, in human language ... Yet the child Mowgli spoke to the beasts in their own tongues’.21 For her then, it is the perceived difference in the languages deployed by the tales, rather than their subject matter that is decisive. More recently, Tess Cosslett has argued that ‘In the Rukh’ is most notably different ‘from the stories for children [in] that the animals do not talk’ and also that ‘The narrator/translator [of the Jungle Books], who could speak to animals because he was speaking to children, has disappeared’.22 I will discuss what I regard as the significance of the way language is characterized in the Jungle Books in Chapter 2, but for the moment I would like to argue that in the more hostile reactions to ‘In the Rukh’ there is the sense of it as an ‘adult’ contamination of what Angus Wilson saw as ‘the child’s vision’23 of the Jungle Books. Further, I am arguing that what are seen as among the chief sources of contamination are the intertexts that are read as producing an ‘In the Rukh’ that is ‘too “arty”’24 and which are noted by Cosslett as ‘“plac[ing]” [Mowgli] in history and literature’.25 This ‘artiness’ of

18 Daniel Karlin, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 19 J.I.M. Stewart, Rudyard Kipling (New York, 1966), p. 139. 20 Philip Mason, Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire (London, 1975), p. 167. 21 J.M.S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1959), p. 68. 22 Tess Cosslett, ‘Child’s Place in Nature: Talking Animals in Victorian Children’s Fiction’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 23 (2002): p. 489. See also Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2006), p. 136. 23 Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1979), p. 18. 24 Robson, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxii. 25 Cosslett, ‘Child’s place in Nature’, p. 489. Introduction 

‘In the Rukh’, presumably provided by the quotations from Heinrich Heine and Swinburne,26 and the references to ‘the illustrations in the Classical Dictionary’,27 has something to do with an idea in the criticism of a language that, because it is ‘arty’, is uniquely or particularly at a remove from what is thus produced in opposition to it as the Jungle Books’ more ‘natural’ (‘pure and uncontaminated’28) and therefore child-appropriate language.29 Likewise, the locating of Mowgli in history and literature constitutes a marked difference from the child Mowgli in the Jungle Book stories who is there divested of such overt references to Greek myth, as far as most critics are concerned,30 and while a British Imperial presence makes its appearance here and there in the tales, references such as those to the English at Khanhiwara in ‘Letting in the Jungle’, have been read by James Whitlark for example, as awkward and self-contradictory interjections of imperialist didacticism into a realm in which it does not naturally belong. Indeed Whitlark goes on to suggest that the reference to ‘white men on elephants, with guns,’ in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’,31 is ‘an obtrusive digression, meant to distract from the fact that the hero, Mowgli, is “brown” and that nature has a relatively rational Law without

26 See Heinrich Heine’s poem 66 from ‘The Homecoming’ in The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine, ed. and trans. Hal Draper (Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), pp. 102–3. Muller quotes it as follows: ‘“Yes, I work miracles, and, by Goot, dey come off too”’ (Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, p. 341). He also quotes Heine’s ‘Almansor’ (Heine, pp. 117–20): ‘“und der Christian Gods howl loudly”’ (Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, p. 341); and misquotes from Swinburne’s ‘Dolores’: Dough we shivt und bedeck und bedrape us, Dou art noble und nude und andeek; Libidina dy moder, Briapus Dy fader, a God und a Greek. (Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, p. 344) See Charles Algernon Swinburne, ‘Dolores,’ Swinburne’s Collected Poetical Works (London, 1924), pp. 154–68. 27 Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, p. 332. 28 Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 47. 29 Edward Shanks also argues in Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas (London, 1940), pp. 159–60, that ‘In the Rukh’ is different from the other stories in that ‘Mowgli is here made to appear decidedly uncanny but there is no real magic about him’. The relation of what we might call ‘magic’ and the child/animal and an idea of ‘natural’ language is one that I will explore further in Chapter 2. 30 In contrast with this view, Daniel Karlin has suggested that J.M.S. Tompkins reads ‘Red Dog’ as referencing Homer (comment made at the Kipling Conference held at University of Kent, Canterbury, 8 September 2007), and he himself reads the scribing of the boar in ‘The Spring Running’ (Kipling, The Second Jungle Book, 1975, p. 197) as a reference to Adonis; see Karlin, ‘Introduction’, pp. 26–7. A number of commentators have made connections between ‘The King’s Ankus’ and Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’; see for example Tompkins, p. 67, and also James Whitlark, ‘Kipling’s Scriptural Paradoxes for Imperial Children’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 24/1 (1999): p. 27. 31 Kipling, The Jungle Book (London, 1972), p. 11.  Kipling’s Children’s Literature

British missionaries’.32 The realm of childhood then, as John McBratney argues in Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, is viewed in the main by critics as a ‘felicitous space’33 in which the cultural and political hierarchies of the adult world have no significant purchase. In order to address such issues in relation to stories like those contained in The Jungle Books, critics seem to find they need to claim an adult audience as justification, as we can see even in Don Randall’s work in his assertion that the ‘narrative’ of the Mowgli tales is not after all ‘only for boys’.34 My point here, by contrast, is not that the Mowgli stories are ‘only for boys’, rather the question is: in what sense is any children’s literature only for children? Running in tandem with this idea of childhood as a ‘felicitous space’ are certain ideas of how children read: what kind of literature is good for them, or appropriate, and also what kind of ‘reading’ they are capable of. The Just So Stories for example, when they are discussed by critics at all, are almost always discussed in terms of ideas about the child’s pleasure in the supposed oral aspects of the text which are said to prompt an ‘active participation’ which seems largely to be understood in terms of the ‘oral savouring’ of repetition.35 This pleasure, moreover, is conceived of in sensual terms divorced of intellectual understanding. And though critics frequently refer to the way the Just So Stories play with language, this is usually characterized as a species of mimicry of what seems to be constituted as child-like exuberance and playfulness, with Elliott Gose, for example, asserting that Kipling here ‘indulges himself in child language’.36 The words ‘play’ and ‘playful’ come up again and again in relation to the Just So Stories, though this playfulness is not really given much account of beyond Barbara Wall’s explanation that ‘the words are designed to amuse and entertain without much informing’,37 or Celia Catlett Anderson’s suggestion that Kipling’s ‘intention was to convey his own love of language’.38 In such assessments ‘play’ is divorced of meaning while being more securely anchored to emotion. The conviction expressed by these critics that ‘understand[ing] … wasn’t the point’,39

32 Whitlark, p. 26, emphasis added. 33 See in particular Chapter 3 of John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native Born (Columbus, 2002), for a detailed discussion of the use of this concept. 34 Randall, p. 63. The implications of Randall’s critical move here are returned to in Chapter 6. 35 Elliott Gose, Mere Creatures: A Study of Modern Fantasy Tales for Children (Toronto, 1988), p. 18. 36 Ibid., p. 17. 37 Barbara Wall, The Narrator’s Voice (London, 1991), p. 130. 38 Celia Catlett Anderson, ‘Kipling’s Mowgli and Just so Stories: The Vine of Fact and Fantasy’, in Perry Nodelman (ed.), Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature (2 vols, West Lafayette, 1985), vol. 1, p. 115. 39 Eleanor Cameron, ‘Of Style and the Stylist’, in Ralph Ashley, Sheila Egoff, Gordon Stubbs, and Wendy Sutton (eds), Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature (Toronto, New York and Oxford, 1996), p. 92. Introduction  and that the verbal pyrotechnics and long words must ‘at first … be appreciated for their sound alone’,40 or for their ‘feeling and sound and overtone’,41 consigns the child reader to the realm of the sensual and tends to distance it from any notion of reading as an interpretative activity, meaning instead being seen as conveyed directly through ‘sound’ and ‘overtone’. Thus though the language of these stories is drawn attention to, the delimiting of the stories according to the supposed characteristics of their audience has tended to mean that while linguistic ‘play’ is noted, how that ‘play’ should be interpreted is set aside as presumably beyond the scope of a text for children on the one hand, or as completely self-evident on the other. Hence Barbara Wall quotes at length from the story ‘How The First Letter Was Written’ apparently so that that it can demonstrate in its own words, and seemingly without need of further critical comment, the simple facts of its ‘fun’ and ‘nonsense’.42 While the Just So Stories is treated unambiguously as being for children, with all the kind of critical omissions I’ve suggested above that this implies, and while critics have contorted themselves in order to preserve their sense of The Jungle Books as stories for children while addressing certain apparently ‘adult’ aspects of them, Kim, published in 1901, has received a more mixed reception in criticism which on the whole tries to acknowledge it as a ‘boy’s adventure story’,43 as a classic, and as a text with considerable political implications and ramifications. Even so, as we can see from K. Bhaskara Rao’s 1967 Rudyard Kipling’s India, as far as the criticism is concerned, the notion of Kim as a ‘classic’ often sits in an uneasy and even oppositional relationship to its positioning as a piece of children’s literature,44 since ‘classic’ has usually been taken to imply a text worthy of the kind of critical exegesis that is not generally deemed appropriate or relevant to children’s literature. Similarly, the notion of the ‘classic’ does not necessarily sit well with a form of analysis that points to differences and inequalities between people since it is bound up with liberal humanist assumptions about a universal

