Rudyard Kipling

by John Palmer

The moral of the tale is not obscure. A baby who runs in the bazaar is better able to legislate for India than a Supreme Legislative Council. India, in short, is a vast and uncertain land, whose ways are not always learned in a lifetime by the men whose business it is. The argument a fortiori—namely, that amiable and humane political philosophers, well bred in the latest European theories of government, are even less likely to be infallible—need not be pursued.

Our second story is the story of Aurelian McGoggin. Aurelian McGoggin had read too many books, and he had too many theories. He also had a creed: "It was not much of a creed. It only proved that men had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry along somehow for the good of humanity." McGoggin had found it an excellent creed for a Government office, and he brought it to India and tried to teach it to all his friends. His friends had found that life in India is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one particular at the head of affairs, and they objected. They also warned McGoggin not to be too good for his work, and not to insist on doing it better than it needed to be done, because people in India wanted all their energy for bare life. But McGoggin would not be warned, and one day, when he had steadily overworked and overtalked through the hot season, he was suddenly interrupted at the club, in the middle of an oration. The doctor called it aphasia; but McGoggin only knew that he was struck sensationally dumb: "Something had wiped his lips of speech as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child, and he was afraid. For a moment he had lost his mind and memory—which was preposterous and something for which his philosophy did not allow. Henceforth he did not appear to know so much as he used to about things Divine."

McGoggin, in fact, was converted; for, as Mr Kipling explains, his story is really a tract—a tract whose purpose is to convey that India is able to cure the most resolute positivist of his positivism. Mr Kipling's India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips. You do not talk of Humanity in India, because in India "you really see humanity—raw, brown, naked humanity—with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot." Mr Kipling's Indian administrators are practical and simple men, who obey orders and accept the incredible because their position requires them to administer India as though they were never at fault, whereas their experience tells them that, if they are never to be at fault in India, it is wise to be not too original and fatal to be too rigid.

Tods' Amendment and The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin are printed among Plain Tales from the Hills. They look forward to a whole series of Anglo-Indian tales which present Mr Kipling's idea of the English in India. Out of his later books we can illustrate a hundred times his conviction that in India the simplest wisdom is the best.

But there are two kinds of simplicity. The one kind is illustrated in a tale from The Day's Work; it is the right kind of simplicity. In no story of Mr Kipling is the devoted service and practical resourcefulness of the good Civilian so movingly celebrated as in the story of William the Conqueror. It is the story of a famine, and of how it was met by the servants of the Indian Government. The administration of famine relief would seem to be a simple thing when the grain has come by rail and only waits to be distributed. But the district served by the little group of English in William the Conqueror was a district which did not understand the food of the North, and, if it could not get the rice which it knew, was ready to starve within reach of bagsful of unfamiliar wheat or rye. The hero of the tale is finally reduced to distributing the Government rations to the goats, and keeping the starving babies alive with milk. It was a simple idea, and the man to whom it occurred worked himself to death's door, which was no more than another simple idea of what was due from him to the district and to his superior officer.

The wrong kind of simplicity is illustrated in a story from Life's Handicap. It is called The Head of the District, and it has to do with a simple idea which occurred to the Viceroy. A Deputy Commissioner who understood the lawless Khusru Kheyel and had put into them the fear of English law had died and a successor had to be appointed. The man for the post was a certain Tallentire who had worked with the late head of the district and knew the tribe with whom he had to deal. But the Viceroy had a Principle. He wished to educate the natives in self-government; and here was an opportunity—a vacant post of responsibility and a native candidate to fill it.

"There was a gentleman and a member of the Bengal Civil Service who had won his place and a university degree to boot in fair and open competition with the sons of the English. He was cultured, of the world, and, if report spoke truly, had wisely and, above all, sympathetically ruled a crowded district in South-Eastern Bengal. He had been to England and charmed many drawing-rooms there. His name, if the Viceroy recollected aright, was Mr Grish Chunder Dé, M.A. In short, did anybody see any objection to the appointment, always on principle, of a man of the people to rule the people? The district in South-Eastern Bengal might with advantage, he apprehended, pass over to a younger civilian of Mr G. C. Dé's nationality (who had written a remarkably clever pamphlet on the political value of sympathy in administration); and Mr G. C. Dé could be transferred northward. As regarded the mere question of race, Mr Grish Chunder Dé was more English than the English, and yet possessed of that peculiar sympathy and insight which the best among the best Service in the world could only win to at the end of their service."

The principle was sound; but the consequences were such as usually follow when ideas which are simple in one continent are applied in another. Any man on the frontier could have told what would come of asking the Khusru Kheyel to respect and obey Mr Grish Chunder Dé. It was not a matter of religion or ability, but of history. The Khusru Kheyel had had relations with the countrymen of their new Head for generations and they were not relations of respect and obedience. How there was riot and some rapid blood-letting on the border, and how the new Head resigned his office before he had taken it over, is told as a warning that there is a wrong kind of simplicity in dealing with India. It is fatal to have invented simple and embracing phrases about a country which holds more races than all Europe; has had a long and private history of its own; has been more often conquered than Great Britain; and has had every sort of experience except that of being governed according to constitutional law.

This chapter being mainly devoted to rescuing Mr Kipling from his political admirers and censors, it may be well to conclude upon his vision of the devoted civilian Scott, the hero of a tale already quoted, the man who fed the Indian babies from a herd of goats fattened on the food which the starving people of the Deccan distrusted and refused. Scott appears in that story at sunset, delectable and humane, sneezing in the dust of a hundred little feet, "a god in a halo of gold dust, walking slowly at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran small naked cupids."

Clearly there is something wrong with the popular habit of regarding Mr Kipling as essentially concerned with the carving of men to the "nasty noise of beef-cutting on the block." His "god in a halo of gold dust" seriously discourages any attempt to brand him with the mark of the reverting carnivor.