Chap is a curious word. A dictionary may settle it
down a fissure or a crack in the skin, or as a fellow, a boy, or a man. Those
who have perused with any degree of satisfaction a type of British literature
of the latter decades of the nineteenth century or the first half of the
twentieth, or who have been in a certain type of educational establishments in
the twentieth century, will easily identify the latter as the meaning they
relate to. Nonetheless, the former is insightful: chap may be a fellow, a boy,
or a man, but it may also be a fissure or a crack.
It is in this latter sense, as a fissure or a crack,
that chap becomes useful for the post-colonial scholar. Victoria’s barely
British empire was run, as is well known, by chaps of all kinds, a certain
breed of more or less insular, inward looking, near-schizophrenic men who
lugged through real and imaginary horrors for the betterment of their God and
his favourite country. The fashioning of these cracks, or fissures, is, then, a
significant point of entry for any study into the politics, illusions, and
delusions of the British empire: these chaps were often trained,
institutionally, to be the men that their empire expected them to be, and an
integral part of such grooming was, as is well-known, a host of chap-py
literature.
This paper intends to study just such literature.
While a considerable number of studies on this topic, the construction of
Victorian imperial masculinity that is, have focussed on so-called boys’
literature, this paper intends to extend the framework of chap-py-ness from
beyond the familiar confines of the typical Tom Brown’s typical school to literariness
of a more quotidian, as well as a more esoteric, nature. This is to say that in
keeping with the framework of the proposed conference, it intends to study the
chap-py-ness in the works of both Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats, and
consider how their notions of masculine virility inform their respective
choices of genre and of narrative styles as and when it masculinity and empire figure
predominantly as a theme. Kipling, though supposedly a largely self-appointed
spokesperson of the Raj, was often not schizophrenic enough to not be able to
condone it, and Yeats, one of the kingdom-turned-empire’s less unfortunate
victims, was still, perhaps, imperial in his stylistics, mannerisms, and
ambitions. Hence, the fact that Kipling and Yeats were on different sides of
the British empire’s faultlines will also be taken into consideration by this
paper as it ruminates on the kind of men which Kipling and Yeats addressed
their writing to, and, hence, the kind of interventions which they sought to be
made in the empire by these men. The ability of these writings to provoke by
virtue of their narrativites their respective, not entirely insular,
chap-py-nesses across such disparate genres as, amongst others, children’s
literature, journalism, symbolist poetry, and travel writing will be commented
upon in conclusion by this paper.
Ipshita Nath is a doctoral candidate working on the postcolonial representations of memshabibs under the supervision of Prof. Nishat Zaidi in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Her research interests come under the rubric of Cultural Studies, though she has an abiding fondness for the textual mythologies of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and nineteenth century British and American novelists. She occasionally indulges herself in écriture poesy, enjoys the music of Kumar and Burman, is as fascinated by the persona of Marilyn Monroe as by the works of Botticelli and Michelangelo, has an enduring passion for bi-chromatic American, Bengali and Hindi cinema and would like to get hold of a time-traveller to hop in to the ‘20s and the ‘70s. She may be contacted at ipshita1nath1@gmail.com.
Anubhav Pradhan is a doctoral candidate working on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India under the supervision of Dr. Baran Farooqi in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi; he is also working as an Assistant Professor with the Department of English, Bharati College, University of Delhi. He enjoys walking, reading, writing, armchair debating and has a few other hobbies like gardening, photography, coin collecting and philately in which he indulges occasionally. He is interested in the production, conception and dissemination of cultural artefacts, fashions himself a bourgeois Marxist and a misogynist Feminist, and is a strong votary of sustainable development and the preservation of Delhi’s (in)tangible heritage from ruthless development. He may be contacted at anubhav.pro18@gmail.com.