40 Gose, p. 18. 41 Cameron, p. 92. 42 Wall, p. 131. The passage in question lists ‘the Hetmans and the Heads of Hundreds, Platoffs with their Platoons, and Dolmans with their Detachments ...’ See Rudyard Kipling, ‘How the First Letter Was Written’, Just So Stories for Little Children, Oxford World’s Classics edn, ed. Lisa Lewis (Oxford, 1998), p. 101. In Chapter 5, the potential meanings of this passage are discussed in detail in relation to a similar one in ‘How the Alphabet was Made’ (Kipling, ‘How the Alphabet Was Made’, Just So Stories for Little Children, ed. Lisa Lewis, p. 123). I regard both Lisa Lewis, in her introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Just So Stories, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, in his essay ‘Kipling’s “Just-So” Partner: The Dead Child as Collaborator and Muse’ (1997), as the exceptions that prove the rule since these two do give serious attention to how the play of words and illustrations in the Just So Stories may be interpreted. 43 Edward Said, ‘Introduction’, in Rudyard Kipling, Kim, Penguin Classics edn, ed. Edward Said (London and New York, 2000), p. 28. 44 K. Bhaskara Rao, Rudyard Kipling’s India (Norman, 1967), p. 123.  Kipling’s Children’s Literature human nature in which the concept of the ‘child’ ‘as a term of universal social reference which conceals all ... historical divisions and difficulties’45 in turn plays a significant role. In what terms is Kim constituted as a children’s or boys’ book? How, on the other hand, is it conceived of as a classic? And how are these two classifications seen in relation to other claims made about the text, such as, for example, with respect to its ideology? Perhaps what most clearly stands out as a juxtaposition in a number of critical assessments of Kim, is the ‘maturity’ attributed to it on the one hand and the nature of its supposed audience, as a children’s book, on the other. Thus Darton accepts it as ‘a boys’ and girls’ book’, but qualifies this with the claim that it is really ‘for all ages’ and is ‘instinct with a maturer wisdom’ than other books similarly categorized.46 Likewise, Rao sees Kim as ‘unlike the usual boy’s story’, since being a product of Kipling’s ‘years of maturity’ it demonstrates ‘insight’ and ‘understanding’ of Indian life;47 and even Edward Said acknowledges what he calls its ‘boyish pleasures’ whilst averring that ‘Kim was Kipling’s only successfully sustained and mature piece of long fiction’.48 What is perhaps most notable here is the association, at least in Rao, of maturity with a grasp of cultural difference. A similar association occurs in a somewhat different form in Lionel Trilling’s 1943 re-assessment of Kipling’s import. There he writes:

Kipling belongs irrevocably to our past, and although the renewed critical attention he has lately been given … is friendlier and more interesting than any he has received for a long time, it is less likely to make us revise our opinions than to revive our memories of him. But these memories, when revived, will be strong, for if Kipling belongs to our past, he belongs there very firmly, fixed deep in childhood feeling.49

Here then Trilling locates Kipling’s importance in the past, a past that is both personal and historical. A past that is both conceived of as childhood, and as a less enlightened or liberal age that did not acknowledge what Trilling refers to as the ‘anthropological view’ which is explained as ‘the perception that another man’s idea of virtue and honour may be different from one’s own but quite to be respected’.50 As such then, ‘Kipling’ is part of a schema in which the development of the individual is mirrored by a wider collective historical trajectory and likewise the development of a consensus on literary value. Just as the child will put away childish things (‘quick[ly] ... giv[ing Kipling] up in adolescence’51), so Kipling

45 Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 10. 46 F.J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England, 3rd edn (London, 1999), p. 306. 47 Rao, pp. 123, 165. 48 Said, ‘Introduction’, pp. 13, 7, emphasis added. 49 Lionel Trilling, ‘Kipling’ [1943], in Elliot L. Gilbert (ed.), Kipling and the Critics (London, 1966), p. 89. 50 Ibid., p. 92. 51 Ibid., p. 93. Introduction  will be put ‘irrevocably’ in the past as far as literary judgement is concerned, and this despite the claim that ‘He was the first to suggest what may be called the anthropological view’.52 However, here where ‘childhood’ is once again associated with ‘deep ... feeling’ (an image of the unconscious), Kipling, or what he represents, is thus also implicitly constituted as foundational to a liberal progressivist history. Kipling is therefore both positioned as irretrievably consigned to the realm of childhood, and as that which at the very least leads to the ‘mature’ view. Part of what lies behind the assessment of Kim as a children’s book is a construction of childhood that, as I have also noted in critical assessments of the Just So Stories, links it to the sensual and to pleasure in the sensual. Indeed it is the ‘pleasure’ said to be found in Kim that is, for critics, most closely associated with ‘boyishness’ or childhood: the ‘pleasure of playing a game, any sort of game’,53 the pleasure to be gained from those sensual elements of the text that ‘speak ... to us from an oral-aural world not only of nineteenth century Anglo-India but [also] of childhood’,54 a pleasure that is more ‘traditional’ and ‘unproblematic’55 than those yielded up by modern literature. Irving Howe contends that ‘the pleasure of Kim is ... a pleasure in the apprehension of things as they are, in embracing a world as enchanting as it is flawed. Kipling’s book accepts the world’s body, undeterred by odors, bulges, wrinkles, scars ...’.56 Here Howe presents Kim paradoxically as both the most realistic of texts, able to accept the world ‘as it is’ warts and all, and as the most fantastic in that it evades ‘the malignity at the heart of things’.57 The association of Kim with fantasy is not, however, unique to him, and indeed it is more than once regarded as that which rescues Kipling from what are seen as his more problematic imperialist excesses, Philip Mason for example, suggesting that ‘When I thought I disliked Kipling I would have made an exception of all the stories I have here grouped under “Fancy” — those about Kim, Mowgli and Puck’.58 In a similar vein, John McClure sees Kim as only able to achieve a ‘partial victory for Kipling over the authoritarian elements in his own personality’ and produce a ‘partial’ answer to his critics via the adoption of fantasy, a move that

52 Ibid., p. 92. 53 Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 54 David H. Stewart, ‘Orality in Kipling’s Kim’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 13/1 (1983): p. 110. See also Michel Renouard’s ‘L’Odeur de L’Inde dans Kim’ where Kipling’s own childhood is seen as remembered more through sounds, smells and colours rather than any real memories as such: ‘les cinq premières années de sa petite enfance (dont il garda plus de sons, d’odeurs et de couleurs que de véritables souvenirs)’, and Kim is noted as experiencing a sensual joy in disguising himself: ‘Kim ressent une joie sensuelle à se travestir et à se meler a la foule’ (Michael Renouard, ‘L’Odeur de l’Inde dans Kim’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y, 4 (1994): pp. 197, 199). 55 Irving Howe, ‘The Pleasures of Kim’ [1977], in Rudyard Kipling, Kim, Norton Critical edn, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan (New York and London, 2002), p. 329. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 328. 58 Mason, p. 173. 10 Kipling’s Children’s Literature for McClure indicates the impossibility of what he takes to be Kipling’s imperial project.59 The mitigating or ameliorative effect on Kipling’s work here attributed to fantasy is by other critics attributed to Kipling’s supposed audience. In his 1941 essay, ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’, Edmund Wilson lists Kipling’s children’s books with the observation that

It is as if the natural human feelings progressively forced out of his work by the rigours of organisation for its own sake were seeking relief in a reversion to childhood, when one has not yet become responsible for the way that the world is run, where it is enough to enjoy and to wonder at what we do not yet understand.60

Peter Hunt takes this further when he suggests that ‘a specific audience of children compelled [Kipling] to be more rather than less subtle’ and that ‘Equally, it may have been that he was unable directly to sustain prejudices that adults would accept in the face of what he felt to be a clear-eyed, innocent audience’.61 It is no accident of course that childhood and fantasy are brought together here, since as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein has observed, ‘Fantasy as a concept is, in the Western world, strongly linked to the idea of childhood and to books classified as having been written for children’.62 Nor is it as inconsistent as it appears for these concepts to be coupled with a particular view of realism and an anti-modernist aesthetic (pace Howe), for as Jacqueline Rose has argued, children’s fiction and its criticism have

... tended to inherit a very specific aesthetic theory, in which showing is better than telling: the ideal work lets the characters and events speak for themselves. This is a ‘realist’ aesthetic ... [which betrays a] desire for a natural form of expression which seems to be produced automatically and without mediation out of that to which it refers. What it denies precisely is language – the fact that language does not simply reflect the world but is active in its constitution of the world.63

And ‘Far from it being the case that realism and fantasy belong at opposite poles,’64 they are inevitably brought together in an arena where ‘childhood itself

59 John A. McClure, Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (Cambridge, MA and London, 1981), pp. 70, 58. 60 Edmund Wilson, ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’ [1941], in Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Kipling’s Mind and Art (Edinburgh and London, 1964), pp. 53–4. 61 Peter Hunt, Children’s Literature (Oxford, 2001), p. 82. 62 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Fantasy, Childhood and Literature: In Pursuit of Wonderlands,’ in Ceri Sullivan and Barbara White (eds), Writing and Fantasy (London and New York, 1989), p. 197. 63 Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 60. 64 Ibid., p. 64. Introduction 11 is formulated as the fantasy of an ultimate reality unmediated by language’65 and the social, cultural and historical divisions that it enunciates. It is precisely this fantasy of childhood that, in the end, I see as operating in the critical assessments of Kipling’s work when it is labelled as being ‘for children’. In relation to the argument above it is noticeable that the elements most often said to disqualify Kim from easy categorization as a children’s or boys’ book are the complexity of its language on the one hand and what we might loosely term ‘history’ on the other. In relation to the latter, Zohreh T. Sullivan argues that ‘What appears to be a boy’s adventure story is also a complex fantasy of idealized imperialism and colonialism, and the friendship between Kim and his lama is Kipling’s fable of the ideal relationship between the Englishman (ever a boy at heart) and the Indian –eternally passive, unworldly, and childlike’.66 Here ‘fantasy’ is used to denote a particular ideological stance with respect to (nineteenth century) British colonialism in India, and it is this that is seen as producing disequilibrium when it comes to assigning Kim to the category of children’s literature. Similarly, though Said suggests that the ‘boyish pleasures’ of Kim do not ‘contradict the overall political purpose of British control over India’67 that he reads there, he also on the other hand argues that ‘If one were to read Kim as a boy’s adventure story, or as a rich and lovingly detailed panorama of Indian life, one would not be reading the novel that Kipling in fact wrote’68 because it is ‘so carefully inscribed’ with views supporting colonial rule and with ‘suppressions and elisions’ of anything that would indicate otherwise.69 Implicitly then the ‘boy’s adventure story’ should not stray into such politicized territory, or if it does so it will be at the cost of its genre attribution. Just as Edmund Wilson and Peter Hunt praise Kipling’s children’s literature for what they read as its avoidance of his ideological excesses, so the qualification of the label ‘children’s book’, by post-colonial critics such as Said and those following after him, indicates that such criticism, even while it investigates colonial constructions of identities such as race and subjects them to scrutiny, nevertheless retains vestiges of a universal, undifferentiated and unexamined ‘childhood’ that in some sense exists outside the history and the culture in which it is produced. In other words, the shift away from discussing Kim as a boy’s book in post-colonial criticism indicates and reflects a shift in the concerns and interests of criticism, but this later politically motivated criticism is nevertheless still rooted in similar liberal humanist conceptions of the child evident in the earlier criticism, and in the assumption therefore that a children’s or boy’s book cannot bear the weight of an in-depth political and theoretical analysis.

65 Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Fantasy, Childhood and Literature’, p. 203. 66 Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge, 1993), p. 150. 67 Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 68 Ibid., p. 28. 69 Ibid. 12 Kipling’s Children’s Literature

As I have already suggested, the question of language is intimately bound up with these issues and with the designation of Kim’s genre. M. Daphne Kutzer argues that ‘Despite its adolescent hero, Kim’s assignment to the category of children’s text is problematic, given its complexities of language, structure, and history’.70 Here then the question of what is appropriate to the child’s reading ability resurfaces, not in this case as a limit to the possible interpretations of the text, which is acknowledged as ‘complex’, but instead as a disqualifier as far as its categorization as ‘for children’ is concerned. On the other hand, though Judith A. Plotz asserts ‘The substantial difficulty of Kim for young readers (and those not so young)’71 she also argues that this ‘does not negate its character as a children’s book’,72 though she does suggest that it does not fit well with what she calls the ‘modern age-specific vocabulary-controlled text’,73 thereby drawing attention to historically discontinuous constructions of children’s reading abilities and the literature appropriate to them. Despite its ‘difficulty’ Plotz still sees Kim as ‘coded “for children”’,74 and goes on to cite as indicative of this its presentation of a ‘paradoxical childhood condition’ that is ‘free but beloved, casteless but not outcast’75 and its ‘evasion of definitive adult commitment to both love and 76 work’. The ‘coding’ then is seen in terms of the novel’s content rather than its language which is accepted by her as perhaps intentionally inaccessible to children, at least on first, second or even third reading. In other words, in Kutzer’s and Plotz’s views on Kim we see various different ideas of how difficulty, complexity, simplicity and content make books accessible or inaccessible to young readers. ‘Coded for children’ can after all be read as having more than one meaning: the coding either indicating to adult readers that the text is for children, or functioning as only really comprehensible to children (code as a particular kind of language). In any case, despite the attribution of a certain kind of linguistic complexity to Kim, this does not extend to a re- conception of the novel as in itself having a complex attitude to language, or, as Rose might put it, a non-‘realist’ aesthetic; indeed, a number of critics praise Kim for its oral/aural qualities which are then read as testifying to the authenticity of its portrayal of India, and as I have already observed, the oral/aural pleasure of the text is an aspect that is often referred to when relating it to its supposed child readership. The connections made in criticism between childhood and orality are

70 M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (New York and London, 2000), p. 17. 71 Judith A. Plotz, ‘The Empire of Youth: Crossing and Double-Crossing Cultural Barriers in Kipling’s Kim’, in Judith A. Plotz, Francelia Butler and Barbara Rosen (eds), Children’s Literature, 20 (New Haven and London, 1991), p. 125. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. Introduction 13 dealt with more fully in Chapter 4, but here I quote from J.M.S. Tompkins who writes in relation to Kim of ‘a babble of voices, men, women and children in gossip, abuse, advice, remonstrance, Indian, English and Indian-English, with the gong-like swell of the lama’s tones to close the variations. Kipling is masterly in his appeal to the aural imagination’.77 This latter remark I read as having common ground with the kind of critical appreciation of the aural qualities of the Just So Stories that I have already commented on. It should be noted, however, that notwithstanding the claim made here as to the text’s oral power, Tompkins invokes a caveat with respect to ‘authenticity’, remarking that ‘it may well be – I do not know – that the language he evolves for Mahbub Ali and the lama is faulty as an impression of what they would really have said’.78 Despite the warning with respect to notions of authenticity, Tompkins’ comments here nevertheless invoke the existence of a Mahbub Ali and a lama outside the text waiting to be presented with more or less accuracy within the text, and many critics duplicate this kind of assumption about the relation of the fiction to the supposed real world beyond its borders. Moreover, the way in which the ‘orality’ of Kim is discussed suggests a routine acceptance by many critics that what they are faced with in Kim is in effect the oral transcribed onto the page, and the argument has tended to be about the degree of skill or accuracy with which this is done. This critical move, which implicitly constitutes the text as approximating an original reality, can also be seen in the way Kim is frequently discussed in relation to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, not only because of its picaresque structure or the pairing of a young boy with an older figure who acts as a catalyst for the former’s growth and development, but particularly because of its use of ‘dialect’. David H. Stewart, for example, having made the connection with Huckleberry Finn, goes on to claim that in Kim, ‘Kipling conveys orality through print’79 and, after listing and characterizing three of the other ‘languages’ of the text, he claims: ‘Finally there is Kim’s fourth language in which over half of the book is written. It is “actual” Urdu, often spoken with an accent’.80 The oddness of this claim, particularly in view of the sentence following which acknowledges that the language in which the book is written is English, can be attributed to the way the ‘oral’ overwhelms Stewart’s argument. The ‘“actual” Urdu’ is ‘spoken’, though it is at the same time written English which ‘sound[s]’ non-English and is conveyed in italics which, it is claimed, ‘invit[e] us to sound [the words] aloud’.81 Throughout his argument then, Stewart, though apparently aiming to read how an idea of orality is produced in the text, instead repeatedly shifts into writing of the text as though it were indeed spoken. Even in Bart Moore-Gilbert’s much later criticism, the appeal for similar work to be done on Kipling’s work as that done

77 Tompkins, p. 26. 78 Ibid. 79 David H. Stewart, p. 50. 80 Ibid., p. 52. 81 Ibid. 14 Kipling’s Children’s Literature by Shelley Fisher Fishkin on Huckleberry Finn, implicitly results in a privileging of an a priori presumed known and oral reality against which the text is to be measured.82 Kaori Nagai points out in relation to the Kipling story ‘The Three Musketeers’ (1887) that ‘the reader is asked to distinguish one voice from another – “You must pick out the speakers as best you can.” This,’ she argues, ‘is Kipling’s call to his fellow English-speakers to join in the detective work of hearing different voices and accents’.83 However, to me this most markedly seems to parallel Twain’s ‘Explanatory’ preface to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike- County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it may readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. –The Author.84

Given that immediately preceding this is a ‘notice’ which reads ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot’,85 I would suggest that what we have here is something that could be read as a warning against taking the ‘Explanatory’ too much at face value as an author’s claims to authenticity. Rather, I would suggest that just as the ‘signature’ attached to both the ‘Notice’ and the ‘Explanatory’ may be read as drawing attention to the distance between the ‘author’ (Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) and the putative ‘author’ and narrator of the novel, Huck Finn; so the claim with respect to the presence of different dialects in the text draws attention to the need to read a written difference, a difference that moreover needs to be signalled and underlined lest it pass unnoticed or be misunderstood. Hence the ‘Explanatory’ may be read as drawing attention to writing as productive of difference, not simply as its recorder. My point here is that the way Twain’s text has been read as accurately presenting different voices, establishes those differences as pre-existing, waiting

82 Bart Moore-Gilbert, ‘ “The Bhabhal of Tongues”: Reading Kipling, Reading Bhabha,’ in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India (Manchester and New York, 1996), p. 131; see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York, 1993). 83 Kaori Nagai, Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (Cork, 2006), p. 55. 84 Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Boston and New York, 2000), p. 69. 85 Ibid. Introduction 15 to be reflected in the text. If, however, Twain’s ‘Explanatory’ can be readas pointing rather to the ways in which similarities and differences between people may be read as textual constructions, likewise, with respect to Kim the question might rather be how differences and similarities are constituted within and by the text, especially in view of a narration that repeatedly shifts perspectives. In other words, where I read extant critical practice as engaging with Kim as representing ‘reality’ (however well or ill), I see the text as open to being read as calling that reality into question through the implicit attention to its construction. As already evident in the example from David Stewart, the privileging of the ‘oral’ as index of the realism of a text also underlies discussions of the ‘languages’ of Kim, and has a particular part to play in what I read as a telling contradiction within the criticism. Critics tend to agree in identifying certain aspects of the language of Kim as ‘Indian’ (though it is true that they do not necessarily agree as to the significance of this identification). This extends beyond individual words culled from some of the languages of India, to something that has been variously referred to as ‘the Indian elements in the narrative discourse of Kim’,86 or ‘a distinctively Indian accent’.87 My argument here is that there is something of a slippage in the criticism between reading aspects of the text as producing an idea of Indian-ness and ‘recognizing’, and thus implicitly acknowledging, such elements as ‘Indian’. As Bart Moore- Gilbert notes:

In Kipling criticism since Orientalism, the Indian elements in the narrative discourse of Kim are often understood as both politically and aesthetically dubious. Said deplores Kipling’s articulation of native voices, which he sees as designed to produce an impression of widespread support for imperialism among the ordinary people of India. Meanwhile Gayatri Spivak argues that Kipling’s use of the vernacular produces a demeaning kind of pidgin which violates and appropriates the subordinate culture. Parry synthesises these accounts: ‘On those occasions when the Indians do appear to speak, they are the mouthpieces of a ventriloquist who, using a facile idiom that alternates between the artless and the ornate, projects his own account of grateful native dependency’.88

Moore-Gilbert proceeds by wanting to draw attention to more positive ways (at least for lovers of Kipling) of reading the ‘Indianisation’89 of Kim, but what I want to draw attention to here is the contradiction between claiming that a text appropriates an ‘Indian-ness’ which is perceived by the critics as such (thus involving them in a certain kind of essentialist ‘recognition’), and claiming that that ‘Indian-ness’ is incorrectly, inadequately, or misleadingly portrayed. Nagai, too, joins the ranks above, though she is writing about the ‘voices’ of Kipling’s Mulvaney & Co.,

86 Moore-Gilbert, ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’, p. 126. 87 Nagai, p. 51. 88 Moore-Gilbert, ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’, p. 126. 89 Ibid. 16 Kipling’s Children’s Literature and not of his Indian characters, when she claims that Kipling ‘“silences” the real voices of the subaltern by forcing them to speak in a false voice, the voice which “unequivocally” speaks for the glory of the Empire’.90 The notions of ‘voice’ and ‘ventriloquism’ pose particular problems here in that they suggest a singular, stable and unified perspective that can be unambiguously traced back to the author who is likewise conceived of in terms of a psychology that is uncomplicated by any notion of the unconscious. The problems with readings that rely on ideas of authorial intention are addressed in more detail in Chapter 3, but if the narrative that the critics give of Kim is of a text that wants it both ways (that is as wanting to be seen as producing an authentic India, but nevertheless an India untroubled by ‘real’ discord), the critics themselves are frequently subject to a similar desire (that is to say that they want to critique as inauthentically Indian something that they nevertheless need to acknowledge as ‘Indian’ in order to do so). This leads in turn to the kind of argument offered by Jan Montefiore who claims that ‘Kipling has not so much “imagined a language” and therefore imagined a world, as invented an artificial English equivalent to Indian language(s) and the minds and lives of those who speak them, inviting his readers to accept that artifice as a reality’.91 What seems to be at stake here is a proposed difference between ‘imagining’ and ‘inventing’, where imagination is legitimized whilst invention is seen as leading to the falsehood of artifice. In a sense the crime seems to be that Kipling’s writing about Indians is almost too realistic, not enough distanced from the ‘reality’, which might explain at least why the language of the animals in The Jungle Books has not been subject to the same critique, since there, for the critics, there is no question that Kipling is trespassing into the ‘real’, The Jungle Books are thus read as a safe product of the imagination.92 How then can the language of Kim be read in relation to how identities (including that of ‘the child’) are conceived of in the novel? At the beginning of Kim, though a number of definite statements are made about his identity, as many critics have observed, Kim is, all the same, rather ambiguously positioned:

He sat, in defiance of municipal order, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.

90 Nagai, p. 55. 91 Montefiore, p. 36. 92 In a not unrelated vein, Theodore Roosevelt precisely spared The Jungle Books from the excoriating attack he levelled at writers of the ‘realistic wild animal story’ in 1907, arguing that The Jungle Books were safe to give to children because they did not claim to be offering true natural history: ‘We don’t in the least mind impossibilities in avowed fairy tales; and Bagheera and Baloo and Kaa are simply delightful variants of Prince Charming and Jack the Slayer of Giants. But when such fables are written by a make-believe realist, the matter assumes an entirely different complexion’; see Edward B. Clark, ‘Roosevelt on the Nature Fakers’ [1907], in Ralph H. Lutts (ed.), The Wild Animal Story (Philadelphia, 1998), p. 167. Introduction 17

There was some justification for Kim – he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions – since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white – a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but his mother had been nurse-maid in a Colonel’s family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment.93

Here, though Kim is clearly claimed as both English and white, certain things seem to qualify and therefore undermine the ascription of Kim’s identity as such: though Kim is said to be ‘English’, his father was Irish (and Irish Catholic at that).94 Kim’s mother is also clearly identified as having been Irish95 and Kim’s Irish heritage certainly has the potential to be extremely disruptive to any attempt to position him as a ‘sahib’ on equal terms with other representatives of Anglo- Indian and British rule, since as Brian Street notes, many nineteenth century writers drawing on ‘scientific’ theories of race conceived of in terms of evolution ‘saw the Irish as nearest to the apes’ thus placing them on a par with ‘the black or “negroid” races ... [who were also viewed as occupying] the bottom rungs of the racial hierarchy’.96 As if to underline this connection, Kim, though ‘white’, is said to be ‘burned black as any native’. Furthermore, when, in Chapter 13, he manipulates the Hillmen ‘with the craft of his mother-country’,97 this, given

93 Kipling, Kim [1901], Penguin Classics edn, ed. Edward Said (New York and London, 2000), p. 49. 94 Ibid., pp. 133–34. 95 Ibid., p. 60. 96 Brian Street, ‘Reading the Novels of Empire: Race and Ideology in the Classic “Tale of Adventure”’, in David Dabydeen (ed.), The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester, 1985), p. 101. Patrick Brantlinger also observes that ‘The writings of many Victorian ethnologists such as John Beddoe, with his “index of [Irish] nigrescence,” gave quasi-scientific status to his view of the Irish as a separate, apelike, or “Africanoid” race (Curtis, ...; Jahoda ...)’; see Dark Vanishings: Discourses on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca and London, 2003), p. 110. For the importance to the text of Kim’s Irishness, see also ‘Le Secret du Texte dans Kim de Ruyard Kipling’ where Hubert Teyssandier notes that even if one were to accept ‘English’ as meaning ‘British’ here, the importance of a specifically Irish inheritance is underscored elsewhere in the novel: ‘Peut- être faut-il ici comprendre “English” dans le sense de “British,” et le régiment irlandais est en effet au service du pouvoir britannique, mais le côté irlandais du personnage éponyme est explicitement souligné’ (Hubert Teyssandier, ‘Le Secret du Texte dans Kim de Rudyard Kipling’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y 4 (1994): p. 206). See also Gyan Prakash, ‘Science “Gone Native” in Colonial India’, Representations, 40 (1992): pp. 153–54. 97 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 297. 18 Kipling’s Children’s Literature the understanding that his ‘mother-tongue’ is English, potentially produces yet more confusion: from where exactly does his craftiness derive? Is it, following the identification of his ‘mother-tongue’ above, an English craftiness? Is it, given that India is the country that has ‘mothered’ him,98 and the fact that Hurree has just been particularly artful, an Indian craftiness? Or is it, given Kim’s parentage, an Irish craftiness? What follows in fact suggests precisely a common ground between being Irish and being Indian,99 and that it is these identities, more than English- ness, that lie at the core of Kim, for ‘The humour of the situation tickled the Irish and the Oriental in his soul’.100 Other things listed as potentially troubling Kim’s identification as ‘white’ are the language he uses – the ‘vernacular’ as opposed to his ‘mother-tongue’ – and his association as a boy amongst other boys with the Indian market children. Interestingly enough, while Kim’s poverty could be read conversely as emphasizing his whiteness because of its repeated connection to the latter, the repetition could equally be read as a sign of uncertainty as to the legitimacy of poverty’s claim to whiteness. All the same, the point at which Kim’s credentials as one of the ruling élite are most stridently asserted is also a point in which those credentials are potentially undermined. Meanwhile, the narration here constitutes itself as both particularly authoritative, knowing that the ‘half-caste woman’s’ claim to be Kim’s aunt cannot be true, and as non-‘native’, since it establishes ‘Ajaib-Gher’ as what ‘the Lahore Museum’ is called by ‘the natives’. Thus the ‘vernacular’ is constituted as a secondary language that merely names a thing that is the Lahore Museum. Or to put it another way, the language of the ‘natives’ is produced here as extrinsic to identity, as language where language is understood as an addition to existence, whereas English by comparison

98 In Chapter 4 of Kim, the Widow of Kulu responds favourably on learning that Kim was wet-nursed by ‘a hillwoman of Dalhousie’ and makes a connection between language (and custom) learning and mother’s milk (pp. 123–24). A passage from Jan Montefiore’s recent book on Kipling also draws attention to the kind of confusion that can be dragged in by the reference to ‘mother-tongue’ or ‘mother-country’, when she writes that ‘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’ (Montefiore, p. 32). See also Jane Hotchkiss, ‘The Jungle of Eden: Kipling, Wolf Boys, and the Colonial imagination’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 29/2 (2001), for a reading of the function and meaning of mothers and foster- mothers in The Jungle Books in relation to this issue. 99 Bart Moore-Gilbert puts it succinctly when he explains that though Kim ‘is ... a colonising subject ... (as an Irish boy) [he is at the same time] a colonised subject’ (Moore- Gilbert, ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’, p. 122). However, for a sharply critical counter- argument to this see Kaori Nagai’s Empire of Analogies, where it is suggested that Kipling’s repeated emphasis on Irish participation in the Raj is a ‘powerful’ imperialist ‘counter- representation’ to the subversive analogies drawn by Indian and Irish nationalists between each others’ colonial situations (Nagai, p. 12). 100 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 297. Introduction 19 is privileged as intrinsic, as not language but being.101 Furthermore, through the translation of ‘Ajaib-Gher’ into ‘the Wonder House’, English is presented as equal to the task of encompassing and translating any possible Hindustani meanings and thus, implicitly, as capable of full and comprehensive understanding of the India that Hindustani here represents. However, whilst Kaori Nagai suggests that Kim ‘achieves ... the single point of view of an omnipresent and omniscient narrator’,102 I am more inclined to agree with Bart Moore-Gilbert and Don Randall’s assessment that the narration of the novel is marked by numerous shifts in perspective,103 the implications of which I shall go on to address later in this chapter. What I want to draw attention to at this point is the way in which language in Kim can be read as closely associated with identity on the one hand, whilst on the other hand also being conceived of as potentially dislocated from it. The presentation of different languages in Kim has the inevitable effect of disrupting any notion of a secure link between language and identity. For example, in addition to being described as spoken in ‘a clipped uncertain sing-song’, Kim’s English is also characterized as ‘the tinny, saw-cut English of the native-bred’,104 and before he goes to school at St Xavier’s, Kim is unable to write’;105 yet the impropriety of Kim’s facility with Hindi is suggested by the professional letter- writer he engages to write to Mahbub Ali once it has been decided that he is to go to the school in Lucknow. The scribe points to an incongruity between Kim’s appearance in his European garb and the language he speaks: ‘But who art thou, dressed in that fashion, to speak in this fashion’.106 Clearly then, for him, as for the sweeper who insults Kim ‘in the natural belief that a European boy could not follow it’,107 the language one speaks should correspond to one’s cultural identity. However, though Kim is claimed from the very outset as ‘white’, in the instance with the letter-writer Kim ‘mechanically’ crouches down beside him, squatting ‘as only the natives can’,108 whereas ‘a white man’ is acknowledged by the Catholic Chaplain as something Kim will have to be made into: ‘They’ll make a man o’ you, O’Hara, at St Xavier’s – a white man’,109 suggesting, as Moore-Gilbert argues, that ‘Britishness is something which is constructed and learned’ rather than intrinsic, which rather ‘undermines any claim to authority on the grounds of an essentialist notion of the innate nature of British identity, let alone its superiority’.110

101 See also Randall, pp. 148–9, on this point. 102 Nagai, p. 62. 103 Moore-Gilbert, ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’, pp. 130–131; see also Randall, pp. 148–52. 104 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 132. 105 Ibid., p. 173, though he is said to have been ‘kicked as far as single letters’ by an itinerant German (p. 147). 106 Ibid., p. 149. 107 Ibid., p. 148; see also p. 154. 108 Ibid., p. 149, emphasis added. 109 Ibid., p. 165. 110 Moore-Gilbert, ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’, p. 123. 20 Kipling’s Children’s Literature

And though Kim accepts his own positioning as a ‘Sahib’,111 he does so somewhat unevenly, sometimes vaunting it, sometimes rejecting it, treating this identity as a set of clothes he can put on and take off, with the further implication that in this case, Englishness or Britishness will have to be erected over an already established ‘native’ identity.112 Likewise, Kim and the lama’s perception of the former’s schooling at St Xavier’s as a sort of noviciate in preparation for taking on the role of ‘Sahib’,113 once again makes of the latter identity one to learn or become rather than being a matter of what one simply is or is not. This too is connected with language since Kim sees learning to read and write English as part and parcel of becoming ‘altogether a Sahib’.114 When on the road with the lama, however, ‘Each long perfect day rose behind Kim for a barrier to cut him off from his race and his mother-tongue. He slipped back to thinking and dreaming in the vernacular, and mechanically followed the lama’s ceremonial observances at eating, drinking, and the like’.115 This reference to Kim falling into ‘native’ ways ‘mechanically’, as in the earlier case cited where Kim squatted ‘as only the natives can’116 down beside the bazaar letter-writer, produces Kim’s Indian identity as both unconscious and primary, as something foundational to go ‘back’ to, despite the mention of his ‘mother-tongue’ which ought to indicate something anterior to it. As such then, Kim’s ‘Sahib’ identity is produced as an addition or supplement117 to a primary

111 Deriving from the Arabic for ‘friend’ or ‘companion’ (F. Steingrass, A Learner’s Arabic-English Dictionary (Beirut, 1971)), ‘Sahib’ need not necessarily be co-extensive with either ‘white’ or ‘English’, though in this text it is usually used in this way. It is worth noting, however, that ‘Sahib’ is also used by a constable to reply to the veteran of the ‘mutiny’s’ enquiry as to the state of ‘Hind’: ‘Rissaldar Sahib, all goes well’ (Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 105). To the Hillmen, however, the Russian and the Frenchman are ‘not true Sahibs’ because they do not really hunt (Ibid., p. 296), and ‘they cannot speak Angrezi as do Sahibs’ (Ibid., p. 294). Such definitions of ‘Sahib’ as these do present a potential problem for Kim’s positioning within the category, since he, too, neither hunts nor speaks English like ‘a genuine imported Sahib from England’ (Ibid., p. 200). 112 In relation to this, see also the following from Moore-Gilbert’s ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’: ‘imperial identity depends upon subaltern culture for its self-constitution’ (Moore- Gilbert, p. 123); and my analysis of the foundations of Mowgli’s identity in Chapter 2. 113 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 239. 114 Ibid., p. 178. 115 Ibid., p. 261. 116 Ibid., p. 149. 117 The term is Jacques Derrida’s: The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. ... But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. ... Compensatory [suppléant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place [tient-lieu]. As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere, something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing Introduction 21

Indian-ness. The implicit construction of ‘native’ identity as non-supplementary, as essential and inherent, is however, according to the logic of the supplement, at the same time undercut in the text.118 For example, Kim’s ambiguous positioning through his greater ease with Indian languages than with English finds a parallel in Lurgan who is seen as follows from Kim’s perspective: ‘He was a Sahib in that he wore Sahib’s clothes; the accent of his Urdu, the intonation of his English, showed that he was anything but a Sahib’.119 Kim’s view of Lurgan here is not so different to the scribe’s view of Kim but Lurgan’s attention to the differentiated speech and behaviours of different castes of people in order that Kim may learn how to ‘enter another’s soul’120 at the same time leads to the suggestion that if languages and behaviours can be successfully mimicked, they are not after all exclusively inherent characteristics. ‘Sahib-ness’, in adding itself to Kim’s ‘native’ identity, though it functions to make that prior identity whole and complete, also at the same time constitutes it as originally incomplete, as in some sense deficient, as fractured, as identities rather than one identity, and as in the end no more ‘natural’ and inevitable than the identity that, in Kim’s case, is sanctioned to replace it. It is worth noting that though Kim repeatedly names and constructs different languages, at the same time it also tends to subsume all of these, apart from English (and to an extent the lama’s Tibetan and Chinese languages) under the label of the ‘vernacular’. The ‘vernacular’ is given as the tongue in which Kim and his Indian friends and acquaintances routinely communicate with each other, though the policeman outside the Lahore museum is noted as speaking ‘Punjabi’121 (which Kim understands, being raised in the Punjab), and as not understanding the

itself to be filled through sign and proxy. The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself. (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London, 1988), pp. 144–45.) 118 The kind of argument I am making here about the role of ‘Indian-ness’ in Kim is made by Derrida in Of Grammatology where he reads ‘the animal’, ‘the primitive’, ‘the child’ and the ‘divine’ (amongst others) as positioned as non-supplementary identities in Rousseau’s ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’: Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a life without differance. The history of man calling himself man is the articulation of all these limits among themselves. All concepts determining a non-supplementarity (nature, animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity, etc.) have evidently no truth-value. They belong—moreover, with the idea of truth itself—to an epoch of supplementarity. They have meaning only within the closure of the game. (Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 244–45.) In the following chapters of this book I will go on to analyse instances of ‘animality’, ‘primitivism’, ‘divinity’, and of course other instances of ‘childhood’ in Kipling’s children’s literature. 119 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 199. 120 Ibid., p. 207. 121 Ibid., p. 53. 22 Kipling’s Children’s Literature lama who speaks a ‘very fair Urdu’.122 Kim however, does understand the lama’s Urdu, just as he understands Creighton’s and Lurgan’s, but it is also written that Kim thinks, usually, in Hindi,123 and yet, as I have already noted, he is also written as dreaming in Hindustani124 or the ‘vernacular’.125 Mahbub Ali, as a ‘Pathan’, speaks Pushtu,126 though the letter Kim has written to him from Umballa is in Hindi,127 and when dealing with Hurree, Mahbub Ali is noted as speaking in the ‘vernacular’.128 At the end of chapter 1, the narration constitutes itself as adopting Mahbub’s ‘own picturesque language;’129 however, the distinction apparently being made here between Mahbub Ali’s language and other languages in the text is undermined by the use of the same adjective to refer to Colonel Creighton’s Urdu.130 In other words, ‘picturesque’ seems to function to describe potentially any Indian language, and likewise, whereas Hurree’s ‘orotund verbosity’131 might reasonably be argued to be more evident in what is designated as his English, it is his ‘Hindustani’ (or perhaps his Urdu), since it is the lama he is addressing at this point, that is referred to as ‘flowery speech’.132 Whereas ‘picturesque’ would seem to suggest a language of particular vividness, a language therefore that is constituted as somehow more direct than the English that is set up in opposition to it, ‘flowery’, with its suggestion of excess, would suggest rather the opposite. The distinction between ‘picturesque’ and ‘flowery’ could be read as the production of a further distinction between those Indian languages used by Muslims and representatives of British rule and that used by educated Hindus. However, both adjectives could also be read as implying a certain ornateness that exceeds the plain functionality that by contrast is implicitly ascribed to English. Nevertheless, the suggestion is that successful governance of India by the British requires that the language of the latter to some extent overlay and be permeated and shot through by the language(s) of the former. Compared favourably to the ‘insipid, single- word talk of drummer-boys’ come to India from England, the tales told by the Anglo-Indian pupils at St Xavier’s are described as ‘told in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular’.133

122 Ibid. 123 Ibid., p. 198. 124 Ibid., p. 241. 125 Ibid., p. 261. 126 Ibid., p. 333. 127 Ibid., p. 149. 128 Ibid., p. 228. 129 Ibid., p. 71. 130 Ibid., p. 166. 131 Ibid., p. 41. 132 Ibid., p. 274. 133 Ibid., p. 172. Introduction 23

Though Kim names many different languages, and appears to distinguish between them, those differences, at least between those languages that are not English, are also repeatedly called into question in various ways; for example, through the use of the second person singular to indicate any usage of a non- English language, including French.134 That this is not unreasonable, given that modern French unlike modern English does make use of the second person singular, does not detract from the fact that it also constructs a commonality between languages marked as not English in the text. Likewise, the references to Hindustani, and particularly the ‘vernacular’, also reinscribe Urdu and Hindi as similar though they are elsewhere instated as separate languages. The distinction between the languages, as claimed and yet at the same time undermined, is perhaps most clearly evident in the way the lama’s discussion with the Museum Curator is at first labelled as taking place in Urdu,135 but is later suggested by the lama to have been conducted in Hindi, given that in Chapter 13 he asks of the Frenchman and the Russian: ‘Have they any knowledge of Hindi, such as had the Keeper of Images?’136 The notes to Kim in both the Oxford World’s Classics edition and the Penguin Classics edition draw on volume 1 of Harbord’s Reader’s Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Works137 for their accounts of the relationship between Hindustani, Hindi, and Urdu. Edward Said’s note on ‘Urdu’ reads: ‘a dialect of Hindustani adopted in the time of Akhbar as a common tongue between the Muslim conquerors of India and the Hindus. It was also adopted by the British for military use’.138 Harish Trivedi has pointed to a number of inaccuracies in Said’s notes, suggesting amongst other things that to call Urdu ‘a dialect of Hindustani’ is equivalent to suggesting that English is a dialect of Cockney.139 Equivalent notes in the Norton Critical Edition of Kim edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan, gloss the ‘vernacular’ as ‘Hindustani, a spoken vernacular made up of Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Punjabi, and other dialects’140 and Urdu as ‘A language introduced at the time of the Moguls that combines Hindi with Persian, written in Arabic script’.141 Sharad Keskar’s notes on Kim for the Kipling Society’s new Reader’s Guide explain ‘the vernacular’ as ‘Hindustani, a mixture of Hindi and Urdu’ and Urdu as:

134 Ibid., p. 286. 135 Ibid., p. 56. 136 Ibid., p. 289. 137 Roger Lancelyn Green and Alec Mason (eds), The Reader’s Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Works, prepared for R.E. Harbord (8 vols, Canterbury, 1961–72). 138 Edward Said, ‘Notes to Kim’, in Rudyard Kipling, Kim, Penguin Classics edn, ed. Edward Said (London and New York, 2000), p. 341. 139 Harish Trivedi, ‘A New Orientalism?: Edward Said on Kipling’, conference paper given at Kipling Conference held at University of Kent, Canterbury, 8 September 2007. 140 Rudyard Kipling, Kim [1901], Norton Critical edn, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan (New York and London, 2002), p. 3. 141 Ibid., p. 7. 24 Kipling’s Children’s Literature

An Indian language, a variety of Hindustani; it includes a vocabulary which has borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian; it is spoken by the Moslems of [the] Indian Sub-continent. Hindustani is a variety of Western Hindi and includes a large vocabulary of Urdu words but like Hindi uses the Devanargri alphabet and script. Hindi — the official language of India — was derived from Sanskrit. Urdu, once the patois of the bazaars of Delhi, is written in the Persian script ...142

As can be seen from the divergences between, and even within, the different accounts above, there is some confusion within Kipling scholarship with respect to the relationship between Hindustani, Hindi, and Urdu. Notwithstanding this, what I wish to draw attention to here is the way Kipling’s text constitutes the languages of India as different from each other and yet also as broadly similar whilst remaining markedly distinct from English. Thus, on the one hand, Kim may be read as Edward Said reads it, as producing an India that is a ‘Babel of tongues’143 requiring an order to be imposed upon it by a language – here ‘English’ – that can contain and subsume all differences; on the other hand the similarity between ‘languages’ constructed by the term ‘vernacular’, or the word Hindustani, also implicitly suggests common ground, particularly so in its differentiation from English, between a people who are elsewhere constituted as divided amongst themselves. Moreover, while all the ‘languages’ in the text that use the second person singular are produced as equally subject or subservient to English, the ability of the narration’s English to reproduce this grammatical form as an archaism constructs English as modern or as an advancement on Indian (and Continental European) languages, and as equal to the task of ‘translating’ such languages and encompassing their meaning; but, since the English narration, via indirect discourse, is able to ‘reproduce’ within itself a language that it labels as not its own but another’s,144 it also at the same time implicitly undermines the very claim to difference that it stakes. The ideas of language I have discussed here point to political perspectives, and as such Kim’s ‘descriptions’ of language cannot be considered neutral. If such complexities seem too much for a children’s book and enough to shift it out of this category, I will go on to show that Kim is not alone in Kipling’s work for children in dealing with such issues. It is noteworthy that, alongside his sense of Kim as full of ‘boyish pleasures’,145 Edward Said writes that ‘Language for [Kipling] was not, as it was for Conrad in particular, a resistant medium; it was transparent, capable of many tones and inflections without too much trouble, all of them directly representative ofthe world he explored’.146 It would seem to me that it is no accident that a certain idea of

142 Sharad Keskar, ‘Kim: Chapter 1, Notes on the Text’, Kipling Society: (Accessed 5 September 2007). 143 Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 42. 144 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 71. 145 Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 146 Ibid., p. 40. Introduction 25 childhood, employed by Said and read by him as present in Kim, leads to the above assessment of Kipling’s attitude to language. In other words, childhood conceived of as separate from the adult divisions of politics and history tends to go hand in hand with an idea of language as ‘transparent’ and ‘directly representational’. As Jacqueline Rose has argued, the ‘child’, since Locke and Rousseau, has tended to be used as a means to deny the arbitrary relationship between the word and its referent,147 and if the ‘child’ is conceived of as the ‘natural’ prior to the ravages and corruptions of civilization, it is also pressed into service as the standard bearer for a language conceived of in terms of ‘its pure and uncontaminated source in the objects of the immediate world’.148 However, it seems to me that both Said’s sense of the ‘child’ in Kipling’s fiction and his notion of the role language plays therein are worth subjecting to further scrutiny. As I have already argued above, ‘language’ is more complexly positioned in Kipling’s work than Said would seem to suggest, and the case is similar when it comes to the ‘child’. For though Kim is able to ‘consort ... on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar’,149 as a number of critics point out, this ‘equality’ does not run both ways; and while Kim is able to change ‘speech and gesture’150 with changes of clothes, it is made quite clear that even under Lurgan’s tutelage the Hindu child cannot. Whilst elsewhere in the text childhood is figured as a universal – ‘the little children [were] as children are the world over’151 – and implicitly, therefore, as unmarked by distinctions of caste and race, this is not the case with Lurgan’s little Hindu boy whose inability ‘to enter another’s soul’152 is tacitly related to his cultural and racial identity. However, this construction of Hindu incapacity is cut across somewhat by Hurree Chunder Mookerjee’s particular flair when it comes to dissembling and disguise, such that even Kim fails to recognize him and the narration, too, seems at certain points undecided as to his true character. What has proved to be one of the most damning charges levied at Kim by Said, given the way his reading has subsequently achieved general acceptance, is its lack of articulation of any sense of resistance to the British in India. Said’s discussion of the old soldier’s account of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ as ‘madness’ is key here: ‘The point about this brief episode [see Kipling, Kim (2000), pp. 100–103] is not just that it gives us the extreme British view on the Mutiny, but that Kipling puts it in the mouth of an Indian whose much more likely nationalist counterpart is never seen in the novel at all’.153 However, Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests a number of ways in which ‘Kim generally rebuts those who see Kipling creating a conflict-

147 Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 47. 148 Ibid. 149 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 49. 150 Ibid., p. 207. 151 Ibid., p. 92. 152 Ibid., p. 207. 153 Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 26. 26 Kipling’s Children’s Literature free India in the text’154 and, as Ian Adam points out, the novel’s inclusion of the episode in which Hurree ‘reveals’ himself to the French and Russian agents as an opponent of the British government of India means that to suggest that ‘in Kim no one is seen who challenges British rule’155 is ‘not quite accurate’.156 The passage in question, after constituting the Frenchman and Russian as ‘strangers’ to India where the ‘Englishman’ is not, and after presenting the behaviour of the former as an inconsistent mixture of over-familiarity and severity, runs as follows:

The strangers did all these things, and asked many questions – about women mostly – to which Hurree returned gay and unstudied answers. They gave him a glass of whitish fluid like gin, and then more; and in a little timehis gravity departed from him. He became thickly treasonous, and spoke in terms of sweeping indecency of a Government which had forced upon him a white man’s education and neglected to supply him with a white man’s salary. He babbled tales of oppression and wrong till the tears ran down his cheeks for the miseries of his land. Then he staggered off, singing love-songs of Lower Bengal, and collapsed upon a wet tree-trunk. Never was so unfortunate a product of English rule in India more unhappily thrust upon aliens.157

As Adam points out, the opposition to British rule here ‘has to [be] accept[ed] as ironized’,158 but as Jonathan Arac has argued, quoting Shelley Fisher Fishkin discussing Huckleberry Finn: ‘An ironist “faces two problems,” namely, that the “reader may miss the point” and that “the reader may get the wrong point”’.159 This is not simply a routine problem of interpretation, that is to say that it is not simply a question of the meaning of a text always being up for grabs, since for irony to be irony relies upon the possibility that its meaning may be conceived in radically opposing ways. If a text can too easily be labelled ironic, then that is what it ceases to be. Consequently, I am arguing that in the passage above the irony works precisely to make it difficult to read Hurree as simply lying. The perspective from which Hurree appears to be ‘thickly treasonous’ is shifting and unclear, at the start of the paragraph Hurree is clearly determined as ‘making pretence to adjust’160 the containers in which the ‘strangers’ have stored the written results of their mission

154 Moore-Gilbert, ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’, p. 120. 155 Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 27. 156 Ian Adam, ‘Oral/Literate/Transcendent: The Politics of Language Modes in Kim’, Yearbook of English Studies, 27 (Leeds, 1997), p. 78. 157 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 286. 158 Adam, p. 78. In relation to this, Sara Suleri argues that the ‘deranging “absence of conflict” [inKim as Said sees it] ... could ... be imputed to the structure of imperial ideology, which Kipling represents with an irony that ... Said seem[s] unwilling to address’; see The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 115. 159 Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Function of Criticism in Our Time (Madison, Wisconsin and London, 1997), p. 14. 160 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 286. Introduction 27 into the area, but when the comparison is made between the behaviour of the ‘strangers’ and how an Englishman would behave, the Babu is presented as having ‘accidentally upset a kilta’, and later as giving ‘gay and unstudied answers’161 to the questions directed at him. That this latter is the perspective of the Frenchman and the Russian is suggested by the fact that they are compared to a hypothesized Englishman who perceives the Babu to have ‘accidentally upset a kilta.’ On the other hand, from whose perspective is Hurree’s indirect speech most ‘treasonous’ and ‘indecent’? The shifting perspectives here, which produce the irony, also make space for ‘a lingering doubt’162 with respect to Hurree’s position in all of this. This doubt finds other expression in the narration of the story, and through Kim’s perspective. Throughout the novel, as Jan Montefiore notes, Hurree’s labelling of himself as ‘a fearful man’163 is belied by his actions.164 On the one hand, the narration seems to concur with Hurree’s self-assessment, noting in the episode where Kim is subjected to Huneefa’s sorcery under the watchful gaze of Mahbub Ali and Hurree, that ‘It is an awful thing still to dread the magic that you contemptuously investigate – to collect folk-lore for the Royal Society with a lively belief in all Powers of Darkness;’165 on the other hand, in more than one description of Hurree, ‘fearful man’ appears within inverted commas as though to signal it as distanced from the narrative perspective – ‘Hurree Babu came out from behind the dovecot, washing his teeth with ostentatious ritual. Full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bull- necked, and deep-voiced, he did not look like “a fearful man”’.166 Following the French and Russian spies through stormy weather, Hurree is described on the one hand as a man more than equal in bravery to most Englishmen (the claim of whom to be the natural repository and benchmark of courage is thus asserted and undermined simultaneously) and on the other as a man whose fear could be read in his change of colour at the sound of a cocked gun.167 The man of whom Kim wonders ‘How comes it that this man is one of us’ when ‘considering’ his ‘jelly back as they jolted down the road’168 towards Umballa, proves, once in the hill country, to have rather better mountain legs than Kim. And Kim, more than once fooled by the Babu’s proficiency when it comes to disguise, finds that, ‘The Hurree Babu of his knowledge – oily, effusive, and nervous – was gone; gone, too, was

161 Ibid., first and third emphases added. 162 Adam, p. 78. 163 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 231. 164 Montefiore, p. 94. 165 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 228. It is also worth noting that here Hurree talks ‘English to reassure himself’ in the face of sorcery (ibid.), just as Kim shifts from Hindi to ‘the multiplication table in English’ in order to shield himself from the illusions that Lurgan creates (ibid., p. 202). 166 Ibid., p. 274. 167 Ibid., p. 284. 168 Ibid., p. 209. 28 Kipling’s Children’s Literature the brazen drug-vendor of overnight. There remained – polished, polite, attentive – a sober, learned son of experience and adversity, gathering wisdom at the lama’s lips.’169 This is significant because it suggests that Kim’s earlier sense of certainty with respect to Hurree is potentially completely misplaced, and also, as Montefiore notes, that Hurree is merely playing up to the role of ‘self-confessed coward’170 and over-educated Babu.171 Here the suggestion is that Kim has never seen the real Hurree, that what he has seen of Hurree’s character are roles that he can peel off one after the other. In the above quotation, it is perhaps possible to read the ‘sober, learned son of experience and adversity’ as the truth of Hurree’s character, since this is what ‘remain[s]’ after the other guises are stripped away, and yet it is clear that this too is an act, another role in Hurree’s armoury, such that it becomes impossible for Kim to settle on the truth of the matter when recollecting the trick played on the French and Russian spies:

‘He robbed them,’ thought Kim [of Hurree], forgetting his own share in the game. ‘He tricked them. He lied to them like a Bengali. They give him a chit [a testimonial]. He makes them a mock at the risk of his life – I never would have gone down to them after the pistol-shots – and then he says he is a fearful man…And he is a fearful man. I must get into the world again.’172

Once again Hurree’s status as coward is under question and Kim does not so much resolve the issue as side-step it by refusing to think further on it, determining instead to return to the world of action, but the question still remains: if when a Bengali lies like a Bengali he is putting on an act, what then does that mean for the other cultural and racial characteristics that are claimed in the novel as constituting the grounds of differentiation between people? With respect to Kipling’s use of irony, its significance lies in the fact that irony demands a conception of language in which words do not necessarily mean what they say; and the not infrequent appearance of irony even in those Kipling texts generally thought to be unambiguously for children, like The Jungle Books and the Just So Stories, mounts a significant challenge to Said’s view that for Kipling language was straightforwardly ‘transparent’ and ‘directly representative of the world’.173 In his essay on ‘the classic “tale for adventure”’ for David Dabydeen’s important 1985 collection The Black Presence in English Literature, Brian Street suggested that the ideological assumptions underlying such tales were not addressed by critics because their ‘very classification … as “tales of adventure” or “children’s classics”’174 was taken to preclude such an approach. ‘The question of their underlying framework and assumptions does not arise,’ he wrote, ‘because that is

169 Ibid., p. 275. 170 Montefiore, p. 94. 171 Kipling, Kim (2000), p. 231. 172 Ibid., p. 330. 173 Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 40. 174 Street, p. 104. Introduction 29 not how such literature is to be “read”. The categories are supposedly ideologically “neutral”: they refer to aesthetic theory and to the supposedly harmless “play of imagination” around fictional texts’.175 While the critical landscape has changed since 1985 and the observation, made by Jacqueline Rose the previous year, that ‘the boy’s adventure story, ... was always part of an exploratory and colonialist venture’176 may perhaps now be regarded as widely accepted, the connection she makes between this kind of literature and a certain view of language and of language’s relation to childhood has not been taken up so readily. ‘Children’s fiction’, she writes, ‘emerges ... out of a conception of both the child and the world as knowable in a direct and unmediated way, a conception which places the innocence of the child and a primary state of language and/or culture in a close and mutually dependent relation’.177 It is this latter point that I am going to take as my text in the following analyses of Kipling’s writings for children and the critical approaches to them: the question of language’s relation to the world and to childhood as it is expressed there. In Chapter 1, which follows, I will discuss how children’s literature criticism has come into dialogue with post-colonial criticism in recent years and will go on to address the impact and effects of this cross-pollination and the questions and problems still to be raised around the constructions of childhood evident in both forms of criticism. Chapter 2 then takes up the question of The Jungle Books and discusses how the construction of childhood in relation to broader questions of identity in the ‘Mowgli’ tales can be read as challenging or complicating current post-colonial readings of these stories as imperialist narratives. Chapter 3 will address the implications of the continuing pull of biographical readings of Kipling’s work, particularly in relation to his children’s literature and how this still dominant element in Kipling criticism has tended to result in a limitation on the interpretation of the children’s texts, which are then read simply in relation to the ‘life’ rather than for the ways in which they themselves might have something to say about ideas of memory, childhood, and writing for children. Chapter 4 will continue the discussion of critical assumptions about ‘authorship’ and biography by addressing critical assertions about the ‘oral quality’ of Kipling’s work for children. Kipling’s Just So Stories in particular have been regarded as seeking to reproduce oral tale telling and have largely been viewed as achieving this goal. I will argue that what is at issue here are assumptions about the simplicity of child reader-responses which are related to arguments about appropriate language for children, in which speech is regarded as more direct, transparent and natural to children whilst writing is regarded as a corrupting and corruptible form. In relation to these ideas I will show how the ‘Taffy’ tales from the Just So Stories in particular probe and question the relation of writing to speech. Chapter 5 will take the insights provided by the way childhood is related to ideas of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘folk’ in the previous

175 Ibid., p. 107. 176 Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 9. 177 Ibid. 30 Kipling’s Children’s Literature chapter’s discussion of ideas about oral tale-telling in children’s literature criticism and draw out more explicitly the ways in which ideas about childhood and growth, the ‘other’ and the ‘primitive’ intersect with each other in Kipling’s work, underlining issues of perspective in such a way as to fundamentally throw into question any notion of an easy or uncomplicated relation between language and reality. The implication this has for ideas about ‘history’, produced as narrative in Kipling’s texts, is examined in Chapter 6 on Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, primarily through a closely focused analysis of one particular story (‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk’); but the chapter ends by contrasting the presentation of ‘history’ offered there with contemporary critical mobilizations of ‘history’ in discussions of The Jungle Books, thus returning me to my initial questions about how and why certain of Kipling’s texts are categorized as being for children and the implications this has in turn for the way they are read subsequently. Bibliography

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